Hello, I've been playing around with an Olympic conversion of NHL94 - thus far mostly focusing on rosters and cosmetics, but wondering about ways one might approach making the game more difficult beyond increasing goalie ratings. Are their any non-obvious values we should be looking at that could be HEX edited?  Any other approaches one might take? 

FYI, unrelated, for those interested in AI, I came across some work using NHL 94 for training algorithms: https://github.com/MatPoliquin/nhl94-ai

Its cool stuff, but I'd rather not need a bank of Nvidia RTX cards to play NHL 94

Thanks!

Some possible things:

* decrease the speed boost multiplier

* increase the energy depletion rate

* increase the "roughness" attribute of the players (this attribute is misnamed, because no one knew what it did back then.. it makes the CPU players shoot more)

Thank you, Smozoma!  Especially appreciate insight into that roughness value - I'd assumed it was associated with aggression or something of the sort.   Do you have any thoughts into ways one might minimize the success of those known early NHL 9x goal scoring moves i.e. the cross moves, crash the net, stuff the net type moves? Anything that can be done to make the goalie supper human beyond maxing their ratings?

Also, I've noticed editing lines now crashing my game - perhaps because I deleted some player rosters ... assuming, I have to fill that data in with null space?

Thanks again!

No clue how to make the goalies better, unfortunately, other than increasing Agility is the biggest boost.

Yeah, when you delete players without fixing the lines, you get crashes. Go into the Lines editor in NOSE and make sure they're all valid. The game stores lines as the index of the player on the team, so if you made the team only have 16 players, and the left defenseman in the original line was the 17th player, it crashes.

There's a hex code edit that can adjust the hit box of the nets as well. This can be used to make them effectively smaller, [even though the sprites will look the same] forcing you to take more precise shots.

As for the cut in front move, I've found that using smozoma's suggestion of decreased speed boost and lower endurance, in addition to increased opponent Defensive Awareness can result in the AI defencemen clogging up those easy lanes and your forwards not having the ability to overcome them.
Overdone, this can turn your games into a slogfest, so use with caution.

Thank you Smozoma for the headsup on the line edits and thanks Von Ozbourme for the tip on the hit box for the net - can you tell me where I'd find that value in the hex dump? I tried comparing BINs that included/did not include this mod, but there seemed to be too many changes to narrow in on what I imagine are a few bytes at most.

You guys are great, thanks!

Edited September 28, 20223 yr by RetroGameplayer

Ah ha found it.
I had some notes copied on this, but even better than that, this is the thread regarding puck collision.

This edit more noticeably affects how close the puck gets to the boards, but a few replies later, Brodeur30 goes into how it also changes the puck's collision with the net.

Heh, come to think of it, make it even harder by expanding the goalie free movement area. Makes it really easy to get way out of position if you like to turn on manual goalie control.

 

Edited September 29, 20223 yr by von Ozbourme

Thanks @VonOzbourme this is great! I had to experiment with a new hex editor as for some reason I couldn't find the memory address using wxHexEditor....??? Not sure what was happening there, but I had no trouble when I switched to using ImHex (great tool!). 

I'll experiment with this some and eventually hope to release a ROM; will upload it to the custom ROMs section. FYI, my focus is on recreating the 1980 Olympics... the so-called "miracle on ice".

Edited October 1, 20223 yr by RetroGameplayer

Hey there,

Sorry I never saw this post until now. I hope you are well on your way to figuring this out. Regardless, I can share this…

When I was doing my ROM, I spent a lot of time trying to making it more realistic, to the point I eventually put out a "Rookie" patch to make it easier, and an "Arcade" patch to make it more action-packed. I'll echo what everyone said here (Speed Burst, Energy Depletion Rates, Net & Rink size), plus I'll suggest looking at the players crossover / stopping rates. But more than anything else, consider how you rate players, and the ratings distributions, for both skaters & goalies.

You might find this post useful, where I break down all of the aforementioned hacks in one place, and I give suggested values.

 

Edited January 9, 20233 yr by AdamCatalyst

On 9/28/2022 at 12:33 PM, von Ozbourme said:

There's a hex code edit that can adjust the hit box of the nets as well. This can be used to make them effectively smaller, [even though the sprites will look the same] forcing you to take more precise shots.

As for the cut in front move, I've found that using smozoma's suggestion of decreased speed boost and lower endurance, in addition to increased opponent Defensive Awareness can result in the AI defencemen clogging up those easy lanes and your forwards not having the ability to overcome them.
Overdone, this can turn your games into a slogfest, so use with caution.

