*"We had a spoon, a box of matches, and a bottle of water. And we had to go into space. Here's how we did it."* Also, I'd like to see you explain the Daytoyna level in Toy Story, and why it couldn't be achieved on the SNES. Or explain in general how you got fully 3D models in that game.
*"Now, you might have noticed that the bottle is nothing more than the same slice repeated 360º. As such, we can get a much reduced weight for our rocket."*
Each match is a tiny explosive device, and as all matches are the same, we used the *same* match repeated many times until the correct thrust was achieved.
"You might be wondering how we managed space, then. The stars are actually just simple frames of animation. We reuse the same frames, but never in the same galaxy, so the effect looks entirely random while only using 8K of memory."
The background effect is the same one used in Axelay on the SNES. But over there it's touted as Mode 7 even though it's clearly not. Nonetheless it was the most amazing groundbreaking thing ever to happen in videogames if the magazines at the time were to be believed. Put the same effect but better on the Genesis and nobody seemed to care back then... though I certainly appreciated it. Thanks for the video!
Absolutely true. You guys (at Traveller's Tales) did an amazing job with the Genesis back in the day that wasn't really as appreciated as it should have been. I personally love Sonic 3D Blast (and Toy Story, and Mickey Mania), and would have loved to see more games from you on the Genesis. And also, is great to see Joe from Game Sack commenting here! Game Sack and GameHut are two of my favourite channels on RU-vid.
A great example of this is ".kkreiger"; it's almost a decade and a half old now, but using a lot of procedural and mathematical generation tricks, they were able to fit a light FPS game with (then) modern graphics, soundtrack, enemies, textured levels, and more into a single 96Kb file: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
Kinda depends on how literally you want to take that question. Nobody's going to do scaling today by pulling lines out of a texture. There's hardware that will do that for you with much less effort, probably at a considerable speed boost to copying bitmaps all over the place, and with much better results from all the clever smoothing algorithms and surface-aware lighting effects. If you change the focus of the question to be "what similar feats could one achieve with different, but equally clever programming?" Well... getting NPCs to act independently with decent AI isn't exactly nothing. Or particle physics. Or on-demand data streaming with open-world games. Modern developers can afford to relax on the graphical parlor tricks of the 90s, but they have a whole set of problems to solve that developers back then didn't even consider because it wouldn't have been remotely possible to achieve anyway. Appreciate what we've overcome, but also what we're overcoming. :-) People scoff at modern consoles when they're aren't able to calculate complex 3D scenes at a perfect 498 MILLION pixels per second. (4K @ 60FPS) I see that as a pretty lofty goal when that's over 124 times the data rate of games I grew up with -- and all those systems had to do was translate what was in VRAM to an analog signal.
I'm actually amazed at the talent of some programmers to fit games into less-capable hardware. The greatest exemple now is the Nintendo Switch. The Doom port is no small feat. And Super Mario Odyssey in itself is full of little tricks, optimizations, to make it run nice and smoothly on this little mobile chip.
I'd love to see some of these videos go into a bit more detail. Makes me realise how spoiled I am working with (pretty much) unlimited hardware resources
Most of these videos go over my head but I love the way you present the info. It's always fascinating It also puts in perspective what it takes to make a good game. A lot more creativity is required than I imagined
That's one of the great things about these videos. Even so-called software engineers (such as me) can appreciate how amazing this stuff is, and we *do* understand it :D I've said it before, and I'll keep on saying it. It's like magic. Even though you know it's magic, and even if you know how it's done, a good magician can still amaze you.
Honestly, I've always found these special stages pretty damn awkward, but it's reeaally impressive how they were made. Thanks for all these Secrets Revealed videos!
You know what's like them but more awkward? The Sonic 2 special stages and their pseudo-3d. The 3d Blast stages have certainly aged a bit better... Notably, the remake of 2 actually changes of the graphics at that part while leaving the rest of the game untouched more-or-less.
Yeah I can definitely understand your point, no worries there. Sonic 3D's special stages are definitely more impressive looking, I've just found the gameplay there to be very... finicky, or maybe flimsy or something like that.
@@hoodedman6579 Having played all the 5 classic Genesis ones (1, 2, 3, S&K, 3D) extensively throughout the nineties, I always thought Sonic 2's special stages were significantly better than all the rest. I really can't understand all this hate.
@@freddy2nt because it's the worst, everything about Sonic 2's special stage sucks, the way you enter them, how they are designed, the controls, tails...
@@joaonitro5149 It's a matter of taste I guess. People say sonic 3's special stages were the best, but I just hated them! The music, the rotation of the screen rather than the characters, the ever increasing pace, etc. felt nauseating to me.
