Adventures with Chaotix

Well, given Knuckles and Tails, the "plural name" seems to be a common theme, so maybe Bomb and Heavy were originally called "Nuts" and "Bolts".

That would make more sense with the fact that they're supposed to be Eggman's Mechanics.

I'd honestly love to see concept art and development documents for Chaotix. I feel like it has so many interesting tangents and unfulfilled ideas that would be great to mine.

 

Given the trend of them removing/adding things in some of the builds we have, I could buy perhaps they were experimenting with the idea of Heavy/Bomb being selectable playable characters at one point? They do have slots in the finalized character select menu (according to Robjoe's old post here).

Now why 'VECTOR' was chosen as the partner character in these placeholder records instead of the other robot character I have no idea.

I completely overlooked Heavy and Bomb being described as Eggman's mechanics (or Mechanix). Those names combined with the roles would make a lot of sense. Is Heavy and Bomb being described as Eggman's mechanics also in the Japanese manual as well? The sources I see for that only cite the US manual which also had the weirder 'Carnival Island' plot.

This is just one of my favorite threads on Retro even if it's only recently been bumped again. There are so many odd little decisions between builds and what ultimately ended up in the final game.

I also kinda saw Sonic Advance 3 as sort of a successor to Chaotix's gameplay. Both have a very similar emphasis on team-up mechanics (with both games having the ability to pick up your partner). I'm curious if it ever actually served as inspiration during development or not.

 

Advance 3, much as I loathe it's cluttered level design, is mechanically a much more logical way of doing a duo-character style Sonic game.

Binding them together with a tether is, on paper, a fascinating idea but it winds up just feeling clumsy and awkward unless you spend a significant portion of time learning how to exploit the physics... Which the game doesn't really encourage because all the levels are empty and boring.

 

Since it was just a mockup tilemap, it's possible that VECTOR being the first name is simply due to Vector being one of the first Sonic characters ever created, and so, one of the first characters revisited.

Mighty's slot as the first character isn't indicative of anything other than it simply being the easiest sprite swap from Sonic from Crackers.

Indeed, prototype versions of Chaotix contain a few Vector sprites with less colour depth than the 32x finals, suggesting that sprite work on Vector was already being done back during the Crackers phase on the Megadrive.

IIRC, the Sonic Band predates Mighty and Ray which seemed to only eventuate as divergent character evolutions from the Red and Yellow Sonics from SegaSonic Bros, although that game did intend to use the Sonic Band too.

I feel like Chaotix really was just a random grabbag of old ideas without any focus, since wasn't the idea of SegaSonic Bros. and indeed development ideas of Sonic 1 based around rescuing the Band members? This would directly influence the whole "friends trapped in a capsule" thing.

So if they're like "no, scrap Sonic and Tails, but rush to find alternate concepts for the brief 32x window", it makes total sense they'd revisit all the old ideas in the vault, even if it's being developed by different teams.

If this is the case, I highly doubt that Bomb and Heavy (or Nuts and Bolts) came from nowhere, and thus there must have been some kind of concept in the "vault" that was bandied around.

So, what kind of project could they have originated for?

We know that Eggman eventually got Orbot and Cubot, characters to play off of so he wasn't a solitary character, so is it possible that they were originally trying to give Eggman his own companion characters as far back as 1994?

Sure, they were repurposed into some "booby prize" characters to hinder you, but it seems like a weird amount of effort to put into some random characters like that *just* for Chaotix, considering how much of the game was a mishmash of old ideas.

Given that the whole Eggman's Mechanic thing (which was part of their name string in the prototypes, not just a western manual thing) plays absolutely no role in the gameplay/story, it seems probable that these aspects of their characters had been decided upon a good while before they were implemented into the game, whether that was during the Bomb/Heavy phase or the theoretical Nuts/Bolts phase.

The potential conceptual relation to Orbot and Cubot is reflected in their designs. Bomb is round, and Heavy is stocky.

