Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Dolphman]

I'm with Ton on this one. That old sheet was done via screen capturing, which is why it had to go as it's all done with coding.
SuperChao's rips were what made me rerrip most of the stuff through the emulator's data viewer. Every boss was segmented.

[Paraemon]

Well, I thought I'd ask, though it would have meant more awkward organising in the end.

Finished the sheet, I haven't found anything else that I'm missing. Included a majority of the Emeralds relative to Hidden Palace for sake of completion to the sheet. Submission to follow.

[Ton]

Looking good! Always love your new sheets!

[Paraemon]

Looking good! Always love your new sheets!

Thank you Ton!   I do appreciate hearing that, it's very encouraging.

I have a Discord account for anyone who wants to discuss in more detail the current status of the project, as well as a secondary, 'Plus' project I'm starting up that's centred on changing ripped assets from the games, maybe recolors, maybe full edits, it depends on the asset. Please feel free to PM me for my username, just be aware I can sometimes forget to jump on it for days. 

[Paraemon]

To keep things fresh, here's the current progress on Ice Cap Act 2.



I don't know how many ice floe drifting frames there are, but they work as a contiguous entity on the same parallax field. Because of this, each individual frame has to be taken for it to be completed, similar to the 800 frames of the Glowing Spheres background. Honestly, this one scares me, because it's so unknown, but if I can do Glowing Spheres, I can do this one.

The false color is from messing around in Debug mode. Turn on Debug, go into the cavern area, go as far left as possible, and go up if it's not immediately visible. There is no animation on the floes or the shimmering water around the distant glaciers, which makes getting those easy. This same process can be messed around with in parts of Act 1, but isn't as easy to figure out and is, as far as I remember, oddly character-dependant.

Ripping the underwater cavern section for this act will be easy, as the shifting glow palettes detected by animget cease to function if you place the glows behind the water overlay. As far as I can tell, too, there's no vertical parallax in Act 2, of which I'm very keen to get from Act 1, since it's the only time I can see it show up in S3K.

[Paraemon]

Update for Ice Cap 2:



I removed the Floe animation cycle to focus on (what was) the more unknown animation cycle for the shimmering water around the background glaciers. 32 frames.

This is where it gets tricky. Remember how I stated that Glowing Spheres, based on two animation cycles for the two pieces of background, had 800 frames? Well, the Floe animation cycle in Ice Cap 2's background is 250 frames. This means there is a rarer alignment between both the Floes drifting in the water, and the shimmering around the glaciers. Here's some maths to explain it:

Floe Drifting          Shimmering (changed to 10 cycles of animation, or 320 frames, for clarity)
250                        320
500                        640
750                        960
1000                      1280
1250                      1600
1500                      1920
1750                      2240
2000                      2560
2250                      2880
2500                      3200
2750                      3520
3000                      3840
3250                      4160 (And take off those last 160 frames to align with the Floes)
3500
3750
4000

This means that, while the Floes need to go through only 16 cycles to align with the Shimmering water, the latter has to go through 125 cycles to align with the former. This comes to 4000 frames, and you cannot break it down lower than that, as taking it down to 2000 frames means that there are 62.5 cycles for the shimmering water, and that doesn't make any sense, am I right?

Well, that just leaves working out the animation cycles for the cavern background. Before that, I'll add the Floes to the sheet.

[Ton]

Yeesh. I've never noticed that there are so many combinations.

[Paraemon]

Yeesh. I've never noticed that there are so many combinations.

Haha, I know, right?

This is why I label a few zones as being worse than others. Carnival Night, for example: everything's glowing, and some of the glows are just a singular pixel. It's next to impossible to tell how many frames there are. I'll get the palette, sure, but getting the palette and demonstrating a cycle?

Please, no.

[Paraemon]

So I actually botched the maths for the Ice Cap Act 2 (above ground) animation cycle. 4000 is the number accurate to original frames - the shimmering water frames change every 3 or 4 frames while the floes change every single frame, so, if I'm right, the full animation cycle is 12000 to 16000 frames. 

Moving on!

Today's work has been divided into three primary sections of the S3K project. This is the first; getting some background content and making sure I got all of Ice Cap's background content.

"Hydrocity 1 BG (sans water effects)". Getting the parallax and all that jazz, shouldn't be too hard, right?

The Answer lies within!

When you move in and out of the water, the surface of the water expands or retracts depending on your proximity to it. And, each stage of retraction/expansion on the view of the water reforms the parallax effect, so there are multiple versions. I thought Hydrocity 1's background would be easy, but oh how wrong I was. It will literally take months to finish Act 1.

Ice Cap 2 has an update. 130 of 250 Floe frames added. As you can see in the folder above, there are other versions which also share the animation. I could just throw up the palette onto the sheet, and depending how things go, I might, but for now, I'll include each of the six-at-minimum versions of the Floe animation.

And, the third chunk of today's work.



The Doomsday Zone. SupaChao hadn't ripped everything, as there were two tiny rocks that come out from the space boulders, and the alternate palettes as the blue craft falls away were overlooked. Hidden alongside them in the VDP were similar palettes designed for the last boss. There isn't exactly a parallax for the background, but it's structured in the same way the sky works in Marble Garden or Sky Sanctuary.

[Paraemon]

Since it's a holiday weekend, I've had plenty of time to get some stuff done.

The Doomsday Zone sheet is across in Feedback/Showreel. Aside from grabbing the various pieces of Death Egg's backgrounds (primarily the glowing animations and interior rooms), I've made a start on this zone and already finished the parallax breakdown...

