And thus ends the Ecco the Dolphin story. A third Ecco was planned (which I'll talk about later) but it never came. The Dreamcast Ecco game had nothing to do with the old storyline, hence the ultimate end to the game was never revealed.
That's a pretty fucking awesome ending, if you ask me.
Great thread, thanks for this.
Tiemler on
0
FalloutGIRL'S DAYWAS PRETTY GOOD WHILE THEY LASTEDRegistered Userregular
However, something goes wrong, and the machine malfunctions, dooming Ecco. He is forever lost in the Tides of Time, hoping each time that his next leap would be the leap home.
However, something goes wrong, and the machine malfunctions, dooming Ecco. He is forever lost in the Tides of Time, hoping each time that his next leap would be the leap home.
Instead of helping people, he just gets them committed because all he can do is squeak like a dolphin.
Still one of the few games I have for my Mega Drive. Ofcourse back when I actually played it I hated Ecco with a passion, and I might have gone on record claiming Alien Breed would be the game that the world remembers. ( I still maintain that I was right with the master system, Psycho Fox was the best platformer... ever! )
Anyways, while Ecco might not have been my favorite this thread is rapidly becomming it.
Picking up the DC Ecco game has always been something I had planned on doing sometime in the vague future, but after reading some of the posts in this thread I'll have to make it a priority.
Also, awesome work TSR, and everyone else who contributed.
As you can see, I kinda like Ecco. It is the most lovably flawed game ever. I can totally understand someone hating its guts, while someone else might fall head over heels for it. It's really strange that way.
Watching YouTube videos reminds me how great the music was too. A lot of people's problems with Ecco simply stem from it being too hard, which is a valid complaint. With Ecco 2 I got stuck on the first level (couldn't get through some rocks) and gave up for six months.. It's quite a scary game too; the claustrophobia can get pretty bad and some of the future levels are frightening places for a dolphin to be in; all twisted metal and red skies.
I didn't like the music either, really exposed the most annoying notes on the genesis.
Man, you HAVE to get the Sega-CD Version then - the music is awesome in there. Another plus - the Sega-CD version has additional graphic effects in some of the levels.
Hm, the article "der" in this case indicates that a (female) noun is following. I could guess it means "Willkommen in der Maschine" - "welcome to the machine". Although I don't know if it is an "inside joke" or reference to something. - Why the developers used German in that case is beyond me.
Additional info: As far as I know the PC version of Ecco used new sprites which were double the size (high res). Unfortunally you won't get the running anymore on the current Windows OS.
I didn't like the music either, really exposed the most annoying notes on the genesis.
Man, you HAVE to get the Sega-CD Version then - the music is awesome in there. Another plus - the Sega-CD version has additional graphic effects in the level.
Hm, the article "der" in this case indicates that a (male) noun is following. I could guess it means "Willkommen in der Maschine" - "welcome to the machine". Although I don't know if it is an "inside joke" or reference to something. - Why the developers used German in that case is beyond me.
I didn't like the music either, really exposed the most annoying notes on the genesis.
Man, you HAVE to get the Sega-CD Version then - the music is awesome in there. Another plus - the Sega-CD version has additional graphic effects in the level.
Hm, the article "der" in this case indicates that a (male) noun is following. I could guess it means "Willkommen in der Maschine" - "welcome to the machine". Although I don't know if it is an "inside joke" or reference to something. - Why the developers used German in that case is beyond me.
No thats not right - I don't know how to express it in English terms - In most indirect German sentence structures which refer to an female noun the article "die" becomes "der". It also depends on the sentence structure.
"Gestern verprügelten wir Leute in der U-Bahn."
"Yesterday we beat up people in the metro."
"U-Bahn" (metro) is still female even if it gets a "male" article in that case.
I always assumed it meant "welcome to her machine"*. The English grammar in the game is hardly perfect, so their German being dodgier than mine wouldn't be too wierd
So yeah... There's been some stuff going on in my life lately that I've been dealing with that's been taking up most of my free time. I haven't been able to get online in the past few days, and I won't be able to stay online for an extended period of time until a couple of more days. I need time to devote to this thread, and I don't want it to die. I promise I'll post more when I clear up my shit.
