SWAG Hype Thread

[Violet CLM]

<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun"><img src="http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/25/24545/emblem.png" /></a>
<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/downloads/sonic-with-a-gun-full-release" title="Download Sonic With A Gun full release - Mod DB" target="_blank"><img src="http://button.moddb.com/download/medium/66133.png" alt="Sonic With A Gun full release" /></a>

<a href="https://shemitz.net/static/swag/">Or play Sonic With a Gun in your web browser</a> if you don't like downloading things/can't figure out the DOSBox emulator.

[cooba]

EmeraldusThat rolls off the tongue so much better than the previous name.

[Violet CLM]

Lark couldn't hold on to it forever.

[DoubleGJ]

I'M HYPED

there, that's my part!

[Love & Thunder]

I remember when I was a lurker and I first tried the SWAG demo... I really sucked at it. XD
Anyway, consider me hyped.

[Obi1mcd]

Looking forward to the 23rd! It looks like it will have been well worth the wait.

[Violet CLM]

Also, if there's anyone out there who understands how music works, I'd love to use the actual Sonic songs in this, instead of whatever existing JJ1 songs I think match the best. Unfortunately I am <em>not</em> someone who understands how music works, and when I have found module versions of the Sonic soundtrack, feeding them into convert.exe has produced incoherent screeching messes. Or errors. :(

[DoubleGJ]

As much as I understand how music works, I'm completely unfamiliar with the PSM format, so I can't be of any help. I'll ask around if someone else could do it.

[Speaktrap]

Also, if there's anyone out there who understands how music works, I'd love to use the actual Sonic songs in this, instead of whatever existing JJ1 songs I think match the best. Unfortunately I am <em>not</em> someone who understands how music works, and when I have found module versions of the Sonic soundtrack, feeding them into convert.exe has produced incoherent screeching messes. Or errors. :(

Which converter are you using and what format are these sanic songs? Screamtracker modules are most similar in it's structure to PSM's

[KRSplatinum]

Also, if there's anyone out there who understands how music works, I'd love to use the actual Sonic songs in this, instead of whatever existing JJ1 songs I think match the best. Unfortunately I am <em>not</em> someone who understands how music works, and when I have found module versions of the Sonic soundtrack, feeding them into convert.exe has produced incoherent screeching messes. Or errors. :(

I can safely volunteer to help with this, if you are talking about .s3m files I can edit them with Open Modplug Tracker.

Jazz Jackrabbit games tend to already use converted versions of .s3m files, so I agree that would be the easiest format to convert to for a JJ1 game.

The only thing special about certain songs that work for the JJ series is that you can implement an automatic loop in the composition of the song for longer levels. But that shouldn't be necessary for a particular piece in general :p

However, I want to denote that the premise of "Sonic with a gun" is kind of broken with a Jazz as the main character.

Well, here's a preview of the .s3m file I made. I guess that .s3m should be able to convert to JJ1 music.

Actually you can download it in .ogg format there. You might have an easier time implementing .ogg into JJ1 than you would have trying to use an Amiga-based format for a game for MS-DOS that can now only be run on Windows. :P

Plus overall the final version of my track is an .OGG file as opposed to an .S3M file. The .s3m of this song is ~24 MB and the .OGG file is only ~3 MB.

https://soundcloud.com/jordanjett/krsplatinum-green-hill-zone

[Violet CLM]

However, I want to denote that the premise of "Sonic with a gun" is kind of broken with a Jazz as the main character.
"Sonic with a gun" was a preexisting, probably somewhat derogatory description for Jazz Jackrabbit which I am RECLAIMING. Also, there isn't a suitable sprite sheet of actual sonic that I could use, and I don't feel like drawing one myself.
https://soundcloud.com/jordanjett/krsplatinum-green-hill-zone
That's definitely an interesting listening experience! Kind of trippy, as it were. I'm not at all sure JJ1 could handle it, though, at 24mb? I'm doing very little editing to the JJ1 .exe itself, so "implementing .ogg into JJ1" is out of the question. :(

Since the last time I looked, I found <a href="http://www.gbadev.org/tools.php?showinfo=1381">this tool</a> for converting .mid to .s3m, which combined with <a href="http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/sega/genesis/#Sonic_the_Hedgehog">this .mid database</a> and <a href="http://www.jazz2online.com/news/706/convertexe-discovered/">convert.exe</a> should give me enough possible options for each song that at least one will probably play semi-plausibly... genesis vgm to .mid (manual) to .s3m (automatic) to .psm (automatic) is not as direct a translation as one might hope, but it's faster than asking you to remix idk how many songs in a few weeks in such a way that a 1994 DOS program can play them correctly.

[KRSplatinum]

Thanks for the links! So the correct file format actually is .psm?

I'd like to clarify the process...

- original Sonic music is for Genesis in VGM format
- Instead of that, Swag can use a MIDI version of those songs
- Those .MID files can be converted to .S3M directly
- Those .S3M files can be converted to .PSM

And jj1 uses PSM, so there must be a program for MS DOS that can convert between .s3m and .psm, since the soundtrack was unofficially released in .s3m format.

I see what you mean, from there it's just about making a list of the Sonic worlds you made levels for, and pick a good .MID song for each different world, and hopefully the music corresponds with the world it's from. ⌒.⌒

I haven't tried yet but overall, it seems like if convert.exe won't work, it might be easiest to convert from .s3m to .mod to .psm, in order to reduce errors. At that point, according to my sources JJ1MOD can convert .mod to .psm.

If the .s3m files won't work entirely, .mid files can be converted to .mod, in my opinion.

...EDIT:

By the way, Convert.exe doesn't run on Windows 8. It's obviously a program made to run in MS-DOS, not Windows, if Epic used it to make JJ1.

Furthermore, JJ1MOD doesn't work for 64-bit machines, which mine is... I might have to use DOS-Box.

Changelog:

Wow, I had no idea Epic actually made a full-fledged module conversion and cleanup program for MS-DOS back in the '90s... They should sell this software.

