Hidden Secrets of Sonic 3's Special Stage Revealed 

Its good but pallet swapping to save memory seems to be used all over the place on 2D 8-bit and 16-bit games. Waterfalls are the most impressive to me, but the chequered ball is also good too.

indeed!

*palette Yes!

@@tensevo Water, fire… many of the things we'd use particle engines for today are more efficiently implemented using palette tricks in the old days. (Water sparkles, twinkling starfields, fades of sky from daytime to nighttime, …) Writing my own video codec (which was *essentially* a stream of PNG frames using 1-bit transparency to exclude areas from update in the given frame) I also allowed each frame to define a new palette, if needed. As a result, some components of any given encoded animation are encoded purely as palette changes, given sufficient availability in the palette.

The Amiga makes great use of cyclic palette for animation in loads of games and demos.

Chrono Trigger on SNES, 1995: 4 Megabytes (MB) Chrono Trigger on Steam, 2018: 588 MB

@@romusz got to collect all the user information.

@@kkgt6591 From what Ive read, they say its due to the filesize of the uncompressed music tracks.... which sounds like crap to me, but whatever. :p

@@romusz don't know, even a simple android app keeps pushing updates every week without any noticeable improvement or changes. The developer assumes that the user has all the space in the world.

​@@romusz Several audio players (Winamp, foobar2000 and ZXTune to name a few) can play .SPC files (the closest thing to a modular music format for Super Nintendo music), all of which, when dumped from original or hardware-compatible games, are always 64 KB each. You could implement the source code of an SPC playback engine into your modern game. I suppose it's a different story for remastered/remixed tracks though.

It's almost non special anymore, because the entire god damn sound design with every bit of Sonic 3 is marvelous!

Yeah. Also, that username of yours is in fact a username.

Sonic music in general does that to you. For instance, firstly I buy the Crush 40 album 'Driving Through Forever' for my iPad... next thing I know I'm downloading Dreams of an Absolution, and then as many Sonic songs as I can!

It's just like, it's just like, a mini, mall!

The thing is that it wasn't originally for Sonic 3. It was for an unreleased sonic Tetris like game called Sega Sonic Bros

The yellow sphere was used nowhere in Sonic 3.

@Giova I think it may have been used in Sonic & Knuckes, if it wasn’t used in Sonic 3.

@@everardogarcia6047 It was, in fact, used in Sonic & Knuckles.

The green and pink spheres were in fact used in Mania.

@@giovannidotgen there was a yellow/orange sphere that would spring you forward. If I recall this was added in S&K

Not to mention that most of the main gameplay uses a pseudo-3D effect a lot like the tricks he used to make the backgrounds in Toy Story's platformer levels.

From same Developer there's also Adventure of Batman and Robin on Genesis. And it has some crazy effects in spots. Especially in Mad Hatter levels.

Sonic cd is my fav but the special stage has to be the worse one

@@Mikey-zj8bn you clearly haven't played the modern Sonic special stages. Like Lost World 3DS.

@@toopienator well yea who would play sonic after sonic adventure 1 that was the last good one

@@Mikey-zj8bn fair point.

Yes please explain the whole "lock on " thing.

100 X 0 = 0

@@blap721 Just because you suck at it doesn't mean it's bad, how come this certain game has rom hacks (s3 special stage edit, blue shares plus.) kiaso levels and more. Grow up and stop being such a hater

oh hey look its nick robinson

today a crapton of video goes into video games too it's just that nobody talks about it in-depth outside of things like SIGGRAPH

8bit guy did a video on oldschool graphics, and originally, you couldn't even load a full screen with a 16 color pallet into RAM without using tricks.

Necessity being the mother of invention was the rule of the day.

Modern ones get less respect because they are crude - the use straight forward codecs for audio and video. They treat memory very reckless, where game take up GYGABITES of memory. Game engines are pre-made, things are whole lot simpler. Their coding is sloppy, because the engine has allot of fool-proof securities that forgive allot of things to coders.

@@digimaks don't generalize things there still are games made from scratch on engines made in-house, sometimes specifically for the game, like in the case of literally every single game that Media Molecule has ever made

what about the blue sphere secret game when putting sonic 1 inside sonic and knuckles

Even the soundtrack on AB&R is so constantly great!! Just played it again after a few years and it is a blaster!

You can't do much tricks to compress 50mb 8-layers HD textures besides general compression. Modern games do use a lot of optimization tricks and push hardware to the limit while rendering, even one modern game can fill up entire book describing techniques. But you cannot compress HD assets further. If you have hours of dialogues you can remove some audio channels, but you can't compress them too much.

@@friendlylaser Pretty much, gamers tend to not realise just how much space highly detailed maps, textures and 3D models can use up, even with aggressive compression.

When he revealed the animation by switching palettes my jaw dropped. I don’t think I have the intelligence to thought of such a clever technique. In English. Never mind actually coding it.

@@jonweinraub it was a fairly well known technique at the time, you'd palette swap a lot because it's an easy way to add content sometimes sacrificing only a few colours for a totally new image.

I didn't. Just last year I started a class in coding, and am currently learning web development, and I know soon enough I'll work my way up to knowing what it takes to code a game myself, because I have a soul filled with DETERMINATION.

