Project Base 0.7.3 release

[begrimed]

14:12 - You changed the little bomb 'gate' to the rest of Crateria/Brinstar. Now I can't do speed booster shenanigans anymore.

?

Did you make Yellow Brinstar clearer? It looks a little less natural, but then it already sort of did to begin with.

I brightened up the yellow just a little bit and redid the glowing blue BG colors.

Battle against Kraid seems easier. BUG: Kraid's room partially glitches out after you get Varia. (I think it did before, too, anyway.)

Yeah, I slowed some things down for that fight. Got a few complaints about Kraid being way too hard in previous versions because he spewed belly spikes like madness, and his bouncing claws moved really fast.

The glow on the blue parts of Norfair is a bit off. The pipes blend in rather well, though.

BEST I COULD DO, MAN. I redid that glow like 5 times to get it where it is now. Glows in general should look a lot better whenever I can figure out how to use Black Falcon's flexglow ASM.

Some Ceres backgrounds disappear when you come back after 'beating' Ridley.

This was intentional. I blacked out blue computery background stuff for the escape palette to make it more obvious that the station's power has been shut off. I originally blacked out the copper-colored stuff too until I realized that the floor of Ridley's room disappeared after he flew away, lol.

Sorry to say, but Wrecked Ship looks hideous now.

Ideas on post-Phantoon colors? I considered a steely light gray, then a much darker gray pre-Phantoon (think Ceres).

15:21 - PHANTOON HARDEST BOSS 2012
15:25 - With much effort, I have beaten Phantoon.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna notch his HP a bit. He takes around 80 or so missiles to kill right now. In earlier versions people said he was too easy with lower HP. . .

BUG/FEATURE - Power bomb is no longer needed to get grapple

Rad.

BUG: Can see two XX-tiles in the elevator shaft to Brinstar, before the gauntlet to Wrecked Ship. On a second try they look somewhat like the exploded Ceres door, but then red and turned 90 degrees.

I have observed this with several elevators, and the vertical door directly above the Maridian glass tube. It's something to do with Rakki's door speed-ups, and/or DSO's tweak to speed up elevator movement.

Maridia is as beautiful as it sounds now. The fight with Botwoon was short.

Aside from colors, I only made him appear sooner after entering his room. Should I give him more HP?

Red Torizo was a very satisfying battle. He was less rape-y with his super ghost kamikaze attack, which was fair.

I didn't tinker with his belly-egg-things attack any. He starts using it when he gets VERY close to dying. Might find the HP check for that and make him start using it sooner.

Your work on the credit roll was great. Oldschool samus had red/pink eyes, though. 66% items.

There are a few GFX edits I wanna make to that big Samus. Right part of her neck is green, and it looks like she has a green bush, haha.

I'm sad that wall jumping feels less ultra powerful again.

How does it feel less ultra powerful, exactly? Walljumps go higher than they did in vanilla. If anything they should feel more powerful because single-wall jumps go faster.

The Crateria and Brinstar palettes tended not to grab my attention much, but that's just my preference for brighter colours.

What colors would you suggest in place of what's there now? Something that doesn't look too much like any of the other palettes used. Area palettes aren't set in stone yet, and I did think about changing Brinstar's colors up again.

Power Beam shots seem WAY too slow :S

I debated this change for little awhile, but I like it. They're slower, but with the rapid firing, it's easy to bumrush enemies by having 4-5 shots hit them all at once. Pretty nifty.

Mother Brain's theme changing back to the original Tourian music wasn't intended, and I actually had no idea that happened until earlier. While working on PB I always had the emulator sound muted and was listening to music. I can only assume it happened because of some changes I made to speed up the chamber-exploding sequence. Ridley's theme I knew about, because Ceres Ridley and lower Norfair Ridley both use the same routine for setting their battle music. To fix that would take hijacking his music code and checking for the area or something, I think?

I know that sequence breaking and bomb jumps are much easier to do now. I have no problem with this, lol. The ultimate goal for this hack will finally begin after v1.0 is released and all of its bugs and quirks are polished off. When the game is 3 or 4 times larger than it is now, all of PB's speed-ups will make more sense because the game's new content will be playing off of these changes.

[passarbye]

15:21 - PHANTOON HARDEST BOSS 2012
15:25 - With much effort, I have beaten Phantoon.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna notch his HP a bit. He takes around 80 or so missiles to kill right now. In earlier versions people said he was too easy with lower HP. . .

