Crushing Sonic to an Impossible Size - Coding Secrets! 

VAT DA FAAK?!

Glad I wasn’t the only one who immediately thought that upon seeing the thumbnail.

Don't give Logan Paul and his RU-vid overlord any ideas.

And now.. for extra content we have these gold metal rings which are extremely dangerous

He is very dangerous and could attack at any time!

I know exactly what you mean - I especially enjoy learning of the lengths and workarounds they had to go to just to fit a game onto a 4Mb cartridge with this video here being my all time favourite so far :3 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-c-aQvP7CUAI.html

benjabby don’t forget the trippy, unnerving, yet somehow addicting music.

Same. It's like a forgotten art form, running into the limits of what the hardware can do is rarely an issue now.

Check out sizecoding, it's an art involving programming the smallest possible programs.

I love how they had to use their brains to squeeze every possible bit/byte back then. People don't give enough credit to old developers about deeply knowing how the hardware operated too and the tricks it allowed :)

I really wish modern devs were like this. We'd have new games compressed and optimized as far as possible. With the trend of digital downloads being at an all time high you'd this this would be priority. Who wants to download a 70GB game when it could be half that size? I'd rather have lots of compressed games than less than a dozen uncompressed ones. I'm sure Valve, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would love to save on server costs as well. I imagine its not cheap to allow millions of people download dozens of gigabytes simultaneously.

InverseCloud well the developers of this time have another challenges, I suggest to you to check ExtraCredits Channel they explain a lot of things more than the programming aspect of the games. Greets.

InverseCloud There is still compression, as it is essential for any program. However, the age of innovative program is currently in a long hiatus. Games are just games now, baring a few exceptions of absolute masterful craftsmanship. The creativity of the first few generations of gaming , for the health of the industry, needs to return.

Yeah, it's quite something isn't it? Conversely when you look back at games and think about say '16 bit' vs '8 bit' games, a lot of the differences you see are arguably less to do with hardware that is more powerful in a general sense, but simply games that are larger in general, due to more storage. A great example of this contrast is the Super Mario series. Super Mario Bros is something like 32 kilobytes. Super Mario 3 is 384 kilobytes. And Super Mario World is 1 megabyte. Now think about how those games look and play, and you can probably agree that Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World have more in common than Mario 3 has with the original. So in fact, it would seem in some ways that the amount of storage space available to work with can have a bigger influence than the hardware a game runs on. At least, to a point. You also see it rather dramatically on the n64 vs the Playstation - one can trivially throw around 600 megabytes or so, the other... It cost a small fortune to have a game use 64 megabytes. The consequences of which seem pretty obvious if you think about it... Notice the n64 basically hasn't got a single RPG to it's credit? (unless you count the two Zelda titles)... It's also something you can see in reverse if you were to do homebrew development on these old systems. If you're going to build your own cartridge, you can easily use 16 megabytes on these 16 bit systems nowadays, and with a little bit of extra work, it's well within reason to use 128 megabytes or even in excess of a gigabyte or more... And if you did that on a 16 bit system you could certainly do a lot of things that would have seemed impossible at the time. (Consider Street Fighter Alpha is the first in the series to have asymmetric character designs. Why? Space of course. even the SNES version, after accounting for the dedicated compression chip, is a 96 megabit ROM, which is at least twice the size of anything else on the system.) Storage space is a major issue that is often forgotten, Yet it has major consequences on the types of games that can be made, what they look like, how they play, and so on.

Not just Kilobytes, but even BYTES mattered, that's what impressed me, that even compressing a frame from 608 bytes to 505 bytes was considered significant. I can't imagine how limiting such constraints must have been. Also, about compression on modern games. Don't forget that modern consoles are a lot more locked-down than previous consoles where you basically has full low-level access to the hardware. You can't really just tell a specific chip to run a specific task in machine code anymore which is how many of the amazing games from older consoles pulled off some "impossible" tricks.

i was thinking the same thing when watching these videos lol

There are. I forget who. But a lot of this stuff is generally applicable to retro hardware. I've seen few techniques in these videos that are overly specific to the Genesis. Now, I do homebrew development on a variety of systems, though Mega Drive/Genesis is not currently one of them. These videos are still quite informative though. I was particularly impressed with the video compression one, but also some of the pseudo-3d effects. Despite what some would have you believe though, the majority of effects would work just as well on other 16 bit systems. Several of them would also work decently on a lot of 8 bit hardware too. Good coding is good coding after all.

