Castlevania Dungeon Forums
The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => General Castlevania Discussion => Topic started by: TheouAegis on November 18, 2021, 11:13:37 PM
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I've been home from work sick the last few days, so I decided to catalogue the sprites in CV3 using the game's own data to kill time. Lo and behold, like much else in the game, the programming for sprites is a mess. There are TWO sets of data concerning sprite animations, which is a bit of a mislead, because roughly half (maybe less) of the "animations" are single-frame images and there are equally as many "inanimate" single-frame images not sorted into "animations". Still, I was ultimately able to catalogue nearly all of the sprites from CV3j and CV3u (many thanks to The Cutting Room Floor) based on one set of sprite data. I will probably tackle the other set of sprite data another day, but from the initial set, after countless trials and errors, I still have 1 unidentified sprite. I have not yet ruled out that it was cut content, and in fact I have a very strong suspicion it might have been cut content, but the sprite data doesn't quite suggest it was cut. Some sprite content was cut and I have no idea what those sprites were supposed to be, although perhaps if I dove deep into the darkest depths of the code, I may yet find pointers to what the cut sprites were. HOWEVER, the one remaining sprite does not have the clear sign of being cut: it's sprite has a unique address, whereas cut sprites typically point back to sprite #00 within their group (sprites are grouped in CV3). I suspect it was cut because, well, I haven't found it yet, and also because the pieces of the sprite are all over the place.
(https://snipboard.io/FlyceA.jpg)
It's a very big sprite, for starters. And notice how it kind of looks like a chair. I was thinking perhaps it was supposed to be Dracula's old demon form, with the !?-& column being his wing. However, the legs seem too thin. That gap between the "legs" is an actual gap, there are no empty pieces in the sprite data. No enemies have thigh gaps that I can think of. :-[ And in any case, it appears the sprite is constructed from 8x16 pieces predominantly IN REVERSE ORDER. Aside from small enemies like Medusa Heads, almost every other sprite is predominantly made up of 16x16 pieces in sequential order, meaning the order you see them in the sprite data is the order you see them on screen. Not so with this sprite, which leads me to believe it was probably from either a test dummy project or was left over from old sprite data somewhere else. I'd even be inclined to hypothesize that perhaps it was originally a copy of an old sprite that faced to the right by default rather than to the left and they flipped the sprite after adding it to the data. ...Then later cut it? I dunno. I'm tossing out conjectures.
Oh by the way, it's sprite batch #14 (bytes $48D thru $4A2, give or take) and frame #14 (bytes $401 thru $418). I don't know what actual set of sprites it uses because that's processed separately. I think it was using CHR2 (the first set of enemy sprites). Its sprite data is nestled right in between the title film roll (those little holes that scroll up the screen) and the epilogue stuff, so I suspect it's an old sprite of Dracula's Castle perhaps, but I couldn't get any of the sprites to display it properly. I even tried using the tile data for the intro to no avail. I'm totally stumped as to what this is or was supposed to be.
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From the look of the screenshot it might be apart of the Death battle.
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From the look of the screenshot it might be apart of the Death battle.
Sorry, ignore the rest of that screenshot except the font stuff. I had a hunch it was a "dying pose" for Death, so I was trying to make it work using Death's sprites. I settled on using the font sprite set for the screenshot because it better illustrated the actual arrangement of the sprite pieces, whereas Death's sprite data made it too confusing to identify which pieces went where. I would have disabled the background to make it a little less confusing, but then you wouldn't be able to see the gaps in the sprite (where the glyphs don't touch each other) as well.
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Compare it against the big Dracula 3rd form.
It is likely the same except the game changed the bottom to have non-mirrored feet/legs.
These may be remnants.