I went back and played Spyro 1 and 2 last year, and it's genuinely surprising just how well those games have held up. A lot of early 3D platformers haven't aged all that well, but Insomniac really knew what they were doing
Brian sooo etherial. the thing that made Spyro standout was it’s spiritual motiffs. Excising the evil spirits from the statues, collecting talismans and orbs to accrue magic. Not to mention collecting spirits for power-ups. I wish they continued with that theme and went further with it to ensure the future of the franchise.
Walton Simons I later learned in life after Spyro that they are using Hz frequencies for healing or peace etc. check them out sometime. I immediately said “AUTUMN PLAINS!”
This game will always hold a special place in my heart. I was 5 years old when my dad had a brain aneurism (he is alive but disabled) and this was the last video game me and him were able to play together. I vividly remember having a blast with him playing this for hours everyday. Been 20 years this month crazy how time flies.
I love that because i watch this series so much, everytime he mentions something or asks a question how something is done, i can usually figure it out as well lol. Man this series is so good.
Growing up with _Spyro 1,_ the whole thing with the hub portals being like cookie-cutter holes into the next environment was always one of the things I was curious about. I'm guessing that when Spyro emerges back into the homeworld, the sequence is just playing in reverse - Camera put against the portal normal, Spyro loads in, Spyro flies out through the portal from within, camera pulls back to show portal. 7-year-old me was fiddling with the idea of the portal being a non-euclidian space. That there's an explanation as simple as *"character is given render priority"* and being able to watch the process side-on _really_ destroys the mysticism behind this. Insomniac were masters of their art, for sure.
@@jaihayes9647 It's a shame that this effect was left out of the original second and third games too, it's only the very first game that has it. The second and third games fade away, which they also do in the remake for consistency. The remake took several features of the second and third game and applied it to the first game. So if they had kept the animation from the first game in the second and third game, I wouldn't be surprised to have seen it being used in the remake too.
The camel head have to be shrunk because the PS1 is not using a Zbuffer to render the graphics, just reorganizing the triangles from back to front, and that would make parts if not the whole camel head appear the whole time depending on the angle, floor polygon size etc..
Yeah, came down to see if anyone mentined it already. Z-buffer is oh-so-easy to take for granted nowadays, but it was just too much overhead back in the day. I'm also fascinated with how exactly are they doing their portals, because without some other modern features that we take for granted (stencil buffer, render-to-texture and such) those things require very creative and carefully implemented solutions. It was mentioned in the video how they've gone around Spyro flying into the portal, but what bugs me is how exactly was the portal rendered? Because the skybox is actually geometry here (triangles with gradients on them, no (or very small and limited) textures). Did they have to clip them manually? Did they make the portal frame thicker than the largest skybox polygon so it wouldn't stick out if they just turned them on and off? Is there a PS1 trick that can do this in some other way? Does anyone know?
You can actually do render to texture on the PS1, as the PS1 treats all the graphical data as this single big bitmap where it store even the picture that got rendered last. This is how it does the FF7 battle intro twirl thing.
Seemed to me like a framebuffer effect that you can enable, implemented in hardware, not a general purpose render-to-texture feature. But again, I'm not that familiar with how exactly stuff works on PS1. Still, even if possible, my intuition tells me that rendering to texture would be too expensive for something like this that needs to happen during regular gameplay. I'd still place my money on some clever geometry and/or layering trickery. Essentially, I'd really love to have that free camera and tinker with it myself :)
Well, its not exactly "rendering to the texture", but more of a "draw stuff, move frame buffer around". But given the fact the skybox don't look pixelated, even with the scaled up render of the emulator used on the episode, it is most likely some sort of trickery, most likely abusing the draw order. As you don't have to respect any real z-buffer order, you could just draw the new skybox, then draw everything over it, except for the hole in the portal.
I feel like Boundary Break is more than just an entertainment series, it could potentially teach indie game devs some helpful tricks! Good job on your success, Shesez!
That environment in the opening cutscene is a variation of Stone Hill from the first game. Including the castle, which you can jump ontop of in the original game and find some gems. They've just added the stormy effect and a portal in the area, which wasn't there in the first game.
Spyro is the game that got me into gaming. I love video games so much that I set out to become a video game developer in my adult life. I've made a few small games already and while that's nothing special, it's still something for me in moving forward towards doing something I love with my life. So watching the little out of bounds secrets and seeing how the game can work and what's going on backstage was really special. Thanks for this. This was awesome. Also I laughed at 6:02 at how unintentionally condescending that statement sounded. "Now don't worry. This isn't too complicated. Especially with some visuals here to help you through it." I love this channel.
