Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Paraemon]

I feel like every post from me in this topic is me saying "Holy crap," but... holy crap.

Haha, I get what you're saying. I have the same reaction when I learn more about the content I'm grabbing at.



So that's the true color (Raw palette) for Ice Cap Act 2's floe background, once night over the glaciers has given way to sunlight when Big Icedus is defeated. This is far from ready to be placed upon the site, since there's so much more content to be archived into a .zip file with this one sheet.

On a sort of explanatory side-note, anyone who's downloaded the new collection release of Hidden Palace will have noticed a specific method to the madness in the naming of the files. The above sheet is named "S3_ICZ_A2_UPR_BG_TRU".

The first three and fifth parts should be obvious: game, stage act and sheet content, but fourth and sixth parts breakdown the identification of the sheet further, which is specific to certain stages across the Genesis games when and where a difference in background needs to be remarked. UPR refers to the higher part of the background, since there's a cavern background for the lower route of the act. TRU identifies the palette that the BG is carrying; there is a false palette that I have grabbed and ready to make use of, which would result in that sheet file being marked as FLS.

As a side-note to the side-note, though the Act 2 background crops up at the end of Act 1, it's easier to justify this as A2 since this palette in particular is really used for the second act of Ice Cap.

Current calculations for the Ice Cap Zone, at least, places it at at least 17 sheets that will be dedicated to Ice Cap, because of the backgrounds collectively having a minimum of 17 variations (there are five core backgrounds which have at least two alternative palettes; the main Act 2 background as seen above has 10 on its own). Unlike stages like Labyrinth Zone and Hidden Palace Zone, I'm taking into consideration, at least so that I still have a working computer so that I can progress the project, the idea of breaking the larger foreground maps into sections, approximately three per act to account for their size. This immediately pushes Ice Cap's eventual sheet collection from a minimum of 17 to 23. But that's something I'm willing to do, if I want this project to mean what I intended for it.

That's enough about that, though.

I've done a minor fix on two of Labyrinth Zone's maps, much like the repair I did for Hidden Palace, and expect the Sonic 1 stage to be out  around the weekend, or by Tuesday at the latest  at some point, as I've just learnt of something I haven't previously noticed in a new Game Grumps episode.

Some research is required before I make real progress on the Glowing Spheres archive. I've found that the height of the map comes to 4064 pixels, based on the foreground wall height; while divisible by 8, it negates the use of the 128-pixel height that I had previously worked on, but my current calculations for the pillar parts of the background means that I would need to attach 126 extra pixels to these towers to safely ensure that the pillars are accurate in some form, as 254 is the lowest practical factor of 4064 that can be used while taking the 800-frame shifting block animation into account. Ultimately, in regard to this, I feel that giving in and constructing the background to a 4000+ pixel height would ensure accuracy to the background, but mean an incredible number (81+ sheets, with 10 backgrounds per sheet) of sheets in the collection release. But time shall tell on this.

There has been minor progress for Mushroom Hill too, and there will be a later update for the Doomsday sheets I have on the site too.