Bloodwych Remake (HTML Version)

[MadMunky]

Testing Characters...

[Hungry Horace]

i wrote a comment about the 'table' below the palette earlier.

I should have known better.... i actually used the data there in the WHDLoad slave, because the mouse/pointer sprites are actually stored there:

      Address $8E88      ; sprite 0
      Address $8F18      ; sprite 1
      Address $8ED0      ; sprite 2
      Address $8F60      ; sprite 3

I actually 'clear' (and store) these sprites so that the pointer will disappear when you are in a walking mode.

[Hungry Horace]

I had what I am hoping is a breakthrough on the "character design" information this evening - it will require further investigation but I successfully changed the colours if blodwyn's legs and torso.

I do not have addresses yet, but two locations were patched .... Hopefully they are next to each other and are next to the other items such as the blodwyn's head (style and colour) arms, boots, feet etc.


My process.... I investigated what colours were used for blodwyn by palette register. These were; 3,4,8 and E. Two greys, a blue and a white.


I wrote a program in Amos that calculated all of the possible combinations (24) and proceeded to check the Bloodwych binary for occurrences.  It counted the number of finds for each, and the patched over a new value (all blues)

Initially I had no luck, I found data for various combination word values, but they caused crashes or simply yielded no change.

When I switched to searching to long numbers, I found out of all of my combinations only one yielded results .... Two results in fact for this same value.

Running the newly saved binary I found the torso and legs of blodwyn had changed, and I am assuming (pending further investigation) that this is why I had two results.

Tomorrow I will get the addresses and see if "live" editing is possible, and then start investigating with other characters and surrounding data

Let's hope this works as well as I hope it will!!!

[MadMunky]

Good work Horace, it sounds like they actually did what we do to colour the images so your find that the arms and head use a slightly different palette. Hopefully one this will make it a lot easier to finish the remaining palettes we need and it will also be near a table where they store which type of torso etc is used for which character

[Hungry Horace]

It seems this data *can* be edited with live data. There is good and bad news atm.

I can confirm I have found a  block of  $6B8 length (I believe, I am assuming it is terminated at the $ff at this point)

In the BW439 binary, this is located at $34F08 (or $351c8 in loaded memory)

There are $14 bytes per character, tested with Blodwyn and Murlock.
This length would correlate to $55/$56 "characters" being defined (which is correct for all the "normal" characters and monsters)

The structure is as follows;

Head: 4 bytes
Legs: 4 bytes
Torso: 4 bytes
Arms: 4 bytes
Head (at distance): 1 byte
Body/arms/Legs (at distance): 2 bytes
Belt/Feet (at distance): 1 byte

I will add this table to files exported / imported by my editor as  characters.colours or something


The bad news is of course that the choice of body/head/legs etc is not in this same table... so more investigation is needed, and I am not sure how easy this is going to be.

[Hungry Horace]

got a little further.

I just 'looked' at the table of head sprites, turned them into a set of numbers, and guess what the sequent might be for the main champions....

$0f 10 0E 0D  (blodwyn, murlock, Eleanor, Roseanne..)

low and behold, a list of "what head is used" can be found at $A596 in the BW 439 binary

Code Select Expand


0F 10 0E 0D 01 0A 07 06 02 0C 03 05 00
0B 08 04 04 05 06 03 10 07 03 11 11 11
11 11 04 04 04 0D 0C 0C 0C 0C 0C 03 03
01 01 02 02 02 02 02 02 01 03 01 06 06
07 07 07 07 10 10 10 10 0B 0B 0B 0B 09
0C 02 07 06 07 01 05 05 05 05 05 03 01
01 03 0F 0F 0F 0F 0F 0F

There are no doubt similar tables around here.


The list of heads is as follows;

Code Select Expand

00 ulrich
01 astroth
02 edward
03 sethra
04 thai change
05 flay
06 elfric
07 baldrick
08 hengist
09 zendick
0A zothen
0B zastaph
0C megrim
0D roseanee
0E elanor
0F blodwyn
10 murlock
11 demon




edit:

Found it!   (well, sort-of)

There are a list of pre-defined bodies-structures  that can be used... this makes things quite a bit easier overall.

These are listed @ $A418 in the BW 439 binary.

The full data-block is as follows;

Code Select Expand

00 03 04 04 02 03 03 03 02 04 02
01 02 03 03 03 03 01 0B 02 03 03 03 0C
0C 0C 0C 0C 03 03 03 08 08 04 04 04 0A
0D 0D 0D 0D 07 07 07 07 07 07 03 02 02
0B 0B 03 03 03 03 03 03 03 03 03 03 03
03 03 04 07 07 07 07 07 01 01 01 01 01
0B 07 02 02 00 00 00 00 00 00

I need to do some testing to see what bodies are formed by each option.

[Wishbone]

Looks good, thanks Horace! We will definitely have to test this in our remake (looking at Madmunky)

[MadMunky]

Nice one horrace! Im going to have to play!



looks like you can do some fun stuff with this..