Still one of the few games I have for my Mega Drive. Ofcourse back when I actually played it I hated Ecco with a passion, and I might have gone on record claiming Alien Breed would be the game that the world remembers. ( I still maintain that I was right with the master system, Psycho Fox was the best platformer... ever! )
Anyways, while Ecco might not have been my favorite this thread is rapidly becomming it.
Psycho Fox was indeed the best platformer ever. Decap Attack on the megadrive is it's spiritual sucessor. Decap Attack started life in Japan as a Mega Drive remake of Psycho Fox, but with the art assets changed to tie in with the anime series Magical Hat. This game became Magical Hat Flying Turbo Adventure. Sega didn;t have the Magical Hat licence outside Japan, and no-one had heard of it anyway, so they changed the art assets for the game agaon and came up with Decap Attack.
Why they couldn't have just gone back to Psycho Fox I don't know.
When you push it against the tubes/walls, they rumble and then break away. this action is never seen in ecco 1, and is only seen in Ecco 2 when you push a rock against another rock. that's right, this is an ecco 2 algorithm in Ecco 1.
Are you sure that was only in Ecco 2? I remember doing things like that in the first few levels of Ecco 1. Or was that something different?
So yeah... There's been some stuff going on in my life lately that I've been dealing with that's been taking up most of my free time. I haven't been able to get online in the past few days, and I won't be able to stay online for an extended period of time until a couple of more days. I need time to devote to this thread, and I don't want it to die. I promise I'll post more when I clear up my shit.
Sorry for making everyone wait.
-TSR
Dude, you don't have to apologize when you're going out of your way for us in the first place. We're just happy to get anything at all of this quality and depth, and thank you for it.
So yeah... There's been some stuff going on in my life lately that I've been dealing with that's been taking up most of my free time. I haven't been able to get online in the past few days, and I won't be able to stay online for an extended period of time until a couple of more days. I need time to devote to this thread, and I don't want it to die. I promise I'll post more when I clear up my shit.
Sorry for making everyone wait.
-TSR
Don't sig your replies noob.
Hope things clear up and you can come finish the thread!
I loved the last thread, so as little as I've been able to browse / post these days (work finally blocked Penny Arcade, and the WoW expansion has consumed my soul), I'll deffinately be checking back for more.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I've been playing on the Virtual Console, and after about five minutes of playing Open Ocean I discovered the swim-on-the-bottom-of-the-screen-constantly-doing-charge-sonars trick that you can use to get through the entire level taking hardly any damage.
So you are dating a girl, and one day you decide it is time to bring her home.
She comes in, and you feverishly start kissing like the French do. Your jaw has unhinged.
She reaches down towards the crotchal region.
You are about to have the best night of your life.
She stops, says she cannot do this, leaves and then two months later...
You are still checking back to a thread about Ecco the dolphin that just left you craving more.
I am a sad, sad, panda.
So I'll spill the beans, just like how there is a prototype for sonic 2, which I detailed, there's a prototype for Ecco 2.
So I guess I'll just go level by level and explain how fucking weird, bizzarre, and different Ecco 2 was when it was in production. Ecco 2, like Sonic 2, was built off it's predecessor, and it shows. Ecco 2, also like sonic 2, was almost a completely different game when it was in production.
LEVEL 1
Unlike the final version of the game, all the levels in Ecco 2 had simple names. "First level," "Second level," etc.
However, while Ecco 2 ultimately would begin in the home bay, setting up the story of how the vortex returns, this version begins with the globe holder level. If you've played the entire ecco 2, you'll notice how odd this looks. First up, the texture on the globe doesn't match up quite right. It's all jagged, and, unlike the final verison, the veins don't show up more as you attack it. Second, the background is completely different.
Most drastic, however, is how the level flat out doesn't work.
The globe can be attacked, but it'll never leave it's chain like it's supposed to. Oddly enough, if you pause the game, the globe will float all over the screen, only to snap back to the chains when you unpause.
Odd first level, but it gets weirder as you go on...
Second level. All the title cards are like this, so I guess it's find if I stop announcing it.
truely an odd level... this level features some new, not seen before art, as well as familiar ecco 2 rocks, but it's not really a level. So what is it?
