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How to rip parallax floor sprites? (Read 57596 times)

Started by Yuko, March 18, 2023, 07:45:04 pm
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How to rip parallax floor sprites?
#1  March 18, 2023, 07:45:04 pm
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I vaguely remember a thread about this in the forum but I can't find it anymore, so I'm asking again.
I want to convert some stages from various games to MUGEN, and while ripping sprites from stages is quite easy, I'm not sure about ripping parallax floors. Since they get distorted, how would be the correct way to rip them? For example, the SF2 stages, MK3 stages, and so on.
Thanks in advance!
Re: How to rip parallax floor sprites?
#2  March 18, 2023, 08:32:34 pm
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For the CPS-1 and 2 games you can disable the parallax effect in Nebula and capture the sprites raw.

I made my stages either before I knew about that or that feature was added to the emulator, though. The old method was to take screenshots of the floor at several points of the stage, like in the middle and in each corner, then rebuild the sprite line by line. This method should work for any game.

Here's an ancient tutorial:
http://www.justnopoint.com/Dev/index28.php.htm

I think I have the even older tutorial Winane mentions somewhere in my backups, if you need it. Unless people have already made newer ones.
You can help with Ikemen GO's development by trying out the latest development build and reporting any bugs on GitHub.
My Mugen and Ikemen content can also be found here.
Re: How to rip parallax floor sprites?
#3  March 18, 2023, 09:24:59 pm
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I think I have the even older tutorial Winane mentions somewhere in my backups, if you need it

Sure, I would like to take a look!

Okay, so for these games I can turn parallax off with Nebula, that's neat.
And for the other games? Since I want to make some MK stages, would MAME have an option like that (or any other recomended emulator)?

N.

Re: How to rip parallax floor sprites?
#4  March 18, 2023, 11:23:01 pm
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There's a few different ways depending on how the game handles it.  Camera position modding, floor layer position modding (there was a game where simply repositioning the floor layer further up the screen had the parallax effect no longer be applied), position modding each line that makes up the floor (some games have addresses that affect both or just one of these things).  I've sometimes accidentally found an address that turns the parallax effect off when messing around in the RAM.

What game are you trying to get the floor from?  I didn't notice you answered that. :p
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Last Edit: March 18, 2023, 11:27:25 pm by N.
Re: How to rip parallax floor sprites?
#5  March 19, 2023, 08:49:16 am
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Actually it looks like I lied about my stages. I probably went back at some point and reripped the sprites when I found out about Nebula.

Anyway here's the old, old tutorial by Shadow Dragon-X4:

https://imgur.com/a/v8Feu6y

Even if you don't rip the floor like this, doing it for the first and last lines will help you with the math to get the parallax parameters right.
You can help with Ikemen GO's development by trying out the latest development build and reporting any bugs on GitHub.
My Mugen and Ikemen content can also be found here.
Re: How to rip parallax floor sprites?
#6  March 19, 2023, 11:13:00 pm
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N.

Re: How to rip parallax floor sprites?
New #7  March 20, 2023, 11:46:42 pm
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Unfortunately, Williams games are kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to finding stuff for them (for me anyways).  It's because of how the memory's set up.  All the addresses are a multiple of 8 (which means don't bother trying to write to 2 or 4 bytes).  If you use Mame-RR to search for cheats, just put the address it gives you into a hex calculator and multiply it by 8. 

Because I didn't wanna feel like I was wasting your time, here's some MAME cheats to help you out with MK3 floors.  Keep the characters in the center of the stage, and you can reposition the floors without parallax being applied.  I didn't fully test the Y position mods, I just know they were right next to the X position ones. Moving it vertically may cause it to get obscured if a BG layer has higher priority over it.  I set up the +1 to move the floor 16 pixels.

Edit: I poked around that area and found X position mods (didn't notice anything being moved vertically) for the other BG layers as well as something to recolor the Black BG (not entirely sure on it).

Spoiler, click to toggle visibilty
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Last Edit: March 21, 2023, 12:33:57 am by N.