I was trying to rip those flags from the first level of Vectorman 19 frames in I'm starting to think that the flag isn't a sprite. Can anyone confirm or deny this? Edit: Sorry about all the double posts and posting in the wrong place the site is being very slow for me and not refreshing as it should.
I haven't looked into the Vectorman ROM or anything, but I would definitely insist that it is a sprite. The Genesis just doesn't have the power to make it a polygon without some serious slow downs.
Wow, that's just wrong. The Genesis doesn't do any sort of polygon calculation whatsoever. Everything's loaded as 8x8 tiles and put on either planes or sprites. These can be animated in real time by just changing the tile # in the plane/sprite data. A simple layer test tells me that the flags are loaded into Plane A, so they would need to be extracted a different way. I haven't looked much into Vectorman either, though I did start a disassembly a while ago, so I can continue it if you'd like.
I don't know what you're talking about. I said I "insisted" that it was a sprite. I'm not talking about hardware. The Genesis can do polygons, as can any computer. How it's loaded into memory isn't important. What he's asking is if it's a polygon or sprite, and I'm saying that the Genesis doesn't have enough power to calculate polygons in a timely manner, so it would almost certainly be a sprite.
Except he never mentioned polygons at all. When referring to how MD graphics are loaded, there's two main types: tile maps (aka scroll planes) and sprites. Bringing polygons into the mix just confuses everyone, because it doesn't explain what method the VDP is actually using to display it. As an example, the SegaCD's scaling and rotation hardware actually uses the VDP scroll planes for rendering, not sprites. Specifically, the graphics are manipulated in the SegaCD, and then DMA'd from SegaCD RAM to the appropriate area of VRAM.
9/10 says the are compressed. How good are you with MD hacking in general. You could try to find the format it's compressed in
He's trying to rip the frames of the flag, and after 19 or so, he started to wonder if it was even a sprite. That's because there's so many frames to it. It appears to me that he's suggesting that it's rendered with an algorithm. I mentioned polygons because that's typically the method for 3D graphics. It doesn't matter what it is, the fact is they need to be stored on the fly. It doesn't matter what the difference between tile and sprite data is, so what does hardware have to do with any of this?
Speaking of which: This may seem a bit far fetched but I think that Vectorman might have been built off a modified Jurassic Park Rampage Edition game engine of sorts. The reason being: 1. Vectorman has some sound effects used that are from JPRE 2. They both are mildly similar in terms of gameplay. 3. Sam Powell, the music and sound composer of both Genesis Jurassic Park games, is listed in the Special Thanks of Vectorman's credits. 4.both use the same sound driver (GEMS) Contradictions to the above: 1. Vectorman may not be built off JPRE for the simple fact that while the games are similar, they are extremely different. 2.Desert Demolition (a Roadrunner and While 'e' Coyote game developed by Blue Sky) also has a few of the JPRE sound effects and is an entirely different games in terms of gameplay. I'd need to compare the source of the two games to contradict the above contradictions.
