What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Discussion of development of software for any "obsolete" computer or video game system. See the WSdev wiki and ObscureDev wiki for more information on certain platforms.
psycopathicteen
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What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by psycopathicteen »

Did they type in every rotation angle by hand or did they use some kind of program to do it?
Oziphantom
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Oziphantom »

they will have made a tool to do it.
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Gilbert
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Gilbert »

It is possible that they just wrote something with higher level language (such as C, or in modern times, scripting language such as Python, Lua, etc.) to spit out a file with look-up tables of the required values defined by lines of .db (or .dw or whatever similar), or even directly making a binary data file to be included with the source files.
Oziphantom
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Oziphantom »

they would, as did every dev back then, have had an extensive suite of internal tools made for each game they worked on.
psycopathicteen
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by psycopathicteen »

Oziphantom wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 4:12 am they would, as did every dev back then, have had an extensive suite of internal tools made for each game they worked on.
How do you make sure that programming the tools doesn't exceed the time it takes to make the game?
Oziphantom
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Oziphantom »

by having a "tools department", having producers and having it only do what is 100% needed as as soon as a feature "works" it will be put in the designers hands and told, "don't press this button after pressing that one, we don't know what that button is suppose to do yet so avoid it and save often. Half of the tools where made on the platform which allowed it to leverage the game engine. See the Mario Kart editor that was found in the giga leak, the "debug" cheat in Sonic 2 etc
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Drag »

psycopathicteen wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 7:21 am How do you make sure that programming the tools doesn't exceed the time it takes to make the game?
By not allowing the (lack of) tools to stand in the way of development.

There's a lot of build-pipeline activities which are just converting data from a development format to a runtime format, like converting graphics from a bitmap file to a tile bank. You could use a plain graphics editor at first, and then use something even as humble as Microsoft BASIC (readily available and great for rapid prototyping) to quickly write a program to convert the bitmap file to tiles. This would get you by until you have a dedicated tile editor.

Similarly, for designing level layouts, you can do it completely by hand and uncompressed at first; just byte-for-byte block-for-block level design, which can allow the game's rules and physics to be tested and tweaked. Meanwhile, any level storage details are figured out, and levels can be hand-assembled until dedicated tools are finished.

If you need to generate some data tables, again, something like Microsoft BASIC can help with that too, and can even help you visualize that data before it prints it out into table form.

(I keep saying "Microsoft BASIC" to refer to the fact that many computers at the time were running some derivative of it for their BASIC environment, so there was a high likelihood that a development team had something available for quickly writing a program or script, even if they had to run out and grab a VIC-20 or something)

Anyway, my point is, dedicated tools are ideal but there's always a way to continue development without them, or while they aren't finished yet, even if it means quickly cobbling something together yourself so you can use other tools already laying around, like paint programs and text editors.
stan423321
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by stan423321 »

Oziphantom wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 4:12 am they would, as did every dev back then, have had an extensive suite of internal tools made for each game they worked on.
Well, the supposed story was, Kirby's Adventure was made with some ad-hoc equivalent of NES-hosted hex editor. So perhaps "every" is an exaggeration.
psycopathicteen wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 7:21 am How do you make sure that programming the tools doesn't exceed the time it takes to make the game?
This is just one facet of a persistent problem regarding programming time management. Do you polish your game engine, or do you put workarounds for missing functionality in individual object handlers? Do you improve the compiler / assembler, or do you just get on with what you have to not lose time on understanding compiler / assembler? Do you hunt the inconveniences in gameplay, or do you release the game as it is earlier and hope for a forgiving reception? There are rarely easy answers.

A relatively sane one for build-time tooling, assuming companies with funding and not garage development, is throwing an overpowered computer at it, so that the tools themselves can be coded relatively inefficiently or even badly and still do the job.
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by 93143 »

stan423321 wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:49 pmDo you hunt the inconveniences in gameplay, or do you release the game as it is earlier and hope for a forgiving reception?
That's not really an efficiency question, and there is* a definite answer, at least for stuff that would need a "forgiving reception" and not just an audience composed of people who aren't you. If an element of the game is not satisfactory (which isn't the same as not perfect), the game isn't done.

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is bad forever." - Shigeru Miyamoto

(This is coming from someone who is nearing release of a SMB3 graphics hack begun in 2008, but as you can see the guy who made SMB3 agrees...)


* or was, before internet patching, which is where the SNES era sits, and since SNES ROM distribution currently involves no way to force an update or even guarantee notification thereof, I think it still applies to some degree. How many people actually updated to the latest version of New Super Mario Land? d4s only got away with that because the first release was already pretty good.
stan423321
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by stan423321 »

Okay, maybe "forgiving" wasn't the best choice of word, but "satisfactory if not necessarily perfect" is highly audience dependent.
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by tepples »

"A delayed game is eventually good" provided that the game gets accepted by a publisher, certified, and released before the console maker ends mainstream support for that console. There are several list videos on YouTube about canceled GBA and DS games that were complete but couldn't find a publisher before Nintendo stopped making GBA Game Paks and DS Game Cards.
Oziphantom
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Oziphantom »

stan423321 wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:49 pm
Oziphantom wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 4:12 am they would, as did every dev back then, have had an extensive suite of internal tools made for each game they worked on.
Well, the supposed story was, Kirby's Adventure was made with some ad-hoc equivalent of NES-hosted hex editor. So perhaps "every" is an exaggeration.
Which they would have had to have made or get from somewhere. They also would have had a graphics entry tool, he probably also made a level editor. They would have needed something to make music on as well. So while yes the Assembler was backwards, they still would have had an suite of internal tools, not optimal easy to use ones, but they still probably had a suite.

However I'm also talking about the MD/SNES era which is a lot less tolerant of such poor tools. As the games would have been made by a team etc. Nasir probably even starting using an actual assembler for Secret of Mana ;)
psycopathicteen
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by psycopathicteen »

Kirby was released at a time when the Genesis and SNES were already out.
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Individualised
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Individualised »

Yeah Kirby 1 is well known for being developed on really primitive tools for the time
Last edited by Individualised on Wed May 03, 2023 3:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
Oziphantom
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Re: What did Treasure use to animate the multi-jointed bosses in Alien Soldier?

Post by Oziphantom »

yeah '93 what were they thinking... actually this does look pretty feature packed https://sourcegaming.info/2017/04/19/ki ... t-secrets/ I guess the one screen coding tool was meant for a quick patch and they were meant to program the game on some other PC just Sakurai didn't get the memo? As they had already made SNES games by this point, and no other game has come out as having a story that it was mode on a trackball and it was developed for other NES game...
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