MushROMs ... progress? No way!
Anyway, MushROMs will be heading in to a β soon. Nothing special, just a few people I've selected will be testing the load/save features as well as giving me input on the overall user interface.
A note to my testers, feel free to criticize me publicly here. I'd like the public to get a feel for my work.
No requests to be a tester at this time please.
The progress of MushROMs is short of substantial, but far from medial. If Neil Armstrong could throw rocks from the ship, he'd hit the moon.
Palette editor: 100% complete
All functions are accounted for and work at optimum efficiency. The user can load data from the ROM as well as from .tpl files. The user can also save the data back to the ROM and .tpl files. As well, I've finished the custom palette asm and the user can, as you may have guessed, create custom palettes now. To my knowledge, this feature works with an infinite amount of happy juice, so on to the next pain in the ass.
GFX Editor: 95% complete
Once again, all functions work at the best possible speed and render happilly. The de/recompressor works fine. The recompressor may be a little slow though, so I should look into that. I tried to feature a format very similar to Lunar Magic where all gfx are saved uncompressed and externally to files. Upon the save, they are recompressed back into the ROM, but this takes a good 4 seconds, so I may need to find a better way to save the data, work on the compression algorithm, or a good mixture of the two. Anyway, you can save the GFX data presented to you, but I haven't yet installed the feature of changing which GFX file to use on which level. So far, it only loads the default GFX I've made in the asm file, which still needs some finishing touches of it's own.
Map16 Editor: 60% complete (90% for basic functionality)
It's hard to say how much of the Map16 editor needs work. What I do with it depends heavily on how I eventually decide to format the level data in the ROM. However, it loads everything, and you can edit all the details much like Lunar Magic allowed you to. It can't save yet, except to external files and can load from them as well. So in that respect, I'd say 90% done.
Save functions: 80% done
While I can save, the algorithms I use for them are still quite buggy and I will be hammering out the flaws later tonight. I use the Lunar Magic style of creating RATS tags and looking for free space in the expanded ROM territory. However, it seems that after I save a ROM, it can play on the emulator, but crashes the next time I load or save it. So something is obviously wrong somewhere. Also, the editor now supports ExLoROM support (and still supports header/non-header ROMs). So all I need to do is fix the saving, but this is obviously a very integral item which needs to be perfected.
Next project: Loading and displaying sprite data
While the object data may be written in lolcode, the sprite data is done quite nicely, simple, and easy to work with, so I will most likely not be needing to change anything and for that reason, will choose to work with it first.
GFX asm: 99% done
A few cutscenes are still garbled GFX, so I'll fix that.
Map asm: 100% done
As far as loading new levels, that is perfect.
Object asm: fml
To finish on a positive note, I get some internets on Friday, so I'll be able to provide more screens of my work, maybe a video, and the like.
I'm done rambling now, I have class and I need food, so away I go.
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