"Green Alley Zone Act 1" and "Casino Night Zone Act 1" are amusing considering their final counterparts are just rearrangements of each other. Gotta keep that creative energy flowing, eh Jun? :v: ...Which actually falls in line with Richard Jacques' Saturn version reusing the main melody from the title screen to most (every?) stage(s), to the ending credits. I feel like I should be shouting "but hey, that's JUST A THEORY..."
Goddamn this makes me feel old. Also, have a technical explanation as to how they fit the opening FMV onto the cartridge:
To add to this, it looks like he also uploaded various re-encodings of the intro sequence: I like the frame blending he tried, I just wish he had the original 3D animation file with the potential to be rendered at a higher resolution, even if still low by today's standards.
When I clicked that latest YouTube video, I was honestly expecting a higher quality of the intro, before it was mangled to comply with GEN/MD limitations and to fit into the space left in the cartridge. I personally think that all attempts to improve the already mangled video sucked ass. Blending the dithering to improve the color count made the video look blockier (the small pixels of the dithering patterns and the shearing used to give the illusion of higher resolution), frame blending made everything fuzzy, and the optical flow was inconsistent as hell (almost nice sometimes, but with serious artifacting all around) The only actual improvement I've seen in that video was the new palette, TBH.
I had honestly never noticed until now that the bushes in the intro are actually sprites that always face the camera, Doom style. Also, somebody pointed out in the comments that Sonic floats when walking over the bridge and now I can't unsee.
Congratulations, you've made me aware of this and now I can't unsee both of these things. I guess the sloppiness of the bridge comes down to that this was added in a few weeks before the final build - meaning that the time spent to make the animation was probably very little. Even if Jon can't find the original animation, I hope he at least finds that Sonic 3D model somewhere. To my untrained eye, it's also used for the Sonic sprite in-game.
I noticed the trees for the first time watching this too. At this frame rate and colour depth / resolution, it looked convincing enough. It's a shame he doesn't still have a higher quality version of the intro, but I fine all of these technical breakdowns fascinating.
It's exceedingly difficult to tell, but this might be the case for the Saturn version too? I assume there was some overlap between the two versions. The release dates suggest so.
Not sure if this is Sega's reasoning, but a lot of companies (for example Disney) save stuff like this for anniversary events so they'll have "never-before-seen" material to show off. Expect a Sonic 3D Blast special ost for the 60th anniversary with these songs.
May actually play with the raw frames later myself. Seems like a fun stress test to play with getting it to run on other systems.
Such a shame that he lost the original files from the intro, we need to see it rendered in 4k 60fps immediately! Then again, I wonder if the files would be compatible with modern 3D rendering software anyway...
All I want to know from him now is if he considers the game to be called '3D Blast', or his native PAL 'Flickies' Island',. I was going to assume he'd be more for using he PAL name, as that might have been Traveller's Tales own choice of title, but it's clearly a '3D Blast' in this tech video (although I know the game switches titles whenever it's ran on 50hz or 60hz systems, so for running nowadays and for youtube, it would make sense for him to use a 60hz release.)
So it looks as if they had a proof of concept for 256 colour+ images http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6KRVmX4FuM
I hope that he releases the code for it or at least makes a video on how he did it, it would certainly be a fun thing to mess around with for Genesis/MD Homebrew. Having cutscenes in the same vein as something like Toy Story but with even better quality would be fantastic.
Blimey! I thought except for Virtua Racing, Mega Drive emulation was as good as it could get. Interesting that there's more potential to be had from the system, especially if it could be utilised in some sort of actual gameplay. Also that Flinstones cut-scene was rad as heck.
Sounds like he's using the 'DMA Colour Mode'. If so, we already know about it and how terrible it is. Still, I don't think anyone else back in the day found it. :v: If not?... I'm even more interested.
I actually wonder if he's using some form of color artifacting because of the way he describes "tuning" the bars.
