Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Ton]

Wow, you sure tackle a lot of things at once.

I think putting a sample together of the way a sprite of background was intended to look is just fine. I did it in one of my Chrono Trigger Black Omen sheets. Just make sure you include the unaltered one from the game as well and label them.

[Paraemon]

Wow, you sure tackle a lot of things at once.

I think that the more I try to tackle in one hit, the less I have to worry about later. Though this has been quite counter-productive lately, along with other things.

I think putting a sample together of the way a sprite of background was intended to look is just fine. I did it in one of my Chrono Trigger Black Omen sheets. Just make sure you include the unaltered one from the game as well and label them.

Understood, I'll cross that bridge later on. Thanks!

Alright, so I don't have really all that much to show and tell, but I'm making progress on updating the Get Blue Spheres sets from Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (these two sheets are just examples that will be part of a more full collection, just showcasing them because they're finished).
 

And while charting out the Act 1 Map for Mystic Cave Zone, I figured I ought to get the objects.



Before I sign off, some observations I've made:
- Angel Island Zone: The intro scene when playing as Sonic is, well, much different than we see up on TSR. I believe where the sand meets the ocean has some sort of 2.5D effect in operation, and there are waves that crash upon the beach that we don't really see in game because of Super Sonic zip-zooming past it. Further investigation shall be undertaken regarding the coastline, but the waves are confirmed.

- Sandopolis Zone: Why there hasn't been an update to that zone in some time. When I dropped it off the schedule, it was because it took too much time to segregate the Pyramid from what it was 'parallaxing' over. After looking at it recently in the VDP, both "layers" are one and the same; taking into account the fact that there is the Heat Haze effect that perpetually animates the (foreground and) background, this means that there is a minimum of 1024 combinations in place for the Pyramid parallax system. By comparison, four or five renditions of the Act 2 background, each accounting for the level of lighting and transition in-between, is much simpler.

- Marble Zone: So the interior background is different in both Acts 2 and 3. I'll get to those soon enough.

- Tidal Tempest (Present): Continues to be a nightmare. While it's entirely easy to get the volcanoes blowing their load in the distance, charting out the extent of that part of the background is an exercise in frustration. Likewise with the Labyrinth Zone-esque background lower in the Present acts, but I have found that the transition between the volcano background and the brick background allows for their respective palettes to overlap.

- Carnival Night(mare) Zone: I've yet to confirm it, but considering my issue with Sandopolis as above, there is a possibility that the city that is affected by the parallax falls under the same 'many combinations' to the tiles that construct it. Unlike Sandopolis, though, since it is a lot easier to cut out because of the lack of a Heat Haze effect, I will stick to the original plan I had for the sheet to the background parallax and do the cutting out separation. While I continue to make remarks on this stage, I can confirm that I've had relative success and getting the parallax for everything above the city in the background. The city parts are definitively for a week where I am literally doing nothing.

In all, it's like Sonic Team anticipated the games being ripped and made it as difficult as possible. That being said, I've found something of a solution to my Sonic CD Special Stage issue, but my problem now is palettes.

[Paraemon]

Just a quick update.



From the 510 Beta of Sonic CD, the Zone 1 (Past) Background of Metallic Madness, torn down into parallax sections and this time with handy cycling palette notes (I can't get a full frame-by-frame-per-second breakdown since I can only seem to activate slow motion in the Sonic 2 Betas and S3K). From what I read on TCRF, this palette is specific only to that time period and zone, and by the looks of things, from trying to see if I could follow the bottom-most section to see if there was more than just 2x2 block lights, the background changes completely between Zones 1 and 2.

Mystic Cave Act 1's map is near completion. The long overdue update for that stage is close at hand.

[Ton]

Wow, the breakdown is really detailed. Nice work!

[Paraemon]

Thanks man! 

I've been messing about here and there with game content, seeing what can be easily gotten while I'm bouncing about between offline stuff. Today's update has two pieces.

First, a pretty much complete foreground  set for the Sonic 1 Special Stage. After a very much elongated attempt at seeing how many fishes there were in slow motion, I found out that, in the Japanese Version at least, the programmers structured the Special Stage to not transition between bird and fish when observing in slow-motion. Pause the game and try to advance the transitioning frames, and nothing happens at all. Pause the game and advance the birds or fishes? Infinite scrolling creatures. So I just let the game naturally return to the birds and counted the pairs that scrolled by, and found that 20 appear on screen in full before shifting to the fishes.

As for why it's the 'foreground', the stage maps themselves consist entirely of sprites, and the background is either the clouds or the bubbles depending on which creature is on laid over them. Notes for this particular sheet shall come later.

 

And where I currently am with getting the map for Hydrocity Act 1. I'm removing the waterfall from the map(s) and dealing with it later when it comes to the 128x128 blocks.