SBGHaseo The name"Ripto," incidentally, is what the Insomniac team thought "Spyro," written in Japanese, looked like. They got used to saying the name "Ripto," and decided to incorporate it into the sequel to "Spyro the Dragon." Michael John of Cerny Games said having two different names "was just a marketing decision made by Sony Europe. No trademark violations or anything sinister ... they just liked the name better and it didn't bother us. The games are identical." I wonder if they will apply the same logic to the remastered versions, will the 2nd game be called RR in America & G2G in Europe? I bet they thought Gateway To Glimmer was a bit more "glamorous" it offers colourful levels waiting to be explored, whereas Ripto's Rage makes it sound like he's on steroids lol
Personally, as long as the games are identical despite the name, I could not care less. But it's interesting that it was a marketing team's decision to change it to begin with. Maybe it's just like Old Gregg said. _"Ripto's Rage"_ makes it sound more like a fighting game, while _"Gateway to Glimmer"_ gives off a bit more fantasy-like platform game feeling. Even though Glimmer itself didn't play a major role in the game itself, it was the place where it all started. Instead of getting to Dragon Shores, Spyro ended up in Glimmer on an adventure he didn't ask for. Ripto has more impact on the game being the main antagonist, but it's not like his existence is the main concern all the time. Actually, for the majority of the game we don't even remember him, since every world we travel to has problems of their own that Spyro solves. It's only in the home worlds and the big boss fights when we ever see him doing anything relatively evil.
Same here. Glimmer is only an ordinary level (the first actually but still nothing special or important about it). It sounds better, yeah, but 'Ripto's Rage' is more fitting.
this is actually one of the coolest videos i've watched on UA-cam. Of course my love of Spyro is totally jading my opinion here, oh oh totally random question and i know it's universally despised, i mean i personally can't bring myself to hate it as i know the developers really did try their best they were simply forced to rush it, but would you consider doing Boundary Break with Enter the Dragonfly, or maybe a Hero's Tail, or Legend of Spyro???
Great episode! There's an amazing tool called Spyro World Viewer that I highly recommend checking out, which lets you fly through any level from the Spyro trilogy (including cutscenes, some removed content and even the credits versions of the levels) while keeping everything with the highest level of detail, and the worlds hold up REALLY well, it looks more like a remastered PS2 game than a PS1 game.
If its anything like Metal Gear Solid. What people are referring to is the same map, only spyro hit the ceiling and warped coordinates to the bottom of the map. this then removes all enemies and collision (just like MGS)
exactly the same actually. Basically, the numbers that store the vertical position coordinates have a finite value, and once that value is exceeded on either end, it "wraps around" to the opposite end and keeps going. Both in SM64 and Spyro, what happens is basically that you've went SO FAR that you wrapped those coordinates around one (or more) entire times. Of course, the collision detection, enemies, etc all operate on a different set of variables, often stored as different variable formats or generally calculated in different ways. Another example of variable overflow: Gandhi in the original Civilization game. He's supposed to be as peaceful as possible, but when he reaches democracy, it subtracts several points from the 'aggressiveness' value - because he's already as low as he can be, he ends up at like... 255 aggressiveness on a scale that NORMALLY never goes above 10. Every Civ game since then has *deliberately* made Gandhi ridiculously violent as homage to this bug.
I loved this episode thanks for the wonderful work on this episode Shesez. Spyro is such a nostalgic game for me I loved it as a child. Playing it again these days would make me cry from the memories of my childhood.
Hey, lovely episode! To get world shots without the polygon shaking and LOD limitations, you can see them through Spyro World Viewer, a program that read the data from WAD files from any of the 3 spyro games and allows them to be displayed in a free view, and you're able to switch between the low, high poly models/texture mipmaps, as well as the vertex mapping colors. You would also find out that the developpers ( for Spyro 3 at least, i didn't check the older ones ) made it so all the custscenes and credits shots are playing in alternate version of the levels, sometimes with areas always off screen cut away. I don't really know why they did that, however. Finally, as they are also viewable and exported in extended .obj format, the skyboxes are actually full hemispheres with 2000 polygons on average placed so the vertex coloring makes all the details. This is why the skybox will remain clear and beautiful even in high resolutions. Finally, all levels and skyboxes are actually divided in chunks ( sometimes they are not perfectly matching, like in SM64 ), so the game knows what to draw and what not to when thing are outside the camera's view. I hope these informations will be useful if you consider making a Spyro 3 episode! I can't wait for Kingdom Hearts 2!
It was great to see you at PAX (I was cappy hat dude with the bled out marker problem). I tried the free cam in dolphin and you're right, it worked. I hope ya had a good time and can't wait to see more BB.
Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future is a fun one to explore like this. You don't even have to break the game because there are so many flaws, you can swim out of multiple levels and explore them. In the Roaring Forces level there's a black (trigger box?) underneath where an eel boss stops chasing you, a dolphin from a different level swimming in place, a tiny version of the eel boss, and a static lightning bolt which the eel boss shoots at you. Also seeing the underwater tubes is trippy and horrifying if you're doing it in-game.
