PartyPlanner64 - Mario Party Board Editor

They made it easier to replace the backgrounds fortunately, but I'm having a lot of trouble with crashing.

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SuperZambezi said:
Also, what's with that purple space?
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The purple and yellow spaces are what toad and bowser stand on. I had just messed them up originally.

TotesTim said:
Pretty exciting stuff. Do you plan on figuring how how to edit shop items and the like as well?
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I haven't gotten far enough to even test with items, so I can't remember how the shop works. I thought it just had a random assortment, maybe based on progress in the game.

The Shattered Legacy said:
In terms of background templating, does it necessarily need to be in color (the bane of my design existence)?
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No, it shouldn't need to be in color.
 
Continuing to be distracted by Mario Party 2, I've pretty much figured out the board animation feature. The original boards have this feature where small little animations go on in the background, for example the cows in Western Land move their heads up and down. It does this by swapping certain image tiles between two different states. (So the entire background is stored, and then the tiles that change are stored in a sparse tree separately.

So naturally the question is how far can this go? I created a couple variations of a background and wrote the entirety of both (so every time the animation state changes, the entire board image changes). Suprisingly it doesn't crash, but it seems like the amount of changes are too much such that they cause a bit of flickering with each change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLZbAsfJcOI
(This video is kind of crappy but I wanted to test on real hardware to see if it still was flickering there.)

But used in moderation, this will probably be a pretty neat feature to support. PP64 would just take two separate images, do a diff between the two to keep the sparse tree small, and write to ROM.

Western Land actually has 3 animation states. I may look into how many the game actually supports.
 
Hmm, Toad sure looks different here...

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The above is one of the first working custom boards I've gotten to work in Mario Party 3! I haven't really had any updates to post lately because unfortunately I hadn't been able to get the game to boot successfully. (The strings are stored compressed and for all localizations in the US title, so that required new dev, and even when everything seemed right, there was some sort of debug spin loop I kept hitting.)

But with initial difficulties aside, Mario Party 3 actually seems like it will be simpler than 2 to really generalize easily. There aren't elaborate themes for the boards or too many custom assets for each. Board animations were removed, but they left in the background "backdoor" from 2 that was for animations  ;D, so the same technique to get custom backgrounds works with no changes.

I also remembered the hard way that the reverse mushroom is a thing in this game, because I was very confused when I was seeing some board data pointing in the wrong direction :). But it will be pretty easy I think to support that.

What remains is the tedious task of identifying all the custom event ASM so full-fledged boards can be built in the sequels. A few assets here and there also need to be found, but it is kind of a relief to have all 3 games at least booting up after PP64 rips them to pieces and stitches the back together. :)

SuperZambezi said:
Oh wow, so the all you need are two images of the same board with slight changes and that will work?
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That's the idea. It may actually be n images depending on how far the engine can be pushed.

BossBlitz said:
Are you going to release a limited beta version first or are you going make sure every element is available to mod  before release?
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At this point, I'd like to wait to release with stable support for overwriting at least one board from all 3 games. Right now it's just not stable enough to be enjoyable to use, which is why I am waiting. It will be disappointing if I released and it didn't live up to expectations :).
 
Nice, finally MP3 support.

PartyPlanner64 said:
At this point, I'd like to wait to release with stable support for overwriting at least one board from all 3 games. Right now it's just not stable enough to be enjoyable to use, which is why I am waiting. It will be disappointing if I released and it didn't live up to expectations :).
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In my opinion, it wouldn't be disappointing at all - While I thought it would be awesome to have support for 3 when you first posted about it, it's still amazing that an editor for one game exists at all.
 
Out of curiosity, are MP3 Duel Maps also possible with your current progress (and possibly have the gimmicks like Blowhard's Fan, conveyor belt on Mr. Mover, etc.)? I imagine with less spaces it should be easier to handle (the only thing that may be a bit weird working with are possibly the starting points of each player)?

Keep up the great work though, would LOVE building MP3 boards! :D
 
So I've been lurking around this board for a long time waiting for someone to finally present something actually related to custom MP boards, and that made me instantly make an account!  So I must commend you on that.  I mean, imagine how active this board would be if people could actually post hacks here...Of course, I think ASM will be the biggest hurdle to get over, and I hope ASM can be added to custom boards instead of recycling events.

(On a side note, now that I'm registered here, I can just subscribe to the thread :) )
 
Ahhh, Mario Party 3, the best version of Mario Party. I can't wait to make custom boards for this one.

Never thought about how things like the Reverse Mushroom will affect the coding in the boards. It makes sense though!

I think it'd be also interesting to take the already existing boards and add animations like MP2. Something someone can try when the tool is released.
 
One of the things I need to do for MP3 is get the spaces to align with the board backgrounds. The current way I have to do this is rip all the background tiles from RAM dumps, piece them together into the background, and then calibrate the alignment using that.

Could someone help put together the tiles for Chilly Waters? I uploaded a zip of them here:
http://www119.zippyshare.com/v/huJMSp5v/file.html

I had to do the same for MP2 Western Land already, and the result is something like this. I only really need the center portion that spaces are located on, but whatever parts are there need to be in their right spots in the 1152x864 image.

If someone wants to do more of these for some reason, I could upload my bg tile RAM ripper. (It's not exactly a thrilling task which is why I'm hoping someone can help multitask it.)
 
I'm realy into making images and texture editing so I used a whole bunch of tricks
1. I put a layer of this image (http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/N64/MarioParty3-BattleRoyal-ChillyWaters.png) up with the opacity down with a black background so I could see where every file would go.
2. I deleted all duplicate files before I started.
3. I imported all the files in as layers at once.
3. I made a grid that was 64*48 and made the files snap to the grid.
and at this point it became really easy and took about 3 hours for me to do.
 
Luke said:
I got the chill waters done is this ok or do i have to edit it?
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That's perfect, thanks for doing this both of you!

The rips on vgmaps aren't really the right resolution, so I was hesitant to use them for this purpose because I wasn't sure they would match with the actual ripped image. But I can compare now with this accurate rip to see if it would have been close enough, and maybe just tweak those for any future boards.

I should have explained a bit more: the duplicates appear because it requires ~16 RAM dumps while moving the camera around to ensure all the tiles get into RAM, and sometimes the same tiles ended up being read more than once. The file name format was {number of times this file has been seen}-{file hash}.png so the hope was that all the 0-*.pngs would be mostly unique tiles. (The hash could be improved to make it less likely to have collisions...) I'll upload the dumper and code at some point if anyone wants to use it.

Like I said before, I'm still shooting for basic support of all 3 games. This will be at least the ability to replace DK's Jungle Adventure, Western Land, and Chilly Waters. The banks, item houses, and boos in 2/3 are turning out to be pretty complicated so I might postpone support for those initially. It means the boards might have to be a little bland at first, but there still are a lot of interesting things that will work (duel/item/gameguy/chance/bowser spaces).
 
PartyPlanner64 said:
Like I said before, I'm still shooting for basic support of all 3 games. This will be at least the ability to replace DK's Jungle Adventure, Western Land, and Chilly Waters. The banks, item houses, and boos in 2/3 are turning out to be pretty complicated so I might postpone support for those initially. It means the boards might have to be a little bland at first, but there still are a lot of interesting things that will work (duel/item/gameguy/chance/bowser spaces).
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Ouch, that's a little unfortunate, but having access to items through the item space will help give it some variety.

Zachula5 said:
do you ever think that we will see parts of each game combined?, kind of like how Goldeneye X combines Goldeneye and Perfect Dark
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I would love to see all the minigames from 1-3 available in one of the games.
 
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