This level is amazing. Looks like PS1 or Saturn. Great job! Sonic 3D Blast is so underrated. This is one of the most technically advanced game of 16 bit era - on par with Donkey Kong Country, Vectorman, Toy Story, etc. And no one talks about it, no one appreciates. It`s a shame.
What other things would we like explained? Well you were in the demoscene and it's an almost unending trove of neat effects and coding tricks. Maybe you want to focus on what you've worked on professionally, but there's only so much neat stuff in the Sonic games you've worked on. If I had to pick out one thing to start with, scroller effects were pretty popular in the 8 and 16 bit scenes so there should be a decent size audience for how those are done.
I was unsettled during this entire video because of the lack of Is the normal song in the background: Is That You or Are You You by Chris Zabriskie. It just changes the entire feel of the video.
I love watching this stuff, it's amazing to see how game developers dealt with very restrictive hardware back then but you guys definitely made the most of it!
Avan Madisen The Saturn could do transparency effects, but could only be achieved by people who knew the Saturn through and through since it was a nightmare to program for.
GameHut The far away elements were drawn using vdp2 color ram palettes AFAIK, so you just needed to tell the vdp2 to apply transparency on the sprite layer since the rest is using a vdp1 color look up table. It's rather easy in fact, but I guess most developpers didn't bother or couldn't fit their sprites' palettes within vdp2's 4 kb cram. I think it's also possible to flip the msb with the lookup table to make it getting drawn by vdp2, so either case it won't affect sprites drawn with vdp1 color palette. The only issue with vdp2 transparency on sprites is that you can't see quads that are behind since they are just overwritten in the framebuffer. Transparency can also be achieved with RGB direct color, but then I don't think it's possible to separate which sprites are being transparent. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong
Technically impressive, though I never really felt these special stages were anything to write home about gameplay-wise, unfortunately. A lot of people say the Saturn version absolutely killed it, though.
This is amazing, i always wondered about all the tricks that were used to create those effects. Please bring more great videos! Ps1 games would be interesting!
If the rings are just scaled sprites same as in Sonic 2. Can you not make them animated? I'd love to hear the reason why they were not animated. I often wondered about that when I was a kid.
This is honestly one of the coolest youtube channels i've ever seen. Please do some Lego Star Wars behind the scenes videos soon, that game was a huge chunk of my childhood!
These bonus stages are actually probably the best in the Sega Genesis series of Sonic games from a gameplay standpoint, I love them. Always impressed to learn more about how these older games somehow managed pseudo-3D gameplay while others struggled with decent controls on a flat, still 2D platform like Bubsy. The way these older games age really shows the strong design concepts and the talent of the programmers implementing them!
Title is accurate: I indeed guessed wrong, I thought it was a bigger cylindrical graphic trick like the MM moose chase! This is fascinating stuff to learn about, and the way you explain it makes it clear enough that I don't need to know coding terms to get the gist of it, so that's good. Do you think you could do a video on tools you used to playtest games, things like debug menus, or what prototype ROM carts were needed for? Seeing the back end of the game-making process is fascinating, and there's only so much the Cutting Room Floor wiki explains.
The way you talk about the game makes me appreciate it that much more and why I consider the Genesis Version to be a technological marvel. You had to put a lot into it and even while you cut corners, you cut corners but somehow you still got the intended effect of what you wanted...which is just brilliant. Nowadays most game companies cut corners for stupid reasons.
I'm impressed, as usual. Sure, when you start to learn about the fundamental techniques used on 8 and 16 bit systems to make the seemingly impossible happen, some of the magic is lost... But the appreciation for the technical challenges, and creative thinking these effects required never diminishes...
Amazing. I Would definitely like to see a video where you explain how you make your videos. How you separate the leyers, the background from the sprites, how you animate the textures and how they seem so perfect they could actually be generated by the real hardware and captured directly.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting/insightful as always! I'd like to hear about the fast development/port of the game to Saturn, or maybe the transparency effect to hide draw distance on Sonic R, or even the water of Sonic R.
I like how you devs have to do creative ways to squeeze the best of those ROM cartridges. Nowadays games are like 60~100Gb in space and they don't give a shit. Kudos for your channel Gamerhut
The furthest wood panels seem to be skipping the "right" horizontal lines too, as they appear darker, which helps with getting a good faked fog look to help with depth. The performance is impressive as well! Super slick.
Did you program the special stages in the PC version? Sense SEGA didn't use the special stages on the Saturn version (Yes I am aware that someone else at TT programed the Saturn version)
All of these graphic hacks are brilliant! You sure had to get creative to work around the hardware's limits, but seems to me you knew the Genesis like the back of your hand!
