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Banjo Theories & Stop 'n' Swop SNS? Bottle's Revenge? Share your thoughts on the mysteries of the Banjo series and discuss the new Stop 'n' Swop features in Nuts and Bolts and the XBLA games

 
 
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  #136  
Old 3rd May 2009, 12:56 AM
FyreWulff FyreWulff is offline
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I always just assumed the Ice Key text was left over from it being the same engine as BK and BT. Build off the same code, and there's going to be some 'leftovers' from the other games.

However, checking to see if anything looks for an ice key as posted earlier would be a good idea. If they were in fact planning on having a swap-fest between all their post-BK BK-engine games, the Ice Key would have been the best item to swap between BK and DK, and keep the eggs for BT.

Now if your game is quite far along, and suddenly SnS isn't possible anymore due to N64 hardware updates, it might be easier to just set the Ice Key flag to 'on' permanently so that any SnS hooks don't have to be reworked. And/or the Ice Key might count towards the game's completion percentage - someone should play the game (or use a GS code) and see if you can still get the full % complete with the Ice Key flag disabled.


  #137  
Old 3rd May 2009, 06:33 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FyreWulff View Post
I always just assumed the Ice Key text was left over from it being the same engine as BK and BT. Build off the same code, and there's going to be some 'leftovers' from the other games.

However, checking to see if anything looks for an ice key as posted earlier would be a good idea. If they were in fact planning on having a swap-fest between all their post-BK BK-engine games, the Ice Key would have been the best item to swap between BK and DK, and keep the eggs for BT.

Now if your game is quite far along, and suddenly SnS isn't possible anymore due to N64 hardware updates, it might be easier to just set the Ice Key flag to 'on' permanently so that any SnS hooks don't have to be reworked. And/or the Ice Key might count towards the game's completion percentage - someone should play the game (or use a GS code) and see if you can still get the full % complete with the Ice Key flag disabled.
Game engines contain code that is essentially the foundation of a game, not it's actual content, so content related code would not spill over into games just because they share an engine, if so, games like Rainbow Six Vegas would have bits of Gears of War code somewhere in there, seeing as they both use the Unreal Engine.

The games were developed side by side, so it's not like they just ripped banjo kazooie's code and edited it to be donkey kong 64, therefore the ice key couldnt be something just left behind in the code from a different game.
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  #138  
Old 3rd May 2009, 10:37 AM
FyreWulff FyreWulff is offline
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You'd be surprised. 99% of Tiberian Sun's text from it's missions are in Red Alert 2, Westwood just added the Red Alert 2 mission text on top of the Tiberian Sun ones.

If you've got an engine already, it would make sense to have a pre-existing item to test out early Stop n Swop, so you'd just leave the Ice Key in there.

Edit: and the reason that there would never be Gears stuff in Rainbow Six is because all Epic gives you is 'generic' code. Where a developer that builds all their stuff in-house is probably just going to fork the latest stable build of the engine, usually the latest version of their last game. It's just that some developers do a much better clean up job than others. It's so painfully obvious that DK64 was basically a Banjo re-skin with some new mechanics and so on duct taped onto it. (Want to bet that Lanky's hand-run is the same code as the talon trot?) I'm almost positive that the first DK64 alphas probably had Banjo running around them before they got DK in there.

Last edited by FyreWulff; 3rd May 2009 at 11:35 AM.


  #139  
Old 3rd May 2009, 03:26 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FyreWulff View Post
You'd be surprised. 99% of Tiberian Sun's text from it's missions are in Red Alert 2, Westwood just added the Red Alert 2 mission text on top of the Tiberian Sun ones.

If you've got an engine already, it would make sense to have a pre-existing item to test out early Stop n Swop, so you'd just leave the Ice Key in there.

