Its good but pallet swapping to save memory seems to be used all over the place on 2D 8-bit and 16-bit games. Waterfalls are the most impressive to me, but the chequered ball is also good too.
@@tensevo Water, fire… many of the things we'd use particle engines for today are more efficiently implemented using palette tricks in the old days. (Water sparkles, twinkling starfields, fades of sky from daytime to nighttime, …) Writing my own video codec (which was *essentially* a stream of PNG frames using 1-bit transparency to exclude areas from update in the given frame) I also allowed each frame to define a new palette, if needed. As a result, some components of any given encoded animation are encoded purely as palette changes, given sufficient availability in the palette.
@@romusz don't know, even a simple android app keeps pushing updates every week without any noticeable improvement or changes. The developer assumes that the user has all the space in the world.
@@romusz Several audio players (Winamp, foobar2000 and ZXTune to name a few) can play .SPC files (the closest thing to a modular music format for Super Nintendo music), all of which, when dumped from original or hardware-compatible games, are always 64 KB each. You could implement the source code of an SPC playback engine into your modern game. I suppose it's a different story for remastered/remixed tracks though.
Sonic music in general does that to you. For instance, firstly I buy the Crush 40 album 'Driving Through Forever' for my iPad... next thing I know I'm downloading Dreams of an Absolution, and then as many Sonic songs as I can!
There's also a yellow sphere, that launches you a few spheres ahead. Stealth made a proof of concept Blue Sphere 2 that added a green and pink sphere. Green spheres turn blue when run through, so you gotta clear them twice, while pink spheres randomly(?) teleport you to another pink sphere. I think it may have been implemented in Sonic Mania, but I'm not sure.
@@blap721 Just because you suck at it doesn't mean it's bad, how come this certain game has rom hacks (s3 special stage edit, blue shares plus.) kiaso levels and more. Grow up and stop being such a hater
I feel like Sonic CD is hiding lots of secrets, all past present and further versions of stages and very unique special stage, would make a great video! Would also love to hear you talk about sonic and knuckles and how that all works, that lock on cartridge blew my mind as a kid and still does if I’m honest !
Modern ones get less respect because they are crude - the use straight forward codecs for audio and video. They treat memory very reckless, where game take up GYGABITES of memory. Game engines are pre-made, things are whole lot simpler. Their coding is sloppy, because the engine has allot of fool-proof securities that forgive allot of things to coders.
@@digimaks don't generalize things there still are games made from scratch on engines made in-house, sometimes specifically for the game, like in the case of literally every single game that Media Molecule has ever made
You should check out the Sega Genesis game Red Zone. It haves a lot of effects including FMV in the way you did the SEGA logo and the Game Over screen in Sonic 3D Blast.
Not to mention that most of the main gameplay uses a pseudo-3D effect a lot like the tricks he used to make the backgrounds in Toy Story's platformer levels.
I’ve also been down the rabithole of S3 special stage remixes. Such a catchy tune! The star-sphere hidden in the sphere graphics caught me by surprise!
I didn't. Just last year I started a class in coding, and am currently learning web development, and I know soon enough I'll work my way up to knowing what it takes to code a game myself, because I have a soul filled with DETERMINATION.
I also dreamed of designing games as a kid but the fact that it's difficult didn't stop me, and for a while I just overanalyzed my favourite games to get an educated guess on how it works, and later when I actually learned how to program started to implement those ideas to see if they work or not, and am now working towards starting a full project using my skills you shouldn't give up
@@TorutheRedFox I liked art a lot growing up, and once I realized that you didn't just "draw" all the sprites and levels and stuff, all the computer stuff bored me... I use computers everyday now (as a machinist, and also for hobbies like audio recording)😆
Holy smokes, I was just thinking last night about how Sonic 3's special stages were made after watching your Sonic 2 special stages video. And now here we are.
Damn, working around these types of memory limitations really brought out some genius programming tricks. That's what's so fun about dealing with older hardware, figuring out how to get it to do what you want. There's usually a way, you've just got to be clever in order to implement it. Nowadays games just release with massive files sizes. Like excuse me... 100gb for a single game? That's like an entire hard drive if you're playing on a computer from only a couple of years ago.
The floppy drive on my Commodore 64 died right before I got around to learning how to do sprites, so it's fun to finally get to see a bit of how they work.
Further proof S3&K is one the greatest games ever produced by humanity. Thank you for going down the rabbit hole for one my most cherished games from my 90s childhood.
All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle.
