Friday, October 20, 2006

More on matching original big hex

Considerable progress has been made, using a special version of WhorldFF that reads jumps times from a list, i.e. a file containing a list of the frame numbers at which to do random jumps. The frame numbers were determined by painstaking experimentation.

The key concept is that in the version of FFRend that created original big hex, all of WhorldFF's parameters were initially set by the host. By comparison, in the current version of FFRend, parameters are only set if they differ from their defaults. So for example, number of rings defaults to .5. If it's .5 in the preset, it won't be sent to WhorldFF, so WhorldFF will use the patch's value (1000) instead of 154 (what .5 denormalizes to). The corrected preset uses a value of .500001 rather than .5, because this tricks FFRend into sending WhorldFF the parameter, but is also close enough to the desired number (.5) so that it makes no difference.

Another thing: Tile's Cell Width and Cell height have to start at .54, not .5! No idea why but it's crucial. With this change we get exact matching at 640 x 480, except for very minor variations near the jump points.

Oh and one more thing: original big hex's initial frame offset turns out to 65, not 67. This was obscured by the Tile Cell parameter error.

Minor detail: still # 4454 was mislabeled, it's actually 4554.

Iages 2288 and 2297 aren't correct even at 640 x 480, and since they're suspiciously close to the jump at 2283, it's likely that 2283 is misplaced. The 1105 image is also off (the jump is at 1104, a single frame before!).

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