RBI Editor updated

[nightwulf]

Changes made in tonight's update:

-- Linebreaks have been removed in the menu frame, and smaller fonts are used. This should help the whole frame being displayed on some computers.

-- The Load, Save, and User pages all "tell" the script to ignore team changes on that page. This will prevent buttons changing to silly things. Thanks to Gantry for finding the error.

-- The "Curve Ability" attribute for pitchers has been split into "Curve Left" and "Curve Right" fields. Left and Right refer to the side of the screen the ball is being thrown toward. Thanks to pmaxx for finding this information.

-- The ROM parser will now correctly find the team colors for all teams in uploaded ROMs. The parser was reading the palette data from an incorrect location, which still worked for 96k and 192k ROMs. 256k files will now work correctly as well. Thanks to Gantry for finding the glitch.

-- The ROMs from the old dee-nee.com site have been updated. They were using incorrect colors due to the glitch above.

-- Corrected a glitch in the ROM parser which didn't correctly handle apostrophes and numbers in attract mode team names.

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

Man, this is a busy fucking night for RBI!  New ROMs, new editors, a few new FAQ questions, new pitcher discovery, 10 pitcher tables to edit, etc etc...

Nightwulf, I was thinking it might be nice if you could include an option to spit out your nicely-formatted text file with all the players and abilities.  Looks like a script, so I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard.  But then again I'm not the one doing it...

I figure people would find it very useful and would start including it with their zipped ROMs.  Which is course is another idea...

[Gantry]

OK, I tried uploading Rob's new 1900-1955 ROM (see sep thread) and it seems to have trouble with the attract mode team names.  Both the year number and apostrophes aren't showing up properly.  I'd give you more info by digging into the ROM, but I'm a bit whooped tonight...

I seem to remember having trouble with apostrophes before, they seem to use the same character code as another letter, which juding from the rbi-editor is the lower-case "i"  - I could be thinking of something else though...

[Gantry]

Man, you're gonna hate me by the end of this....

Using Robs 1900-1955 test ROM again, I was trying to figure out the attract mode problem when stumbling on another feature you are going to need:

People are starting to edit the opening screen's bottom text.  It says copyright ATARI GAMES and TENGEN, stuff like that.  It is three editable lines, using the standard player hex alphabet:

# 2F37h-2F47h - Opening Screen Line 1
# 2F4Bh-2F61h - Opening Screen Line 2
# 2F76h-2F8Dh - Opening Screen Line 3

When uploading the 1900-1955 ROM and resaving it, his custom title screen gets erased with the default. So you'll probably have to incorporate a new section for editing the opening screen...

[nightwulf]

OK, I tried uploading Rob's new 1900-1955 ROM (see sep thread) and it seems to have trouble with the attract mode team names.  Both the year number and apostrophes aren't showing up properly.  I'd give you more info by digging into the ROM, but I'm a bit whooped tonight...

Error on my part, not sure how I missed that heh. Fixed now; attract mode team names will work correctly.

People just need to stop editing the opening screen text. Ok not really. That's been a planned feature of the editor; eventually in the "Edit" box you'll see a "ROM" option which will allow changing of all the text strings in the game, field / dirt color, and anything else that comes up that affects the whole ROM instead of a team-by-team basis. It'll come in time ...

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

It works now, good service!

[Gantry]

Another suggestion would be to default "Save team icon tile data from this ROM."  when uploading a .nes file from your PC.  If you are uploading, then you are most likely using a custom ROM, as the standard ROMs are already built-in...

[nightwulf]

Another suggestion would be to default "Save team icon tile data from this ROM."  when uploading a .nes file from your PC.  If you are uploading, then you are most likely using a custom ROM, as the standard ROMs are already built-in...

Easy enough; done.

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

Excellent work mate...  I'm out of good ideas for tonight, the brain is starting to give out.  Though when you do the "ROM" page, it would be a good idea to let people edit the A+B+Start secret screen that lists the programmers.  That way people can personalize their ROMs with their name/nick/email or whatever.  I've screwed with that screen before, do a search and you'll find the text...

And a check-box to include your .txt file with the .zip.  And don't do all this today!  

[nightwulf]

Nightwulf, I was thinking it might be nice if you could include an option to spit out your nicely-formatted text file with all the players and abilities.  Looks like a script, so I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard.  But then again I'm not the one doing it...

Heh forgot to respond to that. Again, that's a planned feature. On the "User" page, where you get a drop-down lists of all your ROMs, you'll see a "Delete" and "Text Dump" box. Yeah, "Text Dump" sounds awful, someone give me something else to use.

I've got a script that does essentially just that; that's how I posted text dumps of several ROMs. However, that script opens a binary ROM and parses and outputs the data. No work by a user of the editor is stored as a complete binary ROM. It's actually stored as a Javascript source file (for data edited directly in the browser window), and if applicable, a Perl file which has arrays of data used to make team icons.

