[Dekips]

Good Lord...that's an awesome and certainly surprising find, the fact that it's functionally also intrigues me. Keep up the good work guys.

[Shoemanbundy]

If they only deleted unused items for final builds, that would mean all ports are based on old code for previous builds which I'd find somewhat odd. If it's in this version, I'd bet it's in all versions out there as theyre all likely based on the same base material(the DC build).

[Quexinos]

amazing! I never would have thought the dragon was still in there. Can you beat him or anything?

Man... never would have thought...

[Blackbird]

Considering how much stuff we've found here, especially the dragon, SEGA must have very efficient space use on these things. Hell, any DC version with debug mode could have untold amounts of cool stuff, taking up space.

I'm guessing their production method is "whatever the hell we don't use, we'll leave in there, because, y'know, 5-10 years later, no one'll notice."

This post has been edited by Nabaztag: 25 February 2008 - 07:12 PM

[Sazpaimon]

Quexinos, on Feb 25 2008, 04:08 PM, said:

amazing! I never would have thought the dragon was still in there. Can you beat him or anything?

Man... never would have thought...

On hardware, placing him freezes the game. I've yet to look into it more on emulators. Dolphin crashes when you stay in debug for more than like, 10 seconds

[Sazpaimon]

DISREGARD THAT, I GOT HIM IN.
I have the game paused now, I'm gonna go buy an s-video cable for my cube and record this posthaste

[biggestsonicfan]

Alright, it looks like a lot of people are shocked and surprised about this dragon being in this debug build, so I will give my take on the situtation:

Given the fact that Sega was going to port a game they had already created onto a new console, they would need to use a non-finalized version of Sonic Adventure to model onto the Gamecube. Remember guys, SADX was not re-built from the ground up, as obviously shown by the VMU and Internet Options, and various other bits and pieces found in the final SADX build.

Let's take, for example, the Zelda: Ocarina of Time debug ROM that floats about the internet. It has full debugging features, and loads and loads of unused content. However, the ROM was obviously changed (the colors of the HUD were changed from the N64's A + B controller buttons to the GameCube's controller buttons) in some fashions to accommodate the console it was being ported to. In this particular build of SADX, we can see that the splash and title screens were prepared for the GameCube, but the interface and textures hadn't really been touched yet.

Another point I would like to bring up, is that this dragon, while completely badass, is only object placement. Implementation to shift Sky Chase Act 1's game play to accommodate the interactions seen with the dragon in the beta footage we've seen would be a truly marvelous feat, however, I don't see that coming easily anytime soon. For yet another comparison to Zelda, it's much like when the Arwing was found (Albeit that that was found also in the Final build of OoT) in that yes, we have the object, but we don't know how it was implemented in gameplay. We do, however, know how the dragon is supposed to function, but as far as I can tell without further experimentation, will only be a placeable object seen from afar as it animates as Sky Chase continues to move forward. A first step to figuring out why the game crashes is to find out what's going wrong? My speculation is that once the dragon is loaded, the level may try to initiate gameplay based on what we've seen in the beta videos. However, because the gameplay is already loaded as this other type of Sky Chase, the game crashes.
Now this is pure speculation, and I will be attempting to analyze this Sky Chase loading sequence and see if I can come up with something.

DAMNIT SAZ... anyway, I'd still like to analyze how Sky Chase loads, and see if I can find anything.

This post has been edited by biggestsonicfan: 25 February 2008 - 07:52 PM

[Shade]

HOLY FUCKBALLS.

FUCK

Dragon...SA DX...asidfsjgithtrshdty


This must mean it's buried in the dreamcast final as well. And if not, then maybe DX was supposed to implement more features than we though.

This is incredible.

[PicklePower]

It's interesting to bring up that while SADX was in development, a screenshot (fourth image down) of a level that never made it into Sonic Adventure was released:

Perhaps we might find something about this.

This post has been edited by SonicChao: 25 February 2008 - 09:05 PM

[biggestsonicfan]

[GeneHF]

So the Dragon boss is fully in the game and workable? Patterns and all?

Amazing. Never thought we'd see it working.

[Ayla]

That's certainly something I wasn't expecting.. maybe the art for that one "beta windy valley" is somewhere floating around, too? That would rock <3

[JoseTB]

Quite impressive I must say, I wasn't expecting to see the dragon there... I'll see if I can get it to run on my GC, this is definitively worth it.

[BlazeHedgehog]

Nabaztag, on Feb 25 2008, 07:09 PM, said:

Considering how much stuff we've found here, especially the dragon, SEGA must have very efficient space use on these things. Hell, any DC version with debug mode could have untold amounts of cool stuff, taking up space.

I'm guessing their production method is "whatever the hell we don't use, we'll leave in there, because, y'know, 5-10 years later, no one'll notice."

Well, it's not like today where a single deathmatch level for a FPS will take up 15-20mb. I'd assume, textures and all, a single level in SA1 would take up maybe 3mb - 4mb tops. Character models are probably less than a full megabyte in themselves.

The majority of what takes up the most disc space is music, sound, and video.

Furthermore, "padding" is used in most disc-based media. "Padding" is when unused portions of the disc are filled up with garbage data to make sure the disc is completely full when it's written to. This is known to speed up loading times and keep the condition of your CD laser in top shape. Therefore, unless they were really stressed for space and were forced to delete stuff, it makes sense that they'd leave stuff in there.

[Zycor]

Isn't the Dragon called Golah? "When Golah breaths fire, it's your chance to attack." Unless Sonic Adventure holds another boss somewhere to find?