Where's the latest ROM?

[Chrono'99]

Just in case someone wants to do something, where's the latest (well, least old) ROM patch?

[Vehek]

That would be 21_UpToTerra2001Reptite....which disappeared with ce.herograw
I'll attach it here.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Chrono'99]

Thanks.

[ZeaLitY]

I guess that predates my "fixes" to the Porre base in trying to make it more like the revised thread.

Geiger confirmed recently that the Denadoro Mts entrance map we use for 1002 is inherently corrupted (though it looks fine in the ROM). Things like that date back to the first versions of CE, so we will perpetually be dealing with corruption unless the project is completely rebooted somehow.

And even then, it's too much for this number of people...the only way I envisioned its completion is external development on fresh ROMs and then importing to a control ROM with complete logs and textual dating. Things would be polished on the external ROM, not the control. All the hard changes would follow at the end.

But still...not enough developers...

[Chrono'99]

Okay, what if we really reboot the ROM coding? Of course, we won't recode anything from stratch; we'll just redo everything manually.

The locations events can all be exported to txt files (it's a simple feature in TF), then we can recode every location by hand in a new, clean ROM with these txt files as references. It will be tedious, but it's technically less tedious to do this robotical work than to have to actually "think" and code new events. There's no trial and error involved, and working strictly location by location (not even necessarily in the adventure's order) is much easier than going back and forth between several of them like one does when coding new events.

I think it's not a useless work, and I'm pretty sure I have enough motivation to do this recoding. The only reason I stopped coding Prophet's Guile (which never corrupted) was to return to Crimson Echoes, but then I stopped CE too because, here, discouraging corruptions were present. If corruptions don't appear on the new ROM, the momentum we could gain can definitely grow bigger than the non-existent momentum we currently have in "trying" to keep on working on a corrupted ROM.

Other project members can recreate the maps in a similar way, but even if this doesn't happen anytime soon, the benefit of recoding things already coded in the previous ROM means that I can keep on recoding even on empty, uncreated maps, since coordinates and things relevant to game progression are all in the events rather than the maps, except for the exits.

And the icing on our (slightly bitter) cake is this: http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

With this program, one can record things that happen on one's screen. I'm going to use it to record everything I do in TF. This will hopefully help in identifying what generates which corruption, if corruptions ever happen. Coupled with the "make a backup everytime you save" method, this will hopefully ward off any risk of dooming the ROM again.

*insert some kind of huge warcry here for motivation*

[Chrono'99]

Actually, I'll start with only the mandatory locations, like I did with Prophet's Guile, rather than every location that can be visited ingame. Sounds wiser this way.

[ZeaLitY]

There's just no one else to help, though. The community is so small...working on this means accepting all of it, which is hard to imagine.

It might be good to wait for TF 2.60, too.

[Chrono'99]

Well, as the saying goes, a "captain" ought to remain on the ship even if it's sinking...

I'm really willing to recode the stuff (I've started), but I think I'm equally tempted to actually continue working on the current, corrupted ROM. Looking back, corruptions never really stopped us (and Jsondag2 in particular); we've done a lot since the first demo, even though we were waiting for the next "next TF update" half of the time.

Stumbling upon corruption is discouraging for the motivation, but I don't think it actually prevents us from eventually finishing this project. It's not like the ROM is impervious to further modification or anything. So far, each time something has corrupted, we simply re-imported a clean stuff on it or fixed it somehow. The Denadoro Mts entrance looks fine for now; we can just continue coding elsewhere, and if that location re-corrupts, we can just re-fix it again and again... overall, we would still have made substantial progress.

Well, it's set; I'm leaving the recoding aside and I'm just going to resume work on the current ROM. Can't wait for TF 2.60.

[Chrono'99]

Alright, with this post, the project is officially back on track. I spent the past week correcting the beginning of the game to make it fit with the current plot outline (Chapter 2 was a huge pain to adjust...).

