CVCotM apworld v1.1

Good ol' minor fixes release! Here are the whoopsies fixed:

-Audience Room: Right exterior - Upper now properly requires the Kick Boots or Roc Wing.
-Chapel Tower: Outside Battle Arena - Upper and Lower now both properly require Heavy Ring in addition to Roc Wing.
-Ceremonial Room: Fake Floor now logically expects the Kick Boots or Roc Wing. Don't expect your next bit of progression to be placed here if you don't have either of those items, as you won't be able to escape!
-Switched the names of Underground Waterway: Lizard-man turf - Bottom and Top.

CV64 APPP Edition

CV64 but it generates way faster. And you don't need the ROM to generate. All thanks to Archipelago's new-ish AP Procedure Patch.

To use this, put it in the lib > worlds folder in your local, up-do-date Archipelago install over the existing cv64.apworld already in there, and it can now generate CV64 games without a ROM. If you are hosting a game and don't own a CV64 US 1.0 ROM, I highly recommend using this especially if CV64 is not a game you intend to play.

Some other fixes included in this:
-Fixed PermaUps randomized onto NPCs being impossible to get due to the game crashing when talking to said NPCs that have them. Due to the PermaUp's AP item code being weird (I made it 0x10C instead of 0x0C so AP would distinguish it) its item ID was being written wrong specifically for them; only the lower byte 0x0C should have been written.
-Fixed the ice chunk model staying when getting bitten by one of the Villa maze dogs while being frozen via an Ice Trap. A little extra assembly is being injected specifically to set the freeze timer to 0 when the bite happens so the ice model will break like it should.
-Fixed ItemLinked items effectively giving you two items instead of one if you are part of the ItemLink group by writing an AP item for them in these instances instead of the actual item. I thought, for some reason, that the server would not give you ItemLinked items found in your own world if you were in that ItemLink group but it turns out I was very, very wrong about that!
-Fixed a softlock that could happen if you get Big Tossed into an abyss by a hit that kills you. This was a problem with the Nitro explosion as well, so I extended the code I made to catch the problem there to check for both the "blown up by nitro" (0xC) and "launched" (0x8) player state values.
-Moved the part of the option description in Total Specail1s that explained the behavior of decrementing Special1s Per Warp to the Special1s Per Warp description and reworded it to be (hopefully) less confusing as to which option is being decreased.
-Fixed a small type in obscure_checks.md (guranteed should be guaranteed) that someone noted somewhere on the initial Yoshi's Island PR as well.
-Removed the unused ROM_PLAYER_LIMIT variable from rom.py; another thing that was also noted on the Yoshi PR.

CVCotM apworld v1

CV64 is now well and truly supported in AP! Which means other up-and-coming games from me are now free to take over this Releases page! Including this one! :)

This is an Archipelago adaptation of the standalone Circle of the Moon randomizer made with permission from its main developer, which you can find in these places:
https://github.com/calm-palm/cotm-randomizer/tree/master
https://rando.circleofthemoon.com/

Every option and feature from the standalone rando is currently implemented in this version. As far as new options go that aren't built into Archipelago worlds naturally, the only one I've currently added is early_double, which will force your Double in your own Catacombs in sphere 1. If you want to ensure you won't get stuck in the Catacombs while your friends have all the fun, I'd suggest turning this on. Besides this, I do not plan on adding any new non-multiworld-specific features that standalone does not currently have, so if you'd like to suggest some, I recommend you do it there. For information on what the rest of the YAML options do, you can check out the standalone rando's repo or the README. If you've played the standalone rando before, then all the options work exactly as you'd expect them to. Two pre-made YAMLs are included in this release, titled Nathan and Hugh. The Hugh YAML I made to be a harder preset than the Nathan one.

The unused Map magic item is used to represent all non-local items from other games, including other CotM worlds. When you are sent an item, a textbox announcing the receival of the item will appear next time you are in direct control of Nathan and you will receive said item in your inventory. The goal should send as soon as you land the final hit on Dracula II. For instructions on how to set up Archipelago in general and use .apworlds if you aren't familiar with it, read the README.

