I took a closer look at some of the sprites in the "texture2" pack of the leaked game, and I'm seeing some interesting things for if we're still working on getting the "definitive" set of game graphics. Did anyone notice there were four different dust clouds?
I believe I've only seen the largest two in-game. Maybe they intended to have smaller clouds puffing at the very top, as in the movie, but forgot to put them in. (You could try using them during Ralph's initial wrecking, too, but I still wouldn't make them take out the middle of the building, since the arcade rule is that Ralph must slip back to the middle before climbing up, so then he'd be climbing on empty space!) And I see that the inner creases do change shape with the size of the whole cloud; they just don't shrink to the same degree the outer shape does. Also for some reason, these clouds are included in the files for changing the color of Super Felix's hammer. I wonder, could this be used to make other things cycle colors, like the 500?
Since Felix has both left-facing and right-facing graphics in the files instead of relying on the game code to flip the sprites, it might be possible to add lines of red pixels to simulate the drop shadows. Some graphics never had their inner black pixels replaced with red to show up correctly in the game. I mentioned the ducks, whose wings are complete in the file, so it must be just that the game is loading them to the wrong dimensions. (I wouldn't be too surprised if ducks were a late addition, and teleporting back to their starting positions upon killing Felix was a redundant behavior left in from when they were able to spawn on the bottom row, which, like removing all falling bricks and starting Felix on the center of a bottom window after death, would be a way to avoid giving Felix mercy invincibility.) Felix's mouth has empty pixels when he dies, too--I assume you're not supposed to see through it, yes? They didn't bother adding some reversals or changing Super Felix's hat color on some of his death frames, which is pointless anyway since he can't die as Super, but they show that those frames could have been late additions as well. (And darn it, I guessed wrong on most of the shadow pixels around the hand, and the new mound of dirt and shirt button confused me, but some of my other feelings about what might have changed turned out to be correct, like the shape of the flower that I did change, and the ear sticking out two pixels below the ledge and the bill of the cap thinning to one pixel wide that I didn't want to change then.) Ralph is missing his pupils for the frame where he stops to look up at the building and it doesn't matter, but then the Nicelanders also have a set of window-peeking sprites where the dark eyes are missing, and the game uses these. I think I even saw a video of the real cabinet where Nel's eyes were white because she was in front of a piece of glass still in the window.
Unfortunately the medal graphics may be a little unfinished, as they're missing the darker streaks across the front and some shadowing on the hook at all sizes and brightnesses, and you can see some other little changes in the pixels forming the inner round shape compared to the Flash version's graphic. I wouldn't use that version's dingy palette for it, though. This medal from a piece of merchandise art appears to be the final design:
On this one I think they even trimmed a pixel off the right edge of the ribbon to make it look slightly further back.
So I was saying earlier that the movie got the best versions of most graphics, except the "splash down in mud" frames appear to have been redrawn to look nicer in the Flash version... Then I noticed some graphics for Ralph that really sent me down the rabbit hole. Take a look at these sprites for Ralph being carried.
The lower one is from the Flash version, while the upper one is from the arcade version but with the palette of the Flash version applied for easier comparison. What caught my attention is that Ralph's strap with the buckle had been redrawn on top of his body where you can see it. I don't know for sure if this is where the strap ought to be in this perspective, or if it was an attempt to move it to his other shoulder to match the previous frame where it's on Ralph's left shoulder, which is pretty silly since it's going to be back on his right shoulder in the very next scene anyway. In the other version, the strap must have been tucked completely inside Ralph's armpit, as you can only see five pixels of brown across it.
But in fact there are many differences between these two graphics. Ralph's toe is indented more, with extra shadow pixels in a slightly different color from the rest. His legs are a bit longer and thinner, with the scratched-up hem from his other graphics. There's a pixel of shadow missing from the pinky side of his hand. His shoulder is rounded differently. The hair on top is mirrored, there's an extra pixel of it beside each ear, and two of the sweat drops have been moved out a pixel. The whole face has been moved out a couple of pixels, and shadowing from between Ralph's eyes has been moved to just between his eyebrows. Now in transferring the palette, I discovered that the Flash version's thrown Ralph sprite is actually missing the color for Ralph's upper row of teeth: During game-play, the top row of teeth pixels is ever-so-slightly teal.