It's incredible how clever solutions the developers could come up with! As a programmer I can appreciate it just even more. Being able to move parts of a character model so freely like with the bucket blubber, camel head and money bag was a completely new information for me.
this is the main reason why I love Sypro 2 the most out of all 3 original games. The environment/stages/props and every other special effects/graphics were mesmerizing and very well done for that time, and they still gives me goosebumps to this day.
4:30 Also, fun fact about that stage: in the large circular stingray arena, if you swim up to the invisible wall and swim-charge around the length of the edge of the arena, you will break through the boundary. You are now able to no-clip swim outside of the stage and explore the entire map in game. You can even swim through walls and swim into areas without water. If you want, you can freely explore the shark sub area at your leisure. Game does freeze if you swim into the sub though.
We've seen the zoomouts thanks to the Spyro World Viewer, but the cutscenes were really interesting! Glad to hear you enjoyed Spyro 2, hope you check out the rest of the trilogy as well, fantastic games that aged great.
I'm going to guess that the PS1's lack of Z-buffering might account for the camels' heads changing around 7:50. Z-buffering (which N64 had) is used to sort the order of polygons so they don't fight over which one should be in front. PS1 game devs had to manage this sorting issue on their own, and you can see its limitations when say, Spyro enters a body of water and his model doesn't properly clip around the water's planes. So more than likely the camel heads would have clipping issues if they were close to the surface of the floor.
Another factoid you probably already know but wasn't included in the video - similarly to the characters being hidden under the geometry in cutscenes, the entrances for portals are also hidden underneath the map in the void when they aren't yet unlocked. It's why the Swimming in the Air glitch allows you to sequence break the game somewhat, since you can access the bosses and even levels without having obtained enough Talismans or Orbs to progress.
Thank you for this video. I always wanted to see Spyro's lod technique and loading screens in action and detail. Also, the games look like paper animations in HD. A nice touch.
Hey man, great vid as always. Ever thought of doing a Boundary Break on Bloodborne? Love to see what kind of creepy shit may be lurking beneath the surface
Spyro 2 is my all-time favorite PS1 game, and it’s pretty cool to see all these graphical quirks in full detail. On a side, note, I am _so_ hyped for the remasters!
About the jumbled mess of polygons animation thing, it occurs in Zephyr too when you have to shoot those seeds into the ground. Afterwards, a platform-like plant will grow, the actual animation is just the tiny spot you see in the middle before you spat the seed getting bigger
My childhood flashes before me! I'm remembering that one Christmas that wasn't a disaster! Oh we all got along and I played Spyro 2 and 3 all day! Good times, great times.
Something not a lot of people notice when messing around with the camera in this game- sometimes the cutscene versions of areas have small off-screen differences that imply some parts of the level geometry were originally different in earlier builds of the game (when they animated the cutscenes.) If you go to some cutscene versions of Winter Tundra, then take a peek behind the door to Ripto's arena, you'll see that the boss battle originally was accessed through a hole in the ground like the previous two bosses- instead of simply walking in a straight line forward. I always wondered as a kid why Ripto's arena wasn't accessed the same way as Crush and Gulp, but I guess now I know they were originally all the same. Shame you didn't include this when making the video!
Gotta love that game engine! They went the exact opposite of Crash Bandicoot and allowed the entire environment to be there, but in a form the PSX can handle. I can imagine the level artists where leaping with joy over that. Build and finalize an overall level, then work in the details knowing all if it would be seen.
I love this lol and I am so glad I stuck around until the end. This is my first time coming across your channel so seeing this then hearing Kingdom Hearts 2? YES PLEASE
Please do Sly Cooper Boundary Break! I'd love to see the 4 game series get some love. It's one of the most under-rated PS2 series's ever. The orchestral tracks are the best part, along with the heists that the 3 main characters do. If you don't know anything about this game series, *PLEASE* look it up! I know you won't be disappointed. I grew up playing Sly 2 and Sly 3 on my PS2, everything about this series shines in quality. My fav games are Sly 2 and Sly 3. Sly 1 is the weakest of the whole series ironically, followed by Sly 4. The best game out of the whole series is Sly 2, followed by Sly 3. Also, I remember when UA-cam first recommended you to me when you only had like 3k subs and you did the second boundary break, which was Super Mario Galaxy. I've been subbed to you ever since then, how crazy it is that you've grown!
In the first game, when Spyro goes through the portals, it's different. There is no fade to black. He seamlessly travels to the next world, and you even see him land on the level.
The cool thing about Spyro is that they didn't just create all that geometry out of bounds for presentation's sake. Most of the time it's solid enough to stand on as long as you figure out how to get there. I hope the remakes retain this.
Oh man, I'm SO pumped for the next episode!! Kingdom Hearts 2 is one of my favorite games, an opinion that has been solified after playing the hell out of KH2 Final Mix this year.