These videos are great... all of these techniques need to be documented, programmers these days don't have these challenges... they have unlimited resources and just make games 60gb without a care in the world. This style of game making will become a lost art... a bit like how no one knows how they built the pyramids haha
You can't do much tricks to compress 50mb 8-layers HD textures besides general compression. Modern games do use a lot of optimization tricks and push hardware to the limit while rendering, even one modern game can fill up entire book describing techniques. But you cannot compress HD assets further. If you have hours of dialogues you can remove some audio channels, but you can't compress them too much.
@@friendlylaser Pretty much, gamers tend to not realise just how much space highly detailed maps, textures and 3D models can use up, even with aggressive compression.
When he revealed the animation by switching palettes my jaw dropped. I don’t think I have the intelligence to thought of such a clever technique. In English. Never mind actually coding it.
@@jonweinraub it was a fairly well known technique at the time, you'd palette swap a lot because it's an easy way to add content sometimes sacrificing only a few colours for a totally new image.
Your passion and knowledge for this ancient hardware and software for where you are in life is one of a kind. The fact that you acknowledge and educate this tiny enthusiastic side of the gaming sphere with your free time fills me with so much joy. As selfish as it is, I hope this kind of unique content providing you do never ceases to bore you. It is so special.
New subscriber here. Not a developer, but I love watching creative uses of limited resources. The fact that these levels were spellbinding for me when I was young? So awesome seeing them analyzed. Very well done, thank you for all of it!
As usual, an amazing take teaching us what many tricks were used to create crazy effects back then! And I think this is the first time a Coding Secrets video took a clip from another video in the series to further explain a trick. It's awesome.
I've been following Coding Secrets pretty much since the beginning, on the GameHut channel, and I _love_ seeing all these tricks and techniques; your explanations are easy-to-understand and really fun to watch. Please keep 'em coming!
Woohoo! I requested this one in an earlier video and it happened! Based on previous videos I'd seen, I figured it was either something along the lines of the palette swapping used for the Sonic 3D "SEGA" logo or the animated ground used for Mickey Mouse being chased by the moose. In my limited knowledge, I figured that either of those could conceivably work, but the floor's rotation was what kept making me hit a wall. Thanks so much for breaking it down!
Your explanation here was pretty much spot on. I've known this stuff for a while, but your explanation of it is pretty easy to understand, and I suspect that someone else who hadn't gone through all this code before would probably find this a very useful resource.
Its crazy to think how much work was put in to make games 30+ years ago, so much optimisation was needed to fit a game on what is a tiny amount of space today. Great video as always :3
You should make a video about your particle system for these 16 bit game and also explain with the maths involved in it. Your video really inspired me to do programming, keep making these videos
"went down a rabbit hole of remixes of the special stage music" - time well spent. I recommend McVaffe's 'LatinSphere' from OC ReMix if you haven't already come across it.
I would love to hear about *workflow* in those days. A lot of these techniques, though brilliant, the work and process needed to reach them seem so alien to me.
Dude... I subbed to you without knowing you're behind Sonic3D, and now that i know, my respect for you went from 100 to 100000000. Dude, i love you (no homo) :)
This is probably my favorite special stage of the classics! I particularly like the theme cover by the J-Music Pocket Band; make sure to check them out if you haven't already! Thank you for the great explanation as always; you do a great job of showing how everything works in a way that is not only accurate, but also very easy to understand for someone who doesn't know how the hardware works going in. Can't wait to see more of these! As a suggestion, could you check out the Mushroom Hill Act 2 boss? It seems to use some similar effects to the Toy Story 3D, but I'm not sure.
I think the reason they didnt wanna dip into the pallet swap is because they knew they will have to change the colours of the checkerboard sphere at some point, and this would have possibly caused problems later on? There were 7 special stages and I think each one used a different colour sphere, so having the rotations using different colours for animation could have messed with this, as you said it would have reduced the amount of pallet swaps and in the 90s games NEEDED pallet swaps.
Good old color cycling :). Half the fun back then was finding smart ways to do effects with limited resources. Having this (mostly) friendly competition of who could do the coolest things on the Commodore Amiga was a great way to learn the trade, and for many, a gateway into the videogame business. I love these videos, keep up the great work!
Man that's great video... Yet I hoped to see a layout generation thoughts that can compile to a million+ passable stages, that could be players in secret game through lock-on technology
You can tell how much love the developers had for games like these. Devs these days wouldn't dare to be this creative. Brilliant work as always, dude. I adore these insights.
