[Selbi]

If you read the title, you can guess that I kinda pissed off right now, for a good reason: The title card system is pure pain in the ass.
You need to tell the game how many and which letters you load and then do mappings, which are using VRAM offsets to those letters. That wouldn't have been such a big problem though. The problem was the letters I, M and W, as they have a different size from the other letters (I=2, M and W=6, anything else 4), meaning I was pretty much fucked and had to rewrite a lot of code, when it already was working fine for any other letter.

But anyway, presenting you the Sonic 2 - Text Code Generator, a program I finally did, after months of the release of the Sonic 1 - Text Code Generator. The actual programming of this took 4 days, even though day 2 and 3 I didn't really do anything but a few artistic things.

But enough of the moaning, here's the program itself:


The usage is very simple, however, you will have to read the Setup Guide first, which contains a disassembly like file, that uses the code and is damn hard optimized to work with this program.

Oh yeah, the output of the picture above looks like this in-game (thanks to Spanner):


Download (v3.0 - 2013 Hg update)

Please report any problems, bugs, suggestions, etc. =)

This post has been edited by Selbi: 09 May 2013 - 01:26 PM

[Sik]

If you read the title, you can guess that I kinda pissed off right now, for a good reason: The title card system is pure pain in the ass.
You need to tell the game how many and which letters you load and then do mappings, which are using VRAM offsets to those letters. That wouldn't have been such a big problem though. The problem was the letters I, M and W, as they have a different size from the other letters (I=2, M and W=6, anything else 4), meaning I was pretty much fucked and had to redo a lot of code, when it already was working fine for any other letter.

If you think that's a pain in the ass, then you never messed with Sonic 3D title cards. They're all the same size, but there is no useful free space in VRAM at all! You need to look for gaps scattered all around, and title cards usually use tiles that later get reused for some objects (notably the stars of the invincibility power-up). Oh, and you need to find space for the "act" sprite, too.

(...well, unless you take advantage of those 64 tiles that for some reason are never used at all)

[Hanoch]

More like title card generator amirite (judging from the look of the picture)?

[Selbi]

More like title card generator amirite (judging from the look of the picture)?

For now, yes, it only does title cards, but I'm planning to do every other kind of text in the future as well.

[Selbi]

Small fix (v1.0.1)

Due to data shift the level result screens are messed up. I had to seperate the Setup Code from the Mappings.
Thanks to Irixion for reporting.

[Irixion]

Oh yay thanks, will let you know if there are any more bugs =P

[Tidbit]

Errr.. small problem, in the second part of the first set up guide. When editing s2.asm I can't find "byte_15820:", or
"word_15832:" I'm using xenowhirls disassembly.

This post has been edited by Tidbit: 26 June 2010 - 09:25 PM

[Selbi]

Errr.. small problem, in the second part of the first set up guide. When editing s2.asm I can't find "byte_15820:", or
"word_15832:" I'm using xenowhirls disassembly.

PM'd, because I really don't know what's going on, and I don't want this thread to get filled with a conversation about a single question. :V

[Selbi]

Update: v2.0 released

About two weeks ago I decided to continue working on this program. I was just done with the "End of Level" Title Cards, when I realised, I'm already done with everything. Thanks to Xenowhirl, all the other text systems can easly be edited in ASCII text.
So basically the only difference between this and the last version is this single new type (End of Level). I cleaned up the GUI and added a lot of unnecesary features (like auto-patching your disassembly with the project files included in this program).

However, there's one thing you should know: The End of Level Title Cards are using a different system from the Zone Title Cards. You can ONLY use the letters:

CODE

A, C, E, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, S, T, U and Z

Which probably sounds bad to you, but if you don't need special characters from this list, you can edit the art file"art\nemesis\End of level results text.bin" and replace those characters with the ones of "art\nemesis\Font using large broken letters.bin".

And a little screenshot:

(Yes, I didn't know any better example.)

This post has been edited by Selbi: 31 October 2010 - 04:32 AM

[E-122-Psi]

About two weeks ago I decided to continue working on this program. I was just done with the "End of Level" Title Cards, when I realised, I'm already done with everything. Thanks to Xenowhirl, all the other text systems can easly be edited in ASCII text.

Not ALL of them though. The Special Stage results mappings (Obj 6F) are still uneditable.

*shot*

The edits so far have been pretty useful to me though. :D

[Selbi]

Due to continues request by a very certain Tech Member, I've actually decided to give my tool a little update after almost three years.

Sonic 2 - Text Code Generator (v3.0)

Not much has changed and those who use Xenowhirl's 2007 disassembly will probably not feel any difference at all. That's because the biggest part of this update is about adding support for the modern Hg Disassembly in Retro's Mercurial. I personally don't like that version very much, but then again, I'm not a Sonic 2 hacker and I don't want to put certain people at a disadvantage just because of my personal preferences.

What else to say? Some GUIs have been redesigned (especially when it comes to the setup tutorials) and the project files received a few improvements (mostly converting all the byte arrays to words). Listing everything would be pointless gibberish for most of you, so I'll just leave it at that.

Have fun making interesting zone names. I guess.


Special thanks to MainMemory!