Happy Circle multiworlding! :)

CV64 apworld v4.3

What's this? A new setting? Yeah, I felt a sudden flash of inspiration one day and just had to do it. I do not anticipate adding any more options for quite a while (definitely not before the merge), so savor this moment!

Here's what's changed/added in this version:
-New option: Big Toss! Ever wondered what the game would be like if every enemy attack in the game mega launched you like Behemoth's charge attack? If the answer is "yes", then this is the setting for you! Worth mentioning that I added two anti-frustration features to make the platform-heavy stages less scary; you can press A while launched to cancel your launch momentum and avoid getting tossed off ledges, and you can hold Z to have incoming damage be treated as it normally would. I'm not that sadistic!
-Removed the "mystery" choice for the starting_stage option because it was pointless. The option is now "random" by default instead.
-Fixed a bug that would cause Renon's randomized shop prices to not be written correctly if they were below 256 or above 65535.
-Slightly changed a small handful of Location names that I wasn't quite satisfied with.
-Hugely revised and edited all the docs and option descriptions in preparation of them being actual AP web pages before long.
-You may notice that the obscure_checks.txt file is now an obscure_checks.md file. This is because that page is now included in the .apworld's docs folder and linked to on the Game Page (said link will work when this actually merges)! I also greatly touched it up and added some more checks I thought were worth mentioning.

3/13/2024 EDIT: It turned out Carrie.yaml had an incorrect option on it for the required number of Special2s. It should be percent_special2s_required with a default value of 100, not special2s_required with a value of 20. I have now fixed this.

CV64 apworld v4.2

Polishing, upon polishing, upon polishing, in anticipation of that eventual merge,..
What's new with this one? Well, let's see here...

-Incoming DeathLink cause messages now show up in the in-game textbox. Now you don't need to look over at the client to see who's to blame for your sudden death!
-Likewise, outgoing DeathLink messages now actually include your name so they will know who to blame!
-Added a special death message for when you die with the Vamp status effect.
-Fixed Axes and Crosses placed in AP locations not dropping to their correct height when their breakable containers are broken.
-Fixed Red Jewels for other players spinning at a faster speed than what's normal for them.
-Ice Trap items disguised as items that spin are now deliberately made to spin at a different speed to make it possible to identify them as Ice Traps before picking them up. Note that this only applies to local Ice Traps in your own game for now.
-Fixed some gen failures that can occur with smaller starting stages that require one or more keys to get past in smaller multis.
-Attempting to connect with a vanilla CV64 ROM will now cause the client to yell at you for doing so.
-Also implemented is detection for trying to connect a rando ROM generated with an incompatible version. As part of such, all seeds generated before this specific version will need to be played with an earlier version of the apworld.
-Modifying the game's item assets file to insert the AP items is now done during application of the patch rather than generating it, to avoid any copyright problems that might ensure from said full file potentially being distributed in said patches.

NOTE: The code in this apworld is actually slightly different from the code on my dev branch to retain compatibility with AP's v0.4.4 release version. More specifically, the create_regions function within init.py. The dev branch version uses the newly introduced world convenience getters, which are so new that v0.4.4 doesn't have them, so this v0.4.4-compatible version instead has to settle for lowly multiworld getters. You're welcome! :)

CV64 apworld v4.1

Improvements, improvements, and more improvements... I haven't given up on CV64 just because I started LoD!