Too bad the file size of my .s3m file is too big to be made into a .MOD file, lol. I made a valid .PSM file out of a .MOD, but it is only like 5 seconds long XD

The sample I used is too big for .MOD file format. I used a single sample of the whole song from Green Hill Zone, a sample which I edited before putting into a module.

You're right, SwaG will need to use a different remix than the one I posted to Soundcloud, unless JJ1MOD can do better in terms of loading a large file. Right now I'm trying it, but it's taking a while to convert. I've had music file renders take literally about an hour just for ~5 minutes of audio output, so I don't expect it to be much different for this test.

****, if .s3m could only encode .ogg files instead of .wav files, this would be SOOOO much ****ing faster.

I can't say whether JJ1 would be able to use a music file that's bigger than its own filesize, but anyway, I'm just testing conversion with OpenMPT right now. I'm not going to worry about testing with JJ1 until there's actually a significance to choosing the right song for a given level. :p

Anyway, if there's a compilation of the Sonic soundtrack in MIDI format, which can easily be made into small .MOD files, then they can become .PSM files which should work in JJ1.

Update: As for a progress report, my conversion from .s3m to .psm in JJ1MOD totally failed. As expected, it said in the J2O page that it didn't work.

-> The next step of my process is to convert some of those MIDI files you posted into .MOD files, then convert them into .PSM files with Convert.exe.

By the way, JJ1 songs are only 4-channels as far as I know. It's nearly impossible to reduce the number of channels from any song without essentially fully remastering them. These MIDI files will need a complete overhaul before they're properly converted to a 4-channel .MOD. Instead, I'd sooner convert to 32-channel .MOD and check whether that's supported by JJ1 or not :d

mid2s3m can't convert more than 8 channels either.

I have made a .MOD file out of son1hill.mid, but it's SOO messed up right now, haha.

In order to ACTUALLY correct this, I would have to tune EVERY single one of these virtual instruments, and they would still sound like crap since MIDI playback by the Windows synthesizer is literally a joke, so it would be faster to just replace them all. And the filesize is already twice as big as any JJ1 song, so I can't guarantee these MIDI files can be converted to .PSM.

It's really more likely that I could just make new 4-track .MOD files for whatever levels you choose, convert them later to .PSM, and stick to a 150-kb limit for all JJ1-related music.

Otherwise, there's no use trying to convert a 12-channel .MID file into a 4-channel .PSM file. It just won't happen without a true upgrade to Windows' MIDI synthesizer.

However, if there are some 4-channel .MID files on the site you posted, in theory they could eventually be converted to .PSM. They just need to have every instrument re-tuned in the process, in order for them to not be broken in terms of pitch.

Look, in other words... For troubleshooting purposes:

- 12-channel MIDI songs can't be converted to 4-channel .PSM files.
The reason for this is that 12-channels allows (12 people playing 1 instrument each in 1 song) and 4-channels allows (4 people playing 1 instrument each in 1 song). It's like trying to make 4 groups of 3 people read 1 page of sheet music per group, lol.

- Converting .MID to .MOD in Open Modplug Tracker detunes all of the instruments. It's like virtually loading a bunch of guitars onto a rocketship, sending them to Mars and asking how much air pressure is on the guitar strings once a computer astronaut plays the guitar in a Martian atmosphere. They're obviously not going to immediately sound correct, haha.

For the purposes of SwaG:

- The limit for JJ1-based music is about 100-150 kb in a single .PSM file. (I haven't actually tested this in JJ1, but I have been able to make a 4-channel .PSM song that plays in OpenMPT.)
- So far, I haven't found any sheet music for Sonic songs that can be converted and opened in JJ1. JJ1 has a strict limit of 4 channels for a song, and only accepts .PSM files with a certain filename that determines what order the songs are in compared to each JJ1 world.

-> My plan right now is to just start from scratch, make a 4-channel .MOD file that covers a given Sonic level based on any Sonic world music, convert it to .PSM with convert.exe, check to see that its filesize is under ~150 kb to fit in with JJ1, then to apply it to a JJ1 world, rename it to, for example, song0.PSM in order to play, say, Green Hill Zone music in the Diamondus world.

- What this would require is a list of Sonic worlds that are levels that will be in SwaG, so that the music choice can be appropriate for the level, since it would be cool if the levels had the music from the old worlds in Sonic, just a new version of the same song.

...

While I'm at it, there's a strict limit to the file size of an appropriate .PSM file.
This limit is about ~100 kb.
A simplistic method of reducing the file size of a .PSM file would be:

1. Before you convert to .PSM, edit your file as a .MOD.
2. Change the samples your .MOD file uses. They have to be .WAV file format samples.
3. Reduce the bitrate of each of the .WAV files you're using in the song.
4. Reapply the .WAV samples to the .MOD file in OpenMPT.
5. Convert the .MOD again to .PSM.

[Violet CLM]

Woooo, that's a lot of words. And yeah, doing JJ1 stuff requires spending a lot of time in DOSBox.

Look... I really don't understand music files. Even if I took the time to learn, which isn't practical in this timeframe, I have barely any <em>ear</em> for music, so I wouldn't even know if I was doing the right things or not. If you think you can produce better results than automatically converting those .mid files to s3m and then to psm, and do so in a timely manner, and are willing to do so, I'd definitely be grateful and rep up your posts! But it sounds like a lot of fine-tuning and bother, and I don't want to force this on you (or anyone) unless you're sure. If you are, the six main zone songs (GHZ, MZ, SYZ, LZ, SLZ, SBZ) are the obvious contenders for where to start, and if those work out, we can talk about which other songs would be good to have too.

[KRSplatinum]

OK, TY.
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2847/11167513284_a42f05a7a8_o.jpg

[Love & Thunder]

JJ1 songs are only 4-channels as far as I know.
Myth busted.
http://i.imgur.com/yn0DM1t.png
(ENDSONG.PSM, pattern 16 -- technically, it doesn't actually use channels 7 and 8 in the song(At least, I couldn't see it using them), but it uses the first six, as you can see)

EDIT: All the CD songs also have eight tracks.