The level scrolls automatically, with no ecco, and it becomes apparent what this is... it's the intro from Ecco the dolphin 1. The title screen. It's been redrawn with new graphics, but it never appears in the final version. Very, very weird. A video of the original
Examining the code, there is an unplaced ecco object. Placing the object into the game yields a playable ecco the dolphin, who can be moved like normal. His sonar appears below him when he sings.
You can drown in this level. Drowning creates odd, never before seen bubbles. Elsewhere in the game, normal bubbles appear, but this level has weird, huge bubbles. Maybe an incorrectly imported tile set?
Oh, and before I continue, massive, massive props to Dark Sea for his research. The dude basically discovered most of this stuff on his own, while the sonic community was off doing their own stuff with sonic 2.
Thats about it for level 2.
Level 3
Finally, we get to a level which resembles an actual ecco 2 level. Lots of fun stuff in this level. First noticable thing is that the palette is off - in the final game, the rocks are purple, but in this version, they're grey. Second, soon after you begin this level, you meet the first of many strange enemies in the Ecco 2 proto: A crab on a string.
Just what enemy this wound up becoming is unknown. Ecco 2 programmers used crabs as placeholder graphics for damn near everything, so later you might run into a crab that behaves like a rock, a crab which explodes, etc. This particular enemy isn't in the final version of this level. Going to the sonar map reveals him to be a normal crab, but there are other ACTUAL crabs in the level, so this isn't just a proto version of the crab.
He will run and dog you all around the level. Singing to him causes him to shrivel and run away. You can follow him and even sing him into the sky - he'll freely float around. THere are 2 of these in the level, and allowing them to meet will bring the game to a screetching halt - the game nearly crashes.
At the bottom of the level is a ship wreck, just like in the final version. Unlike the final version, however, it's incomplete, as you can see. The art is unfinished and it doesn't integrate into the scenery well.
After completing a fairly simple glyph puzzle, you'll run across this dolphin. He does not exist in the final game, but behaves similarly to a dolphin found in Ecco 1. You cannot swim past him, as he mimics all your moves.
Sing to him, and he'll instruct you to give him a fish. This is just like a dolphin from ecco 1. Give him a fish and you'll finish the level.
This level appears to be an early version of Home Bay, the first level in the final version of Ecco 2. But MAN is it incomplete.
Just like in the final, there are dolphins swimming all around. However, unlike the final, they don't say anything to you. You can sing to them and they won't respond.
I guess I should point out, because I failed to before, that the sprites in the ecco 2 proto are vastly different from the final. The final sprites look shaded and 3D, and features what became sega's signature artwork style (a visual style which could be found in sonic 3, sonic & knuckles, etc) where most things are round and very shaded. These sprites are almost flat. Compare to the final:
Another big difference between the final and the proto is the sonar. In the final, the sonar had artwork and looked generally nice. The proto's sonar looks very bare bones, almost like debug info:
It's also interesting to note that the sonar for this level doesn't display the level correctly. Talk about useless sonar.
Going down to the bottom of this level yeilds these bubble conches from ecco 1. They don't exist in ecco 2. Like ecco 1, they emit air that can be swam into to refill your air gauge, but, unlike ecco 1, they emit odd, giant bubbles that we saw earlier. Judging from the big bubbles in the level that was ported from ecco 1, and that these bubble emitters from ecco 1 emit large bubbles, I'd say that all old bubbles from ecco 1's code is pointing to these large tile sets, instead of the normal bubbles in the game.
Near the bottom of the level is a dolphin who actually talks. However, he speaks engrish. The dudes in the ecco community have tracked down Ed Annunziata, lead programmer and project leader for Ecco 1 and 2, and asked him about stuff relating to the proto. He said the following about this:
"I am sure that didn't make it into the [final] game. The dolphin speak was designed to sound different not bad like that..."
Level 5 is, oddly enough, level 4 repeated. Everything is the same as level 4; the odd dolphins who don't say anything, the weird bubble emitters, everything. The title card even says "Fourth Level" instead of "Fifth level." Except for one big difference - as soon as you begin the level, an animated sequence takes over ecco and the other dolphins and you cannot control ecco until it's done:
It appears this is the animation to the epilouge sequence at the end of ecco 2.
After the dance, all the dolphins line up and you can talk to them. Most say nothing, except for two:
Odd text that doesn't appear in the game. The second quote is in hungarian. Ed explains:
"The quote "A MUNKA SZABADDA TESZ" means: "the work makes you free". Zero meaning, we do it just for fun ... Programmers make it for fun sometimes."