So what's new in this version? A fair few new features, actually, even if they are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, And many fixes and code quality improvements that most of you normal guys probably don't care much about. The important stuff is as follows:
-Leaving Renon's shop with shopsanity turned on will now auto-hint all remaining progress items you haven't bought yet from him.
-start_inventory_from_pool is now enabled. Use it if you want to start with keys while removing them from the world!
-Non-locations accessibility now has a chance for keys that lock minor out-of-the-way rooms to self-lock themselves within said rooms depending on various circumstances. CV64 has the honorable mention now of being the third AP game to do something with this feature!
-Fixed a potentially major problem wherein Tower of Science's end loading zone would always lead to the same destination as Clock Tower's no matter what, while the logic didn't expect that.
-Fixed a crash that could occur while warping while having an item to receive queued up in-game.
-Multiworld items will no longer be given within the few frames after you pick up an item in-game. This should fix cases wherein the item textbox could freak out if you try picking up items while there's a queue of multiworld items to receive.
-Fixed the Villa servant entrance candle being counted onto the maze's Countdown number during generation, when it should've been on the Villa interior's. The result was that the interior Countdown could dip below 00, while the maze one could never go below 01.
-Fixed boss locations counting on the Countdown numbers during generation with draculas_condition set to bosses, when they should not have been.
-Ice Traps on NPC items will no longer decrement the majors only Countdown.
-The Countdown numbers will now hide themselves during the title demos so that you cannot peep the number of majors in Tunnel and Waterway before starting the run. This is moreso for platforms other than Bizhawk at the moment, since the demos literally don't load on Bizhawk currently.
-Fixed problems with putting varying amounts of starting gold in the start inventory.
-Fixed item linked items not being properly given to the player who picked them up if said player is part of the item link group.
-Actrise will no longer go easy on Reinhardt. Yes, despite the fact Reinhardt doesn't fight her normally, Actrise actually has code that checks to see if you are playing as Reinhardt and, if you are, drastically nerf her health and the rate at which she fires her freeze attack! We believe this might actually be a leftover showfloor demo feature, as we know Actrise was fightable as Reinhardt in at least one of those...

CVLoDBIJCW&V v1

At long last, it is finally here! Yeah, that's right, it's the long-awaited sequel to OoTBIJMQWT that no one asked for: Castlevania Legacy of Darkness But It's Just Castle Wall & Villa!

For this first version of LoD rando, I decided to take a different approach from what I did with CV64 by focusing on getting much of the big features working in a small portion of the game first and then adding the rest of the stages and locations later, rather than randomizing the entire game first and then adding on features after that. A major challenge that I have to face with Legacy that I did not need to worry about so much with CV64 is jus the sheer amount of character and difficulty-specific things there are this time around that, in order to make the game work in a randomizer-friendly context without forcing the player to use any one specific character and difficulty combination, I need to make universal. Which extends not just to map actor instances, but even hardcoded checks in some overlays for specific characters! I could go on about how much fun I had getting the child Henry escort sequence to work for everyone, for instance... Villa I daresay has the absolute most of these by far, so hopefully the rest of the stages will be downhill to add from here.

Some things you should know before playing:

-The US version of LoD is the one you need to play this. LoD cartridges are way more expensive than CV64s, but thankfully there are no revisions, so any clean US version you can get your hands on should work. The md5 is 25258460f98f567497b24844abe3a05b.

-Pressing Z + R + START will always send you to your start location initially, but once you get the single Special1 placed in the pool the combo will, every other time you press it, send you to the Villa storeroom instead. The fancy warp menu from the CV64 implementation is not implemented here (yet), so for now, we'll make do with this quick and dirty solution.

-The Villa fountain pillar is on its Cornell behavior for everyone, but with a twist: the order of tombstone buttons to press is randomized! To learn the new combination, find the Oldrey's Diary item (this is an unused item in vanilla LoD, fun fact) and check its pause menu description for four letters. Each letter corresponds to a specific tombstone, and you must press the tombstone buttons from left to right in the order shown in the description:
O: Or De Rais
M: Mary
H: Henry
V: Visitor (the one that's too damaged to read)
There are 24 possible combinations and you can try to bruteforce it if you want, but just know that the logic expects you to find Oldrey's Diary before you can get onto the fountain.

-To enter the Maze Garden through the main OR the servant entrance gate, you will need to find the Garden Key. Once you unlock one gate, the other will unlock as well. This is something I implemented in CV64 as well to make the logic more interesting, but I thought I'd mention it here because you are far more likely to see it with the servant door unlocked from the get-go. That, and it goes along with the next point that IS specific to LoD...