Honestly it's inspired me to learn how to code for a mega drive. (since I dont have a genesis)

djpain aren't they exactly the same? different name for different regions but the same hardware?

the megadrive might be same hardware but it has a different timing than the genesis because of the power.

I wish they would have made this a 2d game

Mo Go it it 2D if pixels are visible its 2D 3D is when its models with no visible pixels

I love you default cube.

@@mogo9052 Check out Sonic Blast for Master System/Game Gear .. not 3D Blast, but regular Blast.

Welcom to the hydrolic press channel. Today we are crushin a hedgehog.

Hydrolicity zone

It could attack at anytime

BFDIFan447 Oh, sorry. But how did I?

BFDIFan447 You were close...

c3ntr0n800 I would watch these really advanced vids, but probably too much work for too small of an audience.

Cooljosh3k while I would love to watch them as well, I have to agree it would be way too much work for such a small audience. maybe if he did a once a month live stream for a few hours it could work?

Icelink256 Hello :3 I subscribed to you. You're awesome!

Icelink256 just out of curiosity, what game engine are you using to get that level of compatibility?

Wow. I kinda admire your effort. Not a lot of devs put a lot of effort in this nowadays. Seeing more and more thrown together bloated unity games is just sad... However note that PNG and JPEG offer better compression and are much less of a hassle than implementing RLE by hand (unless software runs on arduino or something). IIRC, PNG was not in Windows 95 OEM by default, but is installable (probably comes with IE3.0+), and is a sane requirement. Windows 98 probably has it by default. Actually finishing game development within acceptable time (that is, not leaving it in dev hell) is just as important as makeing it great on the inside.

OS support for image formats isn't an advantage if it's a hand-made engine. Trust me on this, my earliest programming was custom-built engines. One of the more painful things I had to code was an image loader - and that loader was using OS calls to load uncompressed BMP's... Just the windows API calls themselves, and the conversion to a format suitable for actual use in gameplay was a fairly painful process compared to the majority of game code itself.

+Kuralthys I understand what you mean, but in my opinion one needs to figure out how those API work once and then just reuse the same code. There are a lot of examples and tutorials online. GDI+ APIs are kind of overcomplicated and not well documented, yes - gone through this myself, but I'd say it beats implementing (and debugging) compression by hand. If everything fails, there are a lot of free libraries for stuff like that. This was not always the case, however: before windows98 era neither all necessary APIs nor good tutorials nor a selection of free libraries existed, and decompression itself could have been too slow, and 16/256-color pallets made it even worse, so yes, that actually made sense back in the day.

As far as I know the demo scene is still around. And you have people like Shin'en still pushing that kind of boundaries to this day.

It's definitely still around. Even going as far as building complete demo's that only take 4kb of space. :-)

Fun fact: Shin'en was founded by former members of Abyss, a demoscene group. It kinda shows with the games they make, lol.

Fred Bronze decompressed to RAM buffer and then DMA. And if I’d just done a scroll update that frame I wouldn’t decompress and DMA until next frame to load balance..,

Interesting. Sega themselves used the RAM buffer approach for Knuckles in Sonic 2, though not for decompression purposes. Rather, Knuckles' sprites are run through a lookup table which converts them from the Sonic & Knuckles color palette to the Sonic 2 color palette.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

*Starlight Zone

i think he was talking about the model too?

Guys, I think the fella was referrring to the original spriter for Sonic 3D Blast.

It could be Jon himself.

low resolution I'd imagine

Its the anti aliasing being roughly cut instead of blended properly. Still works fine on CRT.

It's actually because we had to anti-alias to a background that generally wasn't dark. When seen on a dark background the anti-aliasing doesn't look good, but generally in the normal gameplay it looks fine. No idea about DK:C

These CG sprites are usually lit from the front for the sake of consistency, which means the edges of rounded body parts tend to fade into complete darkness. Although I'm sure it was avoidable.

