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Basic Questions & Answers thread

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by Tweaker, May 29, 2008.

  1. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    Sonic (?): Coming summer of 2055...?
    What I thought was that I could just use level events for the reverse direction as well, so that whatever art was necessary was always available. Not possible?
     
  2. Fred

    Fred

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    It's possible, but you have to account for bad-behaving players who cross the threshold and then immediately turn back -- assuming you're using an art decompression queue like in S3, there's the very real danger of the entire queue filling up with "put on/take off" requests. One trick is to space out the two events' trigger coordinates so that it's impossible to reach the other one while the first one is still decompressing, but then you need the level design to agree with that.
     
  3. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    You know, you could implement unique art per-act (or if you use S3K you already have it), then you wouldn't have to worry as much about VRAM space.
     
  4. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    It's not per-act I'm worried about. It's mid-act. Unless I misunderstood what you mean.
     
  5. MainMemory

    MainMemory

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    Well you mentioned beaches and the bridge, but the beach is only at the start of act 1 and the bridge is only at the end of act 2.
     
  6. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    The first act still has the first 4 terrain types I mentioned as well.
     
  7. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    Well here's a question, have you counted the number of unique tiles in each act?
     
  8. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    Not yet, just had a curiousity about how much space there is to work with in general.
     
  9. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    Selecting which game you want to work with based purely on the number of tiles available is probably not the best idea. You should choose a game that has a disassembly you're comfortable with using, or one which has features you want. There are ways to make whatever level you want work in any of the games.
     
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  10. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    I wouldn't have. Porting desired features to my disasm of choice, however, was an option.

    I mean, there's no way it's not gonna be a Sonic 2 hack.
     
  11. TheInvisibleSun

    TheInvisibleSun

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    Relevant question; where are the Zone-specific Pattern Load Cues/Requests listed out in the Sonic 3&K disassembly?
     
  12. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    Offs_PLC
     
  13. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    Sonic (?): Coming summer of 2055...?
    Another curiosity. How is the water rendered in the games and what makes it such a pain (or impossible?) to have pools of water rather than it stretching across the entire level?
     
  14. Devon

    Devon

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    It uses a horizontal interrupt to change the entire palette midframe.
     
  15. rata

    rata

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    That's because the game changes the palette lines below the water level, remember that you have only 64 entries on your 4 colour palettes.
    There is a bug, however, that you can use to make pools of water. It requires a huge ass sprite as pool though; I can not find the topic right now.
     
    Last edited: Oct 11, 2019
  16. Fred

    Fred

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    https://s3unlocked.blogspot.com/2017/05/theres-something-in-water.html

    It is entirely possible to have pools of water, you just have to avoid changing the colors of the surrounding terrain. You can also use level events to change the water height on the fly so the pool is only present for a particular chunk of the level, but of course the more complicated the effect you want, the more work it'll be.
     
  17. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    Sonic CD has pools of water in Palmtree Panic, and Sonic Mania also has them in Green Hill, it makes the underwater checks increasingly more complex though as you have more of them.
     
  18. rata

    rata

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    On Sonic CD? I can't recall that at all, this is a surprise for me.
     
  19. Fred

    Fred

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    That's because the water is opaque and about knee-deep.
     
  20. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    I guess what you could do is set aside a section of RAM indicating the left, top, right, and bottom of each pool, have the underwater code check those instead of/in addition to the water height, and just paint the water in the low foreground plane. If you want to have the water surface, I think it'd be easier to use animated foreground tiles rather than adapting the object.