Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Paraemon]

All the excitement of seeing all the layers of parallax.

My bad, I should clarify this better.   

In Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, there are various effects throughout the stages that alter (parts of) the background depending on what's relevant to that stage, which affects the parallax. This is at its most simplistic in the Mushroom Hill Zone, as moving to a certain point of Act 2 changes the color of the background.

Angel Island and Launch Base (Act 2) Zones employ an underwater ripple/motion effect. Strangely, this happens for a few pixels above the water in Angel Island, too, which, when combined with the Heat Haze effect in Act 2, makes for a much more complicated animated sequence (oh god what have I let myself in for).

Heat Haze only effects four sections of the entire game: Angel Island (Acts 1-B and 2), Sandopolis (Act 1) and Lava Reef (Act 2-B ). As Sandopolis has been noted to be 32 frames of animation on a cycle and 1 frame to account for the default appearance without the effect, I can surmise that it is a similar figure in frames for the other sections in the game. Lava Reef's boss arena is a struggle on account of the fact of the screen-locked auto-scrolling feature, and Angel Island involves different palettes during the Heat Haze motions, as well as the overlap with the underwater effect.

Hydrocity (Act 1), Ice Cap and Launch Base (Act 2) Zones all employ a form of 2.5D effects on the water. While the first and the third of these stages evoke the feeling of parallax based on the movements you make, be it up and down or left and right, Ice Cap's 2.5D is the auto-scrolling ice floes. You can zip zoom left and right across the map, it's going to move of it's own accord, the only true parallax motion coming from the more distant glaciers.

Now that I've mentioned auto-scrolling in the background, I can name the stages that employ it: Angel Island (Act 1-A), Marble Garden (both acts), Ice Cap (Act 1-B and 2), Launch Base (Act 2), Flying Battery (both acts), Sky Sanctuary (both acts) and the Doomsday Zone. Even the Sonic & Knuckles Credits (and arguably, the Intro to Sonic 3) has this. What this entails, motion-wise, is that the cloud objects (which is what is typically in motion unless it's the ice floes) keep moving regardless of if you're idle or in motion in those stages - if idle, they carry on as normal, if in motion towards the right, it hastens the appearance of the cloud shapes, and if to the left, delays the encroaching shapes. To digress, this is seen earlier in the franchise, in Sonic 2's Hill Top Zone, but that operates on a speedier basis compared to S3K. Then we compare that with the background to Oil Ocean Zone, where the clouds do not in fact auto-scroll, but instead act as a functioning layer of the parallax.

It should be noted, Flying Battery and Sky Sanctuary's cloud object auto-scrollers also rise and sink on a timed basis, yet another function.

This now comes around full circle to the functions of the parallax, but we already know how that works, so let's cover a bit else. Stages like Hydrocity (Act 2) and Sandopolis (Act 1) display two layers of background: the pillars overlap the arches in the former, and the pyramid overlaps the distant dunes in the latter. Whilst it is simpler to extract the background of Hydrocity, the palette and Heat Haze effect in Sandopolis constantly fuse the Pyramid to the dunes, meaning there are very small windows to accurately identify the differential between each layer.

Elsehow, simplistic funtions like glow/color-shifting in the background (for example, Angel Island (both acts), Carnival Night (both acts), Ice Cap (Acts 1 and 2-cavern), Glowing Spheres) do not effect the parallax of a given stage, they're just there for aesthetics. The only backgrounds I've found thus far not to have any sort of parallax or otherwise cloud object auto-scrolling are in the Death Egg Zone (both acts).

[Paraemon]

it beGINSSSSSsssss

In other news:
Lava Reef's Boss arena background is also ready to be dissected, both heat haze frames and static.

Oil Ocean's sheet is getting a change up for the sun's heat haze animation. I'll work out how to add in the clouds for the parallax once those frames are complete.

The Emeralds sheet, as I've worked out from paying attention to the Angel Island glow animation and the final stage for Knuckles, is actually quite a way off from complete, to the point where I'm actively considering breaking it up into three sheets, one for each name of Emerald. That being said, I'd rather the sheet as it currently exists remains on the site while I try and work out the remaining palettes - I can assure you of this, it is not an easy feat, as several repeat or replace what came before.
----> Other sheets, such as Knuckles, will have likewise palettes added to their respective sheets for additional clarity.