Do programming students ever have assignments where they limit the amounts of RAM and ROM they can use to achieve it? Seems like a neat technique to know even if it's "solved" by the abundance of RAM and Storage space in modern machines...
Excellent video as always! To answer your last point, I think it's important to remember that "Sonic 3" and "Sonic & Knuckles" were originally intended to be one game. Of course, we got 2 different games, but regardless there's 14 special stages: 7 chaos emeralds, and 7 super(?) chaos emeralds. So, I'm guessing they opted for a wider color palette to ensure there's enough variety.
The tech demo red sphere objects in the S3-solo ROM and the Nov 3 Prototype showed how they tested the graphics for this special stage, with a rotating spherical grid and a splash/wave animation grid for testing the stage clear animation.
I'd love to see how the animation at the start of Sonic 3 (where sonic jumps through the Sega logo) was achieved. I remember as a kid being blown away by that.
Make a video on the boundary flood-fill algorithm used to check if blue spheres are completely surrounded by red spheres. Or a video on how the 3D positions within the special stage are stored.
For the storing the special stage thing, if you mean how the stages are stored in the ROM, it could literally just be a 2D grid which denotes what sphere is on an area.
Not only would the sphere and ring icons have cut into the other graphics on the foreground layer, but it also could have required them to draw and store two different boxes around the two counters.
There are some other interesting tricks in Sonic 3 that could warrant more videos. For instance, the title screen intro animation, the 3D water effect seen in Hydrocity Zone, the multilayer backgrounds seen in several levels (i.e. Hydrocity and Carnival Night), and the software scaling used for the boss of Marble Garden Act 2. p.s. it's pronounced "hydrossity" don't @ me
I knew that the red and blue orbs were palette swaps, but the white one with a star, I thought it was a white palette with a separate star sprite on top. But that too is part of the palette!? That blew my mind!
I know the Genesis does not have built in sprite scaling...it can scale sprites through software. There are a few games with this technique without any specialized hardware add-ons. For example, there is an amazing fan translation of Wolfenstein 3d that runs on a stock Genesis and it's amazing. EA made a helicopter game that ran scaling not as a trick like a boss fight but throughout the entirety of the game...I think it was called Red Zone.
i'm more impressed by all those perfect squares mapped to a sphere. you'd pretty much have to do the same technique on modern hardware to render that in 3d (as in scroll a texture) that shape is physically impossible
Please do a seperate video on how the sonic and knuckles cartridge is able to produce seemingly random special stages,, all dependent on which genesis game you stuck ontop of the sonic and knuckles cartridge. I thought it was amazing at the time, having seemingly endless special stages that go on for eternity, and how the layout changes from random genesis games.
If you're a sega fan into VGM I can highly recommend Radio Sega. They have a 24/7 stream of sega music and live shows too. Really worth checking out, the community are awesome too.
You could've shown off how the game stores the map layout of any given special stage. It's a false sphere, only an illusion of course. As you can tell from a globe with latitude/longitude lines, you can't exactly tile squares on a sphere perfectly all the way around. The layouts are all just squares; when you reach one edge, you go to the opposite edge of the square like a game of Asteroids.
Yeah, that's pretty typical for games, owing to the fact that it's really easy to code. Ironically, you can in fact map that onto 3d geometry, it just doesn't look like a sphere.. If you wrap a 2d area the way games frequently do in one axis only, you've created a world that's cylindrical. The worlds that allow traversal across both axes are actually mapping onto a toroid (donut) shaped world in 3d... So, every time you see a game do this, what you're actually witnessing is something taking place on the surface of a donut. xD
I just discovered your channel. Kudos for such a great work ! I am amazed by the quality of the explanations. Also you’re very understandable even for non English native which is absolutely a bonus point :D you deserve a subscription!
If you’re looking for requests for games to look into I’d ask for Gunstar Heroes (you could probably do several hours on the various effects that game has) and also the depth effects in Ranger X.
I think it wasn't that difficult, as the Mega CD has dedicated hardware for sprite scaling and rotation. But the stock Mega Drive lacks these hardware features, so they had to work around these limitations.
I think it's fairly obvious they did it the way they did because they didn't want their color palettes to be limited. It may not be obvious with just this one stage, but they swap palettes for every different special stage throughout the game.
There's just 1 thing you got wrong. There's 4 types of sphere. Red, Blue, Orange, and the Star ones. The orange ones act as springs, launching you around 7 spheres ahead through the air. I was really hoping this video was actually going to cover how they used a 2D mapping system and "projected" it similar to Wolfenstein 3D, but it seems they did this without raycasting.
