Legend of Zantetsu: Ocarina of Terrible

[Aleph]

So I was thinking of taking all the hacks both finished and in the "idea" stage and throwing them together to give Link a version of his original Ocarina of Time adventure that involves him ascending to godhood, killing all of the citizens of the various towns and making Ganondorf look like a saint.

An example of a finished hack that would be included would be the Zantetsu hack I did fairly recently ("Zantetsu" is the name I give to hacks that let you hit enemies in the game with your melee weapon(s) from any range regardless of where you are aiming, although in this case it affects other weapons as well). Most likely as an unlockable skill, possibly with a charge time and/or some sort of resource consumption (because hitting every enemy on the map every time you swing your sword from all the way across is kind of broken).

An example of a not finished hack would be the NPC killing that I've been picking at for a few years. i.e. you go into a place full of Hylian soldiers and instead of them catching you and kicking you out, they try to poke you with pointy sticks and you slash and stab them to death. Or like some annoying shopkeeper is charging too much for his damn potion and you go behind the counter and chop him into pieces. Maybe that construction worker in Kakariko looked at you funny, so you throw a bomb at him and he actually explodes.

Then there's stuff like this

[19:11:18] Alex: ooh I just got a kickass idea for the bombos medallion idea I had for ocarina of time

[19:11:35] Alex: instead of making an actual medallion item that you use, maybe I should make it so the ocarina songs do things

[19:12:07] Alex: like playing the bolero of fire and choosing not to warp uses up all of your magic, then spawns bomb explosions all over in an amount proportionate to the magic consumed

[19:12:26] Alex: and the minuet of forest could make magic potions appear more often from grass and enemies

[19:12:38] Alex: serenade of water could give a health regen buff

[19:13:21] Alex: maybe the nocturne of shadow could increase heart drops dramatically

[19:14:01] Alex: and the requiem of spirit could instantly kill enemies that are normally paralyzed by the sun's song and curse other enemies to move more slowly

[19:15:04] Alex: and then like in the co-op version of the game you could have a guy go around buffing people with the ocarina while they kill stuff D:

So yeah like Fable except in the Zelda universe, and also actually fun instead of just maybe fun.

Would probably want to throw in some dialogue changes and have people lose their shit when you barge into someone else's house and kill all of their pet cows/chickens and then their family. You know, so it's at least kind of realistic.

Oh and of course the various components would combine intuitively. Like for example if you used the Bolero to spawn a bunch of bomb explosions in the middle of Hyrule Castle Town, everyone and their grandma would erupt into a fiery doom which would probably leave a bunch of rupees and hearts everywhere or something.

Edited March 10, 2014 by Izayoi

[Brendor]

So like zelda where can do whatever you want (be good or evil) or just be evil? The latter sounds kinda boring IMO

[Aleph]

Probably the first one but I think just the latter would still be pretty awesome

[Brendor]

New story or the old one?

[Aleph]

I think it'd be most appropriate to have a slightly altered version of the original story (even start off the same) so it's like everyone can do all the things they've wanted to do for a long time but never had the chance (like killing Navi, which btw has been done before lol).

but yeah video games are supposed to be fun and hacks are supposed to be even more fun so a good hack would be something like this that caters to the basest desires of the casual and hardcore gamers alike (blowing away all of the npcs that frustrated them the first time through the game).

Edited March 10, 2014 by Izayoi

[Brendor]

Do these npc's respawn or are they dead for good?

[Aleph]

I was thinking of throwing in some dead-for-good data in the form of like a 3D point location (or object ID, if available) and room ID tuple. Not sure about modifying the save format to accommodate this, but...whatever. The game's been hacked to death. Can't be too hard, right?

There should also be some kind of reaction of the citizens of an area you enter that you've aggressed before. Actually, I'd had an idea about how to handle this for Jet Force Gemini too. In that game you can collect heads from killed NPCs, enemy or otherwise. My idea was to take advantage of the animations for when they are near-dead or on fire to make them play dead or flee in terror if your head count is high as a response to your "notoriety". Something similar could be in order. Like, instead of those carpenters in Kakariko running back and forth around the town pretending to build, they would instead run to a fixed hiding location or something and then vanish. Then a bunch of Iron Knuckles would leap down off of some nearby roof tops to kill your criminal ass or something. Or whatever!

[Brendor]

I'd suggest them going hostile on you as opposed to fleeing like when you attack the cuckoos(I think that's how you spell it) they come and attack you; same principle, if you attack someone the people around you should turn hostile on you like using your example with the carpenters, they could attack you if you attack one as well as other people in the village although *some* people should flee also so a mix of both

[Aleph]

It would probably depend on how quickly you obliterate them. If they saw you wiping them out with due speed they (and by they I mean some half assed code that identifies your kill rate) would probably figure out they're not going to win and run off.

btw guards, although the value isn't actually used, have 8 HP (at least I seem to recall confirming this), which is appropriate because most moderate enemies have 8 HP (redead and gibdo; stalfos have about 12 etc.)