[Violet CLM]

<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/features/zone-spotlight-marbelava"><img src="http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/25/24545/Marbelava3.png" />
New screenshots.</a>

[Stijn]

that link refers to itself

[Slaz]

Also, there isn't a suitable sprite sheet of actual sonic that I could use, and I don't feel like drawing one myself.

Psst, don't tell the Sonic fandom, but I'm convinced that Jazz is a way cooler character to play with in the first place!

[Violet CLM]

Yeah, but I'd play a Zoonik game in a heartbeat...

[cooba]

Nobody outside this community knows about Zoonik.

As a matter of fact, I'll safely bet that nobody outside this thread knows about Zoonik.

[DoubleGJ]

As a matter of fact, I'll safely bet that nobody outside this thread knows about Zoonik.
you have just lost your bet to this abomination (http://azulatomdragon.deviantart.com/art/Zoonik-169007280)

[KRSplatinum]

Who is sonic with a gun really? He would have to be a mascot for the Seattle Supersonics, since NBA mascots shoot tshirts at basketball games. However, that shouldn't affect your character development. Jazz could probably beat this game independently, and there aren't any other sprites available. Therefore it's up to him to make this game happen.

[cooba]

you have just lost your bet to this abomination (http://azulatomdragon.deviantart.com/art/Zoonik-169007280)They used to post here, so I'm not that far off.

[Slaz]

I would certainly prefer playing as Zoonik instead of Zool. At least he had a foxy tail. :p

While I never had an Amiga, I always thought of Zool as a Ninja Turtle in a Power Ranger suit.

[Alister]

I'm excited!

But give it to me straight, doc. How badly broken is it in OpenJazz?

[Violet CLM]

Okay, I just downloaded the latest OJ version (no changelog?) and I'll do a runthrough...
Bullets move too fast.
The "Fall" and "Fall to ground" behaviors move much too fast.
Conversely, the "float back and forth" behavior moves too slow. (This may be a difference between single-x-pixel and quadruple-x-pixel movement.)
Offsets for the various weapon icons in PANEL.000 are read incorrectly. (this one surprises me)
The "launch pad" behavior... I dunno, I'm not sure if there are any properties it gets <em>right</em>.
Something about sprite attack positions doesn't seem to be working right, particularly the vertical offset.
OJ has no understanding of vertical movement for the (controllable) slide back and forth behaviors. (This is the main behavior I refer to when I mention things that the original JJ1 levels never used.)
Likewise, it massively overestimates the horizontal distance to be traveled by those behaviors.
The spring plants from Jungrock don't work. (I'm guessing this is because of differing interpretations of the size of null sprites.)
Swinging platforms don't draw their chain sprites. (Not a gameplay problem, and probably known, but I thought I'd mention it.)
The "flying snake" behavior bears no resemblance to its JJ1 equivalent.
Background effect #8 ("Grey sky") has more palette cycles than it should.
Events with the Stand On modifier don't obey the vertical positioning of the sprite when determining which pixels Jazz can't stand on, so the visible platform can end up quite a bit higher or lower than the physical one.
The "shot animation" anims appear to try to display an accessory animation even if their accessory animation is #0
The "Float up and down" behavior is checking for masks on the far right side of the sprite, instead of the column the event is placed, or... something? I'm not quite sure what's going on here. Also its collision detection with the player doesn't make any sense.
OJ <em>freezes</em> when the player comes near an event with an infinite number of accessory animations, instead of capping them at 7 (IIRC) like JJ1 does.
The ability of the "Repel Jazz foreground" behavior to set your XSpeed is much too powerful and lasts much too long.
Likewise, the "Spring up" modifier sends you too high.
The "Dive at Jazz" behavior doesn't have any mask detection at all, following you through walls and across pits.
OJ seems to have zero understanding of the use of Gravity=4 for bullets
Likewise, zero support for the "unknown weapon" (two modifiers after "Dispose airboard", third item in the "Accessory animations" window.
The "Float up" behavior is too weak on the X axis.
Passing over a 0-Strength event with modifier "Change water level" doesn't destroy it.
The "Float on water" behavior doesn't work.
The "Pezrock ball" behavior doesn't seem to respect the "Moving platform start" property.
An event with a >0 Strength property cannot be destroyed by shooting it unless it uses one of a subset of modifiers.
Bullets are moved the same gametick they are created, instead of waiting until the next one.
"Medivo ball" events don't move unless they have chain sprites... I think? Certainly some of them don't move, and that's my best guess for why.
Levels with offset Y camera positions (e.g. many Guardian levels) are misinterpreted as having sun tiles instead.
Only the first sun tile is read, instead of all four of them.
The background sky gradients scroll at the wrong speeds.
Given an attack whose "Hor. speed left #1" and "Hor. speed right #1" are both -1, OJ will manage to fire the bullet only to the right.
That's besides the basic engine stuff like not resetting ammo on death, or moving much too quickly (and not showing the airboard sprite) while flying, or bullets being active in memory while offscreen, or events loaded at different times than JJ1 would load them, or getting hurt not sending you flying backwards. There are probably more things I could have found, but the freezing from accessory animations problem prevented me from viewing three whole levels and I didn't feel like moving the start positions around or whatever to do more detailed testing. Basically, it's pretty, but it's not very playable.

[ThunderPX]

If I knew anything about composing with a tracker (I don't, I find the interface terribly unintuitive), I'd jump at the chance to do the soundtrack for this. I'd probably try to rearrange the Sonic 1 soundtrack in a very Jazz 1-like manner, maybe include some little references to other Sonic games like the levels do... but yeah, I've never really had the patience to sit down and learn such an obsolete form of making music.