It's fascinating how simple these turn out to be in practice... Or at least, this particular special stage. There is some genuinely crazy stuff in some of the old games, but this is fairly straightforward... IF you have the kind of mindset to know these kind of tricks in the first place of course. Palette tricks mostly, in this case, it seems... XD
Before watching this video I guessed "palette animation for scrolling the sphere forward, tile changes for the rotation since only one 90 degree rotation need be encoded", and I was right! Sonic is running on a giant Amiga boingball, after all :)
You forgot the yellow spheres which act as springs, while the star spheres act as bumpers. Obviously that doesn't change much in your explanation, aside from increasing the number of palettes used, but for the sake of including all the details, I figured it was at least loosely related.
That Red Star trick has to be one of the most clever use of Pallets I've ever seen.
Its good but pallet swapping to save memory seems to be used all over the place on 2D 8-bit and 16-bit games.
Waterfalls are the most impressive to me, but the chequered ball is also good too.
indeed!
*palette
Yes!
@@tensevo Water, fire… many of the things we'd use particle engines for today are more efficiently implemented using palette tricks in the old days. (Water sparkles, twinkling starfields, fades of sky from daytime to nighttime, …)
Writing my own video codec (which was *essentially* a stream of PNG frames using 1-bit transparency to exclude areas from update in the given frame) I also allowed each frame to define a new palette, if needed. As a result, some components of any given encoded animation are encoded purely as palette changes, given sufficient availability in the palette.
The Amiga makes great use of cyclic palette for animation in loads of games and demos.
Developers in the 90's:
I fit all of Sonic 3 in less than 4 MB
Developers in 2020:
help my balloon popping simulator uses 4 GB
Chrono Trigger on SNES, 1995: 4 Megabytes (MB)
Chrono Trigger on Steam, 2018: 588 MB
@@romusz got to collect all the user information.
@@kkgt6591 From what Ive read, they say its due to the filesize of the uncompressed music tracks.... which sounds like crap to me, but whatever. :p
@@romusz don't know, even a simple android app keeps pushing updates every week without any noticeable improvement or changes. The developer assumes that the user has all the space in the world.
@@romusz Several audio players (Winamp, foobar2000 and ZXTune to name a few) can play .SPC files (the closest thing to a modular music format for Super Nintendo music), all of which, when dumped from original or hardware-compatible games, are always 64 KB each. You could implement the source code of an SPC playback engine into your modern game.
I suppose it's a different story for remastered/remixed tracks though.
Of course you went down that rabbit hole. The theme of the Special Stage is that good!
It's almost non special anymore, because the entire god damn sound design with every bit of Sonic 3 is marvelous!
Yeah. Also, that username of yours is in fact a username.
Sonic music in general does that to you.
For instance, firstly I buy the Crush 40 album 'Driving Through Forever' for my iPad... next thing I know I'm downloading Dreams of an Absolution, and then as many Sonic songs as I can!
It's just like, it's just like, a mini, mall!
The thing is that it wasn't originally for Sonic 3. It was for an unreleased sonic Tetris like game called Sega Sonic Bros
There's also a yellow sphere, that launches you a few spheres ahead.
Stealth made a proof of concept Blue Sphere 2 that added a green and pink sphere. Green spheres turn blue when run through, so you gotta clear them twice, while pink spheres randomly(?) teleport you to another pink sphere. I think it may have been implemented in Sonic Mania, but I'm not sure.
The yellow sphere was used nowhere in Sonic 3.
@Giova I think it may have been used in Sonic & Knuckes, if it wasn’t used in Sonic 3.
@@everardogarcia6047 It was, in fact, used in Sonic & Knuckles.
The green and pink spheres were in fact used in Mania.
@@giovannidotgen there was a yellow/orange sphere that would spring you forward. If I recall this was added in S&K
this singlehandedly made me appreciate Blue Spheres 100x more. another excellent video, Jon!
100 X 0 = 0
@@blap721 Just because you suck at it doesn't mean it's bad, how come this certain game has rom hacks (s3 special stage edit, blue shares plus.) kiaso levels and more. Grow up and stop being such a hater
oh hey look its nick robinson
I feel like Sonic CD is hiding lots of secrets, all past present and further versions of stages and very unique special stage, would make a great video! Would also love to hear you talk about sonic and knuckles and how that all works, that lock on cartridge blew my mind as a kid and still does if I’m honest !