This isn't a whole lot and the strength of these enemies would be in their numbers. It would be fairly easy to wipe them out quickly with a biggoron's sword, for example

Edited March 10, 2014 by Izayoi

[Brendor]

A GUI to select a difficulty would be cool

[Aleph]

RE: difficulty I was thinking 8 hp is a bit low for an average npc, too. Like surely an elite Hylian Guard would be strong enough to handle a moblin or two, right? Might buff them a bit. At the moment though I'm not entirely sure how capable they are of being animated using the base display lists lol

[Aleph]

http://www.twitch.tv/hextator/b/511518372

[Aleph]

what nobody thinks this is awesome?

[Brendor]

*crickets*

Guess not bro. Sorry

[Aleph]

this is literally the best thing you guys are more terrible than link is

seriously if I saw this a few years ago I'd shit myself with excitement (I probably did a few times while coding this masterpiece)

[Brendor]

tbh it seems really boring no offence

why don't you make a fire emblem oriented assembly hacking tutorial bruh? there's a severe shortage of tutorials and people who know how to do it

[Aleph]

how is chopping up innocent civilians boring

isn't that like the entire point of GTA

Wouldn't it be easier to just add me on AIM and ask me any lame hacking questions you have?

Edited March 16, 2014 by Izayoi

[Brendor]

they don't respond

that's comparable to poking a dead body

never really played GTA but I think there's more to it than punching hookers and stealing cars like actual dangerous/engaging missions like infiltrating enemy bases and stuff but I could be wrong

I guess Skype or AIM or whatever would be cool but I thought you didn't like people bugging you with stuff

[Aleph]

we had a whole discussion about how they would respond and about how this shit is incomplete and everyone knows this shit happens in small victories like this instead of all at once overnight YOU

are just a jaded motherfucker with no imagination

I don't know where you got the impression that I don't like people adding me on AIM/Skype because I have never expressed that sentiment in all of ever.

Edited March 17, 2014 by Izayoi

[Brendor]

whoa easy pal easy. No need to get upset, I'm talking about the 70 minute long video on twitch. It's good you're making progress and all but 70 minutes is waaaayyy too long to demonstrate the hit detection.

Not the adding part itself, I meant having people ask you stuff personally

[Aleph]

It's a 70 minute long stream, not a 70 minute long video. There's other stuff in there and you can skip around

[Chocolate Kitty]

I did, it was pretty interesting. My only real issue with this(well really the ranged thing), was how broken that was(but you already addressed this, so idk why I'm bringing it up). The NPC fighting thing seems nice, but how does that affect the story itself? For example, if I blow up the happy mask guy, will that mean that I can never use the services again unless I leave and come back? Or any shop really(you used the example of bad pricing as a reason to blow up the shop keep, which would in the end make your act pointless).

However, I hate to break it to you, but I really have no desire to fire up my n64 emulator and play through a modded OoT. It's a great idea and concept, sure, but why not make it more expansive? I don't know what your abilities are in that game system, but making it seem like a newer, or upgraded game might make it more interesting?

tl;dr;

the game is kind of out dated for just a few modifications imo

[Aleph]

If you blew up a shop keeper you'd get all their stuff for free because they'd be too dead to stop you

Some shops have big surly dudes in them nearby though so I guess they would probably alert authorities and/or kick your ass. At the moment the quickest way I see to make them combatant is to give them contact damage and have them try to run at you.

[Aleph]

http://www.twitch.tv/hextator/b/513122393

Trying to reuse the collision code from the game was proving difficult so I tried an idea I'd had for a while to just write some simple spherical collision detection of my own.

The stream illustrates it working fairly well and I might just stick with it instead of worrying about collision accuracy. The fun of the hack is that it lets me register hits on NPCs to begin with, not that it's super accurate (although that would be a nice bonus).

Maybe I'll fix it later. In the meantime I will probably generate some data to account for differently shaped and sized NPCs and work on the best part of all: what happens after the collision is detected. Instead of just flashing them red I'll go the rest of the way and have them erupt into a bloody mess or something.

[Aleph]

Blood, hit sparks and hit sounds have been added to the npc killing hack. No demo yet. Waiting until I have a prototype death animation and/or sounds for the npcs (i.e. grunts for when they get hurt, like using ganon's "uwoh!" sound for when a guard gets hit or something). The death animation feature will be added along with rudimentary hit point processing and object deletion (or at least immobilization/nullification of activity including path blocking) so that the next demo can show Link accessing places he shouldn't be able to by removing offending NPCs...violently...as well as putting this particular hack into a "release" stage in which enthusiasts can play with it as a functional and complete code.