Wind Waker Hacking Thread

[Sage of Mirrors]

I know, but... OK, so maybe my excitement was a bit overblown... sorry.

[Zeth Ryder]

Fado isn't a decendant of Saria, to be a decendant would require one to have offspring and Kokiri don't reproduce however the Kokiri were born from the Deku Tree. My guess is that is just a beta Fado.

[Lishy]

Was it ever confirmed Jabun was a dungeon similar to Jabu-Jabu?

And I doubt they would put heartbeats for no reason.

 

If so, any remnants of his dungeon in the game? I'm very interested to learn what we can find of the removed dungeons.

[Sage of Mirrors]

No, I don't think it's ever been confirmed. The heartbeats in Jabun's theme is probably the result of remixing Jabu-Jabu's dungeon music.

As for removed dungeons, I don't think there's much left to find. An occasional unused room a la the Tower of the Gods, maybe, but really there doesn't seem to be much chance that we'd find rooms from entirely removed dungeons. The developers seem to have done pretty well with that.

Interesting Fact of the Day: Dragon Roost Cavern's folder, M_NewD2, has an arc labeled Room9. But that arc is a dummy; there's nothing in it. It just so happens that Room9 is where the mini bosses of the dungeon (the Bokoblins and the Moblin) are fought. Seems like they decided to put Room9 outside the main dungeon's folder like the other mini boss chambers. They were a bit lazy, though- the folder containing Room9 is called M_Dra09. They also still called the arc Room9. I wonder if that was a last minute thing, and that's why it's different from everything else?

Also, the Caverns' name, M_NewD2, seems intriguing. Could it imply Dragon Roost Caverns, like the Tower of the Gods, went though a redesign...?

Edit: Also, some misc hacking stuff:


Seems Kalle is programmed to attach to the closest surface if there's no roof directly above. Wonder why?


Molgera's sand is actually part of its actor. Weird. Also, it looks cool with the effect of the sand being lighter underneath Molgera!

Inappropriate image has been removed by administration.

This oddly placed Tower is the actor called X_tower. I'm quite stumped as to why X_tower exists; there's already a room in Sea that has the Tower in it. My best guess is that this actor version is used in the cutscene where it rises, as the Demo for that scene doesn't contain a Tower model. On a side note, I had to put the cheat code "Have all goddess pearls" to make it appear.

[Kargaroc]

No, I don't think it's ever been confirmed. The heartbeats in Jabun's theme is probably the result of remixing Jabu-Jabu's dungeon music.

 

As for removed dungeons, I don't think there's much left to find. An occasional unused room a la the Tower of the Gods, maybe, but really there doesn't seem to be much chance that we'd find rooms from entirely removed dungeons. The developers seem to have done pretty well with that.

 

Interesting Fact of the Day: Dragon Roost Cavern's folder, M_NewD2, has an arc labeled Room9. But that arc is a dummy; there's nothing in it. It just so happens that Room9 is where the mini bosses of the dungeon (the Bokoblins and the Moblin) are fought. Seems like they decided to put Room9 outside the main dungeon's folder like the other mini boss chambers. They were a bit lazy, though- the folder containing Room9 is called M_Dra09. They also still called the arc Room9. I wonder if that was a last minute thing, and that's why it's different from everything else?

 

Also, the Caverns' name, M_NewD2, seems intriguing. Could it imply Dragon Roost Caverns, like the Tower of the Gods, went though a redesign...?

 

Edit: Also, some misc hacking stuff:

 

Seems Kalle is programmed to attach to the closest surface if there's no roof directly above. Wonder why?

 

Molgera's sand is actually part of its actor. Weird. Also, it looks cool with the effect of the sand being lighter underneath Molgera!

 

This oddly placed Tower is the actor called X_tower. I'm quite stumped as to why X_tower exists; there's already a room in Sea that has the Tower in it. My best guess is that this actor version is used in the cutscene where it rises, as the Demo for that scene doesn't contain a Tower model. On a side note, I had to put the cheat code "Have all goddess pearls" to make it appear.

 

Could you make higher resolution pics? theses are dreadfully small...

 

Nice finds!

[Sage of Mirrors]

Yup:

 

 

 

 

 

Side note: Beating the boss triggered the event that normally occurs if that room's normal boss is beaten. Beating Molgera in Ghoma's room, for instance, lead to the warp out of Dragon roost to appear; beating Kalle in Jalhalla's room leads to the cutscene with Medli (though it crashed, probably cause Makar's model was still there?).

 

One more thing: I couldn't get bosses to load outside of boss chambers. Putting a boss on Outset caused the game to crash. Going to look into dzrs and dzs files to see if we can get them working.

[Lishy]

Excuse my curiosity, but can we get vids of this progress? Preferably, of Kalle in another boss room? Like Jalhalla? Kalle's behavior sounds VERY interesting!

[Sage of Mirrors]

Well, I'd like to, but my computer runs awfully slow when trying to use both Dolphin and Hypercam at the same time... do you have any free capture software to recommend? Eh, I'll try Hypercam again tomorrow.

[Secant]

CamStudio is what I use--it's the open source equivalent of HyperCam with better controls.

 

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE document what you are doing somewhere and preferably share with the public. Notes to what you're changing in RAM/ROM, speculation on file formats, whatever, but please take copious notes so others can reproduce and expand on these works.

[Kargaroc]

Well Dolphin has it's own video capturing capability (just go into the graphics control panel, go to advanced, and select dump frames.

note: videos like this will have to be slowed down to 30fps with virtualdub because they will be at 60fps otherwise which is too fast.

