Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Three more goofs in the Competition levels

Speaking of oddities present in the Competition levels, here are three more goofs I've come to notice over the years:


In Azure Lake, one of the blocks in this overhanging ledge doesn't have any collision assigned to it. The height mask is actually set properly, it's just that the block doesn't have either solidity bit set.


Balloon Park has a bunch of identical-looking flags waving in the background, and exactly one of them is blowing in the opposite direction of the others. This probably happened accidentally when mirroring a bunch of level blocks in order to fill out the rest of the background plane.

Finally, also in Balloon Park, my favorite. First off, in Competition mode, Sonic's palette is loaded to the would-be player palette in line 0, whereas Knuckles' palette is loaded to the would-be enemy palette in line 1.


Meanwhile, although the bumper objects in Balloon Park are set to use colors from palette line 1 (left below), I find that they end up looking much better when they're changed to use line 0 (right):


Here's my theory. The bumper's graphics were originally designed to use Sonic's palette, but the object ended up being programmed to use the enemy palette, like most stage-specific objects do. The error was never caught because unlike most situations, Sonic's palette and the enemy palette are almost completely identical, and as such the bumper doesn't look particularly wrong when the wrong one is applied.

4 comments:

  1. Funny you should mention the bumper oddity. Just a few months ago I was going through some of the art in the game and since I had set the program to render graphics using palette line 0, I thought it was an unused bumper!

    Also, do you think it might be possible that when the lap numbers had their colors switched from blue to red the bumpers were also affected?

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    1. Ah, no. The bumper sets its palette through the palette bits in art_tile, as part of the object's init code. The lap numbers are a completely separate object with its own init code. It's far more likely that they just changed their minds.

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    2. Hi Silver Sonic 1992

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  2. A tad late, but BPZ (well, all the competition stages actually) do load there own palettes in palette line 1, it just happens that BPZ actually intended to use that line, and for obvious reasons, couldn't. If you look at the screenshot I've given, it appears to be a slightly modified version of Sonics palette, with a brighter blue closer to the stage palette. Considering it's not just the bumpers that has this issue, it might be something worth looking into.
    https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1075343291454869585/1079049756577370233/BPZ_palette_full.PNG

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