Rings of Power (Genesis/Megadrive) World Map quest

[Helm]

I love this old Genesis game 'Rings of Power'. You can learn more about it over at mobygames. It looks like this:


What I've wanted to do for a while is make a pixel-perfect full world map of the game (it has a seamless world) but doing that by hand would be extremely painstaking as the game is huge and you only see 10x10 tiles on the screen at any one time. So I was wondering, do any of you have leet genesis hacking/mapdumping skills? If not, do you know on which internet community I might ask where they do?

that's a shot of the in-game overworld map stitched together:



Look at a section of the in-game map up close



Obviously the game feeds from this overworld 8x8 piixel tile map to recreate the terrain on the fly in the game's engine. The data it checks for each tile probably just is something like 'face, elevation, tile type'.



Of course feel free to discuss the game and its graphics, for all its shortcomings, it actually succeeds in many places. I might make someone like that one day.

[Helm]

I've gotten a friend to dump the map and we'll see if we can stitch it together automagically. If so I'll post the wonder that'll be the full overworld map here soon.

[Helm]

http://caverider.com/temp/merged_map.png test.

[HughSpectrum]

That is an incredibly viable world map.  Interesting to see how much geographical attention went into making that.

[Mathias]

I had to grab a copy of that insanely gigantic world map, wow. Thanks for that. (for the unenlightened [or perhaps not geeky enough] - load the map in yer browser via the link there, let is display at 1:1 and use your mouse scroll wheel button to click and drag around to auto-scroll)

And gotta love the 404 error page on caverider - http://caverider.com/temp/ - tried to browse the directory to see what other nifty stuff I could find but it's disabled. Cool backbuffer junk bg! Great idea.

Can't comment much on the game, I've never seen it before. I take it the gameplay is what makes you think it successful. The pixelling doesn't seem impressive to me but I may not be considering it in context of it's release era, or how difficult the palette is. I only recently picked up pixelling, as you probably know, so I don't have that "culture" to draw on. I'd certainly like to try the game, should I ever come across a ROM, but my time to actually play games is short these days. Though, I do love how effective their iso tiling system is. I love a good procedural system, one capable of randomizing output sensibly. Boosts replay value. Whether or not they chose to use some procedural functions for some parts I don't know, but they could've.

[Dusty]

Heh, I found the area in Helm's first screenshot.

[Dai]

Note that map is still full of broken buildings, seams, bits of sprites, implausible areas of tundra, it was a first pass, we'll fix it up soon enough. Yeah it's a nice map, considering it is meant to be viewed 10x10 tiles at a time.

You're right the pixelling isn't amazing, the main restriction is 16 hand picked colours out of the 512 available, the map is drawn by software routines, flexible but laggy. It's basically a nostalgic thing for Helm, even so, I think you can see some love went into constructing it all.

(Apparently I haven't posted before, hello!)

[HughSpectrum]

This is one of those games whose graphics would greatly improve just from altering the color palette to be easier on the eyes.  I personally don't think the actual pixel work is that bad when it comes to tiles and character portraits (though the character sprites on the main game area leave a lot to be desired), just doesn't have a lot of the refinements we're used to today.

[Helm]

I intend to print it up and put it on my wall when it's done, heh.

I think the pixelling is pretty good not in the parts themselves but the sum of the parts looks pretty convincing! Of course I'm taking into account what else was out there in the earlie 90's in these Ultima-style world-roaming rpgs, especially isometric, and extra especially, on the genesis.

The color selection IS pretty horrid (seems to me it's a left-over from people in Naughty Dog working on DOS based EGA before they did this) and very primary and I agree a palette remap would do wonders for this... perhaps an activity to consider for later.

I'm pretty psyched Dai is doing this cuz it's something I've been thinking about since I was 10 years old.

[ilkke]

So do the broken sprites etc mean that you've been ripping this by hand afterall?

Also, +1 for the palette edit activity