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Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Wed May 30, 2018 3:39
by hairmonster12
Hey could someone please update the "level packs" section of the main Galaxy Mods page over at the Wiki? I don't see Sunnylands listed there yet
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Wed May 30, 2018 6:35
by Nisaba
hairmonster12 wrote: ↑Wed May 30, 2018 3:39
Hey could someone please update the "level packs" section of the main Galaxy Mods page over at the Wiki? I don't see Sunnylands listed there yet
done!
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2018 22:37
by Nisaba
Tesseract wrote:[...] Also, I got around to play Sunnylands - in case someone haven't played it yet, Quinton managed to absolutely perfectly match Keen 4 difficulty level there, which is IMO very rare.
In Sunnylands, something pretty cool happened to me.
I'll bet that not many people noticed that, but the "No swimming" sign was in K4 written in English, yet here it was in SGA. That alone is not so exciting, but as part of some larger unreleased project, I've been working on translating just such occurences myself - and this sign looked suspiciously similiar, so much that I had to make comparison pictures. While there are tiny differences, it is incredible for me to see how two independent people could end up with basically same desing!
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2018 15:28
by Quillax
Nisaba wrote: ↑Sun Apr 29, 2018 7:13
@Quillax @Shikadi-Network
ok, just tested everything and it's actually false information. the secret level just features the janitor and the eight council guys are located in regular levels... in other words, one doesn't need to find the secret level to beat the game.
ps.: Yes, please! I'd love to see a K6 levelpack designed by Quillax.
pps.: Is your name Quillax suppose to be an imperfect ananym of Ceillick?
Ah, glad to hear that's not the case! Also nice to see that another one is interested in seeing me do a Keen 6 levelpack! About my username, I never really thought about Ceilick while coming up with it, so I'd say it's more of a coincidence (and a very interesting one at that).
Nisaba wrote: ↑Mon Jul 23, 2018 22:37
Tesseract wrote:[...] Also, I got around to play Sunnylands - in case someone haven't played it yet, Quinton managed to absolutely perfectly match Keen 4 difficulty level there, which is IMO very rare.
In Sunnylands, something pretty cool happened to me.
I'll bet that not many people noticed that, but the "No swimming" sign was in K4 written in English, yet here it was in SGA. That alone is not so exciting, but as part of some larger unreleased project, I've been working on translating just such occurences myself - and this sign looked suspiciously similiar, so much that I had to make comparison pictures. While there are tiny differences, it is incredible for me to see how two independent people could end up with basically same desing!
-snipping out images-
Thanks for posting that, Nisaba! If you can get on contact with Tesseract, then tell them that I appreciate the feedback! I'm also amused by how close my "NO DIVING" sign is to the one shown in the other screenshot.
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 19:39
by namida
I gave this a play the other day. For the record, it's the first time I've actually played anything Keen-related in probably 4 or 5 years now.
I'm very impressed overall! The only thing I'd point out is that in Dumb Lake, the vertical scrolling is awful. There's a patch out there - I saw it in "Keen 4 Ultimate Edition" - which gets proper underwater scrolling for two levels, at the cost of having awkward scrolling on the world map - I think this is preferable, as the world map is a fairly safe place so it's less critical to have proper scrolling there.
The only other thing I'd criticise is the yellow gem in Pyramid of the Secrets. I honestly suspect most people would not find that without cheats, especially given there's no room for error (if you're a little bit to either side, Keen hits his head instead). For quite a while, I wondered if the yellow gem door was just a decoy and there was no yellow gem - because I found a lot of really clever secrets in that level, but none of them seemed to give a yellow gem. The only thing that made me think otherwise was that, in one part, I could see the area that (presumably) that door lead to from another area.
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 22:44
by K1n9_Duk3
namida wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2019 19:39
The only thing I'd point out is that in Dumb Lake, the vertical scrolling is awful. There's a patch out there - I saw it in "Keen 4 Ultimate Edition" - which gets proper underwater scrolling for two levels, at the cost of having awkward scrolling on the world map - I think this is preferable, as the world map is a fairly safe place so it's less critical to have proper scrolling there.
