Restore the palace

Best way to restore Hidden Palace (Ese 2 inflates it). playing hpz in debug mode (rev01a) I saw a red wave (the dumping of oil into the ocean) it was wierd.

 

Sounds weird! When you play Hidden Palace in Sonic 2 final before restoration there is a ton of Oil Ocean stuff in there, I heard somewhere that Sonic Team actually fixed the pointers to load the OOZ objects. Had they not done that and simply deleted the zone, it would crash and not be accessible so easily. Perhaps they wanted it there as a little easter egg?

 

S2beta.com states that the tiles are actoally loading OOZ's pallettes or something, so this is nothing new, unfortunately...

 

HPZ in Sonic 2 Final loads the layer deformation, and palette load cues and some art of OOZ. It actually don't load all of OOZ, that's why some times are mixed up. As you may or may of not noticed, some of the Main menu title screen is there also (Part of Sonic's head on the Master Emerald I believe, well Sonic's head somewhere). This is because it reaches the end of OOZ's cues and then over-runs into the title screen cues.


The rest was left from the Sonic 2 Beta un-deleted (level layout, mappings, rings and object layout, etc).


Correct me if wrong.

 

levartptrs $14,$15, $C, BM16_OOZ, BM16_OOZ, BM16_OOZ ; 8 ; HPZ ; HIDDEN PALACE ZONE (UNUSED)



Unlike normal levels which have 8x8, 16x16 and 128x128 files, HPZ's level slot only has the 16x16 OOZ tiles.

 

Ok, I don't understand this. Why is hidden palace almost finish in the early prototype? Then where do the screen shots come from? How Do I restore Hpz and (not sure if possible) lost background?

 

You're effectively answering your own question. Hidden Palace had a huge amount of work at the very start of the development process of Sonic 2, in fact the is a Tails 1up box proves that it was made before any of the mappings for the item boxes were changed. Why? Well early in Sonic 2's development, they were still using the same item box system as Sonic 1. An item box, set to the "slot" for invincibility was placed in HPZ before it was changed to be for a Tails 1up box at a later stage.





For whatever reason, it was moved down the list of priorities, and eventually deleted when the time had run out for it's completion.

 

A lot of times I do that.

 

Basically the HPZ in the final only has the information to load the "16x16" tiles, and in a sense, spreads them out across the zone filling in all the sprites and aspects of the fore-ground?





What about the glowing bridge? It's one of the few interactable objects left in the level, if not one of the few the only one.


What really purplexes me about the level, is the fact that it's still there. I mean, the story given several times by Sega employees is that time was short and it was cut. I doubt they would leave it untouched for so long then scrap just the art. Most of the lay out, the





The master emerald loads tiles from the introduction.


Also I noticed something about the HPZ in the final, there are tiles and things after the cut off in the Simon Wai beta. after a few lengths of the waterslide in the Simon Wai beta there is nothing, untill the last part of the level where it just shows the rock wall. However in the final HPZ there are things to stand on, and what not. I wonder if this means that the level was fully completed, and only lacked maybe the story elements, and maybe a boss?


More progress was definately made in HPZ after our Simon Wai beta. Yet somehow the tails monitor is still in the same location in the final version of the game. If this was true to be an invincability monitor, doesn't it seem odd that it wouldn't have been changed?


Although in the Beta, when in HPZ, and debug the monitor that is placed IS an invicablity monitor *yet, as well as EHZ, probably the rest of the zones with monitors as well, wood zone shows a blank monitor, as it has nothing in the zone*


Theoretically, the art from HPZ could be ported into the final version of Sonic 2 and maybe thrown into that zones "layout" and we'd have a more complete look at was the zone was supposed to be?

 

I preety much understand. I have all the beta's on my sd card and you cant access Hidden Palace Zone. Is there a way to restore it so we can access it?

 

This was done some time ago, the savestate is out there somewhere. I think it was Nemesis who created it. There are no differences in the layout, other than you spin in the tube and there is also a zone completion frozen area at the end, but that's it.

 

What if there was more in sonic 2 beta 4? Im trying to find a way to add the Hidden Palace level pointer to see what more has been done.


Im not getting anywhere. I been thinking about the Early proto, Is it possible for the Sonic 1 unused stuff to be there?

 

Palm face. It's the same throughout all prototypes we have.

 

Then I give up.