I've never liked pre-rendered sprites much. Though ironically some of the first graphics I ever created for a game (roundabout 1998ish I'd guess? When I was first exploring game coding, anyway), were pre-rendered. Of course, I had the advantage that I was working on a late 90's era PC, so I could use 16 or 24 bit colour for things. Plus, my sprites had a resolution of something like 120x120 and would have been used at a 1024x768 resolution, meaning small details are less obvious. Even so one of my first lessons in doing this was that you had to turn off edge-antialiasing entirely or everything looked wrong; Anti-aliasing against the background is NOT a good idea for pre-rendered sprites, since it will look wrong in just about any situation. Lighting is also a major issue, since you have to pick an angle and stick to it. My sprites were lit from the top left, but I could get away with that for the same reason I could use 24 bit 120x120 sprites with 40 different orientations and no compression whatsoever. Even with that, pre-baked lighting means your image will only look correct under conditions that approximately match your assumptions about lighting. Which is quite limiting. Everything will look off if your environment doesn't match the lighting conditions your sprite was rendered in. Meanwhile As soon as you start to use hardware flip or rotate functions, the need for your sprite to exhibit symmetry to avoid looking really strange means you have to keep any light sources from creating asymmetric shading. If you only flip horizontally this forces lighting to be somewhere along the centreline of the sprite. (basically front or back lit only) If it also flips vertically, then your lighting can really only be from directly in front or behind. This, by the way is a rule that applies not just to sprites and backgrounds created using CGI, but also those drawn using more traditional methods. So if you've ever looked closely at 16 bit games and wondered why they rarely show any sign of pre-baked directional lighting effects, now you know why; Doing so would restrict you from being able to flip tiles... However, I assume a lot of these problems are made a lot worse when you have only 15 colours for a sprite, (and even then have to share those 15 colours with other onscreen objects) I've certainly found it extremely difficult to get a pre-rendered object to look anything other than horrible when reduced to 256 colours or less, and that's with an optimised 256 colour palette! I'm honestly amazed anyone managed to use pre-rendered graphics on hardware with such extreme colour limitations, and have it not look considerably worse than it did. Personally I'd avoid pre-rendered graphics on anything that isn't at least capable of 16 bit colour, or at the very least, I'd be extremely cautious with the use of such graphics... The results rarely look pleasing. (I for one, consider the DKC series one of the uglier games around, especially in hindsight.)

Travelers Tales have done the impossible in many games... While most games boasts 2D excellence and explosions in just a 2D plane (or pretty smooth racing games like TopGear2, in example), they showed us the Genesis was way more capable of other developers were used to.

Papyrus Semi also Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier

Papyrus Semi and i forget ResQ (the 3D bonus stage still blows my mind, its like Star Fox but running on stock hardware)

Papyrus Semi I wish more developers treated their projects with this much care.

And Toy Story

@@retroboy-fh1ji What do they do again?

A lot of times, problems with compression and missmanagement of resourses is what makes games look or run like shit, because they literally think that the resources are unlimited. That's why we get stuff like Assassin's creed corpseface and the terrible PC ports of Batman games.

Sdudyoy Newton That's usually an unfortunate side effect of data streaming being faster than data decompression, it perversely results in faster loading and fewer stutters.

Good programmers still do tricks, because the better it performs means more possible customers. For example, in my game I am developing, I stop running AI code for creatures who are far enough away.

Devs need to go back to learning to compress things well, there is no reason DOOM should take up 50 GB in my storage space.

>Game devolpers these days don't even try to compress anything. What do you base that on? Modern games still have to workaround issues with the hardware like the maximum texture size a specific GPU supports etc.

Camo 64 Consequentially, they put more thought and effort into the design of the game and its longevity. For all the effort they put into it, they didn't want their product to be in a discount bin.

SonicMaster Sword oh don’t worry. I fully agree that gameplay is INFINITELY more important than graphics. But back in those days it would’ve gotten bonus points if it pushed a system to its limits as shown here. It’s too bad the original Genesis version of 3D Blast was subpar