Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Ton]

It's good to have them available disassembled because people may want to use them out of context; Rhinobot without the dust or that worm thing without all the blue effects all over it. It gives people an option.

This is also how those enemies are stored in the game's data. They aren't coded to have these effects over them. That happens when you play the game.

[Paraemon]

I'll be including the parts anyway (Bloominator is very simple to split up so I left it as is), but the full versions where possible without construction notes would be a nice addition, no?

[Ton]

Of course. I think the option is always nice.

[Paraemon]

I like resolutions. 

Another WIP, with notes on when/how the Emeralds appear. I'm not sure about including the Emeralds from the Special Stages and defer the appearance there to another sheet - I can't figure out how to rip the 13th and 14th frames of the Emeralds in the Special Stage anyway, as the characters obscure these with their bodies; I've tried reconstructing the 14th frame, since that has the most visible information, but without the "back" of the sprite, I can't complete it. Trying to effect this in VDP results in character and emerald being removed from the board in unison.

The Red Master Emerald? Found by ORKAL in this glitch video. I can't enact the glitch myself, due to the human problem of having two hands, but there's a small orb in the Emerald Shrine area of Hidden Palace that reflects two glowing animations: the Master Emerald, and the little red lights earlier in the stage. When not activating the Robotnik cutscene, the orbs are red, and are green when you activate Robotnik. Putting 2 and 2 together, it made sense that the red lights contain the palette for the glitched Master Emerald; some green remains, but carefully looking at the video shows that it remains where it does.



And here's current work on a new Knuckles' sheet. Did you know? Knuckles has two other colours just before he attacks Super Sonic in the intro, seen only with the foreground layer disabled. And while it's not yet on the sheet, Knuckles has a golden Super/Hyper palette (albeit garbled but possibly fixable) in the prototypes, and cycling through Debug mode in Mushroom Hill Act 1, he has a purple palette that spawns Butterdroids.

With regard to the 70+ Emerald-juggling sprites; I'll edit these down to include one or two Emeralds as a sample animation. They're just placeholding as a reminder on what to do.

[Ton]

Keep in mind, much of the stuff, like throwing bombs or juggling emeralds, is made up of many separate parts. They can be listed on the sheet as found in the game data and recreated to the user's liking.
Capturing every pixel-perfect difference between frames is an exhausting and mostly unnecessary exercise. As with the enemies, having each effect and object separately is the way to go.

[Paraemon]

Keep in mind, much of the stuff, like throwing bombs or juggling emeralds, is made up of many separate parts. They can be listed on the sheet as found in the game data and recreated to the user's liking.

The bomb throwing, to what I see, is only a few frames before it's completely detached from Knuckles, and like the Bloominator's projectile arc, it would be pointless to frame by frame the bomb's arc through the air, especially since you can't see the off-screen section its in.

Capturing every pixel-perfect difference between frames is an exhausting and mostly unnecessary exercise. As with the enemies, having each effect and object separately is the way to go.

Which is why, in the case of Monkey Dude and Caterkiller Jr (and others as I get to them), they will be broken up with construction notes and bare basic examples as opposed to full frame by frame animation. This is the sole reason I did not include the rising "elimination line" from Glowing Spheres - the animation is far more changeable than the rest of the objects and has the most minute differences; to actually include it on the sheet would likely put the vertical size of sheet into the higher single-digit thousands - all the objects for this are in the micro "item" spheres anyway.

This is why I'm removing around 50 or so frames to simplify the juggling animation (it took me two days to extract them from the rip images, in part due to wanting to focus on other things). I can keep the full amount on a separate file, but a sample animation wouldn't hurt, and then put up notes for if someone wants to recreate the full seven Emerald juggling.

[Ton]

Yeah, I made the same mistake years ago trying to capture a Kirby dance frame-by-frame. After I finished, I realized I could have just put the individual frames on a sheet and let the person using the sheet arrange them however they wanted.

[Paraemon]

Now that I'm not as stupid as "stuff" like I was when I woke up and first responded to Dolphman earlier, I can now actually respond to his query in a more level-headed manner. My apologies on the "attack attack attack" response, I'm obviously not very diplomatic when fresh and have removed the original response.

I think to avoid replacing my Badnik sheets, we both have parts and assembled sheets. That sound alright to you guys?

I'm down for that, if you don't mind me adding in the KMOD palette to your already in-place sheet?

