The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

I assume because it was harder to notice the error on contemporary monitors and screens. That, or to act as shading an otherwise oddly flat surface.

Cybershell also noted that planes don't just hover in midair like that.

 

Yeah, but his ending sprites colored it correctly in that game. I've always assumed they gave it skin color because it made his sprites look better, although after doing a quick edit, I think they look even better when it's colored correctly:


So I'm guessing it was either a mistake, or they feared it would get confused with his white gloves during certain actions.

 

Haha Sonic has no pants. :v:

 

Now we know why Sega didn't allow him to be in the game =O

Either that, or he took off his pants for that group shot as a way of saying "Fuck you" to Sega for removing him from the playable cast :v:

 

At least it's consistant with the Frosties advert!

 

Not an incredibly useful fact but still something strange I noticed:

There is a layering/alpha error in Night of the Werehog.



Not sure how to explain it, but I've encountered this same issue when working in 3D myself.

 

This isn't much, but maybe a little interesting.

In 1994, after getting the level select to work in Sonic 3, I was noodling around with the sound test, hoping to light upon secret codes a la Sonic 2. I did find that entering 01, 03, 05, 07 triggered a ring sound effect. I held A and pressed start and was taken to the secret 8th special stage. I thought I'd found something, until  I later saw in a magazine that the 8th special stage was as simple as A+start on 07. So, I've always been curious about what 01, 03, 05, 07 was about (it may have only been 03, 05, 07 to trigger the ring sound, but I can't easily check right now).

It doesn't seem to actually do anything, but it does produce the ring sound as if a code's been entered. Is there any documentation on this?

 

I think I know what that is. Basically, in an ideal world, polygons would be drawn starting with the ones in the back, and ending with the ones in the front, allowing for proper layering. Unfortunately, this takes too long, so instead a trick is used, utilising a thing called the Z-buffer. What the Z-buffer does is keep track of the Z-axis of every pixel on-screen. When a polygon is drawn, the Z of each resulting pixel is compared to the one in the Z-buffer. Depending on which one's higher than the other, it can figure out if the new polygon would have gone behind or in front of the last polygon drawn in that location. If it's meant to be behind it, the pixel is discarded, preventing a polygon that should be in the background overlapping one that's in the foreground. This allows the polygons to drawn in absolutely any order, while preserving the layering.

This falls apart when transparent polygons get involved. Suddenly, polygons that are meant to go behind others aren't necessarily obscured, since the ones overlapping them are see-through. But because of the Z-buffer, pixels won't be drawn if there's anything in front of them, whether it's see-through or not. Then again, if the pixel was allowed to be drawn, it would overlap the transparent pixel entirely. To my understanding, you can't win. The only solution is back-to-front rendering.

So, in this case the floor is drawn first, then the ghost's hand, and then the whatever-that-grey-thing-is. The parts around the ghost's hand are allowed to be drawn, since there's nothing in front of them, but the parts behind the hand are considered obscured, and not drawn.

Sonic Adventure DX is full of issues like this.

 

Yeah, that's it.

It's the only scene that has this issue though so I believe it was just an oversight. This scene has a lot of motion so it's hard to see, I only noticed it since I have the HQ version and was looking at it frame by frame.

 

Isn't that a leftover from Sonic 2?

 

01 03 05 07 is Sonic 3's debug cheat code. It is the equivalent of Sonic 2's 01 09 09 02 01 01 02 04. Incidentally, the all emeralds code is 02 04 05 06.

So that's all well and good, but it turns out the level select code at the title screen sets both the level select and the debug cheat flags on, rendering the sound test cheat useless.

As a further curiosity, the routine for the title screen cheat still exists in S3K, except now it's called after the SEGA screen rather than during. However, the routine has been preempted by a return instruction, so it doesn't do anything. Removing the return instruction reveals that it still sets both cheat flags at once. Would've been much more convenient than the final codes!

 

So that means the Sonic Jam behavior?

 

Yeah, Sonic Jam's S3 mode seems to use the S3K logic for the title screen at least. I should really go back and play around in that game and figure out what's what.

 

I guess this sort of thing belongs on this topic, so here we go. Maekawa Shiro recently made several tweets about Sonic Heroes's early planning stages, namely the team formations.

In this tweet he states that they originally planned to include characters like Mighty and Ray into the game and that there were going to be 6 teams and 18 characters before ending up going with 4 teams and 12 characters, the reason being that there were simply "too many characters" and that the dev team knew they were going to see 'hell' if they were to realize that idea.

In the later tweet he elaborates on the originally planned team formations. He remembers them being something like this:

Sonic, Tails, Knuckles
Amy, Cream, Rouge (Cream is the Fly type)
Chaos, E102, Big
Espio, Charmy, Vector
Fang, Bean, Bark
Metal Sonic, Ray, Mighty

Yep. E102 was planned to return. Shadow was not. One of his mutual followers named manaita took notice of this by saying "Shadow is not there." which lead him to further elaborate on this. He states that they had a "Shadow DIE or NOT Meeting" which went totally crazy as soon as someone said "Huh? We cannot add characters who have died." The meeting split into "Shadow is dead" and "Shadow is not dead" factions with everyone voicing their opinions simultaneously.