Maridia is as beautiful as it sounds now. The fight with Botwoon was short.

Aside from colors, I only made him appear sooner after entering his room. Should I give him more HP?

I know that sequence breaking and bomb jumps are much easier to do now. I have no problem with this, lol. The ultimate goal for this hack will finally begin after v1.0 is released and all of its bugs and quirks are polished off. When the game is 3 or 4 times larger than it is now, all of PB's speed-ups will make more sense because the game's new content will be playing off of these changes.

phantoon was simple to beat, his pattern is easy to see through.

i loved maridia, but yea botwoon should have a lot more health. especially since it's a mid-late game miniboss.

is this talk of the revival of fullhack PB?  :whoa: or did i miss something?

[begrimed]

That community thing was going to be a full hack made using PB's physics.

What I talked about in my earlier post was a PB expansion, which will leave the vanilla layout alone and simply add a LOT of new content. New rooms, enemies, items and other things that all tie in convincingly with what's already there. A different spin from just wanting to make a whole new world, yeah?

[Prime Hunter]

Ah, that makes sense then. Now that I know there is/was a long term plan beyond the vanilla game I guess I can't complain if you want to speed things up a bit, especially if you're shooting for making the game that much larger in the end. Personally I like the idea of expanding on Super's map and leaving it intact alongside anything new that's added in. Don't see that idea too often when people make their own hacks.

Also, this is a small thing but something I just noticed when messing around with PB in SMILE a few minutes ago: The background on the landing site doesn't have the same scroll settings over each of its four states, so in some of them the stars simply cut off after a while while running from left to right. I don't remember seeing this happen when I was actually playing through the game in ZSNES yesterday, but I might have just failed to notice somehow. I haven't modified or patched the game other than to apply PB v0.6 though so I thought you'd want to know just in case.

[begrimed]

lol, wow. Good catch, Prime Hunter. Just fixed that up. Thanks.

[MetroidMst]

I noticed something strange when recording my run of PB, took a lookie in SMILE, and noticed...?

[spoiler=WHY DID YOU DO THIS?][/spoiler]
[spoiler=ANSWER FOR YOUR CRIME!][/spoiler]

This was obviously a conscience decision. Both block and scroll PLM are moved over a grand total of one block. I am unsure of the reasoning behind this move, other than perhaps to make the tunnel use the entire ledge. That seems like a very minor thing to worry about moving the original location of that block though...

[Quietus]

I like the idea of expanding the original game.  I also think it'd be neat to have a hack where it forces a player to visit each room at least once.  Not so much a linear route, but just have the player experience all there is.  Even when 100%ing the original, there are tonnes of rooms you don't need to visit.

[Fizzer]

I found Phantoon easier than in Vanilla, he was sort of just blasting.

The walljumping just felt less powerful than it did in Project Base 0.5 is what I meant.

The Crateria and Brinstar palettes are just sort of grey without much variation until Yellow Brinstar, and then all of the areas vary nicely.

The stars in the background shouldn't appear to move at all when Samus is travelling such a short distance, really, since they're supposed to be so far away.

[begrimed]

MetroidMst: I was trying to fix a small bit of scroll funkiness. After getting the missile, on the way back through the morph tunnel, the camera likes to try scrolling downward a little bit. What you see is me simply making the wrong block bombable again when I was undoing my change.

Quietus: a neat idea. Would take a lot of door tinkering and stuff to force that, though. That, and unnecessary rooms add more depth to exploring, since you won't always know if you're visiting a dead end.

Fizzer: the vanilla Phantoon fight took way too long. It's annoying just waiting around for him to appear each time. I'll play around with other color sets for Crateria/green Brinstar and see if anything pops. I think making the background stars completely still would require using BG_Data. Noted, though.

[DSO]

I think making the background stars completely still would require using BG_Data DSO.

Could probably do it very easily with an FX2 routine. If that ends up looking a little jerky, then it won't be much effort to find a hijack point that will work.

[Scyzer]

Phantoon for me was very easy to hit, but also very hard to avoid, so it all came down to whether you could kill it before it killed you.