Due to the awkward nature in which I'm building my sheets and including notes, I'll be making the Badnik sheets zone by zone instead of lumped all in one like your parts sheet.

[Paraemon]

Minor update, which somewhat reflects the updated first post.

Sandopolis Zone Act 1 Background; Heat Haze Effect
By the Seven, this is far from going to be anything easy. As is shown, I have one particular, near-complete frame of the Heat Haze effect. The haze works on an animation cycle of 32 frames; I don't have the static background without the effect yet. Further to the splits, as opposed a full vertical section, I broke it up based on Parallax. I may later expand on the smaller blocks to fit better with the large blocks.

Launch Base Zone Act 1. Linked due to needless but unavoidable empty space, due to the inter-connectivity and/or extent of the lake-based construction site. Knuckles' version is pending, and there is another section of background that can be glitched in when debugging with Knuckles, as far as I know (yet to be included). Parallax in progress.

Slot Machine Bonus Stage. Linked due to size. This includes all the objects present in that bonus stage; I've had this sitting around for a month. I cannot find any way of getting the Super Sonic icon that's supposedly meant to exist in this stage, and will not include it until I have outstanding evidence of its in-game existence and the authentic palette.

[Ton]

That Super Sonic icon is probably in the ROM somewhere.

What do you think about splitting the stages into backgrounds/foregrounds, if necessary?

[Paraemon]

I agree, it probably is, but neither Sonic Retro or the Cutting Room Floor say how to get at it. I think it requires a way of getting into the data that I have no idea about how to pull off.

As for splitting the fore- and backgrounds into separate sheets, I'm open to the following options:

1. They're united on an act-specific sheet. This will make the sheets uber-huge along the lines of the Sonic CD foreground & background sheets, which my computer at present may not handle. Included with these will be the stage-specific objects.

2. I separate the foreground chunks based on stage, and place the stage backgrounds for both acts (or all three a la Lava Reef Zone) on their individual sheets. I include the stage-specific objects on the background sheets to boost content.

3. Similar to how I uncovered the alternate Badnik palettes in the Boss areas, I can check and find alternate palettes for state-specific objects, and those that have different palettes will contribute to upgraded versions of Dolphman's sheets, if he's cool with that. From there, I would then continue with one of the previous options for the foregrounds and backgrounds.

[Dolphman]

GENS has a VDP viewer where you can browse the data. This is how I've ripped the majority of sprites I did.


What you use are the keys on the right side of the keyboard.
* scrolls through palettes.
- and + scroll up and down the data.
On the letter keys, X toggles to show the in-game scene. It also triggers a way of changing from underwater palettes.
There's probably more keys. Best to find a documentation about the VDP viewer via Googling.
Works for Sega CD games as well. Not sure about 32X though.

[Paraemon]

GENS has a VDP viewer where you can browse the data. This is how I've ripped the majority of sprites I did.

[image]

What you use are the keys on the right side of the keyboard.
* scrolls through palettes.
- and + scroll up and down the data.
On the letter keys, X toggles to show the in-game scene. It also triggers a way of changing from underwater palettes.
There's probably more keys. Best to find a documentation about the VDP viewer via Googling.
Works for Sega CD games as well. Not sure about 32X though.

This is fascinating and gives me a range of stuff to test out for today. Thank you kindly.

[Paraemon]

Not exactly an update, I haven't done any proper work today because life and trying to make sense of the VDP (I found out how to get the full Emerald sprites from the Special Stages! ). But I've been mulling over, for a while now, how to design the stage-specific sheets, and came up with a simple corner-piece for the sheets, like so:



The corner-piece uses, with the exception of the blue-grey border, a full Raw palette. The red section indicates the zone's appearances, and the icon is just a fancy inclusion for the stage the sheet is built out of. I'm considering making up corner-pieces for sheets that lack icons like the levels do.

[Paraemon]

Well, I feel like a bit of an ass, having already submitted the sheet, but thanks to Dolphman pointing out how to use the VDP, and a couple of inconsistencies on the original sheet, I've updated and improved the quality of the Data Select and Menus sheet, with the missing Result object (found in VDP, looks like it's leftover Sonic 2 data like the 2P menu), more false colors for the S2 icons found by cycling through the menu in the opposite direction, and a Raw-only palette (excluding anything in the information box in the bottom right).