Hi Jon, I'd like you to do a 2 part video, where you give us details and examples in part 1, which allows us to argue about it in the comment section, then you reveal how it's actually done in part 2. No idea what the topic should be, just thought this might be a fun format.
I loved the Director's Cut! These bonus stages are great! Perfect blend of difficulty and fun. By far best bonus stages in the Genesis series. Sonic 2 ones still give me nightmares. (I wish I knew you could play Sonic 2 with Sonic or Tails alone through the options.) Great game!!
To this day, I'm still boggled by the bonus zones on Sonics 1 (the rotating maze), 2 (the halfpipe), and 3 (blue spheres). Although I know you probably had nothing to do with these games, maybe you could provide some insight as to how it was done or how you would pull off the same trick on a Genesis. Keep up the awesome work!
It seems a whole lot of your workarounds involved using animated images (often from prerendered original models created on Silicon Graphics workstations and the like that were converted to sprites or tiles), and certainly far more than I ever would have thought.
While this is my least favorite Sonic Special Stage overall (I really had no trouble getting the emeralds in them), it is an amazingly thought out concept when you look behind the scenes.
It feels like this whole game is "You see, it looks like a full 3D model, but if we take this single pixel, swap its palette, mirror it and repeat it, we can make it seems like its the whole model! Very clever!" Damn, I love this channel.
I wouldn't mind an more in depth discussion of the inner workings of some of those early coder demos. Failing that, a list of games that you worked on so that I can study them to ask probing questions :)
Were these tricks also used in Puggsy? I recall its credits mentioning some of the tricks used. I'd love to see some more videos on that game, it's hands down my all time favourite Genesis game and one of my favourite games in general. It was incredibly advanced technically compared to other titles on the platform and the soundtrack was amazing. It really deserved more praise and recognition.
As soon as you explained the background I could see where it was going with the path. My god the things programmers were able to do with so LITTLE. Just makes me wonder wtf game companies are doing nowadays.
I would love a fully functioning game of this style on the genesis. I've always felt that through this still you can make what feels like an open world "3d" experience on a system that otherwise wouldn't be able to handle it. And clearly if anyone can do it, it would be you. God bless my friend.
I'm wondering if there's another youtuber out there that worked at nintendo, mainly on the snes. That way I can see how different the tricks they used are. (and get more content of this type because I consume it faster than you can make it!)
Thanks for the video! Could you tell us about Contra, Gunstar Heroes or that Batman game (the one with more special effects)? Or at least how rotation was made in Genesis.
Would love to hear more about crash Bandicoot and your works with naughty dog Did you have anything to do with they're later works like Jak and Daxter?
The planks show off a great trick for getting texture-map-style graphics with minimal CPU usage. In the Atari 2600 demo where I used the trick, I was limited to ten different horizontal slices from 1 to 48 pixels in multiples of 2 (240 slices total) but a 16-bit processor could handle more. If you could do the "Mickey 3d" palette trick at the same time, had slices which arranged the 15 colors in a variety of ways, that would allow a "sideways" raycasting game to be handled in real time at 60fps with CPU time to spare. Perhaps something like a platformer where left and right are replaced with fore and aft, and where a non-isometric camera points down and away. Any idea if anything like that has been done on the Genesis?
Neat! I always assumed that the path was just a straight line of static tiles using vertical scaling; like the background, but with horizontal offsets on each scanline. Could that method have been used, or would it have been too processor-intensive? (Or was the Genesis even able to "scale" two background layers at once?)
Very interesting, but for once I am left with questions on how you achieved it. I know you put a lot of work into these videos, and that it's not easy to explain complex technical achievements. I just don't completely get, which lines are drawn where (for the path), and how you ended up figuring out which lines went where.
I actually imagined this was it for the background, considering how it seems to stretch it's downside. But not only I had no idea that was how the wooden bridge was made, I also still have no idea 'cause I didn't get it at all.
Interesting...I was curious about the Sonic 3D Blast special stage...it's strange how the path is made; I would've thought with how stretched the dither pattern with the parts Sonic jumps up is, that it was just the ground pieces with scanlines repeated but it's its own graphics...interesting. This reminds me of videos of this game being corrupted; When it is, the path Sonic runs on becomes like a top-down view. I wonder if that's what the path looks like that you take chunks of when generating the path ahead of Sonic?
I stand corrected: some rumour I heard long ago was that the special stages were made separately by Sega and glued into the final ROM. But in hindsight this could only be your doing, it's unmistakably demoscene-style graphics (and it's _playable_ on top of that!) Never really appreciated how cool all this stuff really was as a kid.
This reminds me: Do you have any information on the Sonic Saturn or Sonc Xtreme prototypes that they had, considering they wanted to use its assets for the bonus stage? Or do you have fewer resources regarding the Sega Saturn version of the game?