[Superjustinbros]

I love how massively detailed this Hydrocity 1 rip is going, very well done!

[Paraemon]

Thank you kindly! 

Advice Request Time
So I'm trying to rip the background of Star Light Zone, and there is a huge problem with the night sky section. To put it simply, the sky part of the background operates in 2.5D, in Japanese and US versions, but there doesn't seem to be enough of the rotary in place to get a full loop; this is the extent of the issues:

1. Each act has a different length, meaning that the rotary stops dead at different positions.

2. Different altitudes in the acts changes the formulation of the 2.5D, meaning a different amount of frames when exploring the extent of the rotary.

3. The beginning of the rotary never shows up again after being seen in the top-left corner of the background.

The most optimal way I can rip the night sky is by keeping it static and just leaving it as a parallax section like the rest of the background, and place on the sheet notes for users to feel free to change star positions along the horizontal axis as they see fit. Would this be suitable for the collection release?

Other info (show and tell coming next post):
Map ripping initiated for Spring Yard Zone Act 1 and Marble Garden Zone Act 2.
The Object sheet for Labyrinth Zone is getting an upgrade, as will eventually to the Badnik sheet.

The Cloud/Bubble background of the Sonic 1 Special Stage is about a third complete, in terms of palettes.

[Paraemon]

Bigger than regular update!

Sonic 1

First up, I've begun progress on one of the tougher backgrounds of the original game. Green Hill seems to, based on what I've properly seen on Acts 1 and 3, have different layouts for the mountainous backdrop in each act, so each act will get individual sheets ala the indoor backgrounds for Marble Zone and the differing backdrops of Scrap Brain Zone.

 

As I mentioned previously, I've upgraded the Objects sheet for Labyrinth Zone; I'll do a similar thing for Scrap Brain Zone Act 3, since it has its own underwater palette. The enemy sheet is 99.75% done, I'm just missing two tiles. I'll release the updated collection in time, once I've got several more Sonic 1 collections finished.

 

Marble Zone Act 3's map is finally complete; it basically took a full day to do due to issues with tile alignment. Fun fact, there is a bit of extra content at the very end of the map that I found through plane explorer. Worry not, it's recolored to the standard the rest of the sheets are in.



Advice no longer required, I just did my own thing after waiting around. Star Light Zone's background is now broken down into parallax sections, and I'll add the notes for the stars later (ripping the individual tiles will be too time-consuming and amount to thousands upon thousands of the buggers). This now just leaves Scrap Brain Zone Act 1 and the Green Hill acts' backgrounds to finish ripping.



Sonic CD

So, after all my plight of not being able to rip certain parts of Sonic CD due to some weird stretching going on, something somehow changed and allowed me to get such parts.

And this is not one of those parts. Out of sheer bemusement, I decided to rip all the frames (since it's Sega CD and not Sega PC, the FMVs are sprite based) from the opening and ending FMVs for Sonic CD. I had planned on doing this a couple of weeks ago, but I figured I might as well do it while I was getting the Time Stones. Right now, I'm just working on the Bad Ending. Bizarrely, the FMVs crash in what I assume is the moment they're meant to fade out and return to the title screen, so I'm operating under the pure assumption that all the frames have ripped, and I don't intend to make a second run through of the rips.



Special Stage 6 is one of the two more difficult stages to rip the backgrounds from, so for now, the buildings are the only thing I've managed to extract, as the endless motioned rainbow background is a frame by frame process.



And voila, the Time Stones! This sheet won't take long to finish, but it'll be released in an eventual collection of all Special Stage content.



I've finally decided to brave the Zone 1 Present background of Tidal Tempest. The volcanoes only appear in this act, and I need to explore the layout for Zone 2 Present's background. The Labyrinth Zone-esque brick backgrounds utilise the outdoors palette to a certain point, so I'm tackling that (about 5 out of 7 max) first before actually dealing with the volcano animations, the subsequent glowing shifts, and the underwater palette for the lower background.



The 510 prototype background for Tidal Tempest Past. Most of the dry version is the same as the final, but I figured I should at least grab the Flubber-coated version.



And finally, from the 510 prototype, the Present background for Wacky Workbench (Zone 1?). The left image is a result of the bouncy floor triggering a light flash, which appears at certain positions, and the right image is the proper palette. Animations need to be observed since, like the flash, they operate when moving in debug to certain positions.

 

[Ton]

Holy cow! I'm really loving that Labyrinth Zone sheet, especially. Awesome work all around!

[Paraemon]

Thanking you as always, man! 