[cooba]

As unlikely as it is for Alister to fix Violet's mega list in two weeks, keep in mind that OpenJazz uses libmodplug, and can run669, amf, ams, dbm, dmf, dsm, far, it, mdl, med, mod, mt2, mtm, okt, psm, ptm, s3m, stm, ult, umx, wav and xm

[KRSplatinum]

If I knew anything about composing with a tracker (I don't, I find the interface terribly unintuitive), I'd jump at the chance to do the soundtrack for this. I'd probably try to rearrange the Sonic 1 soundtrack in a very Jazz 1-like manner, maybe include some little references to other Sonic games like the levels do... but yeah, I've never really had the patience to sit down and learn such an obsolete form of making music.

Well, I have a lot of experience making module music with Windows trackers, but I can't really write sheet music right now.

If you do make an arrangement, and you have it in some form of sheet music, it would be faster for me to transcribe your arrangement into a module file than it would for me to make my own arrangement.

I guess the arrangement should be for ~4, ~8 or ~12 instruments, guesstimating from the number of channels JJ1 songs typically use.

I would just suggest a limit of only a few minutes per song, or else people who play the levels won't get to hear the whole song.

To reiterate, my plan for this project is to create a .mod file and convert it to .psm. AFAIK, That's solely dependent on the .mod file being ~100 kb.

[minmay]

The Genesis' synth had 6 channels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM2612), JJ1 supports at least 6 channels as Robo4900 showed.

Original songs (http://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:Modland&md=col&id=2164).
VGMTool (http://www.smspower.org/Music/VGMTool) can decompress those (.vgz to .vgm).

Then I used this (http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=58684#58684) to convert them to MIDI; probably there is a better converter floating around somewhere.

The resulting file has completely wacky tuning/timing, because that's what the Genesis had. At that point I recommend just re-tracking the whole song using the MIDI file as a guide - with the songs around 1 minute and with only 6 channels this really isn't too bad.
That said I don't volunteer for it quite yet, there's some other work I really need to finish.

[KRSplatinum]

I could work with the midi files by converting them to mod, then fixing all of the instruments manually. If there are only a few instruments, it's only a matter of finding in-tune samples with low file size.

[cooba]

Seems like Violet forgot to post: <a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/features/zone-spotlight-gravis">Gravis</a>

[Violet CLM]

ModDB articles are screened for content, style, etc. by the site admins before being posted, so it's not so much that I forgot as the last time I'd checked it hadn't been approved yet. :) But now it is! Thanks!
<img src="http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/25/24545/Gravis4.png" />
(I've posted this picture before, or at least <a href="http://tachyonlabs.com/sam/Yardius2.png">one very like it</a>. The rest are new.)

[Newspaz]

That looks awesome. Can't wait to try it.

Stuff like this makes me want to go back doing JJ1 modding, but sadly I just don't have time for stuff like that anymore :-(.

Are you also modding the in game menus and episode images? I gave that a try once but as far as I could see it was all hardcoded. I expect that would be no problem for you though.

[Violet CLM]

I have a lot of ideas for additional material to cram in, none of which I'm going to talk about prior to the release. Screenshots and text will focus on the main levels, and anything else will be a surprise. What will or will not make it in basically depends on how much time I have for it, and before any of that I need to finish the last part of the final level, and then do a sweep through all the levels fixing sound effects and sprite alignment.

[cooba]

<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/features/zone-spotlight-labyrinthion">Not Labryn</a> :(

[Slaz]

At first sight, the enemy in image #3 reminded me of the Dopefish. 8D

http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/25/24545/thumb_300x150/Labyrinthion3.png

That got me thinking, wouldn't it be nostalgic to keep the old Dopefish fad alive by, for example, turning one of those enemies into one and placing it in a hidden room?

[Violet CLM]

It would be! I wonder if I have that much free sprite memory...

[Love & Thunder]

If you don't, you could add the Dopefish to a tileset and put that in a secret room?

[Slaz]

And on Feb 23, we'll see a message:

SWAG has been delayed. reason: the Dopefish ate all time that should've been spent on bug fixing. :lol:

[Violet CLM]

If only I'd (have) been planning to add Spaz somehow in that time period...

[ThunderPX]

I totally forgot about this thread after my previous boasting, which is an occupational hazard of being me. That being said, it would be pretty awesome if KRSplat could translate my ideas into tracker format, so here's my take on Marbelava:

http://threefingeredsalute.com/_junk/Marbelava.gp5 (Guitar Pro 5 format, my song prototyping program of choice because I usually write on guitar. Also doubles as sheet music with some notes on sample choice :p)
http://threefingeredsalute.com/_junk/Marbelava.mid (MIDI export of the above for the Guitar Pro impaired)

[Love & Thunder]

There is an easy(And free) solution to being Guitar Pro impaired; it's called TuxGuitar (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxguitar/). :)

Anyway, on a more on-topic note, I recently played some Sonic 1, and I see what Violet means about the up-and-down blocks in that casino-style zone(About how they're annoying, but give the zone an identity other than "That casino zone from Sonic 1").

[Violet CLM]

<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/features/zone-spotlight-noirlite"><img src="http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/25/24545/Noirlite4.png" />
New screenshot dump</a>


I tried out the vgm-mid-s3m-psm conversion series mentioned earlier... several songs (SYZ in particular) I couldn't find <em>any</em> version that wouldn't crash JJ1, and even the ones that would play audibly sounded like .mid files. Reckon I'll be sticking to the normal JJ1 tracks.

[cooba]

You might consider this something of a breather planet.Spoiler: it really isn't

[KRSplatinum]

Try this for reverse conversion from MS-DOS module to Sega Genesis module

Jazz Jackrabbit - Diamondus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MPaPWIJUCo

[KRSplatinum]

<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/features/zone-spotlight-noirlite"><img src="http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/25/24545/Noirlite4.png" />
New screenshot dump</a>


I tried out the vgm-mid-s3m-psm conversion series mentioned earlier... several songs (SYZ in particular) I couldn't find <em>any</em> version that wouldn't crash JJ1, and even the ones that would play audibly sounded like .mid files. Reckon I'll be sticking to the normal JJ1 tracks.