I think I know why the camel's heads shrink when they go underground. As you said yourself the Playstation 1 is very limited, but you don't know how limited it is. It doesn't have a Z buffer among its other limitations. Simply put this means that it's not very good at knowing which objects should be in front of other objects. It means that if something is just below the ground, you might still see it because the PSX doesn't know that it should be obscured. So they shrunk the camels heads so all you'd see is the neck, regardless of the poor 3D accuracy. When you take into account other limitations such as 1 MB of VRAM, affine texture mapping, and a 2X (300 KB/s) CD drive, it really helps one to appreciate how good the visuals are and what the developers had to pull off to make that happen.
Loved the video as always, thank you for this! Spyro, alongside Crash Bandicoot (especially Twinsanity) are my favourite games. I'm hoping that since the're going to be remastered (Crash already is but shh) they will be loved by many again...
I've always loved the way the playstation 1 graphics looked. I found out that it's because it doesn't use division when calculating the perspective to save on performance that allowed render time to be faster at the cost of the graphics looking wavy because it doesn't take into account decimal places. Makes me wonder what games would look like these days with such high poly models, would you even notice the perspective errors as much. Might allow for some highly detailed renderings at the cost of things looking weird up close.
Awesome as always. Love lil Spyro! How about boundary breaking "Boundary Break". Take the camera outside of boundary break to show what goes into making a video heh =D
Great video Shesez not because Spyro is my all time favorite game but I'm also a programmer. Imsomniac was way ahead of their time when they are developing Spyro WOW...
The PS1 lacked floating point precision, which is why you sometimes see polygons warping in weird ways, and also why some polygons seem to appear in front of others. So, I think the reason they made the camel's head shrink instead of simply clip into the ground, is because the player still might be able to see the camel's head under the right circumstances due to the way ps1 renders polygons.
I went back and played Spyro 1 and 2 last year, and it's genuinely surprising just how well those games have held up. A lot of early 3D platformers haven't aged all that well, but Insomniac really knew what they were doing
I love the ambiance music in the hub worlds. It was hypnotic as a kid and still just as fresh now
Brian sooo etherial. the thing that made Spyro standout was it’s spiritual motiffs. Excising the evil spirits from the statues, collecting talismans and orbs to accrue magic. Not to mention collecting spirits for power-ups. I wish they continued with that theme and went further with it to ensure the future of the franchise.
Walton Simons I later learned in life after Spyro that they are using Hz frequencies for healing or peace etc. check them out sometime. I immediately said “AUTUMN PLAINS!”
MY. GOD. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I INTENDED TO SAY FOR YEARS.... I thought I was crazy thinking about aetherial but... It is....
I also made sooo many dreams when I went to bed thinking about Spyro, imagining to explore the magic worlds, that now it's in my brain forever.
Autumn Plains is the best hub world in the history of video games.
FACT.
I love it too its so peaceful and serene!
150% agree with you dude
Imagine an alarm ring in the morning with that sound?
Evening lake
This game will always hold a special place in my heart. I was 5 years old when my dad had a brain aneurism (he is alive but disabled) and this was the last video game me and him were able to play together. I vividly remember having a blast with him playing this for hours everyday. Been 20 years this month crazy how time flies.
The difference between this and the remake is amazing
My favorite game ever made. Can't wait to watch.
thank you sir
Spyro 2 and Crash 2 are my favourites. I can't decide which is better :)
Penapenis and you can get remastered versions of the first 3 games from both series now for pc xbox one and ps4.
EZScape best game ever
love your channel ez
Trouble with the trolley, eh?
Also, you were right on Twitter to say that the bucket enemy was going to be my favorite part!
ugh. that phrase still haunts me..
Haha dude that line... don’t know how many times I’ve heard it LOL
People look at me strangely when I say that.
I went boom again
I love that because i watch this series so much, everytime he mentions something or asks a question how something is done, i can usually figure it out as well lol. Man this series is so good.
Growing up with _Spyro 1,_ the whole thing with the hub portals being like cookie-cutter holes into the next environment was always one of the things I was curious about.
I'm guessing that when Spyro emerges back into the homeworld, the sequence is just playing in reverse - Camera put against the portal normal, Spyro loads in, Spyro flies out through the portal from within, camera pulls back to show portal.
7-year-old me was fiddling with the idea of the portal being a non-euclidian space. That there's an explanation as simple as *"character is given render priority"* and being able to watch the process side-on _really_ destroys the mysticism behind this.
Insomniac were masters of their art, for sure.
It's actually a real shame that this effect was left out of the remaster. It's something that always added to the awe of the game for me
@@jaihayes9647 It's a shame that this effect was left out of the original second and third games too, it's only the very first game that has it. The second and third games fade away, which they also do in the remake for consistency. The remake took several features of the second and third game and applied it to the first game. So if they had kept the animation from the first game in the second and third game, I wouldn't be surprised to have seen it being used in the remake too.
@@Liggliluff I never played the first one, so that literally can’t be true
The camel head have to be shrunk because the PS1 is not using a Zbuffer to render the graphics, just reorganizing the triangles from back to front, and that would make parts if not the whole camel head appear the whole time depending on the angle, floor polygon size etc..
do sleeping dogs, i want to see the mountains and other places you dont have access to
Yeah, came down to see if anyone mentined it already. Z-buffer is oh-so-easy to take for granted nowadays, but it was just too much overhead back in the day.