Sonic cd is my fav but the special stage has to be the worse one
@@Mikey-zj8bn you clearly haven't played the modern Sonic special stages. Like Lost World 3DS.
@@toopienator well yea who would play sonic after sonic adventure 1 that was the last good one
@@Mikey-zj8bn fair point.
Yes please explain the whole "lock on " thing.
Its crazy how much "video" goes into old video games, especially compared to more modern ones
today a crapton of video goes into video games too
it's just that nobody talks about it in-depth outside of things like SIGGRAPH
8bit guy did a video on oldschool graphics, and originally, you couldn't even load a full screen with a 16 color pallet into RAM without using tricks.
Necessity being the mother of invention was the rule of the day.
Modern ones get less respect because they are crude - the use straight forward codecs for audio and video. They treat memory very reckless, where game take up GYGABITES of memory. Game engines are pre-made, things are whole lot simpler. Their coding is sloppy, because the engine has allot of fool-proof securities that forgive allot of things to coders.
@@digimaks don't generalize things
there still are games made from scratch on engines made in-house, sometimes specifically for the game, like in the case of literally every single game that Media Molecule has ever made
You should check out the Sega Genesis game Red Zone. It haves a lot of effects including FMV in the way you did the SEGA logo and the Game Over screen in Sonic 3D Blast.
Not to mention that most of the main gameplay uses a pseudo-3D effect a lot like the tricks he used to make the backgrounds in Toy Story's platformer levels.
From same Developer there's also Adventure of Batman and Robin on Genesis. And it has some crazy effects in spots. Especially in Mad Hatter levels.
Lol, this special stage is so nerve wrecking for me that i never noticed it had a sky background before and i've been playing this game for decades.
Thanks for doing my request! I am eternally grateful for you doing this, it means a lot to me and seveal others I know. Thanks so much!!!
I was guessing that they would of used pallet swapping for all of them. Pretty crazy the bounds people had to go through to store memory back then.
When I was a kid, I’d rent Sonic 3 and play it just to ear that bonus level music. Still love it.
what about the blue sphere secret game when putting sonic 1 inside sonic and knuckles
I’ve also been down the rabithole of S3 special stage remixes. Such a catchy tune!
The star-sphere hidden in the sphere graphics caught me by surprise!
I dreamed of designing video games as a kid.
Then I realized how difficult it was, and promptly gave up on that dream 😆
I didn't. Just last year I started a class in coding, and am currently learning web development, and I know soon enough I'll work my way up to knowing what it takes to code a game myself, because I have a soul filled with DETERMINATION.
I also dreamed of designing games as a kid
but the fact that it's difficult didn't stop me, and for a while I just overanalyzed my favourite games to get an educated guess on how it works, and later when I actually learned how to program started to implement those ideas to see if they work or not, and am now working towards starting a full project using my skills
you shouldn't give up
@@TorutheRedFox I liked art a lot growing up, and once I realized that you didn't just "draw" all the sprites and levels and stuff, all the computer stuff bored me... I use computers everyday now (as a machinist, and also for hobbies like audio recording)😆
I'm not encouraging anyone to give up on their dreams. It just turned out that my dreams changed over time. 😉
@@scramblesthedeathdealer and what about graphic design / 3d modeling and not the programming itself, did you consider that back then?
Holy smokes, I was just thinking last night about how Sonic 3's special stages were made after watching your Sonic 2 special stages video. And now here we are.
Damn, working around these types of memory limitations really brought out some genius programming tricks. That's what's so fun about dealing with older hardware, figuring out how to get it to do what you want. There's usually a way, you've just got to be clever in order to implement it. Nowadays games just release with massive files sizes. Like excuse me... 100gb for a single game? That's like an entire hard drive if you're playing on a computer from only a couple of years ago.
The floppy drive on my Commodore 64 died right before I got around to learning how to do sprites, so it's fun to finally get to see a bit of how they work.
This shows how knowledgeable Yuji Naka, Hiroshi Nikaidoh & Masanobu Yamamoto were in the Megadrive hardware.
Further proof S3&K is one the greatest games ever produced by humanity.
Thank you for going down the rabbit hole for one my most cherished games from my 90s childhood.
Woohoo! My favourite special stage! Much appreciated. (And that BGM *is* amazing!)
yeah
This makes me very happy that we can draw as many sprites as we want nowadays.
I realised that a sphere covered with only square checkerboards is impossible...
still fun tho
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
All these squares make a circle.
