Yesterday, for the first time in months, I actually released something. But despite all that time I’ve had to learn from my mistakes of the past, I messed up just as bad. The new beta release contained all of the assembly patches for Ages that will allow ZOHS to edit graphics and maps, which seemed to work great upon releasing. It turns out, though, that I didn’t test map swapping. For loading maps I was using CC2D as the group, which turned out to break swapped maps. The real address I should’ve been using was CD24, AKA the area’s “unknown” value in ZOLE 4. This value is actually the area’s map group, which is almost identical to the real map group. Instead of it going Present Overworld, Past Overworld, Present Underwater, and Past Underwater, it’s Present Overworld, Present Underwater, Past Overworld, Past Underwater. Why is this? I don’t know. Maybe the developers wanted setting bit 0 to trigger a map-change event that’s grabbed from the next group.

Long story short, I released ZOHS Beta 0.04 before testing map swapping even though I knew it I shouldn’t have. I guess eagerness to get something out strongly overpowered patience. Not even 10 minutes later did I fix the bug and re-upload the beta version.

In other news, I’m trying to think of ways to revive the Primary Zelda Hacking community. With most of its core people gone, it’s tough to build it up. I have beta releases, but they’re so people can find bugs to squash early on. Not many people are going to want to use it over ZOLE until it can do everything ZOLE can and more. ZOHS isn’t going to take off until I at least get the scripting engine done, so that’s one of my goals for at least 0.06 or 0.07. Beta 0.05 is going to consist of a lot of code rewriting and organizing to allow a smooth creation of the API that’s going to be used for most of the mini editors inside the suite. The problem is ZOHS is using a lot of ZOLE 4′s code, especially with map loading. The only new hacking-related code is the graphics loader, which was taken from ZOLE 5. The suite, for the most part, has just been a pretty interface that brings it all together.

This post is getting really long, so I’ll save describing the API and macros in another post. I believe they’re the biggest things to implement at this point and once done, the suite’s progress will fly and quickly become superior compared to ZOLE 4.