I'm also fascinated with how exactly are they doing their portals, because without some other modern features that we take for granted (stencil buffer, render-to-texture and such) those things require very creative and carefully implemented solutions.
It was mentioned in the video how they've gone around Spyro flying into the portal, but what bugs me is how exactly was the portal rendered? Because the skybox is actually geometry here (triangles with gradients on them, no (or very small and limited) textures). Did they have to clip them manually? Did they make the portal frame thicker than the largest skybox polygon so it wouldn't stick out if they just turned them on and off? Is there a PS1 trick that can do this in some other way? Does anyone know?
You can actually do render to texture on the PS1, as the PS1 treats all the graphical data as this single big bitmap where it store even the picture that got rendered last.
This is how it does the FF7 battle intro twirl thing.
Seemed to me like a framebuffer effect that you can enable, implemented in hardware, not a general purpose render-to-texture feature. But again, I'm not that familiar with how exactly stuff works on PS1. Still, even if possible, my intuition tells me that rendering to texture would be too expensive for something like this that needs to happen during regular gameplay. I'd still place my money on some clever geometry and/or layering trickery. Essentially, I'd really love to have that free camera and tinker with it myself :)
Well, its not exactly "rendering to the texture", but more of a "draw stuff, move frame buffer around".
But given the fact the skybox don't look pixelated, even with the scaled up render of the emulator used on the episode, it is most likely some sort of trickery, most likely abusing the draw order.
As you don't have to respect any real z-buffer order, you could just draw the new skybox, then draw everything over it, except for the hole in the portal.
Level of detail in a Playstation 1 game? That's actually pretty impressive.
Spyro basically invented it
Even when i got my new ps2 back in the day i was still playing Spyro ps1 version. Such a great game!
Oh childhood memories, I still love this game! 😊
Dude, that was a great ep! I cant believe Spyro actually use level of detail thing to get stable framerate.
I feel like Boundary Break is more than just an entertainment series, it could potentially teach indie game devs some helpful tricks! Good job on your success, Shesez!
That environment in the opening cutscene is a variation of Stone Hill from the first game. Including the castle, which you can jump ontop of in the original game and find some gems. They've just added the stormy effect and a portal in the area, which wasn't there in the first game.
Spyro is the game that got me into gaming. I love video games so much that I set out to become a video game developer in my adult life. I've made a few small games already and while that's nothing special, it's still something for me in moving forward towards doing something I love with my life. So watching the little out of bounds secrets and seeing how the game can work and what's going on backstage was really special. Thanks for this. This was awesome.
Also I laughed at 6:02 at how unintentionally condescending that statement sounded. "Now don't worry. This isn't too complicated. Especially with some visuals here to help you through it." I love this channel.
It was Gateway to Glimmer here in the UK, one of my favourite games of that time
Ö _ grew up in US and I was raised right. Had so much fun with these games and died when they said it will finally have a remaster.
I never understood why it was retitled to that. Glimmer's not exactly a major part of the game.
SBGHaseo The name"Ripto," incidentally, is what the Insomniac team thought "Spyro," written in Japanese, looked like. They got used to saying the name "Ripto," and decided to incorporate it into the sequel to "Spyro the Dragon."
Michael John of Cerny Games said having two different names "was just a marketing decision made by Sony Europe. No trademark violations or anything sinister ... they just liked the name better and it didn't bother us. The games are identical."
I wonder if they will apply the same logic to the remastered versions, will the 2nd game be called RR in America & G2G in Europe? I bet they thought Gateway To Glimmer was a bit more "glamorous" it offers colourful levels waiting to be explored, whereas Ripto's Rage makes it sound like he's on steroids lol
Personally, as long as the games are identical despite the name, I could not care less. But it's interesting that it was a marketing team's decision to change it to begin with.
Maybe it's just like Old Gregg said. _"Ripto's Rage"_ makes it sound more like a fighting game, while _"Gateway to Glimmer"_ gives off a bit more fantasy-like platform game feeling.
Even though Glimmer itself didn't play a major role in the game itself, it was the place where it all started. Instead of getting to Dragon Shores, Spyro ended up in Glimmer on an adventure he didn't ask for. Ripto has more impact on the game being the main antagonist, but it's not like his existence is the main concern all the time. Actually, for the majority of the game we don't even remember him, since every world we travel to has problems of their own that Spyro solves. It's only in the home worlds and the big boss fights when we ever see him doing anything relatively evil.
Same here. Glimmer is only an ordinary level (the first actually but still nothing special or important about it). It sounds better, yeah, but 'Ripto's Rage' is more fitting.
this is actually one of the coolest videos i've watched on UA-cam. Of course my love of Spyro is totally jading my opinion here, oh oh totally random question and i know it's universally despised, i mean i personally can't bring myself to hate it as i know the developers really did try their best they were simply forced to rush it, but would you consider doing Boundary Break with Enter the Dragonfly, or maybe a Hero's Tail, or Legend of Spyro???
