7 replies to this topic

[Marco]

Ok, I was wondering.... is it possable to just delete all screen scolling? As in no more screens so its all a smooth scrolling overworld?

[Plissken]

Only in all of our wildest dreams, but Gleeok and blue_knight have both been making Z3 scrolling scripts, but they both have their limitations.

[Cjc]

There are two grand roadblocks that stop this from happening.

The 1st:

The entirity of your map (Or rather, the dmap) would have to be loaded upon entry to the overworld. That means every enemy on every screen, every combo, every item, every flag, and every secret. You can see how that would slow the engine to a crawl.

The 2nd:
Instead of the lower left corner of a screen being (0,0) for the grid, the lower left corner of the entire map becomes (0,0). This makes some of the coordinates on the map extremely high, since each ticmark is one pixel. I'm fairly certain that would make the upper right corner of a map very laggy.



Jman was able to stitch nine screens together with correct scrolling, but non-functional Link-to-Enemy and Link-to-Solidity interaction.


Gleeok was able to stitch four screens together with mostly functioning scrolling (It doesn't stop before showing the edges, which come out blackscreen), functioning enemies, and functioning solidity... by reprogramming Link's movement code from scratch.
You can find that script here, but it's not annotated. That means if you wanted to add special Link functions, like jumping or running or whatever, first you would have to meticulously disect the whole script to learn how everything works, and then slowly reprogram it to make it work the way you want.


To put it simply, that feature is currently limited to the insane scripting pioneers, like Gleeok.

[Joe123]

You posted this request two weeks ago, why are you asking again?

[Marco]

That was for Z3 Scrolling.

[Bayta]

Aren't smooth scrolling and Z3 scrolling the same thing?

And to answer your question: Is it "possable"? Not the way you're describing it. Even if you could just delete all screen scrolling, all that would happen is that Link would walk right off the screen like and enemy or FFC would. Data from the other screens would have to already be loaded, and you'd need to completely rescript scrolling.

[Joe123]

Which is essentially what you're asking here.

Unless what you're after is the 'No Screen Scrolling' Quest Rule (found in the Animation section), but I'd be willing to bet that it's not.

[blue_knight]

It's actually quite possible to do 8x8 or more screens, there aren't any coordinate problems yet at that scale. Of course things like FFC positions need to be specified in a special way since they just disappear if their coordinates are too big. In my scripts I use "virtual coordinates". Enemy/NPC/item/etc. scripts work in virtual coordinates and the main scrolling script converts virtual coordinates into real coordinates to have the objects show up in the correct place on screen or just far enough off screen to be invisible but not destroyed. Anyway this means that enemy/NPC/etc. scripts aren't even aware of scrolling since they just see the virtual position of the objects and Link. In order to handle scrolling through a large number of screens a virtual screen area is maintained as well as a virtual position for Link and a center position for Link. Then for rendering or collision the screen rects for the real screens it overlaps can be quickly calculated so that exactly 17x12 tiles are rendered - no distance checks or anything it just loops through the exact combos to be rendered and reads them from the screen data. Similarly for collision, since enemies, NPC and Link collide with the combos - the exact set of combos to test are computed and read as necessary. I should also mention that I don't use arrays for the scrolling script at all, otherwise scaling to 16x16 would be horrendous

I'm rambling a bit, but in the end the practical limit - given the way coordinates for FFCs and such are stored - is 16x16 screens, though the biggest I've done so far is 7x5 or 7x6. With proper scripting this is all possible - but as you see from Gleeok's script - just giving you a scrolling script is not enough. This is why I'm holding off until my quest is far enough along. So I can release a tutorial, a full enemy system with several examples (atleast for sidescrolling), show how to make items work, show how to do sideview gravity (with scrolling and collision), jumping, variable numbers of screens to scroll through, warps, scrolling to other screens and automatically appearing in the right place, both top down smooth scrolling and sideview scrolling (limited to 1 axis or free form) and so on.

So, as Gleeok pointed out, making a script that scrolls through a small set of screens isn't that hard but... making a smooth scrolling system that can be used in a real quest is a lot of work which is what I tried to say before in that other thread. So, finally, to answer your question Furion there are a few possibilities-
1) you're good at scripting and can start with Gleeok's script and/or my description and build a usable scrolling script. This probably means scripting enemies - since I don't think using the built in enemies is practical (in a non-glitchy manner) at this time, as well as flags, work on items, etc.
2) someone like Gleeok does as I described above and makes a usable scripted scrolling system that handles what you need. This is a lot of work or
3) wait and see if the Zelda II Classic stuff is useful for you once its further along. It will have its own limitations, everything does, but once the kinks are worked out it should be a decent starting point.

Edited by blue_knight, 07 April 2009 - 06:28 PM.