After this, the dolphins scatter and the level plays out just like level 4.
This level is a prototype version of "The Eye" from the final version. Unlike most levels, the art in this level is very incomplete, with random snippits of background appearing scattered around:
As you can see, none of the walls in this level have proper side art - they all end with sharp edges.
As you swim towards the surface, things start to look normal...
Until, OOPS! The level loading block which switches the palette is placed too low, and the palette for the above water portion of the level gets loaded prematurely.
The level is more complete gameplay wise than art wise. Just like in the final, the object of this level is to find the globes for the asterlite. You can pick them up and travel with them, and even place them where they're supposed to go.
One of the most complete looking parts of the level is near the exit. This tunnel is never seen in the final game - it's an odd angled tunnel.
This is the final exit for the level. Very plain looking. Not much else to this level.
WELL, I'm 1/3 through the levels in the proto, so I figure this is a good spot to break down and explain some neat programming aspect of the genesis. I'll talk about how the genesis handles the screen that gets drawn in my next post.
So, in a previous post, I talked about how the genesis ripples a background, and in my both of sonic threads, I talked about how the genesis displays graphics. Now I'll talk about how the genesis actually handles the screen.
if you haven't read those posts, read them here and here so you won't be lost.
The genesis could display in a variety of resolutions, but most games displayed in 320x224 mode. Most people know that those dimensions refer to the number of pixels on screen. Well, that means each screen drawn by the genesis displayed 71680 pixels. Thats 71680 displayed 30 times a second, or 2150400 pixels drawn every second. Pretty impressive.
The sort of logic I'm about to talk about isn't just how the genesis handles a screen, but how all graphics work (computer, genesis, snes, etc).
To keep things simple, instead of working with a 320x224 screen, I'll instead talk about a 10 x 10 screen. Imagine that this is our screen:
Each box represents a pixel. As I explained before, you fill in boxes to create pictures, calling from palette entries. However, this isn't how the screen is actually stored in the genesis.
For those who aren't familiar with programming terms, there is an object called an array. The best way to think about it is as a file cabinet filled with folders, each numbered. You can place exactly 1 piece of data into each folder. They are stored in a linear order. That is, it's not a square like above, but a straight line of folders. Thus, if you want to refer to every piece of data in that file cabinet, you could simply talk about the entire file cabinet. Same principle with arrays. You can refer to individual parts of an array, or you can refer to the actual array.
In C++, an array of characters might look like this:
In this case, our array of characters is called FileCabinet, and it has the letters a-e stored in it. The first statement, printf(FileCabinet[0]) would print the character in spot 0, in this case 'a'. The second statement, printf(FileCabinet[]) would print the entire cabinet, in this case "abcde".
To now that you understand how arrays work, lets see how the screen can get stored in an array. We number our screen like so:
Each pixel on screen has a number that it relates to. These are the spots they occupy on the array. So, in spot 1, we store the first pixel. In spot 2, we store the second. And so forth.
However, you might realize that the screen isn't actually stored in a box, but in a line. It's more accurate to say the screen looks like this:
Now, if you recall from my sonic topic, you draw stuff to the screen by telling it to fill in the box at 5 across, 5 down with black. But as we can see, there is no across or down in an array. So how does (5, 5) get translated into the correct box?
Well, a screen has width and height. In the case of our imaginary screen, it's got a width of 10, and a height of 10. So if we wanted to draw the 5th box across, 5th box down (aka box 45), we simply do the following:
first, we move down 5 boxes. You can do this by multiplying the ammount we want to move down, minus one (to compensate for the origin row) by the maximum width. So, in this case, (5-1)*10, or 40. Then we add to this number we want to move across, 5. 40+5 = 45, the box we want to arrive at.
So the final equation looks like this:
((Y-1)*Width)+X
And that's how a screen works.
I've already gone through 6 levels, which is 1/3 of the game. I've got work tomorrow, but I'll try to post more then.
Posts
That's a pretty fucking awesome ending, if you ask me.
Great thread, thanks for this.
dude that blows
Anyways, while Ecco might not have been my favorite this thread is rapidly becomming it.