Great episode! There's an amazing tool called Spyro World Viewer that I highly recommend checking out, which lets you fly through any level from the Spyro trilogy (including cutscenes, some removed content and even the credits versions of the levels) while keeping everything with the highest level of detail, and the worlds hold up REALLY well, it looks more like a remastered PS2 game than a PS1 game.
Oh wait, Shesez! You forgot the best part! There is a duplicate map of each stage and homeworld with no NPCs or collision far above the actual map!
breIoom oh wow
Also toad
If its anything like Metal Gear Solid. What people are referring to is the same map, only spyro hit the ceiling and warped coordinates to the bottom of the map. this then removes all enemies and collision (just like MGS)
Shesez is it at all similar to the idea of parallel Universes in Nintendo 64 games like Super Mario 64?
exactly the same actually. Basically, the numbers that store the vertical position coordinates have a finite value, and once that value is exceeded on either end, it "wraps around" to the opposite end and keeps going. Both in SM64 and Spyro, what happens is basically that you've went SO FAR that you wrapped those coordinates around one (or more) entire times. Of course, the collision detection, enemies, etc all operate on a different set of variables, often stored as different variable formats or generally calculated in different ways.
Another example of variable overflow: Gandhi in the original Civilization game. He's supposed to be as peaceful as possible, but when he reaches democracy, it subtracts several points from the 'aggressiveness' value - because he's already as low as he can be, he ends up at like... 255 aggressiveness on a scale that NORMALLY never goes above 10.
Every Civ game since then has *deliberately* made Gandhi ridiculously violent as homage to this bug.
I loved this episode thanks for the wonderful work on this episode Shesez. Spyro is such a nostalgic game for me I loved it as a child. Playing it again these days would make me cry from the memories of my childhood.
I like how many zoomouts there were. They've definitely a highlight.
Frickin *KINGDOM HEARTS 2*
I love the original Spyro trilogy. Thank you for making this video.
Spyro 2 is so damn good. My favourite in the series.
Hey, lovely episode! To get world shots without the polygon shaking and LOD limitations, you can see them through Spyro World Viewer, a program that read the data from WAD files from any of the 3 spyro games and allows them to be displayed in a free view, and you're able to switch between the low, high poly models/texture mipmaps, as well as the vertex mapping colors. You would also find out that the developpers ( for Spyro 3 at least, i didn't check the older ones ) made it so all the custscenes and credits shots are playing in alternate version of the levels, sometimes with areas always off screen cut away. I don't really know why they did that, however. Finally, as they are also viewable and exported in extended .obj format, the skyboxes are actually full hemispheres with 2000 polygons on average placed so the vertex coloring makes all the details. This is why the skybox will remain clear and beautiful even in high resolutions.
Finally, all levels and skyboxes are actually divided in chunks ( sometimes they are not perfectly matching, like in SM64 ), so the game knows what to draw and what not to when thing are outside the camera's view.
I hope these informations will be useful if you consider making a Spyro 3 episode! I can't wait for Kingdom Hearts 2!
Will you be doing a spyro 3 episode since there's a free camera for it?
It was great to see you at PAX (I was cappy hat dude with the bled out marker problem). I tried the free cam in dolphin and you're right, it worked. I hope ya had a good time and can't wait to see more BB.
I made a great discovery, that's why I subscribed to this channel!
Nicholas Jett. Why yes, I didn't know what it was at first, played with it little bit, and nearly went blind!
3:52 at this point you can tell they wanted Spyro to call the tiger a pussy, but they still wanted to keep it G rated.
Spyro was my childhood, I'm actually impressed with myself for how well I remembered so many of the stages and events you mentioned/showed.
Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future is a fun one to explore like this. You don't even have to break the game because there are so many flaws, you can swim out of multiple levels and explore them. In the Roaring Forces level there's a black (trigger box?) underneath where an eel boss stops chasing you, a dolphin from a different level swimming in place, a tiny version of the eel boss, and a static lightning bolt which the eel boss shoots at you. Also seeing the underwater tubes is trippy and horrifying if you're doing it in-game.
The jak and daxter series recently had its debug mode discovered which allows you to use a free camera where ever you want if you're interested.
This series, a well as sequence break, are excellent for studying the development techniques of these old games. Thank you.
0:09 Shesez souunds like ''she says''
Darkune. That's what shesez!
rekt
lol I see you have 666 subs right now, demon confirmed
SvenDaHacker64 pls sub so Im free from my curse :c
He said in a live stream that he named his channel after that so that it would remind people of his channel if they said she said/says
It's incredible how clever solutions the developers could come up with! As a programmer I can appreciate it just even more.
