8 replies to this topic

[TheOnlyOne]

I don't really know why I'm asking these questions; I doubt the answers will help all that much, but, since I'm curious, I'll ask anyway. These questions have more to do with the logic behind Zelda Classic in playing, not questions on how to make something work or whatever.

1. Whenever you defeat enemies in a certain room, if you die or leave before you kill all of them, the number that was left undefeated will return (unless all enemies are killed, or special quest rules are checked.) However, let's say you have a red darknut and a blue darknut. You kill the blue one leaving only the red one. When you return, though, a blue one is there instead of the red one you left. This is supposed to happen; the strongest enemies return. My question is this: How is the strength of enemies determined? Is there some cool formula Zelda Classic runs in order to decide which ones to keep, or did someone make up some really long list? How are/will custom enemies be affected by this? I ask this because sometimes it seems as though weaker enemies are returning (can't think of specifics), or bubbles/fire shooters are being overridden when they aren't really kill-able to begin with. Also other weird-ish things such as killing bat wizzrobes when the bats are still there, or splitting a darknut, but not killing both of its splitees. So really what I want to know is how enemy regeneration works, if its possible to explain it without just showing a hunk of code (well, I guess that would work too…)

2. Shorter question: when is the outcome for gambling determined, when you enter the room, or when you step on the rupee?

3. What is the smallest unit of health? The smallest visible unit is one half of a heart, but the game still counts less than that (you get hit with two fireballs with the blue ring, then your health goes down one half. Also, with the gold ring, you get hit with I think ten fireballs, then your health goes down one half.) So does the game have a specific decimal that is rounded to, or is your health bar technically just a semi-accurate representation given the case where you are taking very, very little damage?

4. What is link's walking speed, probably in Zelda Classic tics per tile or something?

Bleh, I probably have more questions that I can't even think of, but whatever. If anyone can answer one or more of these questions that would be pretty cool. Again, though, don't waste your time looking in to it unless you really want to; I'm just curious. Thanks.

[The Satellite]

I'll answer #1:

It's not the most powerful. It's the first one on the list of enemies for that room. Say, 1 is keese and 2 is Death Knight. Walk in, kill the Keese, walk out. Walk back in, and the Death Knight will be a Keese.

[TheOnlyOne]

Um, I was playing a quest just yesterday in which there was a room with dodongos and red bubbles in a room. The dodongos would always return, and the number of bubbles would drop. And even then, how did it work for the original Zelda; did they have a list similar to the one in Zelda Classic. I guess it's kind of hard to answer that.

[Captain Magenta]

To answer your questions, the enemies that return to a given room depends on the order that the enemies appear in the list of enemies assigned to that room or area, with the enemies higher in the list taking precedence over those lower in the list, regardless of their inherent strengths. That's why if you have say, three Dodongos and three Bubbles in a room and you eliminate one of the Dodongos, when you reenter it repopulates the room starting from the first enemy and working down to the tenth; if the Bubbles are enemies four through six then that will result in one of the Bubbles being eliminated since the sixth enemy is discarded since it was killed.

As far as health representation is concerned, the meter will visibly decrease with any of the Rings collected, but only if the Life Gauge is designed to show those representations as a graphical change. Depending on the graphic you choose to represent the Life Gauge, it can become difficult to visibly display damage when you have the Red and especially the Gold Ring since the amount of health lost is so small that you could be dealing with trying to subtract eigths and sixteenths of a heart from icons that are small to begin with when dealing with extremely small damage counts like the half a heart that would be lost with no ring at all.

Link's walking speed could be determined by using the enemy editor to tinker with a Darknut's stepping speed until it matches Link's walking speed, but I would suspect it is a value greater than one hundred fifty since I think that is the speed the Blue Darknut moves at but I'm not positive.