 

Chaotix really does feel like a glorified tech demo packaged as a game. The direction of the game seems aimless, thrown together, and quite padded out, especially since stages are quite empty and are picked at random, and there's a 5 whole levels per attraction, with some indication that they were planning up to 7, based on how the stage data tables are arranged (seems like level IDs 0 and 6 are unused):

Code (ASM):

1. StageObjLayouts:
2.         dc.l    .BotanicBase
3.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider
4.         dc.l    .AmazingArena
5.         dc.l    .TechnoTower
6.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness
7.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut
8.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro
9.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance
10.  
11. .BotanicBase:
12.         dc.l    .BotanicBase0
13.         dc.l    .BotanicBase1
14.         dc.l    .BotanicBase2
15.         dc.l    .BotanicBase3
16.         dc.l    .BotanicBase4
17.         dc.l    .BotanicBase5
18.         dc.l    .BotanicBase6
19.  
20. .SpeedSlider:
21.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider0
22.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider1
23.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider2
24.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider3
25.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider4
26.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider5
27.         dc.l    .SpeedSlider6
28.  
29. .AmazingArena:
30.         dc.l    .AmazingArena0
31.         dc.l    .AmazingArena1
32.         dc.l    .AmazingArena2
33.         dc.l    .AmazingArena3
34.         dc.l    .AmazingArena4
35.         dc.l    .AmazingArena5
36.         dc.l    .AmazingArena6
37.  
38. .TechnoTower:
39.         dc.l    .TechnoTower0
40.         dc.l    .TechnoTower1
41.         dc.l    .TechnoTower2
42.         dc.l    .TechnoTower3
43.         dc.l    .TechnoTower4
44.         dc.l    .TechnoTower5
45.         dc.l    .TechnoTower6
46.  
47. .MarinaMadness:
48.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness0
49.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness1
50.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness2
51.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness3
52.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness4
53.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness5
54.         dc.l    .MarinaMadness6
55.  
56. .IsoIslandTut:
57.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut0
58.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut1
59.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut2
60.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut3
61.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut4
62.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut5
63.         dc.l    .IsoIslandTut6
64. .IsoIslandIntro:
65.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro0
66.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro1
67.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro2
68.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro3
69.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro4
70.         dc.l    .PracticeMode5
71.         dc.l    .IsoIslandIntro6
72.  
73. .WorldEntrance:
74.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance0
75.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance1
76.         dc.l    .FinalStage
77.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance3
78.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance4
79.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance5
80.         dc.l    .WorldEntrance6

Code (ASM):

1. StageArtIndex:
2.         ...
3.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 0, Morning
4.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 0, Day
5.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 0, Sunset
6.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 0, Night
7.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 1, Morning
8.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 1, Day
9.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 1, Sunset
10.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt1-*                             ; Act 1, Night
11.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt2-*                             ; Act 2, Morning
12.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt2-*                             ; Act 2, Day
13.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt2-*                             ; Act 2, Sunset
14.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt2-*                             ; Act 2, Night
15.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt3-*                             ; Act 3, Morning
16.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt3-*                             ; Act 3, Day
17.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt3-*                             ; Act 3, Sunset
18.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt3-*                             ; Act 3, Night
19.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt4-*                             ; Act 4, Morning
20.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt4-*                             ; Act 4, Day
21.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt4-*                             ; Act 4, Sunset
22.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt4-*                             ; Act 4, Night
23.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 5, Morning
24.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 5, Day
25.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 5, Sunset
26.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 5, Night
27.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 6, Morning
28.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 6, Day
29.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 6, Sunset
30.         dc.w    MarinaMadnessArt5-*                             ; Act 6, Night
31.         ...

 

The extra levels per attraction (or acts per zone, for those not familiar with Chaotix terminology) may have been intended for specialised Time Attack versions of those attractions.