These videos are great... all of these techniques need to be documented, programmers these days don't have these challenges... they have unlimited resources and just make games 60gb without a care in the world. This style of game making will become a lost art... a bit like how no one knows how they built the pyramids haha
You can't do much tricks to compress 50mb 8-layers HD textures besides general compression. Modern games do use a lot of optimization tricks and push hardware to the limit while rendering, even one modern game can fill up entire book describing techniques. But you cannot compress HD assets further. If you have hours of dialogues you can remove some audio channels, but you can't compress them too much.
@@friendlylaser Pretty much, gamers tend to not realise just how much space highly detailed maps, textures and 3D models can use up, even with aggressive compression.
When he revealed the animation by switching palettes my jaw dropped. I don’t think I have the intelligence to thought of such a clever technique. In English. Never mind actually coding it.
@@jonweinraub it was a fairly well known technique at the time, you'd palette swap a lot because it's an easy way to add content sometimes sacrificing only a few colours for a totally new image.
1993: Six minutes of explanation worth of palette rotations, mirroring tricks, and sprite hacks.
2020: 4 lines of vertex and pixel shader code.
Can you talk about Adventures Batman and Robin on Sega ? damn that game blow me away with, some rotation, fog transition and scrolling
Even the soundtrack on AB&R is so constantly great!! Just played it again after a few years and it is a blaster!
Your passion and knowledge for this ancient hardware and software for where you are in life is one of a kind. The fact that you acknowledge and educate this tiny enthusiastic side of the gaming sphere with your free time fills me with so much joy. As selfish as it is, I hope this kind of unique content providing you do never ceases to bore you. It is so special.
I love this. The Special Stage of Sonic 3 looked incredible back then and it is still one of my favorite memories of the Megadrive.
Confirmed, Genesis can Run Crysis, if done by you!
New subscriber here. Not a developer, but I love watching creative uses of limited resources. The fact that these levels were spellbinding for me when I was young? So awesome seeing them analyzed. Very well done, thank you for all of it!
Hang on a second, you said Red or Orange squares, they look orange and brown to me, different to the red of the balls.
What color is the dress?
They are brown and orange, it's a scripting mistake
@@titanic_monarch796 Brown is just orange in context
i mean, brown is a shade of red
no brown is orange with context
I still find it amazing how you guys did so much with so little memory space
That kind of palette-shift wizardry on a grand scale is what enabled the GBC port of _Cannon Fodder_ to have an FMV intro. Have you covered that one?
As usual, an amazing take teaching us what many tricks were used to create crazy effects back then! And I think this is the first time a Coding Secrets video took a clip from another video in the series to further explain a trick. It's awesome.
I've been following Coding Secrets pretty much since the beginning, on the GameHut channel, and I _love_ seeing all these tricks and techniques; your explanations are easy-to-understand and really fun to watch. Please keep 'em coming!
Woohoo! I requested this one in an earlier video and it happened! Based on previous videos I'd seen, I figured it was either something along the lines of the palette swapping used for the Sonic 3D "SEGA" logo or the animated ground used for Mickey Mouse being chased by the moose. In my limited knowledge, I figured that either of those could conceivably work, but the floor's rotation was what kept making me hit a wall. Thanks so much for breaking it down!
Your explanation here was pretty much spot on. I've known this stuff for a while, but your explanation of it is pretty easy to understand, and I suspect that someone else who hadn't gone through all this code before would probably find this a very useful resource.
Its crazy to think how much work was put in to make games 30+ years ago, so much optimisation was needed to fit a game on what is a tiny amount of space today.
Great video as always :3
You should make a video about your particle system for these 16 bit game and also explain with the maths involved in it. Your video really inspired me to do programming, keep making these videos
"went down a rabbit hole of remixes of the special stage music" - time well spent. I recommend McVaffe's 'LatinSphere' from OC ReMix if you haven't already come across it.
I remember suggesting the s3 special stage for a coding secrets video. Thank you for making it happen! I can't wait to see what's next
I played the hell out of this game as a kid and this has to be one of the most fascinating videos I’ve ever seen
I would love to hear about *workflow* in those days. A lot of these techniques, though brilliant, the work and process needed to reach them seem so alien to me.
Dude... I subbed to you without knowing you're behind Sonic3D, and now that i know, my respect for you went from 100 to 100000000. Dude, i love you (no homo) :)
This is probably my favorite special stage of the classics! I particularly like the theme cover by the J-Music Pocket Band; make sure to check them out if you haven't already!
Thank you for the great explanation as always; you do a great job of showing how everything works in a way that is not only accurate, but also very easy to understand for someone who doesn't know how the hardware works going in. Can't wait to see more of these!