-The two doors in the Maze that divide the front and the rear of it are locked by the Rose Garden Key (a key specific to Cornell's version of the stage that normally locks the door between the Foyer and the Rose Garden), and once you unlock one door all three Rose Garden Key doors in the game will unlock at the same time. Between this and the regular Garden Key locks, the entire Villa stage is essentially split into four main logical "quadrants" that you may or may not have access to depending on what you currently have when you get there.

-Child Henry is the kid to rescue in the maze for all characters, not Malus. In the future I plan to let you pick between the two when generating a seed, but for now this is how it is. To be able to start the escort sequence, you must talk to Mary first in the mirror room adjacent to the bedroom. She will tell you what item is at stake for rescuing Henry and what player it's for, so you can then decide if the kid is worth saving or not. If you start the escort and decide you want to get out of it without finishing it (and you may have to if you never got the Rose Garden Key), just Z + R + START warp out. There's an issue I'll have to address wherein the "jaws theme" instrument in the Maze Garden B song continues playing, but everything functions as it should and you can restart the escort by going back to the starting point of it.

-Everything else I didn't mention about Castle Wall and Villa so far is in a combination of both its Cornell and Reinhardt/Carrie states. This means you will need both the Left Tower Key and Winch Lever to reach the Castle Wall exit normally, both the 3am Rosa meeting and 6am Thorn Key rose patch are present in the Rose Garden, you will encounter vampire Oldrey, Mary, and Vincent in the bedroom area, etc. Locking the maze doors with the Rose Garden Key I figured would be a good compromise between having to choose between making said doors open one way or the other.

-Your goal in this is to make it to the end of Villa, defeat the bosses there, and trigger the "Found a hidden path" cutscene. Doing this entails finding the Copper Key and both Crest Halves to get into the crypt. Once the flag for that cutscene is set, the goal will send. You can jump into the coffin and play the next stage if you want, and I set the loading zone up to have its Henry time of day behavior for everyone, but there's hardly any point to because I have not made any changes to said post-Villa stages whatsoever. Don't expect everything to work properly if you are not the intended character for the stage.

-The settings you see in the Cornell YAML are what I currently have tested and working. The Countdown number in particular is a bit more advanced than the CV64 one, actually changing colors this time; it will start off green initally, and once its no longer its starting value it will turn light brown, and then dark brown once it hits 00.

-AP off-world items will appear as spinning contracts for now. This will change if/when we get the AP icons from CV64 working in this game some day, which we haven't as-of-yet.

KNOWN ISSUES:
-Z + R + START warping during the child Henry escort sequence causes the "jaws theme" instrument in the Maze Garden B song to continue playing. I will fix this later.
-Warping during either the second or third vampire fight in the Villa crypt can potentially cause the "found a hidden path" cutscene to become un-triggerable. I'll prevent warping during boss fights later, but for now, I'll have to ask you please don't do that!
-If you access the end of Castle Wall by orb sniping the dogs through the gate (a trick accounted for in Hard Logic) and then go back through the loading zone, the Villa stage intro cutscene will play and the gate will close with no way to re-open it since the dogs are dead. Again, I will address this later, but try not to screw yourself out of beating the seed if there's something essential in that end part of Castle Wall!
-On the character select screen, on Bizhawk specifcally, on lo-res mode, the character selector does not show the currently-selected character behind it properly. It's a Bizhawk problem with the game in general, it happens with the vanilla ROM, and AFAIK there's nothing I can do about it beyond reporting the issue which I did. So we'll just have to deal with this one...

If you run into any problems not listed there, let me know in the Archipelago or CV64&LoDSpeedruns Discord and I'll address it. The setup is the same as with my CV64 apworld, so read up on it in its README if you aren't familiar with it.