Edit: and the reason that there would never be Gears stuff in Rainbow Six is because all Epic gives you is 'generic' code. Where a developer that builds all their stuff in-house is probably just going to fork the latest stable build of the engine, usually the latest version of their last game. It's just that some developers do a much better clean up job than others. It's so painfully obvious that DK64 was basically a Banjo re-skin with some new mechanics and so on duct taped onto it. (Want to bet that Lanky's hand-run is the same code as the talon trot?) I'm almost positive that the first DK64 alphas probably had Banjo running around them before they got DK in there.
That's because they are lazy. You don't see that kind of stuff too often, especially between two games that were being developed at the same time, there isn't much room for one to be running off of the finished code of the other. I have no doubt that the engine is the same, and that they may have shared code back and forth, such as the talon trot you said, but things like the ice key and stuff probably weren't added when the engine was built, but way after, at a point where both games were so far into development that they were completely isolated from each other, I dont see any way how the ice key would of just been in there from Banjo.
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  #140  
Old 3rd May 2009, 11:24 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FyreFluff
If they were in fact planning on having a swap-fest between all their post-BK BK-engine games, the Ice Key would have been the best item to swap between BK and DK, and keep the eggs for BT.
I think it can be narrowed down to 1 of 2 possibilities:

A) Sns was implemented only with the ice-key at a time when Tooie wasn't a planned sequel for BK. Therefore, the eggs aren't present in that version of SNS, whilst the ice-key is. Later on, SNS was cancelled in DK64, and they decided to use it in Tooie instead.

B) DK64 was used to test SNS between BK.


Quote:
Originally Posted by WyreFluff
Now if your game is quite far along, and suddenly SnS isn't possible anymore due to N64 hardware updates, it might be easier to just set the Ice Key flag to 'on' permanently so that any SnS hooks don't have to be reworked. And/or the Ice Key might count towards the game's completion percentage - someone should play the game (or use a GS code) and see if you can still get the full % complete with the Ice Key flag disabled.
As I said, the totals menu won't show the Ice-key based on wether you have more than 0 collected (like the other items). Therefore, it sets the ice-key amount address to 0x0001 so that when it does show up in the total's menu (after being activated by some other trigger), it will always show that you have 1/1 ice-keys collected.

Also, it doesn't affect the total game percentage.


  #141  
Old 4th May 2009, 12:04 AM
Banjo-Korezooie Banjo-Korezooie is offline
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I'm confused on a few timelines..

First off, the N64 was released, what, two years after Banjo-Kazooie came out (Long after the Nintendo 64's extra memory was dropped)? And Stop 'N' Swop was still kept in the finalized version of Banjo-Kazooie.

During Banjo-Kazooie's development, RARE was also developing Donkey Kong 64, and were at least probably testing Stop 'N' Swop with both games (I say "probably" because since there is technically no proof that the ice key in Donkey Kong 64 was used for testing SnS, as likely as that is, it isn't a fact). So if the 64's extra memory got canned far before SnS was officially shown in the finalized version of Banjo-Kazooie, even if it was originally planned to be used for SnS early on, isn't it more realistic that Donkey Kong 64's expansion pak was used for swapping (especially since that's the game that was found with a fragment of SnS in it and the one that needed the expansion pak)?

I also think it's an odd-yet irrelevant-coincidence that the Stop 'N' Swop in Tooie was gotten through game "paks".


  #142  
Old 4th May 2009, 10:02 PM
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runehero123 runehero123 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Banjo-Korenzooie
I'm confused on a few timelines..

First off, the N64 was released, what, two years after Banjo-Kazooie came out (Long after the Nintendo 64's extra memory was dropped)? And Stop 'N' Swop was still kept in the finalized version of Banjo-Kazooie.
Wha...??? I don't know where you got that. The extra memory, we would call the expansion pak, which wasn't dropped at all. What you're probably trying to say is that they replaced the original RDRAM (shipped with the first N64 consoles) with the concurrent RDRAM. These only held data for a second or two after the console was powered off, while the original retained data for at least ten seconds. This is why it became impossible to "SWOP" the games in that short amount of time.

They(Nintendo, Rambus) didn't replace the original RDRAM until sometime during BT's developement. This is why SNS was dropped in BT and remains completely in BK.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Banjo-Korenzooie
So if the 64's extra memory got canned far before SnS was officially shown in the finalized version of Banjo-Kazooie, even if it was originally planned to be used for SnS early on, isn't it more realistic that Donkey Kong 64's expansion pak was used for swapping (especially since that's the game that was found with a fragment of SnS in it and the one that needed the expansion pak)?
Part in bold has been explained, and is false. Also, who's to say that DK64 was using the expansion pak early on(when tested with BK)? Especially if they were running on the same/similar engines (although I haven't seen any proof of this.).

Last edited by runehero123; 4th May 2009 at 10:04 PM.


 

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beta, dk64, ice-key, sns


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