Also, awesome work TSR, and everyone else who contributed.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
You mess with the dolphin, you get the nose.
Man, you HAVE to get the Sega-CD Version then - the music is awesome in there. Another plus - the Sega-CD version has additional graphic effects in some of the levels.
Hm, the article "der" in this case indicates that a (female) noun is following. I could guess it means "Willkommen in der Maschine" - "welcome to the machine". Although I don't know if it is an "inside joke" or reference to something. - Why the developers used German in that case is beyond me.
Additional info: As far as I know the PC version of Ecco used new sprites which were double the size (high res). Unfortunally you won't get the running anymore on the current Windows OS.
No thats not right - I don't know how to express it in English terms - In most indirect German sentence structures which refer to an female noun the article "die" becomes "der". It also depends on the sentence structure.
"Gestern verprügelten wir Leute in der U-Bahn."
"Yesterday we beat up people in the metro."
"U-Bahn" (metro) is still female even if it gets a "male" article in that case.
*A reference to the Vortex Queen.
Hands up those who spent hours just swimming, doing flips and jumps out of the water, "just because"?
*raises hand*
Oh yeah I still find a lot of similarities in the design choices between Ecco and Shadow of the Colossus.
I never asked for this!
I could do either for hours without even getting involved in the game.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Sorry for making everyone wait.
-TSR
Psycho Fox was indeed the best platformer ever. Decap Attack on the megadrive is it's spiritual sucessor. Decap Attack started life in Japan as a Mega Drive remake of Psycho Fox, but with the art assets changed to tie in with the anime series Magical Hat. This game became Magical Hat Flying Turbo Adventure. Sega didn;t have the Magical Hat licence outside Japan, and no-one had heard of it anyway, so they changed the art assets for the game agaon and came up with Decap Attack.
Why they couldn't have just gone back to Psycho Fox I don't know.
Then I stopped playing because the ocean scares me and everytime I play it I feel like i'm drowning.
Are you sure that was only in Ecco 2? I remember doing things like that in the first few levels of Ecco 1. Or was that something different?
Dude, you don't have to apologize when you're going out of your way for us in the first place. We're just happy to get anything at all of this quality and depth, and thank you for it.
Open Ocean is SADISTIC.
XBL: Torn Hoodie
@hoodiethirteen
Hope things clear up and you can come finish the thread!
Click me for Sin City Breakfast Tacos! | Come discuss CG with us!
I need more.
I've been playing on the Virtual Console, and after about five minutes of playing Open Ocean I discovered the swim-on-the-bottom-of-the-screen-constantly-doing-charge-sonars trick that you can use to get through the entire level taking hardly any damage.
She comes in, and you feverishly start kissing like the French do. Your jaw has unhinged.
She reaches down towards the crotchal region.
You are about to have the best night of your life.
She stops, says she cannot do this, leaves and then two months later...
You are still checking back to a thread about Ecco the dolphin that just left you craving more.
I am a sad, sad, panda.
So I'll spill the beans, just like how there is a prototype for sonic 2, which I detailed, there's a prototype for Ecco 2.
So I guess I'll just go level by level and explain how fucking weird, bizzarre, and different Ecco 2 was when it was in production. Ecco 2, like Sonic 2, was built off it's predecessor, and it shows. Ecco 2, also like sonic 2, was almost a completely different game when it was in production.
LEVEL 1
Unlike the final version of the game, all the levels in Ecco 2 had simple names. "First level," "Second level," etc.
However, while Ecco 2 ultimately would begin in the home bay, setting up the story of how the vortex returns, this version begins with the globe holder level. If you've played the entire ecco 2, you'll notice how odd this looks. First up, the texture on the globe doesn't match up quite right. It's all jagged, and, unlike the final verison, the veins don't show up more as you attack it. Second, the background is completely different.
Most drastic, however, is how the level flat out doesn't work.
The globe can be attacked, but it'll never leave it's chain like it's supposed to. Oddly enough, if you pause the game, the globe will float all over the screen, only to snap back to the chains when you unpause.
Odd first level, but it gets weirder as you go on...
Second level. All the title cards are like this, so I guess it's find if I stop announcing it.
truely an odd level... this level features some new, not seen before art, as well as familiar ecco 2 rocks, but it's not really a level. So what is it?
