31 Dec 2016
Parallel Worlds v1.2 is out! This has been the culmination of several years of work, including help from several people over on the Zeldix boards. Big thanks to
Euclid and SePH for allowing me to call this an official v1.2 release, instead of another random fork. This update includes many of the gameplay improvements from my
aLttP DX project, along with several bugfixes and other improvements to the game. I know that the site still isn't complete, I wish that wasn't the case. I'll try to
continue my work and get the site finished... it'll be done when it's done.
27 Mar 2016
I've finally (almost) completed a long-overdue code update that allows me to switch between map tile sources, so I can finally display multi-floor dungeon maps. Right
now the only map that I have up using this new code is the Nabooru's Hole map, but now that the code is working, I should get around to uploading the rest of the dungeons
soon. There's still an issue with non-square maps (as can be seen with the B7 and B8 floors on Nabooru's Hole), but I think I know how to fix those. Additionally, I
changed the tile sizes to use larger tiles, which allows me to upload larger zoom levels with far fewer files, and stay below the AppEngine file number limit, so both
overworlds now have an additional level of zoom available.
26 May 2015
Almost 3 years after first launching this site, I have finally completed the icy world overworld map! I also finally got around to finishing the GIMP script to tile-ify
the image for the Google Maps API engine so I didn't have to do that part semi-manually any more, which freed me up to attempt generating an additional zoom level. The
resulting layer is 16,384 x 16,384 and is composed of 4,096 tiles, which took nearly half an hour to render, even with my newly finished script. Sadly, that ended up
exceeding some kind of file limit on my host, so I guess that's that. Oh well.
18 Aug 2014
I suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure resulting in the loss of nearly all of my source files for this site. Thankfully, I have access to all of the files on the
existing version of the site, but the Ice World Overworld map especially may be nearly impossible to fully recover in native resolution. On the bright side, I've started
playing around with formatting for the walkthrough, and have begun adding content to it (finally). I guess that's something...
8 Jul 2013
I have been playing around with the Google Maps API for awhile now as a replacement for WorldKit for powering this site's map pages, and I think I've finally gotten all of
the kinks worked out, and I've rolled it out to both overworld pages. One really cool side effect of this transition is that the maps will now load on mobile browers! The
site itself doesn't have a mobile-friendly layout, so there are some issues on phone-sized screens, but I've been told it works great on the iPad, and I assume the same for
Android tablets. It's not perfect, but I think that the current code should cover everything that I had implemented with WorldKit, and there's plenty of room left for further
customization, so I'm really excited to see what's possible. One thing I'd really like to implement is map layers for the dungeon floors, but I'm not sure how to do that yet.
I'm still working on this site, so I WILL be updating, both the site functionality and the content (I know, the content has been rather lacking... stitching the map images
together is considerably more work than I anticipated when I first began this project). My goal is to have 100% of the item/
heart locations documented, and at least a halfway decent walkthrough written. I may complete the boss guide section, or I may remove it entirely, I'm not sure yet.
Anyway... progress!!
1 Jan 2013
I finally managed to get my hands on the new version of the patch to fix the graphics glitch in the title screen without creating new glitches in the ending. I've uploaded
the patches to the site and added a download link in the sidebar. The patches are in .bps format, so you'll need beat in order
to apply the patches. I have combined the full Parallel Worlds patch with the intro fix into a single patch, which is meant to be applied directly to the original, unheadered
Link to the Past ROM.
In other news, I have added an easter egg to the site. Enjoy :)
20 Dec 2012
I finally finished actually playing through Parallel Worlds earlier this week, so I figured I'd work on the site a bit. I added the locations for all 9 Parallel Tower keys, as
well as a few hearts in the heart guide. I also fixed up the links in the drop-down nav bar. I still haven't managed to figure out the Z-order layering issue with my drop-down
menus in Firefox, sorry.
15 Nov 2012
The Icy World map is up now. I haven't managed to fill the scrolling gaps yet, so for now I've just uploaded what I have, gaps and JPEG artifacts and all... but it's there!
I also added a new custom 404 page, thanks to imgur...
11 Oct 2012
Big update to the site, I added guides pages and filled out the nav bar links with blank pages where I haven't completed the maps yet, to avoid 404s. I'm also playing around with
drop-down nav menus, so we'll see how that works out. The big news this time around, however, is that I have finally finished the Light World Overworld map. No more gaps. I have also
updated the images to higher quality versions. It's a pain to manually create all of the tiles, but ZoomifyExpress doesn't have any quality config settings, and I wasn't happy with
JPEG artifacts showing up at native resolution. I'll be updating the images for the dungeons that I've posted eventually as well.
11 Sept 2012
I have FINALLY managed to fix annotations, so I have begun marking heart pieces on the Light World Overworld map. Unfortunately, in the process it seems I broke the map grabber, so I'll
have to play around some more to see if I can't get everything working properly. I've also made some more progress on the manual gap filling, so that's coming along... slowly but surely.
3 Sept 2012 - Welcome to the site!
I've finally gotten around to making the site look nice, as opposed to the previous blank page with the embedded map. This is my first time playing around with CSS, so I'm quite happy with the result. I have used some CSS3 features not supported by IE, so if you're viewing this site with IE and it looks like crap, well, get a better browser.
Anyway, the Light World Overworld map is up as is the Din's Catacombs map (though I should embed the that one in the map browser as well, it's a bit bigger than I realized, so just posting the raw image doesn't really work as well as I'd hoped). I've started work on the Icy World Overworld map as well as doing some touch-up work on the Light World Overworld. If you notice, there are a few gaps in the map (see the Endless Beach or Sacred Meadow). This is due to there being a strip of each overworld panel that isn't visible unless you are scrolling between panels, and it is completely inaccessible on panels that use the "warping" transition instead of scrolling. So I'm having to fill in the gaps using individual 32x32 tiles, which is tedious and annoying, and so I'm not making a lot of progress. However, I WILL finish them all eventually, as my OCD won't allow me not to. Once the map is finished, I'll post the full lossless 1:1 PNG image for download, but I'm not going to bother until then. Anyway, that's the site, enjoy!
-qwertymodo