Since I've been able to have access to the Special Stage backgrounds proper, I've not hesitated to get some base content that for some reason isn't up on TSR already. That being said, I've broken down the parallax set up for the third and seventh Special Stages, which show case how complicated it can get. Hopefully the construction notes make sense. I've initiated the same set up for the first and second Stages. I've already covered an aspect like this in Launch Base and Mushroom Hill, and know that it exists in both acts of Carnival Night and Ice Cap.



And there's only been a little more progress on the sixth Stage. Remember way, way back when that I said Sonic & Knuckles' background has 800 frames that cycle through a very succinct motion of diagonal blocks and colors? The sixth Special Stage of Sonic CD has 2932 actual frames before restarting the cycle; the two frames on the sheet are explained as loading the animation proper. Naturally, this sheet shall take quite a while before it gets complete.



And it would be quite apropos that I discuss the issue I face with the first Special Stage's animated background; I'll say it simply, this sheet here doesn't actually properly articulate the motions of the background nor does it really showcase the shifting shapes. Yes, I said I've begun the first sheet's background, but bear with me. As I mentioned just a few seconds ago, Stage 6 has nearly 3000 frames of animation, but with double that amount, I cannot yet find a loop point to the cycle for the first Stage's background. I expect to be able to resolve this issue, but maybe not before September.

The background sheets for Stages 2 and 4 will be similar to the set up as seen above for 3 and 7, and 6 will be rolled out similar to the original release for Glowing Spheres, in perhaps two-four sheets at the minimum to account for the high amount of frames. 5, on the other hand, has a complexity similar to that of 2.5D archs during the Mushroom Hill Act 2 Boss, but won't actually take all that long to put together.

As I mentioned Launch Base earlier, I've started re-exploring the structure for the collection I'm working on for it, and broken down the background sheets to they reflect the acts, much like what I'm doing with Green Hill, Marble and Scrap Brain. Act 1's background sheet is complete and Act 2's is still under development because of the base of the Death Egg still being unfinished; assuming I take a break from Sonic CD content, I can try get the wheels rolling on that.

And I might as well put these out there. I've got the icons for the rest of the stages for Sonic 1 ready, but since I don't know and can't say when the related collections will be actually released, I'll stick them here for now.

  
  

[Paraemon]

Today's update consists of three items.

To begin with, the fourth Special Stage background from Sonic CD. I'm kind of glad in a way that the dithered clouds don't parallax behind or in front of the islands, because else that would've been a nightmare and the sheet wouldn't have been finished today.



Progress on re-ripping the content from the Sonic CD title screen, a la the way I ripped the title screen for Sonic 3. Pretty much everything is set to be compiled; there are 178 frames for the cloud animation behind Sonic and the medallion. 



And it's been quite a while since I did anything with this, but I can finally state that I've worked out the issue with the 2.5D water surface of Hydrocity Act 1 (and Launch Base Act 2, but the refraction effect slows any meaningful work on it). The max height is 96 pixels, all that's left to get now is each Y-axis difference and corresponding underwater object, and unlike the parallax breakdown, I won't be cutting down the horizontal differences for the 2.5D blocks since each individual row of pixels moves. The corresponding notes will appear on the sheet later.

[Paraemon]

I've managed to work out the extent of the 2.5D water surface, and how it works with reference to the background. I just now need to color check everything, since there's three combinations for the underwater palette surface set.

Anyway, here's a thing I decided to trial. It takes a lot more time as I have to resize every cap to 1x size (I get them at double and manipulating the window to this size doesn't work out as well as it should), and then align everything while trying to avoid animated content. Everything is still basically a sprite, but if it's not interactive like Sonic and the continue medals, it's a lot more difficult to dissect, since it seems to be JPEG'd. I'll just touch on this version of 3D on an as-and-when basis, since the difficulty eclipses those of the stages I find frightening enough in the other games I'm working on.

[Ton]

You're adding another game to your list?! O_O

Loving that Hydro City BG.

[Superjustinbros]

I love that Sonic CD title rip, especially for how crazy in-depth it is.

[Paraemon]

Thanks guys, I'll have an update for them both soon! 

You're adding another game to your list?! O_O

Hahaha, why not. I keep considering the Advance games but I'm still finding out so much about the older bunch that I might as well stick to those. Though I have technically already started on Sonic 3D, I can place it into two sub-projects: SD (Genesis) and HD (Saturn).

Today's update is one item, but the sheet is huge so it's justified. I've finally solved the Sandopolis Act 1 issue, and instead of dissecting the Pyramid from the dunes, or go at them through the VDP, it was easier just to grab each alternate pixel shift (32) as it was affected by the Heat Haze (which will be upto 32 rows including the sky fused section). I'm 1/16 done with the core content of the Pyramid/Dune fused section, and once I've got the parallax solved then I can color fix the static frames on the far right of the sheet (these were taken from Plane Explorer that lacks the raw palette, hence the inverted color set). Notes have been added early too.