08-22-2022, 02:29 PM
(08-21-2022, 10:16 PM)Mooshry Wrote: Is there a particular reason maps and tileset rips don't get posted as often?
Dazz covered the basics very well with Obama going to detail on Dragon Quest V and if you know the game, you can give it a try for yourself but for more detailed reasons why:
From the NES/SG-1000 up to the PS1/Saturn era, there is at least a background viewer on some emulators to help a bit and the more popular games have their own tools however from the PS1/Saturn onwards (with the exception of handhelds up to the PSP), there isn't a background viewer due to the way graphics are drawn meaning that you would have to do quite a lot of work. The same also applies on computers where it doesn't have a tile based system. You might get lucky with a tool, debug mode or a walk through walls cheat but for many cases, those options aren't there...
Other things to consider:
*Animations especially when it comes to water or lava.
*Palettes especially if it has a day and night cycle, season based or even the lights in an area.
*Any effects e.g. weather, flashing, scanline based, scaling & rotation (Mode 7 on SNES), filters (modern games)
*Unreachable areas
*Whether the NPC/item sprites are part of the map or not (sometimes they are baked in but usually not)
*Possible graphical/palette glitches especially when it comes to scrolling
*Regional variations in case of signs or content
*Language barrier (for RPGs/strategy games that don't have a translation)
Ripping RPG maps can be tough but sports games are worse especially when it comes to scrolling fields. Unlike RPGs where the scrolling in most cases outside of unused areas or cornered off boundaries can be controlled to a certain extent, the scrolling cannot be controlled very easily and getting towards the furthest edge of the boundaries where the crowds usually are is a bit of a nightmare. There are other examples too: Ultra Golf for the Game Boy, there is one water animation that only triggers once and if you miss that (which is VERY easy to do on the scrolling courses), that's it because it is the first animation that loads and never reloads. I had to abandon or put on hold many golf course maps, baseball/soccer fields and because the only way to get them ripped completely would be to hack into the game and find the co-ordinates. Hard to do when there's no research on a game. It also applies to backgrounds in general too because map ripping is similar to background ripping and much of it is the same process.
Tilesets are a bit easier because even for PS1/Saturn games onwards, they are loaded in assuming that the emulator has support for a VRAM viewer. Even if they don't, it might use files that can be viewed at best on a default image viewer (if it uses pngs for a PC game, best case scenario!), use a convertor/special tool, see if TileGDD shows anything or at worst baked into the exe in the case of PC. They still need sorting out and some tilesets are shared with other areas in the game. At worst, an animation can be dynamically loaded into the tile viewer/VRAM/VDP and the ROM/files are compressed with no decompressor. Also they maybe in a format that is hard to understand.
Another reason is probably because the people who do rip maps either don't come here, used to come here but don't anymore (Davias was a huge contributor regarding RPGs) or do rip the maps but are very busy. Many rippers here also don't focus on maps/backgrounds and/or not into RPGs/strategy games. As already mentioned, some of it is down to a dedicated fanbase where Pokémon has a higher chance of nearly everything being ripped, have a good chunk like Fire Emblem/Advance Wars/Final Fantasy/Mario & Luigi but other fanbases are smaller especially when you move away from the Nintendo/Square-Enix games. Wouldn't be surprised if there were maps that were on here that got rejected because they were stolen from somewhere else (unless said ripper is the same).