As a suggestion, could you check out the Mushroom Hill Act 2 boss? It seems to use some similar effects to the Toy Story 3D, but I'm not sure.
I think the reason they didnt wanna dip into the pallet swap is because they knew they will have to change the colours of the checkerboard sphere at some point, and this would have possibly caused problems later on?
There were 7 special stages and I think each one used a different colour sphere, so having the rotations using different colours for animation could have messed with this, as you said it would have reduced the amount of pallet swaps and in the 90s games NEEDED pallet swaps.
Good old color cycling :). Half the fun back then was finding smart ways to do effects with limited resources. Having this (mostly) friendly competition of who could do the coolest things on the Commodore Amiga was a great way to learn the trade, and for many, a gateway into the videogame business.
I love these videos, keep up the great work!
This really is fascinating to watch you break down games that I grew up with. Just goes to show how much work went into such a simple looking game.
im not a coder by any means but playing most of these games so many years ago, im finding this series so intresting, thanks for these,
this channel's gonna blow. just one more viral vid and you're good
This is actually Gamehut's second channel, if you wearnt aware.. :)
But yeah, I found this in my recommended, so it may catch on
I really enjoy the explanations of how you made classic video games. Fascinating.
Man that's great video... Yet I hoped to see a layout generation thoughts that can compile to a million+ passable stages, that could be players in secret game through lock-on technology
Wow, that's pretty cool, some ingenious design there!
Great video, I aced all these levels back in the day (Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles) and never got tired of the looping music.
You can tell how much love the developers had for games like these. Devs these days wouldn't dare to be this creative.
Brilliant work as always, dude. I adore these insights.
Do programming students ever have assignments where they limit the amounts of RAM and ROM they can use to achieve it? Seems like a neat technique to know even if it's "solved" by the abundance of RAM and Storage space in modern machines...
aw that was soooo cool and I love the ambient music you used for the vid
Finally, after so many years, I have gained a new fact about my favorite Sonic game to launch at people when we talk about it.
Excellent video as always!
To answer your last point, I think it's important to remember that "Sonic 3" and "Sonic & Knuckles" were originally intended to be one game. Of course, we got 2 different games, but regardless there's 14 special stages: 7 chaos emeralds, and 7 super(?) chaos emeralds. So, I'm guessing they opted for a wider color palette to ensure there's enough variety.
The Sonic 3 bonus video we have been waiting for.
The tech demo red sphere objects in the S3-solo ROM and the Nov 3 Prototype showed how they tested the graphics for this special stage, with a rotating spherical grid and a splash/wave animation grid for testing the stage clear animation.
This stuff makes me really appreciate my old game collection.
This special stage always mystified me
Glad to know how it works
I'd love to see how the animation at the start of Sonic 3 (where sonic jumps through the Sega logo) was achieved. I remember as a kid being blown away by that.
A video about the SNES port of Doom would be awesome now that the source code is available
I wondered so much about how they did it. It's even more clever than I expected.
Make a video on the boundary flood-fill algorithm used to check if blue spheres are completely surrounded by red spheres. Or a video on how the 3D positions within the special stage are stored.
For the storing the special stage thing, if you mean how the stages are stored in the ROM, it could literally just be a 2D grid which denotes what sphere is on an area.
Not only would the sphere and ring icons have cut into the other graphics on the foreground layer, but it also could have required them to draw and store two different boxes around the two counters.
As someone who developed a rotoscoped game for blind gamers, you are a wizard.
There are some other interesting tricks in Sonic 3 that could warrant more videos. For instance, the title screen intro animation, the 3D water effect seen in Hydrocity Zone, the multilayer backgrounds seen in several levels (i.e. Hydrocity and Carnival Night), and the software scaling used for the boss of Marble Garden Act 2.
p.s. it's pronounced "hydrossity" don't @ me
I knew that the red and blue orbs were palette swaps, but the white one with a star, I thought it was a white palette with a separate star sprite on top. But that too is part of the palette!? That blew my mind!
Subbed cuz I like how you explain stuff
I know the Genesis does not have built in sprite scaling...it can scale sprites through software. There are a few games with this technique without any specialized hardware add-ons. For example, there is an amazing fan translation of Wolfenstein 3d that runs on a stock Genesis and it's amazing. EA made a helicopter game that ran scaling not as a trick like a boss fight but throughout the entirety of the game...I think it was called Red Zone.
