Hey guys. So for the longest time, ever since the introduction of ZOLE 4 Live, I've been unsatisfied with ZOLE 4. It's not programmed terribly, but it became hard to add onto and Live really built onto that. There are many Ages-only things about ZOLE that would make Seasons support really difficult to add, especially regarding the assembly patches. Those are other things bothering me - the assembly changes are... not so good. Before the introduction of my own assembler I made, I had to use a hex editor and BGB and do a lot of things by hand. This is the primary reason most of the programs can only be used for Ages.
However, now I have my assembler, a lot of experience regarding both games, and had a long break since the last time I worked on ZOLE. For some reason, a few people decided to pick up ZOLE and use it, which is really inspiring - just enough to breathe life into the forums.
So you might be asking yourself what's with the title. Oracles
Suite? ZOLE
6? What ever happened to 5? Well, in regards to ZOLE 5, I dropped it because of the plugin system. The way I designed it was extremely flexible - but too flexible. It might've just been called "Gameboy Tool Making API" because you could literally use the system to make tools for any game. Eventually this got to be really annoying and I stopped working on it. I like the ideas of plugins, but nobody would honestly write them except maybe Fatories. As for ZOLE 6, that's the next number up. ZOLE 4 was the first functioning editor for the Oracles I made and actually tried 3 other times. You can read about that all
Here.
But anyway, the title of the next editor for the Oracles would be the Zelda Oracles Suite. ZOLE stood for Zelda Oracles Level Editor and the rest of the programs had their own names. This was proven to be inconvenient for many and the idea for this program is to combine everything into one - making it a suite. Every design, tool, assembly patches and custom formats would be written from scratch. While the current layout of ZOLE is decent, there are some things it can improve on (like removing the area editor window since it's useless). Unfortunately, this means old hacks won't work with the new editor. My solution is to have data transferring from old ROMs to new, but for some custom additions like sprite changes will have to be done manually. It will be way too much work to convert the old ROMs.
"Why now, Lin? And how do we know you'll stick with this one? You let us down with ZOLE 5. We will not forgive. We will not forget." Well honestly, about 3 years ago I released ZOLE 4 and in just over one short month I'm off to college to start my life. I don't know if I'll ever get a true opportunity to dedicate myself to hacking the games that made my childhood and stood as the reason I started programming seriously. I can't just leave ZOLE in its current state. My primary starter motivation will come from playing both Ages and Seasons in the next couple days - something I haven't done in many years. And as usual, people using ZOLE and creating hacks is the best way to do it directly. Seeing Radz's creation reminded me of a user by name of Mue, who created an amazing past-style overworld, which then took me back to the days of the scene's prime. I want that feeling back again, and I can't do it alone. If the forums or IRC are dead, then I lose motivation. But as soon as someone shows me something they edited, I feel that spark in me and want to work with the games. I promise to try and hold my part if you guys do the same. Join the IRC and actually make it #ZOLE! (the server is irc.caffie.net #ZOLE port 6667)
So with all that to read, I give you news regarding Fatories's and my hack, Oracle of Nature. It's dead. For good. It's not completely because we don't want to work on it, but the path we took after level 3 was disastrous and we don't like it. We also did a poor job with the overworld and could make a significantly better hack now. The dungeons are all really cool still though, so we might still use those if we ever make another hack.
~Lin