Being able to move parts of a character model so freely like with the bucket blubber, camel head and money bag was a completely new information for me.
"a surprisingly good episode of Boundary Break"
Take pride in your work man, lord knows I couldn't do this week in and week out. You do good stuff.
this is the main reason why I love Sypro 2 the most out of all 3 original games. The environment/stages/props and every other special effects/graphics were mesmerizing and very well done for that time, and they still gives me goosebumps to this day.
Can't believe I haven't seen this video before. One of my favorite games ever, if not my very favorite. Thank you for making this!
I love all the spyro content coming up lately! My favorite series ever!!
I never thought that the level transition effect would be done in such a clever way. That was very cool to see!
I just absolutely love these videos! Keep it coming and I’ll keep sending the love!
Every Episode is Supreme! You earned every Like :)
Thanks stevie! ❤
Nice moana reference! lol
Oh man, Spyro 2 was my favorite PS1 game as a kid. I Can’t wait for the trilogy remake. Great episode as always Shesez.
Oh my god I love this video! Thank you for doing this! :D It's incredible to see how it all works!
Jessica Williamson 🙌
4:30
Also, fun fact about that stage: in the large circular stingray arena, if you swim up to the invisible wall and swim-charge around the length of the edge of the arena, you will break through the boundary.
You are now able to no-clip swim outside of the stage and explore the entire map in game. You can even swim through walls and swim into areas without water. If you want, you can freely explore the shark sub area at your leisure. Game does freeze if you swim into the sub though.
My favorite bit was probably the loading screen trickery. That's -really- cool to see how they did that.
Also excited for next week's!
Great episode, now I’d like to see my favorite game boundary broke. Spyro 3
Awesome thanks for this! Hope you cover the other two games!
These are sick tricks. Really puts perspective on how things work outside of the sight boundries
Great work Shesez, always love your work and I hope you're able to make this a full time gig like you wanted.
We've seen the zoomouts thanks to the Spyro World Viewer, but the cutscenes were really interesting! Glad to hear you enjoyed Spyro 2, hope you check out the rest of the trilogy as well, fantastic games that aged great.
Can you make Nintendo Land boundary break? I always want to know how the gates open (they seems bigger on the inside)
Thank you so much man for this episode. Im really excited for the re-ignited edition this year
I'm going to guess that the PS1's lack of Z-buffering might account for the camels' heads changing around 7:50. Z-buffering (which N64 had) is used to sort the order of polygons so they don't fight over which one should be in front. PS1 game devs had to manage this sorting issue on their own, and you can see its limitations when say, Spyro enters a body of water and his model doesn't properly clip around the water's planes. So more than likely the camel heads would have clipping issues if they were close to the surface of the floor.
i came here exactly to comment this!! very well put. worth a pin @Shesez
Best video I’ve seen on UA-cam in a while.
Thank you sir
Another factoid you probably already know but wasn't included in the video - similarly to the characters being hidden under the geometry in cutscenes, the entrances for portals are also hidden underneath the map in the void when they aren't yet unlocked. It's why the Swimming in the Air glitch allows you to sequence break the game somewhat, since you can access the bosses and even levels without having obtained enough Talismans or Orbs to progress.
Dude, I remember subbing when you started out! Huge fan, keep up the good work!
FINALLY the Spyro episode we have waited for!!!
Thank you for this video. I always wanted to see Spyro's lod technique and loading screens in action and detail. Also, the games look like paper animations in HD. A nice touch.
Nice video, Shesez! This is what I was waiting for :)
Hey man, great vid as always. Ever thought of doing a Boundary Break on Bloodborne? Love to see what kind of creepy shit may be lurking beneath the surface
9:05 Are we uh... are we not going to question the morality of what's going on on the left?
Spyro 2 is my all-time favorite PS1 game, and it’s pretty cool to see all these graphical quirks in full detail.
On a side, note, I am _so_ hyped for the remasters!
About the jumbled mess of polygons animation thing, it occurs in Zephyr too when you have to shoot those seeds into the ground. Afterwards, a platform-like plant will grow, the actual animation is just the tiny spot you see in the middle before you spat the seed getting bigger
My childhood flashes before me! I'm remembering that one Christmas that wasn't a disaster! Oh we all got along and I played Spyro 2 and 3 all day! Good times, great times.
Something not a lot of people notice when messing around with the camera in this game- sometimes the cutscene versions of areas have small off-screen differences that imply some parts of the level geometry were originally different in earlier builds of the game (when they animated the cutscenes.) If you go to some cutscene versions of Winter Tundra, then take a peek behind the door to Ripto's arena, you'll see that the boss battle originally was accessed through a hole in the ground like the previous two bosses- instead of simply walking in a straight line forward. I always wondered as a kid why Ripto's arena wasn't accessed the same way as Crush and Gulp, but I guess now I know they were originally all the same.
Shame you didn't include this when making the video!
Have you ever thought about doing a Boundary Break on Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit or any of David Cage's games?