"If we can't add dead characters, what do we do about E102 and Chaos?"
"E102's shell remained, so the inner parts were repacked. Chaos is not dead. He just kinda went up into the sky is all."
"That's sophism."
"It's not sophism."
"I didn't intend that scene to be his end."
"Why?"

So yeah. The dev team had just as many polarizing opinions about dead characters coming back to life as all of us were. I guess this is how they decided to make Omega. There's no way they could have explained the hows and whys of Gamma coming back without it feeling all clunky and expositional.

 

Sonic Battle's development overlapped with Heroes. This could be why that game had Gamma and Chaos as characters, which was unexpected even at the time. That version of Gamma (Chaos Gamma) didn't have a gun-arm, so maybe that's a leftover from Heroes too. (Or having a symmetrical design just made it easier to flip sprites.)

 

And yet that's exactly how Shadow's resurrection came off :v: I don't see why rebuilding E-102 would be that weird though. He was rebuilt as a badnik in SA2 and Metal Sonic's been rebuilt about 100 times. Chaos might have been harder to explain though, although it certainly didn't stop modern Sonic Team from slapping him in Forces for no reason. Man do I wish I had company meetings like that though.

Wow though this is amazing. And Rouge being a power character makes sense given her role in SA2. I'm not sure how Chaos would work as a speed character, but I'm amazed that at one point they actually considered bringing back Fang, Bean, Bark, Ray, and Mighty, which would have been huge as that would have meant they'd of all received redesigns and would likely still be appearing in games (Mania aside). And this could have led to an alternate timeline where Shadow remained dead. If the game came to be with it's original plan in mind that'd probably of had a huge impact on the series (Also if Shadow stayed dead his return in Forces would have actually been cool instead of just "why?").

These are some weird teams though. What do Chaos, E-102 and Big have to do with each other outside of "Hey we're from SA1?" I guess Amy, Cream, and Rouge would have been like team girl or something. And why would Metal Sonic team up with Ray and Mighty (As much as I'd of loved to see something like though that'd of been amazing). But this whole thing brings up one of Sonic Heroes biggest flaws: its set in stone teams. If the game was just "pick your speed character, pick your flight character, pick your power character" that number of characters would actually be acceptable, especially if they all played similarly to each other that they were basically cosmetic swaps (So yes basically the fan game Sonic World). They also could have taken the time to craft some better levels since they wouldn't have had to make 4 different object layouts, and maybe instead the game could have had an SA2 esq system with it's missions (beat the level, collect 100 rings, chaotix esq mission, beat in a certain time, hard mode, which the game basically already had but each sub-mission type was given to different teams).

 

Wow, that's really interesting. Thanks for sharing, Windii. I am surprised they didn't have another go at bring back Mighty, Ray, Fang, Bark and Bean for a game like Rivals or 2006.

 

It sounds like this was before they had a story decided on, so I wonder if they even had a concept of why these characters were going to be teamed up or if they just thought they'd figure it out later. It would be interesting if there was concept art for any of it but I somehow doubt it was that far along.

 

According to Maekawa's 2006 interview here, Heroes's story was written around the action stages, as opposed to SA2's opposite approach. So they definitely didn't have a story at that point yet.

 

Wow. Would have loved to see Fang return, but 6 teams is overkill. It's bad enough that we had to beat the game with 4 teams that played almost the same and had the same stages with minor variations

Gamma's return could have been explained as being a separate robot modeled after Gamma, just like E-1000 in SA2 and Chaos Gamma in Sonic Battle. But I'm glad they created a replacement in Omega instead, I felt Chaos Gamma was a completely pointless addition that cheapened his character. In fact, Sonic Battle felt like it was riddled with pointless fanservice that didn't fit the story, namely Chaos Gamma, Chaos, and the Death Egg. But this may explain the presence of the first two; they put them in because they would originally have been brought back to the cast by Heroes, but when they scrapped them from this game, they came up with tacked on explanations for their presence in Battle. Perhaps the Death Egg was also going to be in Heroes, to go with the game's retro theme, before being scrapped for some reason (perhaps time or memory constraints prevented them from implementing its stage)? That would explain why Heroes' final zone is Egg Fleet/Final Fortress, when airships are usually the stages preceding to the final zone, rather than the final zone. If so, they may have intended for the Death Egg to become a recurrent element in games from that era starting with Heroes (similarly to how the Egg Fleet returned in Shadow the Hedgehog), seeing how it was never shown to be destroyed in Battle, and it likely wouldn't have been destroyed in Heroes either (given its appearance in Battle).