Look, my schedule is 9 am - 5 pm school, 8 pm - 4 am sleep.
Or in 24 hour time,
9 - 17 school, 20 - 4 sleep.

So I really don't have a lot of time to contribute valuable information except for on week ends.

But I'm sure I could make a .PSM file that's low enough in filesize.
You just have to start by making a .MOD.

Converting .MIDI to .MOD will ALWAYS break a .PSM because of the file size restrictions on importing a MIDI instrument into the .MID format, which is necessary in order to convert it to .MOD.

Let's just step back a bit...

MIDI has 7-bit sampling.
.PSM has 8-bit sampling.

That should be clear in comparisons between MS-DOS and Windows.

The trick is that in computing, a bit has 3 states- 0, 1 and neutral.

[KRSplatinum]

###TriplePost

I totally forgot about this thread after my previous boasting, which is an occupational hazard of being me. That being said, it would be pretty awesome if KRSplat could translate my ideas into tracker format, so here's my take on Marbelava:

http://threefingeredsalute.com/_junk/Marbelava.gp5 (Guitar Pro 5 format, my song prototyping program of choice because I usually write on guitar. Also doubles as sheet music with some notes on sample choice :p)
http://threefingeredsalute.com/_junk/Marbelava.mid (MIDI export of the above for the Guitar Pro impaired)

I will make my best attempt at converting this to .PSM!
Thank you for allowing me to transpose these .GP5 and .MID files to .MOD and .PSM.

I assure you, your efforts have been appreciated, n00b13!?...

Meanwhile, I made an NBA remix of the Green Hill Zone song I posted earlier.

https://soundcloud.com/jordanjett/lolesports-ibl-nba-seattle

[Violet CLM]

<a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonic-with-a-gun/downloads/sonic-with-a-gun-full-release" title="Download Sonic With A Gun full release - Mod DB" target="_blank"><img src="http://button.moddb.com/download/medium/66133.png" alt="Sonic With A Gun full release" /></a>

[snzspeed]

Played it, it was awesome. :D

[Violet CLM]

Played it, it was awesome. :D
Wow, that was fa&mdash;
*looks at username*
<em>Oh.</em>

[Love & Thunder]

Just tried it, and failed to beat Emeraldius. Therefore, this is just has hard as it should be, and I am very happy! :D

[Slaz]

Downloaded it, but will play tomorrow due to lack of time I had today. :p

[Louis K]

Awesome! I love it!

[DoubleGJ]

Rough first impressions:

It's beautiful.
Enemies are really cool.
I found the second Emeraldus level easier for some reason.
I freaked out when jumping off the ramp at act 2, started falling back and the screen started flashing mid-way. I fell into some pit but I still got transported to the boss.
Marbelava is kind of glitchy, I had to die in act 1 because falling blocks all fell into the same spots in lava and wouldn't budge and I got hurt numerous times because the swimming blocks and spiky platforms lagged.
The second act is a bitch of a level. Still can't beat it. I found a secret area by falling into lava, and got stuck in a wall in a corner when I thought it's a way back (maybe it was). Well, I never liked Marble Zone in Sonic, so I guess it's only fitting. Looking forward to getting to the further levels, then.

[Slaz]

First try I lost all my lives on Marbelava Act 2, second try got me all the way to the Gravis Act 2 boss. I also found 2 bonus levels and 1 secret level.

So far I really like the way certain gimmicks are utilized. Especially the moving platforms DoubleGJ disliked. No platform in the original JJ1 moves that complex, so it felt surprising. :p

I'm playing on Normal and want to finish it retro style, from the beginning to the end in one continue. Let's see how it goes. :7

[DoubleGJ]

That reminds me, I haven't found a single secret in Emeraldus.

And I don't dislike the platforms, I just said they glitched.

[Slaz]

Ah ok. Well, the part in Marbelava where the falling square platforms supposedly have to stack in order to create a way up, never stacked for me on the 3 times I played it. On my first try, I just kept jumping to see if more blocks would fall, yet they eventually stopped so I had to kill myself in the lava. Then I found that just running and jumping diagonally into the falling blocks will move you up too.

JJ1 and logic, they don't go well together. :p

Anyway, my third play got me to Labyrinthion Act 2. The water level puzzle in Act 1 was pretty clever, it took 2 of my lives too! 8D

[Violet CLM]

Mmhmm. The JJ1 engine has no support for "stacking" objects as you describe them.

<a href="http://www.tssznews.com/">If anyone wants to spam the poll on this website a bit,</a> feel free. ;)

[Stijn]

Why did you not upload this to J2O?

[Louis K]

Why did you not upload this to J2O?

I think that because it just related to JJ'1'..(not '2'..)
Maybe!..

[Stijn]

But we have a special category for JJ1 uploads :(

[Love & Thunder]

Perhaps because SWAG comes with a (Renamed) JAZZ.EXE, and that kind of thing is frowned upon on J2O.

[cooba]

All three admins disagree

[Violet CLM]

To be a little more clear, we did talk about it, and the consensus was that JAZZ.EXE (well, really FILE0001.EXE, since JAZZ.EXE is nothing more than a launcher that sometimes runs SETUP.EXE instead) and the like are not sufficient for the download to count as piracy. To the best of my knowledge, there is no difference between the FILE0001.EXE files in the JJ1 shareware and the (non-CD) registered version. What you are paying for is the extra content. Since SWAG does not include any of the original JJ1 levels or tilesets (in unmodified form), and the music files are available elsewhere, downloading it doesn't really get you substantially closer to having the full version of JJ1 than you were before.

(Also, I find it's easier to figure out how to download something from ModDB than from J2O, since ModDB has a big red DOWNLOAD button and J2O has one text field among many. So I wasn't in much of a hurry to get this done.)

But it's on J2O now.