He did a heavy rain one
I actually remember that one - my mistake. But I still think Indigo Prophecy, Beyond Two Souls might be cool.
Gotta love that game engine! They went the exact opposite of Crash Bandicoot and allowed the entire environment to be there, but in a form the PSX can handle. I can imagine the level artists where leaping with joy over that. Build and finalize an overall level, then work in the details knowing all if it would be seen.
Wow I've just replayed the remastered version so its crazy seeing the old version again 😂 great video😁
ooh my good, i really really wanted a spyro video by you, i am sooo happy about this video, thank you!!!
💚💚💚💚
I love this lol and I am so glad I stuck around until the end. This is my first time coming across your channel so seeing this then hearing Kingdom Hearts 2? YES PLEASE
Spyro! Oh man, I got so excited seeing this in my subscriptions. I miss playing this game.
Your channel never disappoints!
Please do Sly Cooper Boundary Break!
I'd love to see the 4 game series get some love.
It's one of the most under-rated PS2 series's ever.
The orchestral tracks are the best part, along with the heists that the 3 main characters do.
If you don't know anything about this game series, *PLEASE* look it up! I know you won't be disappointed.
I grew up playing Sly 2 and Sly 3 on my PS2, everything about this series shines in quality.
My fav games are Sly 2 and Sly 3. Sly 1 is the weakest of the whole series ironically, followed by Sly 4.
The best game out of the whole series is Sly 2, followed by Sly 3.
Also, I remember when UA-cam first recommended you to me when you only had like 3k subs and you did the second boundary break, which was Super Mario Galaxy. I've been subbed to you ever since then, how crazy it is that you've grown!
I sure as hell didn't have the words for it as a kid, but I was SUPER impressed with the LOD in Spyro games.
That "Save Error" definitely triggered me. I'm glad we don't have to deal with memory cards anymore.
Great episode as always, thanks for this series im really enjoying it!
Spyro 2 is my favorite of the original trilogy! Can't wait for the HD release!!
cool episode! i was waiting for this a long time. thank you
After you gave me inspiration I have now officially put an out-of-bounds Easter egg in my game.
Legacy of Kain Defiance! I'd die if I could see that boundary broken.
Can't wait for the Reignited Trilogy!
In the first game, when Spyro goes through the portals, it's different. There is no fade to black. He seamlessly travels to the next world, and you even see him land on the level.
Yay. Boundary break/Shesez is back. Those 4 days must have been fun.
The cool thing about Spyro is that they didn't just create all that geometry out of bounds for presentation's sake. Most of the time it's solid enough to stand on as long as you figure out how to get there. I hope the remakes retain this.
Oh man, I'm SO pumped for the next episode!! Kingdom Hearts 2 is one of my favorite games, an opinion that has been solified after playing the hell out of KH2 Final Mix this year.
Just coming back here after ordering the Spyro remake. I will love it to death, just like I did (and still do) back then!
Just finished watching all your classic games here
I think I know why the camel's heads shrink when they go underground. As you said yourself the Playstation 1 is very limited, but you don't know how limited it is. It doesn't have a Z buffer among its other limitations. Simply put this means that it's not very good at knowing which objects should be in front of other objects. It means that if something is just below the ground, you might still see it because the PSX doesn't know that it should be obscured. So they shrunk the camels heads so all you'd see is the neck, regardless of the poor 3D accuracy.
When you take into account other limitations such as 1 MB of VRAM, affine texture mapping, and a 2X (300 KB/s) CD drive, it really helps one to appreciate how good the visuals are and what the developers had to pull off to make that happen.
Loved the video as always, thank you for this! Spyro, alongside Crash Bandicoot (especially Twinsanity) are my favourite games. I'm hoping that since the're going to be remastered (Crash already is but shh) they will be loved by many again...
I've always loved the way the playstation 1 graphics looked. I found out that it's because it doesn't use division when calculating the perspective to save on performance that allowed render time to be faster at the cost of the graphics looking wavy because it doesn't take into account decimal places.
Makes me wonder what games would look like these days with such high poly models, would you even notice the perspective errors as much. Might allow for some highly detailed renderings at the cost of things looking weird up close.
Awesome as always. Love lil Spyro!
How about boundary breaking "Boundary Break". Take the camera outside of boundary break to show what goes into making a video heh =D
Texture work was amazing already on the PS1.
Thank you. The nostalgia I have for this game.
Great video Shesez not because Spyro is my all time favorite game but I'm also a programmer. Imsomniac was way ahead of their time when they are developing Spyro WOW...
I'm definitely excited for the KHII episode, especially because I love that one
This video made me want to listen to the spyro soundtrack. The first two games sound similar
The PS1 lacked floating point precision, which is why you sometimes see polygons warping in weird ways, and also why some polygons seem to appear in front of others. So, I think the reason they made the camel's head shrink instead of simply clip into the ground, is because the player still might be able to see the camel's head under the right circumstances due to the way ps1 renders polygons.