The Flash version adds back two pixels to Ralph's shirt sleeve, matching how it looks in his walking frames... But this is where I noticed that the arcade version is missing one whole color from Ralph's shirt, in all his graphics! Every second row of squares uses the same color for both squares, so really there are no squares but in your imagination; each of those rows is a plain stripe. You know, some earlier versions of Ralph's character model had just plain stripes on the shirt like this in sprite form, so I wonder if Ralph's not quite as finished here, or if there was a decision to reduce the color domain as with the medal, to be more 1982-constrained. It makes me surprised to learn that the brick pile does have an outline color.
Has anyone been able to rip the graphics from the newer smartphone versions of the game? I took a rough screenshot from a video, which you can compare to
the movie's.
And really this one matches the movie very well, with the whole extra row of shadowed skin between the eyes and the eyebrows, and the coloring of the open piece of the overalls flipped over. The arcade version may have just recolored this dark brown by mistake; it doesn't even save colors as this color is reused from Ralph's hair. Actually, you can see a few pixels of that color on the very top of the Flash version's sprite, so that seems to indicate that it still is the right shoulder strap facing us, only redrawn for better perspective. The one thing redrawn in the mobile version is Ralph's sleeve, with many more jaggies now, which I think looks the coolest. Even good-quality screenshots of the movie tend to blur the squares of Ralph's shirt together, just as they might be blurring any highlights on the smaller medals, so they're not much help. I think the mobile sprite of Ralph falling down the building was a little more jagged in how it drew the arms and legs... And now that I check the arcade graphic pack, the turned-right frame has an extra pixel beside Ralph's armpit, and the upside-down frame has an extra pixel beside his right fingers. What? Did they copy these graphics by hand sometimes?
Just played it and this is also possible in the original version (using 'jump' and not 'up')
Yep, in the official version it's fun to alternate between Up and Jump to get different behaviors out of Felix below the same overhang. The Jump button can be dangerous in this respect because while it allows him up though those overhangs, it doesn't protect him from brick piles on the next floor up. It was interesting to learn just how the controls worked, especially the fact that the purpose of the Jump button is to land on the center of the next windowsill, which leaves Felix safe from brick piles on both sides and gets him across the screen a little faster, and which must be pressed after beginning to walk but before the auto-hop, or Felix will jump up and then walk to the next window due to the annoying input buffering. You probably wouldn't even want total jump control as the movie suggests, just as allowing Felix to run past the edge of the building where Ralph couldn't reach him would make it too easy. I was also a little surprised to learn that every push of the joystick includes an auto-hop to the next windowsill; there is no running and stopping on a different part of the same window unless it's at the edge of the building. Though you can turn Felix around after he's started running and before the auto-hop, this also leads to some buffering weirdness where he steps two windows away instead of one. One more trick I learned from this is that pushing Left and Right very quickly against the right edge of the building makes Felix turn back to the left without performing any more actions.
So if you didn't know already, the levels max out at four overhanging flowerbeds and three brick piles--yet even this was enough to make one area impassible without dying when the brick piles stacked up all in one column and some of the overhangs ran in a perpendicular line from them to the side. I would have taken a screenshot, but I hadn't yet figured out a workaround to what the game does to the PrintScreen key, where the screenshot is only a quarter of the viewing window. I found the trick is to make the window lose focus by clicking outside it, and I learned this in time to take a screenshot of my high score:
I bet I could do even better now that I've had the practice of getting there, but I'd have to set aside another four hours, and I think my laptop's fan broke down today, no kidding, so maybe not.
An important thing to learn about the bottom doors is that Ralph can break them three times in a row without you fixing them in between, so one or two gashes deserves attention. As if to balance that out, the round doors above them can only take one gash before becoming unbreakable, and it seems impossible for an overhang to appear between them.
While I want to just emulate the promotional arcade game as is, I understand people will still want the movie voice clips, so I went ahead and uploaded "realistic" Ralph and Felix voice over clips, if played on arcade hardware. I went ahead and used Famitracker to convert the voice over clips into 4-bit DPCM NES samples so it's accurate to voice technology circa 1985, lol. As long as it sounds a lot like Sinistar, it's close enough for me, lol.
Haha, cool. I did my own thing and mixed "high-quality" versions
here and
here just to try in the arcade game.
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Topic: Fix-It Felix, Jr. Replica (Finished) (Read 261121 times)