For the record, I don't think sacrificing the wold map scrolling is a good idea. If you're already changing the scrolling style, you might as well do it correctly and add the underwater/world map scrolling for all levels that need it. Don't listen to naysayers who say it's impossible. It most definitely
is possible if you know what you're doing.
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 18:32
by namida
K1n9_Duk3 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2019 22:44
namida wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2019 19:39
The only thing I'd point out is that in Dumb Lake, the vertical scrolling is awful. There's a patch out there - I saw it in "Keen 4 Ultimate Edition" - which gets proper underwater scrolling for two levels, at the cost of having awkward scrolling on the world map - I think this is preferable, as the world map is a fairly safe place so it's less critical to have proper scrolling there.
For the record, I don't think sacrificing the wold map scrolling is a good idea. If you're already changing the scrolling style, you might as well do it correctly and add the underwater/world map scrolling for all levels that need it. Don't listen to naysayers who say it's impossible. It most definitely
is possible if you know what you're doing.
I mean, if that is possible, even better. But I got the impression that currently, there's no
known way (short of a full-blown source mod) to have that scrolling on more than two levels, and while an ideal outcome would be having it on all three, I think having it on the actual levels that need it is more important than having it on the world map.
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 22:24
by K1n9_Duk3
Well, here's one possible solution for Sunnylands. Just add this to the PATCHES.PAT file (before the "%end" command):
Code: Select all
%patch $904F
$FF $36 $A7D6w $0E $A1 $A7EDw $3C $00 $74 21 $3C $11 $74 17 $3C $10 $74 13
$E8 $F637w $EB $0B $90 $90 $90 $90 $90 $90 $90 $90 $E8 $F4E0w $44 $44
And remember: If you find this information helpful in a project you're working on, please give credit where credit is due.
Edit: Updated the patch. The original one didn't work as intended.
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 21:03
by K1n9_Duk3
Sooo yeah, I messed up. That's why I had to edit the previous post and add this one as an explanation. I thought the patch I wrote was 1 byte shorter than the original code, but in reality it was 1 byte longer. The fact that I only tested the patch on the world map and the underwater levels didn't help much either.
As a bonus, the updated version of the patch leaves 8 bytes unused, which should be just enough space to add world map scrolling for two more levels (basically allowing you to have up to 4 underwater levels), but I wouldn't recommend using it like that. If you really want to have more than one underwater level, I would recommend a different approach:
All the checks to enable underwater behavior (scrolling, death, oracle message) use code in the form of "if levelnumber = 17" in Keen 4. I would suggest making all your underwater levels use the first couple of level slots (levels 1 to n) and then modifying all the checks to "if levelnumber <= n". This would be a lot easier since the machine code would have exactly the same size and you would only have to change like 2-3 bytes for each check. This would make it a lot easier to modify the scrolling, death and oracle message code to support any number of underwater levels.
Re: The Sunnylands (K4 levelpack)
Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2019 20:08
by Quillax
Thanks for the comments, namida and K1n9_Duk3! It's nice to have feedback even if it has been about a year and a half since this levelpack came out!
Regarding the Dumb Well, I actually didn't know that level 17 gets to have special scrolling meant for water levels until after I released the levelpack. I just remembered that The Keys of Krodacia, which had two water levels, had bad scrolling in one level. I guess the awful scrolling just stuck to my mind, and I thought that it applied to both water levels. It's nice to see that K1n9_Duk3 has given a patch that seems to fix the problem in not just Sunnylands, but also The Keys of Krodacia! (I actually haven't tested out the patch yet, but I'm sure it works pretty great.)
About the yellow gem in the Pyramid of Secrets, it seems that most people here have managed to find the gem by themselves. All the Let's Plays I've seen on YouTube (except for one, maybe, but I could be wrong) have also found the gem. So, I'm sure not too many people would have a lot of trouble finding it. During the beta-testing phase, Nisaba even suggested to me to make one ceiling tile by the gem non-solid!
Even if someone did have trouble finding the yellow gem, I did provide a clue in Life Lake for those who found a certain secret and have good observation skills.