Reworking other sheets I submitted in the summer. To demonstrate, I overlooked spacing blocks and for whatever reason, a part of the Sonic 2 emblem/level icon viewer is missing a few pixels of blue. I've fixed those already, but I'm going to reorganise the content to highlight the S3K stuff and the leftover S2 stuff.

And finally, a new question!

After reading this post on Sonic 3 Unlocked, I've started considering how to tackle the 2.5D water in Hydrocity and Launch Base. But, would you rather a full, pixel-by-pixel change based y-axis position for the sheets, or attempt at getting the specific appearances of the water's surface as shown in the blog post? Either option will take a while to employ, but so long as it's for the project, ain't no mountain high enough, even if it's as vile as Carnival Night.

[Ton]

That's a neat site!

I think just posting the tiles somewhere and having an example of how to use them will work.

[Paraemon]

Got it, coach.

Quick update from today's activities:



I spent a few minutes taking notes from the Mania rips and came to a conclusion: break the zone sheets into smaller items, as there's only so many pixels I can make use of in Paint without breaking the computer's back, but gives me the opportunity to better flesh out variations and alternatives.

I revisited Hidden Palace to better explore the parallax. Part of the background is 2.5D. The rest is as above; I'm going with the purple palette first from the 0408 programming error, and then working up the green palette once the first map is complete. These will go into a .zip file upon completion.

And ripping Green Grove, and any Sonic 3D stage, seems to work best this way at the moment. I'll have a better snap at it once I've fleshed out the meat of this map.

[IceManual]

This thread gets juicier every time i look at it, great rips!!

[Paraemon]

Thank you very much!   

Midterm season is over, and I'm on Easter Break.

I've updated and submitted the Hidden Palace as a .zip archive via the website. It will contain two versions of the foreground maps that each utilise the shifting green/purple palette depending on where you are in the stage, or if you've accessed the Bonus Stage in certain prototypes, an updated background parallax layer sheet and the relevant objects (sans Super character Emerald palettes). Part of the higher foreground is included as an object since it disappears and shows a very briefly seen broken section of the lower (interior background) foreground.

Anybody expecting Carnival Night, it is ever the pain in the ass that it shouldn't be. Certain areas of both the foregrounds and the backgrounds have a glowing animation that is just a single pixel. I'll need a considerable amount of time to be able to have something of worth displayed.



A lengthy process, but I've extracted the waterfall to the intro area and will include that as an object on a separate sheet. What's left is a bunch of bricks that don't fit in with the area surrounding where the waterfall is meant to be - those bricks are different tiles and normally have the waterfall overlaid.

The red blocks are the animated aspects of the foreground. In addition, I've also included the bizarre under-section of the map; it only goes that low - once you've reached the waterfall next to the left-most set of bricks, you're actually looking at the waterfall, and reaching the same y-axis as it triggers a fast vertical scrolling that only stops once you move up enough to escape.

The final version of the map will be split into three. One will be an all open air palette, the second will have an all underwater palette, and the last will be as seen above, a mix of the two as normal from the game, displaying the trigger on the x-axis that changes the palettes. The water line is a little lower (1-2 pixels) in the game compared to the WIP map, but I've heightened the water line for purposes of staying within the multiples of 8-pixels.



Those weird balls from Debug Mode in Sonic 3's Angel Island. I'll eventually get around to showing an approximately layout, but the problem is that increasing their size forces a lot of the balls content past the camera. I'll take a look at the multiples and guesstimate. Also, I'll add in the underwater palette later on.



Since I'm already doing this for Launch Base (Sonic 3 Ending), Lava Reef (Boss Arena) and Sky Sanctuary (Knuckles), this is the set of palettes that occur when the Phase 1 boss explodes off-screen and causes the whole screen to light up. Disregard the top row of each block, those are Knuckles'. Because of the shifting palettes of super transformations, it's not going to be so easy to get them all, but if I can do it with Mecha Sonic's power-up flash, I can do it with this.

[Ton]

Woooooow

You’re certainly got patience!

[Paraemon]

Woooooow

You’re certainly got patience!

Hahaha, not really! I'm probably actually one of the most impatient people you'll ever meet, I'm super awful at waiting around.

And speaking of waiting around, wow, I really let this thread get away for last month or so.

So I've taken my mind off the project temporarily while I focus on getting some deadlines and exams out of the way in Cyprus. That final week of March, I became so burnt out from such a stringent run of classes on a weekly basis before the Easter Break, it was making me highly irritated when trying to rip content. Logically, I had to take a backseat, otherwise the quality I'd have displayed would have dropped, to say the least.