I also dreamed of designing games as a kid but the fact that it's difficult didn't stop me, and for a while I just overanalyzed my favourite games to get an educated guess on how it works, and later when I actually learned how to program started to implement those ideas to see if they work or not, and am now working towards starting a full project using my skills you shouldn't give up

@@TorutheRedFox I liked art a lot growing up, and once I realized that you didn't just "draw" all the sprites and levels and stuff, all the computer stuff bored me... I use computers everyday now (as a machinist, and also for hobbies like audio recording)😆

I'm not encouraging anyone to give up on their dreams. It just turned out that my dreams changed over time. 😉

@@scramblesthedeathdealer and what about graphic design / 3d modeling and not the programming itself, did you consider that back then?

yeah

All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle.

What color is the dress?

They are brown and orange, it's a scripting mistake

@@titanic_monarch796 Brown is just orange in context

i mean, brown is a shade of red

no brown is orange with context

This is actually Gamehut's second channel, if you wearnt aware.. :) But yeah, I found this in my recommended, so it may catch on

For the storing the special stage thing, if you mean how the stages are stored in the ROM, it could literally just be a 2D grid which denotes what sphere is on an area.

It's just animated tiles. Even the NES does it.

Me too... 🤔

I think it wasn't that difficult, as the Mega CD has dedicated hardware for sprite scaling and rotation. But the stock Mega Drive lacks these hardware features, so they had to work around these limitations.

Mode 7? Or the Sega equivalent? The CD add-on could have chips installed the basic Mega Drive was lacking.

It also supports system link. Yes, really.

It actually supports sloped floors as well, and if you can clip into an elevator door you can see both levels at once as you move between them.

I have an entire book on the subject of these kinds of engines written in 1994 - it speculates as to how Doom works, but since the source code wasn't yet available, their guesses were quite wrong. Still, they came up with a variety of techniques for extending a raycasting engine to do the kind of things Doom did. As it turns out, Doom isn't based around raycasting... But that doesn't mean there aren't other possible approaches that get similar results. (one example is the build engine powering Duke Nukem 3d - that's a portal based engine, and as a result can do some weird tricks Doom cannot... Still similar overall though...)

for me it depends on what version of mania you have. i first bought the ps3 version in which I felt the special stages were unplayable because of a slight delay when you turned. and you can believe me if i say I played these stages to death in 1994 (hint: just watch my videos. hint, hint. xD). on switch they fixed this issue, where I could get all the emeralds properly. still don't know what exactly they messed up, but there's surely something off on ps3.

Yeah, that's pretty typical for games, owing to the fact that it's really easy to code. Ironically, you can in fact map that onto 3d geometry, it just doesn't look like a sphere.. If you wrap a 2d area the way games frequently do in one axis only, you've created a world that's cylindrical. The worlds that allow traversal across both axes are actually mapping onto a toroid (donut) shaped world in 3d... So, every time you see a game do this, what you're actually witnessing is something taking place on the surface of a donut. xD

Chaotix uses no tricks. The special stage uses 3D polygons, who is what the 32X can do my itself. And the bonus stages uses pixel scalling, who is what the 32X can do it by itself. The difference between the 32X and the stock Mega Drive / Genesis is the latter can't work with polygon or scalling. The purpose of this channel is to show the tricks to make games overcomme the system's limitations with clever programing tricks. One example is with Burning Rangers for the Sega Saturn. The Saturn can't work with transparent objects by itself, but Yuji Naka make the Saturn display transparent objects with the creation of a dedicated code inside the game.

@@miasuke damn

miasuke Keep in mind that the 32X can’t pull off those aforementioned effects in hardware, every bit of graphics on the 32X’s side is rendered in software to a framebuffer

@@Jamie-yp7qz So, in that case, it's a case to explain how the 32X works, and not a specific game exceeding the 32X power. But I would love to see an explanation of this thing, but I think Jon created a game for the 32X before (not under the TT Games label... Maybe a personal demo...).

@DejaVoodooDoll Again: The Sega Genesis was not build to offer polygons or scalling sprites by its own power. To a Sega Genesis game offer scalling or polygons without the help of a dedicated chip or processor, a specific code must me writed to make the genesis display this kind of effect, or use smart program tricks to create an illusion of such effect. It's like the example of the Sega Saturn displaying transparent sprites in Burning Rangers I comented before. A demo of Star Fox and F-Zero for the Genesis was made using the stock console by just making use of the fast Genesis processor with a proper code (who is different of a system who have a dedicated processor / component to do this job). Jon creted many programming codes to make the games he worked to offer something exceed the expectation of what the system can do, like the Genesis displaying more colors than its limit... Many other effects other systems can do from that time, the Sega Genesis was able to do it with a dedicated programing code or trick, like zoom and MODE7. In the 32X case, the porpose of the system is to offer Arcade-like games to the Sega Genesis. Polygons are present in 32X games since day 1, as Virtua Racing Deluxe and Star Wars Arcade. Scalling object are present in 32X games since day 1, as After Burner Complete and Space Harrier. But, again, I would like to know a programmer like Jon deal with the 32X when programming games for the system. But the purpose of Coding Secrets is to revell as "the impossible was possible". Want an example? I would like Jon could explain how *Panorama Cotton* works...