Also, I do like the idea of adding extra rooms and areas. I also more like the idea of annoying MM, and slightly changing the location of every single bomb/shot block slightly, and maybe slightly change the terrain in some places.
One example would be to change the terrain in the first green bubble room so the player couldn't wall jump to get Speed Booster early. Put the bomb block path to get to the lower part of the room in a different place, etc.
It would make it feel like an even newer game while still holding true to the original SM.

I guess PB would be to SM was ZM is to M1 :D

[begrimed]

I'm definitely not ruling out small terrain changes after 1.0 is out. That version and earlier releases all work within the original game's tile data limits and stay loyal to the source material so any copy of SMILE can open it up and start editing. I'll probably be more liberal with making structural changes in later versions.

[Quietus]

One example would be to change the terrain in the first green bubble room so the player couldn't wall jump to get Speed Booster early.

You'll have to be fairly devious with those edits.  To get up there early you can wall-jump up the central pillar, wall-jump up the left-hand wall and jump across, freeze one of the flying enemies, or IBJ.  Stopping even half of those is going to take some serious work.  The only way I can really see you doing it would be to completely block it off with crumble blocks.

[Corruptor]

One example would be to change the terrain in the first green bubble room so the player couldn't wall jump to get Speed Booster early.

You'll have to be fairly devious with those edits.  To get up there early you can wall-jump up the central pillar, wall-jump up the left-hand wall and jump across, freeze one of the flying enemies, or IBJ.  Stopping even half of those is going to take some serious work.  The only way I can really see you doing it would be to completely block it off with crumble blocks.

how would you even gain enough speed to get across the crumble blocks? Unless it will be like the crumble blocks in brinstar so you have enough room. That would also prevent you from getting that reserve tank and missle earlier. And I hate going back to get those two :P although, if it were project base, I might not mind doing it. Also, I get that Grime can also make it so you would HAVE to use the grapple beam to get across.

[Quietus]

Well, if crumble blocks were the solution, you'd only need one or two tiles to actually crumble, not all of them, so there'd be plenty of space to either run over them or jump the obviously different (crumble) tiles.

[advancedpillow]

I'm definitely not ruling out small terrain changes after 1.0 is out. That version and earlier releases all work within the original game's tile data limits and stay loyal to the source material so any copy of SMILE can open it up and start editing. I'll probably be more liberal with making structural changes in later versions.

I am fully on board for a begrimed edition of PB, in which you beautify the vanilla world.

[Zhs2]

Oh, and don't forget to extend the original for four more hidden missile packs (for a total of 250 missiles) and also Pipe Boots and Wood Beam and Warfair.

[Quietus]

And four Energy Tanks, to make twenty, and one Reserve Tank, to make five. :^_^:

[Corruptor]

Grime, do you know people can STILL get past the one part and get super missile's early? Loving this hack btw.

[MetroidMst]

Grime, do you know people can STILL get past the one part and get super missile's early?

He said he was staying true to the original game...

[begrimed]

Oh, and don't forget to extend the original for four more hidden missile packs (for a total of 250 missiles)

And four Energy Tanks, to make twenty, and one Reserve Tank, to make five.

You guys are thinking small-time. I imagined everything doubled. 500 missiles, 100 super missiles/power bombs. Placing 28 energy tanks somehow making them still all fit neatly in the HUD, maybe devising a way to make them smaller so they don't take up any more space than they already do. Like having two energy tank blocks drawn in a single 8x8 tile. Same with reserves. Also, using JAM's plasma+Spazer patch. Most importantly, giving you a reason to wanna try to get everything by making tons of stronger enemy clones for the new parts to give it that edge of danger again, and if I can come up with ideas to fit in well enough, new bosses and some optional new items, like finally separating speed ball into its own item that just lets you use run button while morphing, etc.

Without all that, it'd just be a bunch of new rooms with nothing but enemies in them. That'd be kind of boring.

I realize this is a pretty big goal, but I'm sure it can be done.

[Zhs2]

I see the purposefully hidden text in my post got missed... :grin:

[begrimed]

No, I saw it. I just missed copying it after hitting reply. NOT GONNA HAPPEN.

[Weterr123]

I have seen the hidden text. What are those 2 things?

Gonna be going through 0.6 tomorrow btw, looking forward to it  :^_^:

[Quietus]

All three are just long running jokes within the community.  Pipe Boots and Wood Beam I believe are slightly older.