The gambling game would be impossible to determine without asking the developers of ZC since that information could only be determined by reading the code that governs the functions of that game, but regardless of when the function was performed it would not increase your chances of winning the game; in fact theoretically if the game determined the result upon stepping on the Rupee if the code was altered in a certain manner the game could be "rigged" to prevent the player from ever winning the game. I would be more interested in a means of altering the values of the wins or losses in the editor to customize the game for certain needs.....

[Mitchfork]

1. TS is right here. I dunno how it works with the original LoZ, but that's how it works in ZC.
2. Dunno.
3. 1/16. In the builds, this can be displayed via the subscreen editor, but in 2.10 and below, only 1/2 (or 1/4, if that quest rule is there) hearts are visible. I believe it still counts to 1/16, though.
4. Dunno.

EDIT: Errr.... what Captain Magenta said.

Edited by Ebola Zaire, 19 November 2007 - 08:48 PM.

[TheOnlyOne]

Thanks. I never actually knew that the designer held the power to order the enemies' return; I though it was somehow set. I figured there would be no way to determine the gambling thing. New question:

5. Is the hitbox attacks and attackees based on preset info, or is is partially based on the sprite? I might be crazy, but I seriously think I've noticed a slight difference in the range of the sword or the leaway in dodging fireballs when playing in different tilesets. Probably not, but still...

[Mitchfork]

Nope. It's the exact same in every tileset/quest.

[ziplobob2]

I'm to lazy to read the other replys and I'll answer number 3.
When you get hit with a fireball fo rexample with a ring on you have a certain amount of damage you can take before the health bar goes down. Then I think it resets itself. Unless someone makes a tile set somehow that makes the health go down in 1/4 increments, the least health you can lose is 1/2 a heart.

[ShadowTiger]

It actually does not reset itself. There is no real pattern to it. As of the later betas, where we have a lot more freedom to determine what the values of health and damage really are, you'll see that its predecessors just *happened* to have values that worked out fairly evenly.

For example, in 1st quest or 210testquest whatever, (The defaults.) you have halves of hearts. If a keese hits you with you having no ring, you will lose half of a hearts worth of damage. If you have a blue ring, you won't lose any health on the first hit, but will lose that half of a heart on the second hit of the keese.

If you're playing a more recent quest which has quarter hearts enabled as a quest rule, (Which said rule is now relatively moot due to the fact that you can change the appearance of your heart indicators. More on this later.) you'll be able to see your health more accurately than not, as the quarters would be visible to you then.

Now that we can change the appearance of our health indicators, we should realize that the earlier method only had three kinds of appearances: 1) Full. 2) Half. 3) Empty. Now There are, however, sixteen or seventeen possible values for what these can look like, as there are sixteen possible values for a heart to take. (Maybe more. My math is atrocious.) If you make a separate quarter-tile graphic for each of these, you'll find that your health actually visibly changes even when you have a gold ring and a keese does whatever it does to you to make you lose that sixteenth of a heart. (From half to a quarter to an eighth to a sixteenth.) So no, you wouldn't notice the change if you had any ring and the heart indicator graphics only had three representational tiles spread out among the sixteen values, because they can only represent full, half, or empty. That all depends on the tileset used. Some tilesets use the default heart indicators, whereas other people take the time to draw more elaborate or even complete indicators and use those. The difference in health is nonexistent. The only difference is graphical.

5. Is the hitbox attacks and attackees based on preset info, or is is partially based on the sprite? I might be crazy, but I seriously think I've noticed a slight difference in the range of the sword or the leaway in dodging fireballs when playing in different tilesets. Probably not, but still...

The sword's range has actually varied with the different versions, but that's actually a designer glitch, more or less. You can ignore it as a "feature" of the game. Expect the sword to have the same "range" through out, as well as most of Link's other weaponry. Assume their defaults.

Sprites are all contained within the bounding boxes of their tiles, and ALL tiles are 16x16 pixel entities which can be tied together to produce a 32x32 entity. Ultimately, it's the tile that determines the hitbox, not the sprite at all, though some monsters (Bosses, generally.) are unique enough that only a specific part of them can be hit. (Such as the "head" of the Aquamentus.)