The level scrolls automatically, with no ecco, and it becomes apparent what this is... it's the intro from Ecco the dolphin 1. The title screen. It's been redrawn with new graphics, but it never appears in the final version. Very, very weird. A video of the original
Examining the code, there is an unplaced ecco object. Placing the object into the game yields a playable ecco the dolphin, who can be moved like normal. His sonar appears below him when he sings.
You can drown in this level. Drowning creates odd, never before seen bubbles. Elsewhere in the game, normal bubbles appear, but this level has weird, huge bubbles. Maybe an incorrectly imported tile set?
Oh, and before I continue, massive, massive props to Dark Sea for his research. The dude basically discovered most of this stuff on his own, while the sonic community was off doing their own stuff with sonic 2.
Thats about it for level 2.
Level 3
Finally, we get to a level which resembles an actual ecco 2 level. Lots of fun stuff in this level. First noticable thing is that the palette is off - in the final game, the rocks are purple, but in this version, they're grey. Second, soon after you begin this level, you meet the first of many strange enemies in the Ecco 2 proto: A crab on a string.
Just what enemy this wound up becoming is unknown. Ecco 2 programmers used crabs as placeholder graphics for damn near everything, so later you might run into a crab that behaves like a rock, a crab which explodes, etc. This particular enemy isn't in the final version of this level. Going to the sonar map reveals him to be a normal crab, but there are other ACTUAL crabs in the level, so this isn't just a proto version of the crab.
He will run and dog you all around the level. Singing to him causes him to shrivel and run away. You can follow him and even sing him into the sky - he'll freely float around. THere are 2 of these in the level, and allowing them to meet will bring the game to a screetching halt - the game nearly crashes.
At the bottom of the level is a ship wreck, just like in the final version. Unlike the final version, however, it's incomplete, as you can see. The art is unfinished and it doesn't integrate into the scenery well.
After completing a fairly simple glyph puzzle, you'll run across this dolphin. He does not exist in the final game, but behaves similarly to a dolphin found in Ecco 1. You cannot swim past him, as he mimics all your moves.
Sing to him, and he'll instruct you to give him a fish. This is just like a dolphin from ecco 1. Give him a fish and you'll finish the level.
This level appears to be an early version of Home Bay, the first level in the final version of Ecco 2. But MAN is it incomplete.
Just like in the final, there are dolphins swimming all around. However, unlike the final, they don't say anything to you. You can sing to them and they won't respond.
I guess I should point out, because I failed to before, that the sprites in the ecco 2 proto are vastly different from the final. The final sprites look shaded and 3D, and features what became sega's signature artwork style (a visual style which could be found in sonic 3, sonic & knuckles, etc) where most things are round and very shaded. These sprites are almost flat. Compare to the final:
Another big difference between the final and the proto is the sonar. In the final, the sonar had artwork and looked generally nice. The proto's sonar looks very bare bones, almost like debug info:
It's also interesting to note that the sonar for this level doesn't display the level correctly. Talk about useless sonar.
Going down to the bottom of this level yeilds these bubble conches from ecco 1. They don't exist in ecco 2. Like ecco 1, they emit air that can be swam into to refill your air gauge, but, unlike ecco 1, they emit odd, giant bubbles that we saw earlier. Judging from the big bubbles in the level that was ported from ecco 1, and that these bubble emitters from ecco 1 emit large bubbles, I'd say that all old bubbles from ecco 1's code is pointing to these large tile sets, instead of the normal bubbles in the game.
Near the bottom of the level is a dolphin who actually talks. However, he speaks engrish. The dudes in the ecco community have tracked down Ed Annunziata, lead programmer and project leader for Ecco 1 and 2, and asked him about stuff relating to the proto. He said the following about this:
"I am sure that didn't make it into the [final] game. The dolphin speak was designed to sound different not bad like that..."
thats all there is to this level...
Level 5 is, oddly enough, level 4 repeated. Everything is the same as level 4; the odd dolphins who don't say anything, the weird bubble emitters, everything. The title card even says "Fourth Level" instead of "Fifth level." Except for one big difference - as soon as you begin the level, an animated sequence takes over ecco and the other dolphins and you cannot control ecco until it's done:
It appears this is the animation to the epilouge sequence at the end of ecco 2.