Seamor shrunk the nets in his new ROMs and they rock. Though I think I have the record for hitting the post. Haha!

Edited January 9, 20233 yr by WileECoyote

I love the smaller nets! Hitting the post more is fun.

3 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

I love the smaller nets! Hitting the post more is fun.

Funny, I just got a message yesterday from my brother about a ROM I pranked him with. Small nets and awful shot accuracy.
"What the hell did you do to my team?!"
"Yeah. Sorry man. I'll fix that."
"No! I'm losing 4-0! I love it!"

13 hours ago, von Ozbourme said:

Funny, I just got a message yesterday from my brother about a ROM I pranked him with. Small nets and awful shot accuracy.
"What the hell did you do to my team?!"
"Yeah. Sorry man. I'll fix that."
"No! I'm losing 4-0! I love it!"

I would love to know the exact changes you made to create this rom.

Also does smaller nets not also make it harder for the CPU to score?

Edited January 10, 20233 yr by CoachMac

21 hours ago, von Ozbourme said:

Funny, I just got a message yesterday from my brother about a ROM I pranked him with. Small nets and awful shot accuracy.
"What the hell did you do to my team?!"
"Yeah. Sorry man. I'll fix that."
"No! I'm losing 4-0! I love it!"

Can you post that ROM?

12 hours ago, CoachMac said:

I would love to know the exact changes you made to create this rom.

Also does smaller nets not also make it harder for the CPU to score?

Actually truth be known, I found the corresponding offset for the puck collision detection in EA [PAL] and NHL [NTSC] Hockey (92) games and it was the PAL version that I had modded. [I am slightly obsessed with the +20% "turbo mode" physics that playing the 50Hz game on the 60Hz setting gives you]

It does seem to also make it harder for the CPU players to score so you might want to play around with it. I tried it out and had back-to-back 0-0 games, so results may vary. But the gist of it was that the whole team had a shot accuracy of 1 or 2 out of 6, so combined with the net collision being set to 0002 instead of the default 0005, it made for a play experience somewhere between complete frustration and masochistic joy, depending on how seriously you take your games.

4 hours ago, WileECoyote said:

Can you post that ROM?

It's a weird one, so I'm not sure how much appeal it would have, but it's also only 90% complete. I can see about posting it when the progress bar reached 100% though.

Edited January 11, 20233 yr by von Ozbourme

10 minutes ago, von Ozbourme said:

Actually truth be known, I found the corresponding offset for the puck collision detection in EA [PAL] and NHL [NTSC] Hockey (92) games and it was the PAL version that I had modded. [I am slightly obsessed with the +20% "turbo mode" physics that playing the 50Hz game on the 60Hz setting gives you]

Wait, what!?! I’ve been trying to figure out how to affect the puck collision physics, but so far I’ve not been able to develop the skills to figure this out. Can you share what you found, or point me in the right direction?

10 hours ago, von Ozbourme said:

It's a weird one, so I'm not sure how much appeal it would have, but it's also only 90% complete. I can see about posting it when the progress bar reached 100% though.

That's cool

14 hours ago, AdamCatalyst said:

Wait, what!?! I’ve been trying to figure out how to affect the puck collision physics, but so far I’ve not been able to develop the skills to figure this out. Can you share what you found, or point me in the right direction?

On a hunch I looked to see if 92 and 93 shared the same code as 94. The location was different, but doing a search for 0001 0005 0005 0018 yielded the same pairs of 0005's that determines the collision distances. Changing the 0's to F's made the puck bounce off the crowd's feet in every game.

I actually just checked '95 to '98 and noticed the exact same thing for every game, so that was considerate of the coders.

I pasted the locations into the comments of that original How To if you're interested.

@von OzbourmeOh, I thought you had discovered how to change the rebound rate for when the puck colides with the boards! That's the one that is just vexing me. I want to dampen the boards a it.

@AdamCatalyst Ahh.. Sorry no. Although if you want to ramp them up, I might recommend the PAL versions... no?

Funny, that never even occurred to me. But then I tend to mostly watch international events that are played in smaller, sometimes temporary, settings where the announcer will inevitably comment on how "This arena has some lively boards" and the dasher or older style stanchions will sometimes kick the puck out hard and possibly in a surprising direction.

On 1/9/2023 at 6:35 PM, Guest said:

Seamor shrunk the nets in his new ROMs and they rock. Though I think I have the record for hitting the post. Haha!

What rom is this!? I’m desperate to find it