 

I've not really looked deep enough to come to some sort of conclusion, I've mainly just been overwhelmed by the sheer size of these tables lol @.@

 

I just suggest that since the prototype time attack mode uses alternate Time Attack specific versions of the first level. (Botanic Base? Can't remember.)

So at the very least, they may have pre-emptively created data tables for the possibility.

Ever tried analysing the data of the earliest prototype we have? 1207 I believe? If it contains 3 alternate Time Attack versions of a level, then potentially there are table differences?

Guessing then, this all comes from a disassembly? Does an equivalent disassembly exist for the prototypes?

I may be confusing the first level with Isolated Island. Or did that not exist yet in 1207?

It's been a while and my memory is fuzzy.

 

The code I have been posting came from a disassembly I made a year ago, and unfortunately is in nowhere near a state for public release. And also unfortunately, I am wrapped up in other things to work on in further.

 

The single biggest problem with Chaotix IMO is the poor physics. It's not that it takes a long time to exploit the physics of Chaotix, it's that the game outright doesn't have much physics in the first place to exploit. Outside of the simple rubberband mechanic -- holding makes you taut which builds up potential energy that bursts out when you release -- the game is basically void of most Sonic physics mechanics. The most simple interactions that basically all other Sonic games have and are built off of, are lacking in Chaotix. Example: You can't roll down a quarter pipe anymore. In previous sonic games, you could fall onto a quarter pipe, hold down, and you'd roll as you come down the quarter pipe, which was important because rolling broke the speed cap. Well, Chaotix doesn't do this: if you try and hit a quarter pipe on the way downward, no matter what, you'll be forced into the running animation. You outright cannot roll down pipes in Chaotix, at all, any of them. You can test this very easily at the beginning of Isolated Island Act 1, the very first piece of level you come up to is a quarter pipe with rings atop it. Try all you might, it's impossible to roll down that pipe. And this leads to a couple of other big noticable changes: Rolling has no affect on your momentum in the game, at all. It basically has Sonic 4 momentum. Rolling isn't a real mechanic in Knuckles Chaotix, rolling doesn't affect your momentum. In fact, the speed cap in the game is basically flipped from normal games: You can accelerate infinitely when running in Chaotix (I guess to let the rubber band mechanic work better) but when you roll, you'll come to a max speed and stop. It makes rolling in the game completely useless. Rolling is THE defining mechanic for the series, every game is basically built for you to suss out the spots in the level where rolling will make you invincible and ultra fast, and that dynamic is completely missing in Chaotix. That slopes and pipes aren't abused by rolling in the game, makes their presence pointless in most levels, so they basically avoid them. Chaotix has exactly 1 level layout trick that it does constantly: rather than loops and half and quarter pipes and slopes and such, Chaotix will do this thing where you'll have 1 half pipe that leads to an elevated section that leads to another half pipe to another elevated section going the other way, to another half pipe to an elevated section going back the original direction, and repeat. You can see this layout piece in multiple stages, because it's basically the only level set piece that works with the rubber band mechanic. The rubber band mechanic neuters the physics, which affects the level design. Again, going back to Sonic 4, rather than lots of rolling set pieces in Chaotix, everything is activated by just running through things full speed. There are lots of invisible boosters that are meant to give you a jolt of speed as you, for example, run up a quarter pipe and leap off the end. That leap is a boost of speed at the end of the pipe that is given to you no matter what speed you approach the pipe. It doesn't feel at all like you're playing with a consistent rule of gravity in the game.