[Love & Thunder]

Ah, well you learn something new every day. :)
(And actually, that's quite interesting)

In other news, I got past Emeraldius, but I died on the first level of the next planet. XD
(If it wasn't already clear, I really suck at JJ1. Next time, I'll try beating the original game before trying SWAG)

[Violet CLM]

<a href="http://sonicunited.org/2014/02/26/sage-advice-the-not-so-great-part-2/">Laughing at this.</a> Lists under the "worst entries" and can't find a single bad thing to say about it.

[DoubleGJ]

#sonicfanboys

[Slaz]

The Sonic fandom is roaming with kids that can't take it if the Blue Blur himself isn't in the game, while design-wise it's a perfect tribute to both JJ1 and SEGA's classic.

But.. That's to expect from a fandom that praises and defends 'Sonic NextGen/2006'. At least we despise JJA, sort of. :p

[DoubleGJ]

this may be slightly too offtopic, but I disagree. acknowleding that gba jazz is mediocre but still somewhat enjoyable as a portable title is more mature than hatred of a video game

[Slaz]

this may be slightly too offtopic, but I disagree. acknowleding that gba jazz is mediocre but still somewhat enjoyable as a portable title is more mature than hatred of a video game

That's why the 'sort of' came in. I was comparing the way Jazz fans look at JJA (that is, the overall reception of the game seen on this site throughout the years) with the way Sonic fans look at Sonic '06. Or basically, the way I remember kids on the Sonic Stadium forum trying to defend Sonic '06 gameplay as being perfect. While my playthrough of Sonic '06 (and many others) saw obvious glitches and rough design work that made the gameplay hard to describe as perfect.

But perhaps 'despise' was a bit of a blunt choice of word on my behalf. I've enjoyed JJA as well. Played through all dificulties and even did some CTF multi-pak multiplayer with a friend at school's. Thinking of JJA gives me pleasant memories of a kinda mediocre platformer with it's ups and downs.

Let's just say I meant to compare the way people in this community describe JJA as more mature than the way some Sonic fans describe their black sheep in the series. And based on that, let those fans play SWAG, and they'll likely go: Oh noes where's Sonic it can't be!! :7

[Slaz]

Well, let's get back on track.

Anyone know how to pass this room? I can't seem to go through any hidden wall, jump up, or fall back down. Nor have I got any idea how to reach those crates.

http://s11.postimg.org/fcl4ygomr/SWAGNow_What.png

[cooba]

Launcher.

[Treylina]

But.. That's to expect from a fandom that praises and defends 'Sonic NextGen/2006'.

Hahaha, that's a great joke. Oh wait...don't you know that's one of the most criticised Sonic games even within the fandom? People who do like it are either being sarcastic or in a minority.

It's understandable why people don't like JJ1. The resolution is way too small for the speed it encourages, and you can't see very well what dangers are ahead of you. That asides, I know some sonic games that have the same two issues... Sonic Rush *cough*.

Ok, sorry for derailing slightly. I don't know if I'll play this. Maybe when I'm really bored.

[Slaz]

Launcher.

Thank you! That did it. I'm at Noirlite Act 2 now, and found 3 secret levels (if that one speedy boss fight is actually secret). :)

Hahaha, that's a great joke. Oh wait...don't you know that's one of the most criticised Sonic games even within the fandom? People who do like it are either being sarcastic or in a minority.

Then I believe it's this minority what I encountered on a forum years ago. Though it's hard to know for sure if people on the internet are sarcastic or not, especially on a subject such as Sonic '06. I admit playing through it myself from the beginning to the end and it had a few OK moments, but overall frustration with the ongoing glitches and lacking design made it meh meh and meh..

[Violet CLM]

It's understandable why people don't like JJ1. The resolution is way too small for the speed it encourages, and you can't see very well what dangers are ahead of you.
Which is why every level is designed with that constantly in mind, to a much greater extent in than the original game.

[incandescentembers]

Congratulations on SWAG, Violet. I am really impressed and also very curious how did you managed to place so many new enemies. Do you think you could show us the scripts of some of your enemies? When it comes to the coding I am a total noob, and I'm just very interested to see how this looks like, all their movements etc.

Also, since you managed to do that much to JJ1, are you able to do the same to JJ2? I'd love to see new enemies in JJ2... Especially some JJ1 convertions not limited only to tiles but enriched also with JJ1 enemies, some JJ1 hazard etc. At the current point I don't really see much point in all those conversions of JJ1 and Hocus Pocus (which I also like)... Just the original tiles filled with BORING JJ2 enemies, hazards and pick-ups, which don't really fit.

[Violet CLM]

Well, they're different games, and so work differently. In JJ1, all the enemies and other objects are defined inside the level file. So one level might have a normal carrot object worth 10 points, another might have it be worth 2000 points, and another might have it spin around in a circle until collected. And so on. Graphics are defined on a per planet basis, so while there's a limit on how many sprites can be defined at once (and how large they can be), you can in principle import any sprites you want. As for defining those objects, there are no "scripts" as you put it... JJ1 has a list of ~60 behaviors (how objects move around) and ~40 modifiers (what happens when you touch or shoot the objects) which can be combined and passed various parameters to behave in certain ways. I'd recommend downloading J1E and having a look for yourself.

As for JJ2, well, I think we're all familiar with how JCS works. But if you want to see custom enemies and things there, I'd recommend downloading <a href="jazz2online.com/jj2plus">JJ2+</a> and checking out levels like Rocket Powered Rabbits or Ozymandius.

[incandescentembers]

Well, they're different games, and so work differently. In JJ1, all the enemies and other objects are defined inside the level file. So one level might have a normal carrot object worth 10 points, another might have it be worth 2000 points, and another might have it spin around in a circle until collected. And so on. Graphics are defined on a per planet basis, so while there's a limit on how many sprites can be defined at once (and how large they can be), you can in principle import any sprites you want. As for defining those objects, there are no "scripts" as you put it... JJ1 has a list of ~60 behaviors (how objects move around) and ~40 modifiers (what happens when you touch or shoot the objects) which can be combined and passed various parameters to behave in certain ways.

