[Vangar]

Shade, on Dec 19 2005, 03:31 AM, said:

Oh, and Vangar, come back damn you :cry:

lol, I'm supposed to be gone! But I'll make _another_ reply here. Out of everyone in the scene, you care the most. Dude, I've never even talked to you om MSN or anything before? Why do you want me to come back?

[/offtopic]

Yes, editing it for a few seconds would be wierd, but if there was no ball at all in the first place there they would have to edit one in there :cool: .

[Rlan]

Just to make it easier to see

[Orion]

That thing is uuuuuuugly :o

[Qjimbo]

Rlan, on Dec 19 2005, 09:19 AM, said:

Just to make it easier to see

For some reason watching that makes me giggle @_@ but yeah I'm thinking that star bit is a test to see what angle the ball will move or something?

[Jayenkai]

Is it not entirely possible that the diamond is simply a single polygon?
I mean, I don't know how hard it'd be, or how slow on the processor, but it's a really small object, so perhaps.. Or maybe not.. I dunno.
Either way.. try this..

Create image 32*32
Pink background, Black circle filling most of image.
Create image 31*31
Black background, small white circle in center.
Create image 1024*1024, 2 layers.. [edit]<-- actually, it's bigger than that, can't be arsed working out what it should be, but you get the idea![/edit]
Layer 1, fill with the black+white
Layer 2, fill with the Pink+Black, and mask the black..

voila, super simple rotating 8-ball.
Now, the diamond is marginally more complex, but if you can do that by hand in a paint package, why can't you get the Megadrive to do that in realtime? (ie, you don't then need the memory to hold the 100s of sprites.. you just need the one..)

This post has been edited by Jayenkai: 19 December 2005 - 07:50 AM

[Orion]

As I understand it, the megadrive has no rotation/scaling processor (though the 32x does), and doing it in software using matrices would be waaaay too slow.

[Elusive]

I don't get why it would be added in after footage of the game was taken. Surely the other games in the advertisement would be similarly jazzed-up? If we start saying that the ball is added, how can we be sure any other part of the ad is real?

My point is, why go to all that work (reeeealy hard work from what LOst is saying) for a six second clip?

^ EDIT: Gunstar Heroes and Red Zone, among others, proved the Mega Drive COULD do software rotation, in some cases ironically better than the SNES thanks to its better processor. Lots and lots of little sprites jiffling about can create a rotation effect. Besides, look at the S1 special stage rotate, that was considered impossible at the time - extra :o power at the time of release.

EDIT2: watching Rlan's GIF with Yackety Sax in the bacground makes me OHNOS in my pants XD

This post has been edited by Elusive: 19 December 2005 - 02:23 PM

[Varion Icaria]

Did anybody realize the diamond flashes? *points to the gif*

This post has been edited by R. Solaris: 19 December 2005 - 02:28 PM

[Shade]

Looks more like it is pulsating, but either one could be attributed to video quality issues and not actual gameplay. Hell this thing might not even be in-game.

[ICEknight]

LOst, on Dec 19 2005, 12:38 AM, said:

Hivebrain, on Dec 19 2005, 08:11 AM, said:

LOst, on Dec 19 2005, 04:19 AM, said:

EDIT: Still, how did they add the ball behind the rings counter? If it was added by the ad people?

The ad people could have added a second rings counter, on top of the ball and existing rings counter.

We do need a higher quality video, if we want to be sure whether or not it's real.

Remember that this is a PAL capture from Sonic 1. Making pixel masks is almost impossible. Try doing it in Photoshop, and you have to make alpha masks, and still it will look wrong.

While I think it's a too farfetched idea that the red ball was edited into the footage (why would they bother to make the ball not overlap the platform and the counters?), it would be nice if one person (eg. LocalH) contacted the guy and asked for a better rip or something.

Quote

Time to do the Sonic math to see if this is possible. Imagine the diamond is always 16x16 pixels big, even when rotated. That means 4 cells per frame. 16 frames per rotation. 64 rotation states (90 degrees).

4 * 16 * 64 = 4096. That's 150% of VRAM. Remember that the level art takes 46.8% of VRAM, and SAT, HSCROLL, and SCROLL A/B must fit VRAM too.

Or let say this is animated pattern just like the big ring. Uncompressed pattern takes 32 bytes per cell. 32 * 4 * 16 * 64 = 131072 bytes or 131 kb. That's 26% of Sonic 1's ROM size.

You are welcome to correct my math if needed.

You'd just need to update the diamond, and only when it reaches the sides, so it wouldn't need that much space. Also, the diamond might be a 16x16 sprite, but made with 4 parts that can be flipped and mirrored.
To sum up, you'd just need to rotate an 8x8 part of a diamond, plus those (two?) frames for the diamond when it disappears from one side, which could be just mirrored when it appears from the other side.


But anyway, I'm sure there must be a much easier way to do it...

From what I see in the footage, the diamond may only have three different animations: horizontal, diagonal and vertical, just like Sonic, so it might be even possible to load all of its graphics directly into the VRAM. In the video you can barely see how the first time it rotates it goes horizontally, the second time it goes from the top-left side to the bottom-right position of the ball, and the third time it starts on top of it but then (once it reaches a certain angle) it changes its vertical movement for the diagonal one and goes again to the same place at the bottom-right.

And by the way, I think this object just "pulsates" the same way as the round shine of the wrecking ball: one frame you see it, one frame you don't (see pic).

Attached File(s)

•  redball_anim_flash.gif (2.46K)
  Number of downloads: 1

[Varion Icaria]

Maybe but it is a beta and it could have been initiated by only making the diamond glow a red for a moment, the flickering doesn't look right as the diamond stays solid while it glows in the animated gif/movie.

[Neo]

R. Solaris, on Dec 20 2005, 01:12 AM, said:

Maybe but it is a beta and it could have been initiated by only making the diamond glow a red for a moment, the flickering doesn't look right as the diamond stays solid while it glows in the animated gif/movie.

Now that is what might be just an illusion due to the low quality of the video, and not the flickering. I think ICEknight is right on the money.

Off-topic: it's good to see something good can be extracted from Portugal :D (read: I'm portuguese)

[LocalH]

ICEknight, on Dec 19 2005, 08:14 PM, said:

While I think it's a too farfetched idea that the red ball was edited into the footage (why would they bother to make the ball not overlap the platform and the counters?), it would be nice if one person (eg. LocalH) contacted the guy and asked for a better rip or something.

I'll do that. The video has a RetroJunk.com bug on the beginning, so I'll start there and see what I can find out.

Also, the pulsating could indeed be flickering instead. This is obviously from a PAL Genesis, since A) you can see the thick vertical border, and B) Portugal uses PAL. However, the video is 30fps, which means two things - it was standards-converted from PAL to NTSC, and if the video was deinterlaced by blending, the flickering could morph into pulsating.

This post has been edited by LocalH: 19 December 2005 - 09:58 PM

[Qjimbo]

Don't they speak Portugease in Brazil? Maybe from there and actually PAL-M which is 60hz a.k.a. 30fps?

[LocalH]

Yeah, but due to the fat borders, you can tell that the video was PAL at 50Hz at one point. It's still entirely possible that it was a Brazilian ad, but translated from French and thus using the French source video. Yes, I know France is SECAM, but analog video production in France is generally done in PAL as far as I'm aware.