For years and years and years when I'd play Chaotix, the main way I'd play would be to just hold my partner the entire game. Grab them and hold them with the B button, then jump with C, like if you were holding a run button in Mario games. Playing Chaotix like this basically does away with the rubber band mechanic, which lets you play the game like basically a normal sonic game. And playing like that reveals just how lacking and boring a lot of Chaotix level layouts are, and how poor the normal sonic physics are in the game. Simply making Chaotix behave like normal Sonic games would go a long way towards fixing the game, because there's a lot of places in the chaotix level layouts with slight slips and dips what SHOULD be useful with rolling physics, but aren't in Chaotix's design. Problem is, even when you play Chaotix "properly" with the rubber band mechanic, it's not really any more fun than playing the game improperly while holding your character. Because at the base, Chaotix is boring and unfun.

this is a fault with how you read a 6 button controller. The Sega Mega Drive controller is multiplexed, the lines that run to pins change what they read multiple times as you poll the joystick, you can't poll a Sega 3 or 6 button joystick in 1 reading. On a normal 3 button controller, the first polling of the controller maps the state to 6 bits in the controller data buffer like so:
bit 6: C
bit 5: B
bit 4: Right
bit 4: Left
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

and the second polling is:

bit 6: start
bit 5: A
bit 4: NA
bit 3: NA
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

When you poll a 6 button gamepad, you do a few extra polls for the new buttons, but you also have to wait for the orignal button state to change. So the convention is multiple polls, more than needed, typically 7, like so:

Poll1:
bit 6: C
bit 5: B
bit 4: Right
bit 4: Left
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

Poll 2:
bit 6: start
bit 5: A
bit 4: NA
bit 3: NA
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

Poll 3:
bit 6: C
bit 5: B
bit 4: Right
bit 4: Left
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

Poll 4:
bit 6: start
bit 5: A
bit 4: NA
bit 3: NA
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

Poll 5:
bit 6: C
bit 5: B
bit 4: Right
bit 4: Left
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

Poll 6:
bit 6: start
bit 5: A
bit 4: NA
bit 3: NA
bit 2: Down
bit 1: Up

Poll 7:
bit 6:C
bit 5: B
bit 4: Mode
bit 3: X
bit 2: Y
bit 1: Z

If you notice, on the 7th polling, the pins that run to MODE, X, Y, and Z, are the same pins used to poll Right, Left, Up, and Down on subsequent odd number of polls. What this means is that what is going on in Knuckles Chaotix is they aren't polling enough times for the 6 button controller in port 2. The way games use this data is to store the results of the poll into a couple of status field bytes that map to the buttons. So they're incorrectly mapping the status of the odd polling of a 3 button pad, onto the status field of the buttons for MODE, X, Y, and Z.

Knuckles Chaotix uses the same kind of split tile system that Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles use, that Sonic 1 and 2 do not. This is where the tiles for zones are spit into banks -- a common bank that all acts share, and a unique bank that individual acts share. In Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, this is done for the benefit of act transitions: boss areas are built with the common tiles shared between acts, so they can invisibly load act-specific tiles without you seeing things change in front of your eyes. The zones in Sonic 1 or 2 aren't setup like this. It honestly doesn't make too much sense for Knuckles Chaotix to use this scheme, but it does. This would be an indication that Knuckles Chaotix/Sonic Crackers at least had access to the sort of things that were being done to Sonic 3 during development.

 

Okay, since I'm not gonna be able to work on this, I decided to just go ahead and release it as is. Just wanna stress that this is extremely incomplete, but I can at least say that I believe all of the 68000 side is properly disassembled, builds bit-perfect, and can be modified to your hearts content without issue. The only buildable SH-2 code here is the PWM driver (disclaimer, it does get manually patched to put in the pointer to the PWM sample table, and unfortunately, it's fixed in place as is. Proper integration would be best done with a linker, and PSYLINK is the one compatible with ASM68K and ASMSH), while the rest is in an IDB file for IDA Pro (I have version 7.7). As for how the 68000 side is mapped out, Chaotix fixes the switchable bank (mapped at 0x900000-0x9FFFFF) is at bank 2 (0x200000-0x2FFFFF in the ROM file), so the disassembly has a fairly simple setup for laying it all out around that.