Also, it doesn't capture sound. The best thing about this is it's not sensitive to computer speed as the final video will always be at full speed.

[Secant]

Also, it doesn't capture sound. The best thing about this is it's not sensitive to computer speed as the final video will always be at full speed.

There's a workaround--simply use a sound recording program and use stereo mix as your default recording device (or whatever your speaker output hardware is called). This records your sound. In some cases (like mine) there may be a lot of static background noise, in which case I currently know of no remedy other than using different speakers. Once you've recorded the video and the sound, open the audio file in Audacity and set the length of it to be equal to the video's length, and voila, you have sound synced with video.

[Sage of Mirrors]

I didn't know Dolphin could do that. Thanks for telling me about it!

 

The feature doesn't seem to cause a gigantic slowdown, so tonight I'll make a video of Kalle Demos in Jalhalla's room and upload it to Youtube.

[xdaniel]

Short question, can you replace Yaz0-compressed RARCs with uncompressed ones, or does the game expect those certain files to be compressed? If it can read uncompressed files instead, I'll probably try and implement actor editing and in turn RARC modification/rebuilding in Wind Viewer. Otherwise I'll need code for Yaz0 compression, C# or otherwise... at least as long as I can read it, I should be able to rewrite it in C#.

[Sage of Mirrors]

Yes, Xdaniel; the game will read RARCs in the place of Yaz0ed files.

 

I'm going to edit an explanation of what I did in detail later.

 

Edit: Fixed the speed!

[Kargaroc]

well then... if we could make an uncompressed version of the game, then things would really get started

[Sage of Mirrors]

I'm taking on a new project. I'm going to try and edit Laruto's entry cut scene to use Medli's model and a 'wait' animation. I've successfully added files to a .arc before, but this one has multiple changing pieces... then there's those .btks that we have no information about...

 

Correction: I'm thinking about a new project, IF I can figure out why Dolphin keeps crashing when trying to play the unaltered cut scene.

[Mallos31]

One thing I'm mildly curious about, can you find any reason why they didn't use anything similar to object sets in this game like they did in OoT? Instead they just have the same room over and over again, and that room has it's own set of objects in the folder with it. Also, why is it that there's 3 copies of outset island, (one's the E3 version of course) one's compressed, and one isn't.

[Sage of Mirrors]

On the first thing, I'm not sure what you mean.

 

 

On the second thing... My guess is that the E3 version made it in because they changed Outset at the last minute- adding minor details, as well as the cave where Jabun is hiding. Compression-wise... I'm thinking that the Yaz0 compression used on most beta Roomx .arcs is left over from when they intended to have all files compressed; the majority of final room .arcs are just RARCs, uncompressed.

 

 

On another note, I find it very interesting that they experimented with clear water (shown in Amos_T, the test area where it has the boat). It's a shame that they abandoned the concept. Using it in a hack might be a bit sketchy, as the water in the test room is somewhat buggy.

 

 

One more thing: I've figured out part of how .bms files (music) work:

 

 

-There's a section at the start that lists all the parts of the song. Normal format seems to be:

 

C1 yy xx xx xx

Where yy is the number of the part (starts at 00, then goes to 01 for the next entry, ect.) and xx is the offset of the music data.

 

 

Then there's a row of bytes that has a varying length between files... It starts with 0E 00 78 FD and ends with an FF where the music data starts. The rest of the information after that is the music data, with each part separated by FF. I'm going to experiment with changing data in these sections.

[Kargaroc]

Nice! I wonder if it would be possible in the future to convert the BMS'es into IT files so that you could listen to them...

 

Also, like I said, Outset Island's folder for most of development was DmSpot0. (any theories as to what DmSpot means?)

 

When they changed to the sea folder they just left DmSpot0 there, in beta form. It's the same thing as the Alpha Outset minimap. They updated to a new folder for the minimaps in that case, and they just left whatever they had at that point there.

 

I suspect that had they ever changed to a new BMD folder during development, we would of had Alpha Outset's map cause that's what would of happened.

 

So... is there any tool that I can use to insert large files into the ISO? In order to replace a Yaz0'ed map with a unyaz'd version, we need to be able to do that.

[Sage of Mirrors]

If I have to insert a larger file into the ISO, I just use GCR to rip the root folder out, replace the file I want to change, and convert it back to an ISO with GCR.

[SanguinettiMods]

You should try to find traces of the old HUD shown in E3 trailers.

[Kargaroc]

So... is there a program that can make a .arc that the game can read? I've been trying to swap R_00's non-functional bmd with another (specifically, TEST's bmd). It doesn't match the geometry but I don't think that will matter right now.

 

hmm... I think spinout demonstrated that R_00's bmd wasn't actually the model for the room, and instead, something else. I think that perhapse, R_00's room could be somewhere else. No reason for replacing the room with something else, considering how they updated things.

 

Also, on a kinda unrelated note... Does anyone know the ratio of unused content to used content?

 

Edit: I found a .arc packer that worked, and made R_00 load ingame. The thing is I had to use the different bmd from the room, so everything except for the fake test room in the sky is invisible, and from what I tested (my testing consists of about 10 seconds of walking blindly (while being very excited) before attempting to climb, which caused it to crash), it isn't very stable.

 

Edit 2:

 

Edit 3: On a slightly unrelated note, I also fixed A_nami, by giving it the version of the VrTest bmd found in title.arc

thankyou camera hack

[alphaheiti]

 

nothing big just a texture hack

[Kargaroc]

 

nothing big just a texture hack

 

That's looking pretty nice!

[alphaheiti]

That's looking pretty nice!

 

haha thank ya ;P