Plus, with the workload that I've got to toy around with for uni, the last thing I want to do is dive into more work for the project. I've had to R&R on a chain of manga and anime in my free time to ensure that I don't, for lack of better terminology, break my back over the project. At the very least, don't expect further updates to the project for the remainder of this month, it's just impossible. Once I'm settled back in the UK, I can look into getting back on my feet for it (sometime in June, all being well).

That aside, here's the last two things I properly did for the project: Labyrinth Zone Act 1.




The 'dry' variant is still WIP, but once it's complete I've got the assets required to tackle to latter two acts. This is actually part of the reason why I shut down temporarily - the 'dry' version should be the complete, but I accidentally saved the 'wet' assets on the original 'dry' file. But, it's not too hard to fix, as evidenced by the content covered already.

Also, Sonic CD is an absolute sodding bitch to try and rip. I hate Tidal Tempest. 

[Ton]

Wow this is looking really nice! Sorry SCD is such a pain!

[Superjustinbros]

That Labyrinth Zone rip is looking top-notch.

[Paraemon]

Thanks guys!

Alrighty then, so I'm dipping in and out of this on an as-and-when basis. I shan't bore you with the details, but since returning to the UK, I've been a bit on the hectic side and recent personal developments have kept me occupied. I expect this to decrease within the next seven days.

I can affirm that Act 1 of the Labyrinth Zone's foreground is completed, in essence; the only part I'm missing for it are the platforms on ropes, but I'll mark those positions in the sheets before final release, and place the entire item(s) on a separate sheet for simplicity purposes, in case other people want to adjust positions of the platforms. Act 2 has been started.

Now, it's no secret that I have a particular distaste for Carnival Night Zone, because of what is a higher-than-high level of difficulty in its construction. There are many kinds of lights, both in the fore- and backgrounds, with the most minuscule of sizes and/or changes. While I haven't got onto the monstrosities that are a singular pixel, I can at least detail the following.

Exhibit A:


1. The orbs do not have the underwater palette ripped yet, but nevertheless they consist of 22 frames, with randomised frame lag. These are part of a larger object that will be stripped down for simplification purposes.

2. The triangular lights are fully ripped, but the ...LEDs? that encompass and lead to/away from them are something for me to tackle later. The top row (20) is the out of water variety, and the bottom row (19) is found underwater. Both animations have randomised frame lag; as for why there are 19 frames for the underwater variety eludes me, but one color (I believe fifth or sixth from the right) carries itself for approximately 10 frames.

Edit: Question time!
No more DIY BS. I make the BGs, you play the BGs, but it may not be released this year. Who wants to see a more in-depth release of the Glowing Spheres?

[Paraemon]

Took about five hours to do, but I can display the completed map variations for Act 2 of the Labyrinth Zone. All that's left now are the little objects and Act 3.




While I'm at it, I might as well throw up the full background variations to the Labyrinth Zone that I did yesterday; not an easy task let me tell ya. The nominal height is 1024 pixels, but bizarrely it starts and then abruptly cuts off the loop, at least in Act 1. Perhaps designed to deal with the map loop in Act 3.

[Paraemon]

And that concludes Labyrinth Zone Act 3's maps. Release will arrive soon.

The layout looks slightly weird as there's a seemingly dead-ended bottomless pit about 2/3 or 3/4 across the map. Because of the early loop and the later climbing loop to get to the boss, this isn't a bottomless pit, as the 256x256 block that's at the vertical antipode of this gap is actually the floor. If comparing this map against the one on Sonic Zone: 0's download links, they've offset the uppermost collection of blocks (upto 32 pixels in height (16 pixels on their map)) and moved all those to the base of the map to better highlight that there is no bottomless pit in this gap. Having discovered this when reference checking against what I have covered in building the map, I stuck to the way in which the game was actually laid out and kept those aforementioned top-most blocks exactly where they should be.

Phew. That was a mouthful.

In other news, three things:
1. Ice Cap Act 2's floe animation ripping is back on.
2. Hidden Palace has been resubmitted due to minor map fixes and Dolphman's suggestion for 128x128 tiles.
3. Update for the Glowing Spheres sheet has been initiated. This is going to be huge; I anticipate a minimum of nine sheets to cover all of it.

[Ton]

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

[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.