Hopefully someone finds use in it and perhaps even continue where I left off. If needed, I have this thread that describes how the (non-special stage) graphics are handled in pretty good detail.

Also, while it may seem there's no checksum check, that's because it's handled by the 32X master SH-2 boot ROM, so keep that in mind.

GitHub Repository

 

I'm probably beating a dead horse by saying this, but it's seriously insane how much this game seemingly changed in development.

To think that somewhere out there is still that Saturn prototype that supposedly resembles neither Clackers or Chaotix and is yet again its completely own game.

 

Well, Crackers had the early beginnings of an isometric-ish version of the gameplay. Was it an attempt at a map screen, an overworld hub of sorts? Or was it a divergent idea from the same ringstar concept?

We know the perspective was off, and it hadn't really been developed properly, as it had no collision by the time of the Crackers prototype, but maybe the team behind it were attempting to revisit the isometric gameplay that Sonic 3 was supposed to have.

Surely it couldn't have just been the one team working on all of these engines, so maybe there were a good amount of people all split up trying to do their own thing.

Given that the final Chaotix team seemed to struggle with programming loop-de-loops, I wonder if there was also a struggle to program an isometric engine?

They just didn't have the skill that Traveller's Tales did.

Thus, could the Saturn prototype have been a divergent thing where they attempted to make the isometric style of game engine in actual 3D, both because of "the future of gaming" but also to sidestep the quirks of isometric engines?

As with the final game itself, it all seems like a lot of tech demos and engine tests that all struggled to come together in a focused package within the very short timeframe given to then.

If not a revisiting of an isometric thing, just what could the Saturn game have been trying to do?

 

You know, not porting this game to Saturn was a mistake, I think. Sure, it wasn't a flagship title, but it should not have been entirely abandoned and at least there could have been more sales and more of the Sonic IP to push on hardware that so desperately needed more of it.

Of course, that wouldn't really do much to solve our issue of modern inaccessibility for the game... but hey, one wonders if a Saturn port could've at least generated some extra profits.

 

Of course, one could argue that the rubber band tether mechanics weren't strong enough to build a game around without a lot of work, and if they couldn't make it work as a concept in 2D, I find it difficult to believe that they could get it working well with an added dimension.

Heck, even basic platforming in 3D was being worked out, it didn't need anything complicating matters.

Even loops in 3D were scripted affairs.

Or if you meant a whole port of the 2D game a la Sonic Jam, it still wouldn't have done much simply due to the poor gameplay and may have hurt Sonic Adventure sales by simply being an alternative.

Back then, you'd be lucky to get one game from your parents. Imagine them getting you Chaotix because it was cheaper and they thought they were getting more bang for their buck because the salesman told them that it had more levels and characters.

If they tried a Saturn game, and it didn't get developed to standard, and the 32x was just a black stain on the company, then the last thing they'd want to do is put Chaotix on the Saturn after the fact, especially since it would have resulted in even less sales of the remaining 32x stock that the obsessives were buying just for Knuckles Chaotix.

 

To be fair the 32X as a whole was a mistake. They should have just focused on the Saturn.

 

I don't think it was. 99% of the gaming press was extremely anti-2D at the time, so Sonic's 5th gen debut being a mediocre 2D spinoff that doesn't even star him would've made the series a laughing stock almost ten years before it actually became one.

As far as I'm concerned, the only downside about not porting it to Saturn is the fact that we potentially missed out on a cool remixed soundtrack.

 

Wasn't Chaotix going to be a full-fledged mainline Sonic game, but SoA decided to shove it into the 32x early, forcing the devs to give us the half-baked game we got? If so, I'd say we missed out much more than "a cool remixed soundtrack". With more dev time we could have gotten more zones, better level design and physics, more polished gameplay and mechanics, a proper ending, Sonic and Tails, multiple and more fleshed out hub areas, and possibly Super forms.

 

I think this was only the case in the West. Japan didn't care how many dimensions the graphics had. There were way more 2D titles released over there.