Yes, multiworld works in this initial playable version! No waiting a whole entire year for that like with CV64! :)

CV64 apworld v4.0 hotfix

A hotfix? Nearly 2 months after the last release? Wouldn't this be more like a coldfix? However you want to call it, there were issues with said last release that were never brought to my attention until recently. Including a particularly major one that flat-out made a good portion of seeds unwinnable if they didn't have the Castle Keep warp! I don't know if it's a matter of people not being interested in this game, people not thinking to report bugs...or maybe some combination of both?

The changes/fixes made are as follows:
-Dropping the last sub-weapon now works properly.
-Picking up PowerUps when you had 2 occasionally would not let you. This has been fixed.
-Spawning at the main Castle Keep starting point now works properly without softlocking the game.
-Added a safety check for Ice Traps for when you are going through doors.
-Getting an Ice Trap while sliding will no longer perma-freeze you.
-Made the start of Castle Center once again the Actrise/Rosa fan room. I accidently changed this at some point.
-Very minor feature I decided to throw in at some point: Renon will now acknowledge DLCQuest 1 Coin bundles in his shop.

Archipelago version 0.4.4 is out now, so this version will work on their normal up-to-date release without requiring some feature that may be in their upcoming one. If while playing you encounter any more bugs, please report them to me in one of the places listed in the README so that I can squish them!

CV64 apworld v4.0

This is it! The final big release that I will probably ever do of these, from a standalone standpoint at least until the apworld system becomes fully decentralized. It is now complete enough that I feel confident in opening a pull request to Archipelago main, wherein it will appear on the website itself once its eventually accepted in... maybe half a decade when they eventually get through all the other new games currently in line ahead of it! Until that happens, I am pretty much going to step away from this entirely, outside of doing bugfixes and taking suggestions from AP's maintainers as they arise. It's been a fun journey, and this chapter of it is coming to a close! Legacy of Darkness rando will eventually happen one day, when my life becomes less hectic than it currently is.

For now, tho, enjoy this release! Because it uses AP's new options system that was only merged somewhat recently, it won't work on the current stable AP release (version 0.4.3) until they eventually put out a new one (version 0.4.4). This post will be updated when that eventually changes. For now, tho, you can download a preview build of version 0.4.4 from the pins in the Archipelago Discord's #archipelago-dev channel, with which the apworld will work on at the moment (or you can just grab it from this link here):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/731214280439103580/1166172879931580546/Setup_Archipelago_0.4.4_Preview.exe?ex=656535a1&is=6552c0a1&hm=fe24cc0bc5ad591d08efa75c0104ea4cd02b9d0ec5bf23635b42a97c9f19b8eb&

EDIT: Turns out there was a newer settings API for ROM selection that I completely missed. Now, when you generate a CV64 world for the first time, it will prompt you for the ROM there and you will not have to manually edit host.yaml beforehand. The attached apworld has been updated with this fix, and the setup in README has been updated to omit some now unnecessary things starting with 0.4.4, like BizHawkClient being merged (making acquiring its apworld separately unnecessary).

As for the new features? Ice Traps! Just like in Ocarina of Time! And also, more minor things like changing the gameplay textbox color and choosing the starting stage. See the changelog for more details.

CV64 apworld v3.2

Sort of a half version this time around, focusing first and foremost on enhancements to the multiworld experience. Namely actually getting the game to display other world items as Archipelago logo icons and putting the names of items and players in the game's textbox whenever you pick up an item for someone else! It's amazing, and I had no idea I'd be able to get it that far when I first started! With that said, I did slip in two new options; one for permanent PowerUps that stay even after dying, and...the long awaited, highly anticipated DeathLink! More details in the README and CHANGELOG. It also now uses a BizHawk Client apworld rather than requiring a wholly separate version of AP, so check out the updated README setup instructions for information on that.

I'd like to give a very special thanks to @Fluvian with this release and giving me permission to use their LZKN64 utility (found at https://github.com/Fluvian/lzkn64) to help in decompressing and compressing the game's files to and from their custom format, even going so far as changing its license off of GPL so I could use it without much hassle. The in-game AP icons were made possible in a legal manner because of it, and it will help exponentially with other things in the future as well from here on!