Here's a list of the major changes:

Prologue:
- no access to Porre anymore (Mrs Elisa is in Truce Mayor's Manor now)
- no need to look for Lucca, she's already in Guardia Castle waiting with Marle

Chapter 1 (renamed to "Legacy of Zeal", as a reference to what an NPC says in the Commons):
- changed the overworld

Chapter 2:
- no access to northern Zenan (thus Porre Base is explored on the first trip)
- Porre is trying to build a tank but it doesn't function; Agent waits for CML to exit the base then he fixes the tank
- Zenan Bridge battle (no Mystics); Agent drops his Gate Key; player must choose to leave Marle or Lucca in the present
- Melchior isn't in Chronopolis (too much things happen in this chapter, so it's wiser to save this less important event for later)
- Atropos isn't killed/hurt (we can save this for the Chronopolis onslaught in the new Chapter 21, for a more dramatic effect)
- Belthasar briefly explains Time Error in a cutscene because PC2 asks "Why do we go to 11998BC instead of 12000BC?"

Chapter 3 (renamed to "Beneath the Azure"):
- Crono, PC2 and Robo are teleported straight to the Ocean Palace

Planned but not coded yet:
- Magus breaks his seal all by himself when the party meets King Zeal and he teleports directly to the MM room
- Melchior and the character left in 1002AD rejoins the party in Chronopolis

I've also altered, like, all the locations of these 3 chapters for graphical polishing, event refining, additional text, etc., but note that all texts are temporary since I suck at them. Rewriting/correcting them will probably be among the last things we do (before the graphical hacking).

Tell me what you think, especially about the "Time Error" cutscene (it's in the style of Lucca's "Guardia Paradox" cutscene in CT, except it's not wrong this time). The way the TDC and Temporal Catch works is a bit complicated because the plot requires it, but I don't know if a whole cutscene is necessary to explain it. Perhaps it doesn't even explain it well? please see it and tell me if you... see my point.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Vehek]

While looking at it with Temporal Flux, I realized that there's a huge bug. The "Belthasar explains Time Error" is in the location where the skills tutorial is, and you can still ask the soldier in the Mayor's manor for the tutorial!

It feels nice to hear the right music for the locations again.

[Chrono'99]

Yeah, I'd like to replace the texts in the Mayor's Manor to something more pertaining to CT:CE, but I don't know what to put yet (perhaps out-of-universe comments on Temporal Flux or something?).

[Vehek]

Crimson Echoes 2007-10-28.ips (536.28 KB - downloaded 1 times.)

Almost 6 hours, and I'm the only person who's tried the patch...

[ZeaLitY]

I would, but I'm writing a paper, and my time is about to be consumed with constructing Chrono Cross's location images for the encyclopedia and releasing the battle models.

But really, the Chrono community isn't exactly the most active. Posts have been generally languishing here, with FaustWolf's Cross thing, a few notes in Kajar Labs, and Chrono'99's recent analysis being the only noteworthy entries. I couldn't even find people to beta test the Chrono Trigger Retranslation, easily the most important thing to come out all summer.

Anyway, here's the current team and their last login dates.

Code: [Select]

jsondag2 July 05, 2007, 05:04:00 PM
Janus Zeal August 19, 2007, 02:24:40 PM
Kae October 05, 2007, 01:10:47 AM
Zakyrus October 21, 2007, 10:23:37 PM
Hadriel October 25, 2007, 12:15:22 AM
Geiger October 26, 2007, 09:27:09 AM
TheOutlaw Today at 04:43:43 AM
JLukas Today at 08:04:25 AM
CyberSarkany Today at 01:04:15 PM
Daniel Krispin  Today at 02:13:06 PM
nightmare975 Today at 03:19:46 PM
justin3009 Today at 05:40:50 PM
Chickenlump Today at 06:04:14 PM
Chrono'99 Today at 07:46:39 PM
Kyronea Today at 07:47:30 PM
Shinrin Today at 09:47:39 PM
Vehek Today at 09:57:04 PM
ZeaLitY Today at 09:58:24 PM

[Vehek]

Yeah...
And Justin3009, Shinrin, and Zakyrus all have their own fan projects to work on.

[ZeaLitY]

And in the end, nothing gets completed. This is the typical starved-resources cycle of modding communities for cold franchises, and we are enslaved by it.