Horace, please can you post a line/example of the palette data so I can also try and find this

[Hungry Horace]

you mean the list of palette entries for the characters?

Code Select Expand

00 04 08 00 0E 04 08 03 0E 04 08 03 04 08 04 0E 08
08 04 04 00 09 0C 0B 05 06 0E 00 09 0C 0B 0C 0B 0D 0B 0E
09 0C 06 0D 00 00 08 0C 09 0C 0B 00 09 0C 0B 00 0B 09 0C
0C 09 0C 0D 0C 05 00 00 0C 08 04 0E 00 08 04 0E 00 0B 08
04 0B 08 04 09 04 05 06 00 0C 01 05 06 00 01 05 06 06 06
05 06 06 05 06 01 05 00 00 00 05 09 0C 0B 00 0B 0D 0E 0B
0B 06 05 0E 0A 0D 0C 06 07 08 04 05 08 04 0D 00 08 04 0D
0B 0B 08 04 0D 07 08 08 08 05 06 00 07 05 06 0E 00 05 06
0E 0B 0B 05 06 0E 05 06 06 06 02 03 04 0C 09 0C 0B 00 09
0A 0B 0B 0B 0B 0A 0B 0A 0B 09 0C 00 05 06 0C 05 06 0E 00
05 06 0E 00 0B 05 07 08 05 06 00 07 05 04 06 0C 0B 0D 0E
00 01 05 06 06 06 05 06 06 05 06 0B 0D 00 04 0E 0C 0B 08
0E 0D 00 08 0E 00 0E 0E 0E 00 0E 08 0E 0B 00 00 00 07 07
<edit>

data begins at $34E44 in the BW439 binary (not sure where I got my value from before)

I am going to work on ripping each of the combinations (the crude way if need be) in order to create some kind of character design editor.

[MadMunky]

Thanks Horace,

It seems like that table holds all the characters palettes but not the palettes for the larger monsters, summons/dragons etc..

[MadMunky]

This block of data does some strange stuff with the player portals...

Code Select Expand

ff ff ff ff ff ff ff fd ff ff ff fe ff ff ff e8
ff ff ff ac ff ff fe ec ff ff fb ff ff ff ff ff
ff ff df ff ff ff ef ff ff fe 8f ff ff fa cf ff
ff ee cf ff ff bf ff ff ff ff 7f f7 fe fd 7f d7
fc f5 7f 57 f8 d5 7d 57 08 d5 7d 57


[Hungry Horace]

hey MM - what do you mean by player portals? 


re: dragons/summons etc, there is no need for them to be coloured really, because their colour scheme is dependent on their level.

i guess it must be possible to change what colours a level 1 dragon uses, what colours a level 2 dragon uses etc etc but that would be about it. (i am sure i can look for this if you think it would be useful)

it is a little bit of a shame that single-space monsters such as beholders and summons cannot be "mixed in" with other characters / monsters, but it's not a biggie.

[MadMunky]

hey MM - what do you mean by player portals? 

It looks like these are pointer address's for what is drawn on the player view.

[MadMunky]

Horace you might find this helpful as we are changing our version to read a palette file for the monsters now and also the body types so here is a list of all the different body types we have found so far

Code Select Expand


CHA_BODY[0] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_FEMALE_NAKED,
torso: CHA_TORSO_FEMALE_NAKED,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[1] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_SKELETON,
torso: CHA_TORSO_SKELETON,
arm: CHA_ARM_SKELETON
};
CHA_BODY[2] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_MALE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE_NAKED,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[3] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_MALE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[4] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_FEMALE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_FEMALE,
arm: CHA_ARM_FEMALE
};
CHA_BODY[5] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_MALE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[6] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_FEMALE_PLATE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_FEMALE,
arm: CHA_ARM_FEMALE
};
CHA_BODY[7] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_MALE_CHAIN,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE_CHAIN,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[8] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_FEMALE_CHAIN,
torso: CHA_TORSO_FEMALE,
arm: CHA_ARM_FEMALE
};
CHA_BODY[9] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_MALE_CHAIN,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE_CHAIN,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[10] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_FEMALE_PLATE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_FEMALE,
arm: CHA_ARM_FEMALE
};
CHA_BODY[11] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_MALE,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE_CHAIN,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[12] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_DEMON,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE_NAKED,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};
CHA_BODY[13] = {
leg: CHA_LEG_DEMON,
torso: CHA_TORSO_MALE_CHAIN,
arm: CHA_ARM_MALE
};


[MadMunky]

We now have our version reading all the monster types and palettes

http://bloodwych.co.uk/bwhtml/bloodwych.html

More Features

*Adding Bloodwych Font
*Fixing Character Graphics and distances issues
*Monster logic, monsters able to move and open wooden doors (unlocked)
*All monsters in the tower now drawn expect large monsters

Thanks to Wishbone for this and Horace for finding the data, this really makes it better and more accurate for us.