[Paraemon]

So yeah. I renamed the thread to incorporate the earlier games in 16-bit Sonic, but still primarily focusing on S3K because the workload for it is maybe double that of Sonic 2 alone.

That being said, I've shifted gears from Mushroom Hill to Sandopolis Act 1. 32 frames on the background because of the Heat Haze effect; fortunately, this is the easiest of the effects (excluding that dratted pyramid).



Each block is 256 pixels across to accommodate the largest section at the bottom of the background. Whether or not this leads to a 8000+ pixel-length sprite sheet, I cannot say, but if it ends up that way, it wouldn't be the largest on the site. (Btw, dibs on ripping a breakdown/new sheet of Wing Fortress). As this is a 'show and tell' sample, the work for the Pyramids will be much more in-depth, for the following reasons:

1. The Pyramids overlay the far-distant dunes.
   
2. Because of this, the palette for the Pyramids blends in with the palette for the dunes because of the Heat Haze effect; only the green pixels can accurately distinguish where the pyramid ends and the dunes begin.
   
3. Because of the Heat Haze effect being in play, the Pyramid displayed in the sample is as accurately cut as it can with be. It may well be revised later as I explore how the pyramid works along the parallax.
   

All being well, I'll update at the weekend. I'll still hover about the forums.

[Ton]

This is really interesting! I've never really gotten to see the parallax stuff on its own. It's very pretty!

Looking good! The heat effect would have scared me off of Sandopolis, hah.

[Paraemon]

Haha, I imagine the Heat Haze and the parallax combined, or each standalone, would be the reason older sheets don't have the variants already. It just takes too much time and detracts from wanting to get the sheet finished, which is why we have the static backgrounds accessible.

That said, I'm not kidding about Sandopolis being perhaps the easiest of the stages with the Heat Haze overlapping the parralax. Here's the in-depth explanation to each:

Angel Island, Acts 1 & 2: I cannot for the life of me, at this moment of writing, figure it out. The methodology exists to reasonably extrapolate the objects comprising the background, which I need to get to sooner or later, but then you also have the foreground in receipt of the Heat Haze effect, on account of there being a forest fire. That's not the worst part; the worst part is that the foreground glows via reflection of the fourth-wall-inferno, as the Heat Haze does its thing. That's not even getting on to the auto-lock near the end of Act 2.

Sandopolis Act 1: As shown above, it is the most simplistic, complicated only by the Pyramid object that intertwines with the dunes that shift behind its position.

Lava Reef Boss: The difficulty here lies between the previous two Zones. While it can be done, it needs to take a lot of time. Why? Because of the forced advancement to get to the actual boss arena at the far end of the act's map. As it happens, I must digress; having recently toyed with the Doomsday Zone and Debug mode, I've discovered that activating the mode can allow players to return to earlier points of the stage, thus negating the final stage's auto-lock. Theoretically, I can do the same in Lava Reef, though I need to test this.

With regard to the static backgrounds displayed, where the heat haze isn't in effect (I've seen this during the opening days of the project when I didn't have access to the raw palette or VDP), I can get that too, it'll just take a little while I focus on the obviously more time consuming pieces.

While I'm at it, I should explain the parallax and other background tidbits of some other stages.

Carnival Night.
The parallax to this stage is about as nightmarish as it can get, because much of the background is a solid black color, if it's not flashing or otherwise another static color. That's before getting into the limited underwater and dark palettes.

Mushroom Hill.
The parallax functions in three objects: the trees, the distant hills, and the distant trees. There is foliage beneath the final object, but remains static with the first object, for whatever reason. For the plus sheet, I might make it the fourth object, but that's a bridge for waaaaay later.

Sandopolis Act 2.
Does not contain a regular parallax, as the main background object is just a looped combination of smaller murals and bricks. When compared to other stages, it outdoes the backgrounds of Marble Garden Act 1, Death Egg (both acts), and The Doomsday Zone.

Death Egg Act 1.
No parralax, as the background is fixed in place the entire time, and the glowing is so much more simpler to explore than whatever is going on in Carnival Night. The larger bother from this stage is the room background against Red Eye, since the glowing/flashing animations increase.

Credits.
Yes, these deserve some mention. At the very least, in Knuckles' conclusion, the clouds are the same objects from Sky Sanctuary, so it's already easy enough to get those. The tail-end of the credits for Knux's route display no parallax in the end, but the objects move just as they do in stages that rely on free-flowing cloud mechanics, and the stars flicker. And then there's the oceanic horizon in the credits for Sonic's route, there is a quantifiable amount of parallax that can be acquired from here.

[Paraemon]

Today's update!

As per the first screen cap, here is Launch Base's update, with the Sonic 3 Final Boss sky background. The water is a lot more complex than I anticipated, as it functions like three other systems in the game: Angel Island's underwater refraction effect, Hydrocity Act 1's water surface, with the parallax taking cues from Ice Cap Act 2's 2.5D drifting floes. That's why I'm putting in the Death Egg first, and no, SupaChao's sheet does not in fact have everything.



Speaking of the Death Egg, here's what its own sheet currently looks like. The background for Act 1 only has a 6-frame rotation on the glowies, whereas some 'interior' sections have three or twelve frames depending on where you are in the stage, excluding the bouncing puzzle and the tunnels.

[Ton]

I’ve always really liked the Launch Base background and the story it tells you without using any words. Great work so far!