It'd be a silly waste of the end-user's time, and a waste of CPU time, to open those files, run them through the ROM builder, save the complete binary ROM in a temporary directory, and open that with the script I use now. I need to re-write the script to parse the Javascript source of a saved ROM and spit out a text dump that way.

Some day ...

Nightwulf

[Gantry]

Yeah, if you have to re-write the script, throw it in the later pile...

Another neato idea would be to store some custom rbi-edit data in an unused portion of the ROM.  There seem to be quite a few continuous FF bytes of data out there.  An immediate use I can think of it to store simply byte-by-byte character translation of the team icons.  So if you've edited your ROM via RBI edit, you can check said portion of memory and tell the user what letters are currently used for the team icon.  But maybe you can do that simply by look at the graphics themself, I'm not sure...

Another cool one would be to put your URL and name by default in the programmer's screen (A+B+Start).  Give yourself a little props...

[Gantry]

It would probably be best to default people to the Load page once they are logged in or initially come to the site with an auto-login.  By default you go to the "Team" page for an empty ROM, meaning you always have to click off that page to get anywhere.  First thing you typically want to do after logging in is to load a ROM...

[Craig3410]

Just tried it, and just messing around, I maxed the stats for two people and it jacks the stats up WAAY higher then the offline RBI editor does.   One thing I noticed, though, is that when I throw a fastball right down the middle, even though it's going about 120 mph  , the computer opponents seem to hit it every time. I also made two exact same pitchers with the same stats except one has an "Unknown 1 and 2" rating of 0 and the other with one of 255. Best way to try to find out what the heck something is, I figure. Cool editor. Thanks for releasing it.

[Craig3410]

Okay, after doing a little work with it, I noticed one difference: The pitcher with the "0" Unknown 1 and 2 hit very cheap grounders, short dribblers to the infielders, etc.  The pitcher with the "255", however, hit quite well, drilling the ball foul into the stands a couple of times and flew out to deep left. My hypothesis: Maybe pitcher hitting power? Just a guess.

[Craig3410]

Last post, I promise.

And looking at the original RBI rom, with almost all of the pitchers with unknowns around 130 or so, seeing a pitcher with a 255 unknowns hitting the ball much better... maybe one is Contact/speed and the other being power?

[nightwulf]

Just tried it, and just messing around, I maxed the stats for two people and it jacks the stats up WAAY higher then the offline RBI editor does.  

My editor doesn't "jack" any stat up, it sets that stat to whatever you tell it to. I'm not terribly familiar with RBI Manager, but from what I'm told it held you within a range of stats to keep the edited game stats within the same range as the original game stats.

I don't do that. I allow the user to set the stats to whatever the hell they feel like. If you can't keep them within a reasonable distance of each other to keep the game competitive, that's your problem.

Nightwulf

[Craig341]

Yeah, I know.    I'm just the type of guy that likes messing around with games and such. Hey; it's fun. And compared to the old RBI editor, it knocks em way up.  

[nightwulf]

Small update just now: The big image with all 64 NES palette colors (the one you click on to change team colors) has been removed. In it's place is a table that looks, feels, and smells identical to the big image.

What's the difference? By making a table in this manner, the browser actually has to load all 64 images. Don't get all upset; they're all about 650 bytes each. Even on dial-up it's less than a few seconds to download all 64. This way, the image is forced into the browser cache, and changes to team colors will be instant. Yes, even in IE. Booo to IE.

On a related note, the cheesy "Loading ..." page you used to see is gone. The purpose of that page was to preload all the images, and since it sucked at it, it's history.

Coming soon: Functionality to change the text strings within the game, and the ability to show a text page of all your players' abilities.

Nightwulf

[BeefMaster]

Nightwulf,

I just got done putting the finishing touches on a ROM using your editor - it's a pleasure to use.  There are a couple things I'd like to mention to you, though.

First, I think I've found a slight bug.  The ROM I made uses a combination of custom team abbreviations and default ones.  It saved fine this way, but when I loaded it back up in your editor, the default abbreviations had been replaced with blank custom ones (the custom option was selected instead of default).  It's not a big deal, but I figure you should be made aware of it.  FYI, this was found using Mozilla on XP.

Second, I'd like to request a feature, or at least some documentation.  Do you happen to have the formula for converting the pitching speed ratings into MPH?  The hardest part of fine-tuning my ROM was getting pitching speeds right, as I didn't know just how fast I was making everything.  You don't need to do the conversion for us, a la RBI Manager, but a quick note on how to translate would be helpful.

Again, great work on the editor.  Let me know if you have any questions or need some clarification on the issues I brought up.  Thanks!

[MarquisEXB]

Second, I'd like to request a feature, or at least some documentation.  Do you happen to have the formula for converting the pitching speed ratings into MPH?  The hardest part of fine-tuning my ROM was getting pitching speeds right, as I didn't know just how fast I was making everything.  You don't need to do the conversion for us, a la RBI Manager, but a quick note on how to translate would be helpful.

I'd guess that the converstion is about 1/2. As for documentation, I wrote some stuff up about roms & ratings, but I'm waiting for Gantry add it to his site.

Mike