Good to know that. So the enemies (& bosses) graphics are included in the planet's tileset (if so, how come all the JJ1 tilesets don't have that?)? Or where are they stored?

Is this image:

http://www.spriters-resource.com/resources/sheets/7/7025.png

covering every single graphic (for every single movement) of all the enemies in Jazz 1?
(not including bosses, since I couldn't find them)

As for JJ2, well, I think we're all familiar with how JCS works. But if you want to see custom enemies and things there, I'd recommend downloading <a href="jazz2online.com/jj2plus">JJ2+</a> and checking out levels like Rocket Powered Rabbits or Ozymandius.

I'm not that into those 2... And still I don't see a completely new enemies like in SWAG. By completely new I mean not only movements / behavior but also graphics. Maybe the question will be silly, but how come no one (pointing at you in first place, since you are the JJ1 convertion master, and I assume that also a huge fan of JJ1) ever tried to bring the JJ1 enemies into JJ2? Don't you think that all the convertions would be much more real and interesting when some world's tiles would be completed with it's enemies?

[KRSplatinum]

I posted the best versions of Sonic music I could find to J2o.

Trying to use them in JJ1 would be difficult, so I suggest creating a separate, Internet Explorer-based application that can successfully read and play MIDI music files.

http://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/7358/unoriginal-sonic-midi-music/

[KRSplatinum]

It would be nice if there was a way I could start focusing on this now.
I hope you noticed that I posted some high-quality music files for Sonic and IE but I didn't write any of that music, so I'm not even sure where the GAME of SWAG is in progress.

I totally forgot about this thread after my previous boasting, which is an occupational hazard of being me. That being said, it would be pretty awesome if KRSplat could translate my ideas into tracker format, so here's my take on Marbelava:

http://threefingeredsalute.com/_junk/Marbelava.gp5 (Guitar Pro 5 format, my song prototyping program of choice because I usually write on guitar. Also doubles as sheet music with some notes on sample choice :p)
http://threefingeredsalute.com/_junk/Marbelava.mid (MIDI export of the above for the Guitar Pro impaired)

[Stijn]

I have deleted that upload because Sonic music belongs on a Sonic website and not on a Jazz Jackrabbit website

[Violet CLM]

So the enemies (& bosses) graphics are included in the planet's tileset (if so, how come all the JJ1 tilesets don't have that?)? Or where are they stored?
Intuitively enough, they're stored in the SPRITES.### files.

Is this image:
[snop]
covering every single graphic (for every single movement) of all the enemies in Jazz 1?
(not including bosses, since I couldn't find them)
The vast majority, anyway. It doesn't include the generator things from Battleships, off the top of my head, presumably because Dolphman decided they didn't count as enemies. And JJ1 has no code for horizontally flipping sprites, so most enemies have separate frames for facing in either direction, and that image doesn't include that. And it's only so useful, because once you've compiled all those sprites from all those different tilesets into a single image, there's no way for them to retain their palette information.
By completely new I mean not only movements / behavior but also graphics.
We're not there yet at a code level.
Maybe the question will be silly, but how come no one (pointing at you in first place, since you are the JJ1 convertion master, and I assume that also a huge fan of JJ1) ever tried to bring the JJ1 enemies into JJ2? Don't you think that all the convertions would be much more real and interesting when some world's tiles would be completed with it's enemies?
Nope. It's only in the last few months that such things could be remotely helpful to include in tilesets, so there was no reason in the time before that to fill up the tile count with useless animations. Even now it wouldn't be an ideal solution, but that's getting even more off-topic than the rest of this.

KRSplat, I'm just ignoring you now.

[Love & Thunder]

Violet: Theoretically, though, you could use very clever coding to draw a square sprite(I believe there is one somewhere in anims.j2a) scaled down to one pixel, and then change its colour and do this a lot to create a "Sprite". Of course, even simple animations and bounding boxes would be hell, but it is technically possible, right?

KRSplat:
<iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hJOt4bEV7CA?start=72&end=77" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" width="640"></iframe>

[KRSplatinum]

Violet, I dont know why you have to be ignorant toward me, I'm not that ignorant .

I dont see why J2O deleted my post, Violet is the admin there and I just wanted to send him a file. You didnt have to erase it from J2O, because that might prevent Violet from getting a file. It's not that important to me, but it might still be somewhat relevant .

[Stijn]

Violet, I dont know why you have to be ignorant toward me, I'm not that ignorant .

I dont see why J2O deleted my post, Violet is the admin there and I just wanted to send him a file. You didnt have to erase it from J2O, because that might prevent Violet from getting a file. It's not that important to me, but it might still be somewhat relevant .
www.wetransfer.com

[KRSplatinum]

Interesting idea Stijn, but 2 MIDI files aren't going to require 10 gigabytes.
It would be faster just to download from a link like this:

MIDI sonic music
http://www.sendspace.com/file/63g5je

This might be vaporware, considering this has accurate notation for Green Hill Zone but it's not looped and it has no samples or synths to replace the highly irritating MIDI library that still comes with Windows. They sound quite a bit better when played with Winamp compared to when played with IE or OpenMPT - but this music needs drastic improvement over time.

[Stijn]

Indeed, so don't put it on J2O.

My patience has limits by the way, so just stop doing stupid shit like this.

[KRSplatinum]

İm not sure what you mean. Are you saying it's bad to post about Sonic on J2O?
İf it is, then it should be stated in the rules. İm not going to stop posting just because you post telling me to stop posting. İts counterintuitive. You have authority to ban, yet you instead tell me to stop posting? How is that logical or reasonable? You expect me to be qüiet when İm on this forum yet theres no point to even posting if all the JCF readership is asking for no more posting, while posters are just being hypocrites .

[Stijn]

it should be stated in the rules

3. Your upload must be related to the Jazz Jackrabbit games.
9. If you upload music, you must be the author and it must be related to the original Jazz Jackrabbit games soundtracks (a remix, for example); no original songs. An exception is the music you upload to accompany your levels.
<!>

[Love & Thunder]

... KRSplat... Did you just ask for Stijn to ban you?... Am I in the Comedy Café again?