Speaking of that Toy Story driving section.... (can you do one for that pretty please?) ❤️
i'm more impressed by all those perfect squares mapped to a sphere. you'd pretty much have to do the same technique on modern hardware to render that in 3d (as in scroll a texture) that shape is physically impossible
oh shit, as a developer I'm jealous of those things. I'll never achieve this level of genius.
Yuji naka is a true genius
Please do a seperate video on how the sonic and knuckles cartridge is able to produce seemingly random special stages,, all dependent on which genesis game you stuck ontop of the sonic and knuckles cartridge. I thought it was amazing at the time, having seemingly endless special stages that go on for eternity, and how the layout changes from random genesis games.
I would love Jon commenting on Treasure's games effects, especially those in Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy and Allen Soldier.
If you're a sega fan into VGM I can highly recommend Radio Sega. They have a 24/7 stream of sega music and live shows too. Really worth checking out, the community are awesome too.
You could've shown off how the game stores the map layout of any given special stage. It's a false sphere, only an illusion of course. As you can tell from a globe with latitude/longitude lines, you can't exactly tile squares on a sphere perfectly all the way around. The layouts are all just squares; when you reach one edge, you go to the opposite edge of the square like a game of Asteroids.
Yeah, that's pretty typical for games, owing to the fact that it's really easy to code.
Ironically, you can in fact map that onto 3d geometry, it just doesn't look like a sphere..
If you wrap a 2d area the way games frequently do in one axis only, you've created a world that's cylindrical.
The worlds that allow traversal across both axes are actually mapping onto a toroid (donut) shaped world in 3d...
So, every time you see a game do this, what you're actually witnessing is something taking place on the surface of a donut. xD
I just discovered your channel. Kudos for such a great work ! I am amazed by the quality of the explanations. Also you’re very understandable even for non English native which is absolutely a bonus point :D you deserve a subscription!
Sonic is never on a black or white square. He is always in between them.
If you’re looking for requests for games to look into I’d ask for Gunstar Heroes (you could probably do several hours on the various effects that game has) and also the depth effects in Ranger X.
I’m curious how they were able to get the UFO stages in Sonic CD to work.
Me too... 🤔
I think it wasn't that difficult, as the Mega CD has dedicated hardware for sprite scaling and rotation.
But the stock Mega Drive lacks these hardware features, so they had to work around these limitations.
Mode 7? Or the Sega equivalent?
The CD add-on could have chips installed the basic Mega Drive was lacking.
Endlessly interesting! Love your content, thanks for this.
“Is it really that easy?” I thought this video was going to show an easy trick for beating all the special stages.
I think it's fairly obvious they did it the way they did because they didn't want their color palettes to be limited. It may not be obvious with just this one stage, but they swap palettes for every different special stage throughout the game.
There's just 1 thing you got wrong. There's 4 types of sphere. Red, Blue, Orange, and the Star ones. The orange ones act as springs, launching you around 7 spheres ahead through the air. I was really hoping this video was actually going to cover how they used a 2D mapping system and "projected" it similar to Wolfenstein 3D, but it seems they did this without raycasting.
It's fascinating how simple these turn out to be in practice...
Or at least, this particular special stage.
There is some genuinely crazy stuff in some of the old games, but this is fairly straightforward...
IF you have the kind of mindset to know these kind of tricks in the first place of course.
Palette tricks mostly, in this case, it seems... XD
Not at all what I was expecting but, very interesting and smart. Eye opening.
Amazing videos and descriptions of functions.
Sonic Mania uses 2x the amount of colors for the same effect, and I think it also overlays a sprite ontop to give that fog effect
Really great videos man! How can we find the song you play in the background of your videos?
I love when creators share the rabbit holes they go down when they are making videos.
Holy shit dude you are a freaking genius the sign thing is absolutely incredible
Before watching this video I guessed "palette animation for scrolling the sphere forward, tile changes for the rotation since only one 90 degree rotation need be encoded", and I was right! Sonic is running on a giant Amiga boingball, after all :)
Knowing all the spheres have stars destroys my worldview.
You forgot the yellow spheres which act as springs, while the star spheres act as bumpers. Obviously that doesn't change much in your explanation, aside from increasing the number of palettes used, but for the sake of including all the details, I figured it was at least loosely related.
Wow! I'll never be unamazed by 90s game development. I would never have come up with a concept like that!
That palette swapping floor is reminiscent of the Master System Japanese BIOS with the Space Harrier theme.
At last! I always wanted to know how they managed to make this stage work. Thank you very much for this video.