After the dance, all the dolphins line up and you can talk to them. Most say nothing, except for two:
Odd text that doesn't appear in the game. The second quote is in hungarian. Ed explains:
"The quote "A MUNKA SZABADDA TESZ" means: "the work makes you free". Zero meaning, we do it just for fun ... Programmers make it for fun sometimes."
After this, the dolphins scatter and the level plays out just like level 4.
This level is a prototype version of "The Eye" from the final version. Unlike most levels, the art in this level is very incomplete, with random snippits of background appearing scattered around:
As you can see, none of the walls in this level have proper side art - they all end with sharp edges.
As you swim towards the surface, things start to look normal...
Until, OOPS! The level loading block which switches the palette is placed too low, and the palette for the above water portion of the level gets loaded prematurely.
The level is more complete gameplay wise than art wise. Just like in the final, the object of this level is to find the globes for the asterlite. You can pick them up and travel with them, and even place them where they're supposed to go.
One of the most complete looking parts of the level is near the exit. This tunnel is never seen in the final game - it's an odd angled tunnel.
This is the final exit for the level. Very plain looking. Not much else to this level.
WELL, I'm 1/3 through the levels in the proto, so I figure this is a good spot to break down and explain some neat programming aspect of the genesis. I'll talk about how the genesis handles the screen that gets drawn in my next post.
if you haven't read those posts, read them here and here so you won't be lost.
The genesis could display in a variety of resolutions, but most games displayed in 320x224 mode. Most people know that those dimensions refer to the number of pixels on screen. Well, that means each screen drawn by the genesis displayed 71680 pixels. Thats 71680 displayed 30 times a second, or 2150400 pixels drawn every second. Pretty impressive.
The sort of logic I'm about to talk about isn't just how the genesis handles a screen, but how all graphics work (computer, genesis, snes, etc).
To keep things simple, instead of working with a 320x224 screen, I'll instead talk about a 10 x 10 screen. Imagine that this is our screen:
Each box represents a pixel. As I explained before, you fill in boxes to create pictures, calling from palette entries. However, this isn't how the screen is actually stored in the genesis.
For those who aren't familiar with programming terms, there is an object called an array. The best way to think about it is as a file cabinet filled with folders, each numbered. You can place exactly 1 piece of data into each folder. They are stored in a linear order. That is, it's not a square like above, but a straight line of folders. Thus, if you want to refer to every piece of data in that file cabinet, you could simply talk about the entire file cabinet. Same principle with arrays. You can refer to individual parts of an array, or you can refer to the actual array.
In C++, an array of characters might look like this:
char FileCabinet[5] = {'a','b','c','d','e'}; printf(FileCabinet[0]); printf(FileCabinet[]);In this case, our array of characters is called FileCabinet, and it has the letters a-e stored in it. The first statement, printf(FileCabinet[0]) would print the character in spot 0, in this case 'a'. The second statement, printf(FileCabinet[]) would print the entire cabinet, in this case "abcde".
To now that you understand how arrays work, lets see how the screen can get stored in an array. We number our screen like so:
Each pixel on screen has a number that it relates to. These are the spots they occupy on the array. So, in spot 1, we store the first pixel. In spot 2, we store the second. And so forth.
However, you might realize that the screen isn't actually stored in a box, but in a line. It's more accurate to say the screen looks like this:
Now, if you recall from my sonic topic, you draw stuff to the screen by telling it to fill in the box at 5 across, 5 down with black. But as we can see, there is no across or down in an array. So how does (5, 5) get translated into the correct box?
Well, a screen has width and height. In the case of our imaginary screen, it's got a width of 10, and a height of 10. So if we wanted to draw the 5th box across, 5th box down (aka box 45), we simply do the following:
first, we move down 5 boxes. You can do this by multiplying the ammount we want to move down, minus one (to compensate for the origin row) by the maximum width. So, in this case, (5-1)*10, or 40. Then we add to this number we want to move across, 5. 40+5 = 45, the box we want to arrive at.
So the final equation looks like this:
((Y-1)*Width)+X
And that's how a screen works.
I've already gone through 6 levels, which is 1/3 of the game. I've got work tomorrow, but I'll try to post more then.
Amazing stuff.
http://DocumentingLaziness.blogspot.com/