Anyway, on topic, I think the music is fine as it is, although having new music would be a nice touch(But again, not really necessary).

[Violet CLM]

although having new music would be a nice touch(But again, not really necessary).
I did try, but nobody ever produced a .psm before (or after) the release, and even the subset of songs I <em>was</em> able to convert from .mid files without crashing JJ1 sounded incomplete or tinny.

[KRSplatinum]

İ loaded Süagjazz but crashed at difficulty selection... Slowly rebooting.

[Love & Thunder]

Maybe one day we'll actually know how to make PSMs that sound great and don't crash the game. By out luck, though, that will also be the day that Epic announce a HD remake that will include a level editor on the PC version. XD

[KRSplatinum]

I'm looking at using MPXplay as an audio palybkac format for this game $v$

https://soundcloud.com/jordanjett/emeraldus

https://soundcloud.com/jordanjett/emaraldus-swagjazz-remix-t3

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ETTNXp3AMgs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Violet CLM]

Some years back, someone wanted to make their own level with what was then known as "Hillgrius," and I asked that they wait until the full thing was released since changes might occur in the meantime. Since then, the grass and trees got redrawn, the background mountains got replaced, and a few other such changes did in fact occur. But there's no such event to wait for now; had this been a JJ2 episode, the tilesets would be easy-to-reuse .j2t files; and since the graphics are nearly all edited from JJ1 stuff anyway, it's not like there's any copyright stuff to think about. So here are all twelve tilesets that I made for SWAG, and you can use them or edit them in any way and for any game you like so long as you acknowledge where you got them in the first place. Click the checkboxes to view the tilesets from the hidden zones, which I've left invisible by default in case you're still trying to find some of them.

(The same openness of permission applies to the sprites, btw, but if you're knowledgeable enough to be able to use them for something, you're knowledgeable enough to figure out how to extract them on your own. Likewise if you want to make your own JJ1 levels in J1E/J1LES using the SWAG tilesets <em>and</em> sprites <em>and</em> defined events, that's cool too. Just make your own layouts.)

<style>input.spoiler, style ~ img { display: block; } input.spoiler:checked, input.spoiler:not(:checked) + div.spoiler { display: none; }</style>
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Emeraldus.png" />
<input class="spoiler" type="checkbox" /><div class="spoiler"><img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/EmeraldusHidden.png" /></div>
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Marbelava.png" />
<input class="spoiler" type="checkbox" /><div class="spoiler"><img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/MarbelavaHidden.png" /></div>
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Gravis.png" />
<input class="spoiler" type="checkbox" /><div class="spoiler"><img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/GravisHidden.png" /></div>
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Labyrinthion.png" />
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Noirlite.png" />
<input class="spoiler" type="checkbox" /><div class="spoiler"><img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/NoirliteHidden.png" /></div>
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Cloudsduel.png" />
<img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/Fabricant.png" />
<input class="spoiler" type="checkbox" /><div class="spoiler"><img src="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/swag/FabricantHidden.png" /></div>

[ThunderPX]

http://jptv.threefingeredsalute.com:1337/misc/marbelava.s3m

Learned how to use a mod tracker just for this yw

convert.exe mostly works on this, but the pitch bends get fucked up--it looks like they all get divided by 2 when they should be multiplied by 2 to sound the same in PSM. Long story short, I gotta multiply all my pitch bends by 4 to make them sound right after conversion.

A more pressing matter, though, is that the "B" function in S3M (which skips to another pattern) seems to be removed upon conversion. Perhaps it doesn't exist in the PSM format, which would be a shame since the first pattern is meant to be skipped upon looping.

[Violet CLM]

<a href="https://shemitz.net/static/swag/">You may now play SWAG in your web browser!</a>

[Primpy]

<a href="https://shemitz.net/static/swag/">You may now play SWAG in your web browser!</a>

The wonders of modern browsers. Very neat!

[Violet CLM]

Indeed!

Actually, since I went to the trouble of uploading all that javascript, why not make it a bit more versatile?

<a href="https://shemitz.net/static/swag/?game=1">Click here to play</a> in your browser <a href="https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/7616/lost-ages-v25/">Lost Ages!</a>
<a href="https://shemitz.net/static/swag/?game=2">Click here to play</a> in your browser <a href="https://www.jazz2online.com/downloads/6144/mission-spaz-foreseeable-future/">Mission Spaz: Foreseeable Future!</a>

[cooba]

Very interesting.

How much work would have to be put into Bad Seed to make it compatible with the launcher?

[Violet CLM]

Sure, the launcher is "just" DOSBox coded in javascript, same as what the internet archive uses... I could be uploading anything I wanted, Keen mods or whatever, and it'd theoretically work just the same. What's specifically going on is that it reads all the files from a single zip, and I have one zip each for SWAG, LA, and MS:FF, each of which contains <em>all</em> the files needed to play JJ1. So unless there's some good way to override the file loading code (unlikely, because this is not your grandmother's javascript, and <a href="https://js-dos.com/6.22/docs/api/generate.html?page=js-dos-fs#dosfs-extractall">"you can’t store different content (from different archives) into one path"</a> isn't promising) to convince it to read <em>certain</em> files from one place but everything else from another, like a good mod loader, there'd need to be another single zip for Bad Seed containing everything JJ1 needs to run normally plus those specific level/tileset/etc. files. Or maybe like somebody could compile <em>multiple</em> singleton custom JJ1 levels into a single zip, that would be more efficient.

ETA: <a href="https://github.com/caiiiycuk/js-dos/issues/82">I got a response.<a> Will have to try this out soon.

[Violet CLM]

Okay, I got Bad Seed (and everything else) working by coding up a mod loader.

[cooba]

I love that the answer to my question is "none whatsoever".

[Violet CLM]

I'll have you know I <em>artisanally</em> renamed several files to use .000 extensions.