GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Wreck]

I've just made him an active user, so hopefully he'll come back on and post something soon.
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[The Extremist]

The full video should edited into the first post, and put on the GE Forever front page. This is best thing since the game came out!!!

And the game's DIRECTOR now a registered member here??????????

*swoon*
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[Kode-Z]

So, Silo was the first level that was modeled?! That explains the on-rails video clip with the elevator being one of the very first pieces of BETA footage! Would love for Hollis to do a Q&A for us - that would be awesome!!

[The Extremist]

I love that picture of the "Perfect Dark" team (mostly GE team members) near the end. Don't think I've ever seen B Jones before (the character designer)!
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[MRKane]

@kodez - it think that'd be great if he were able to answer a few questions from the GE community! Some questions that are more than just the usual stuff the masses get fed...if we were to ask ten things...what would they be? What are our quality questions?
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[Kode-Z]

MRKane wrote:

@kodez - it think that'd be great if he were able to answer a few questions from the GE community! Some questions that are more than just the usual stuff the masses get fed...if we were to ask ten things...what would they be? What are our quality questions?

Well, if we were to go ahead with it and he is willing to do it, then we'd have to ask "out of the box" questions that he probably hasn't been asked before. Haven't got any right now, but Hollis could possibly fill in a lot of gaps in our GE knowledge!

Just had a thought - if the multiplayer was added in the last month of production, then the "All Bonds" must have been removed within that month - or at least after the promo vids/pics were taken. I'm starting to wonder if Connery/Moore etc were considered as playable Bonds in solo for the bonus levels...

[MRKane]

I know goldeneye has more than its fair share of mysteries, and I really wonder how many of these were intentional, how many are the result of designers "just filling gaps" and how many just happened. Also I'd love to know if theres any we havent yet found

I frequently wonder what it would have been like as an "on the rails" shooter also.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[zoinkity]

Does nobody read the documentation?

The 'selected Bond' flag still exists and works in the save files. It wasn't fixed on the menus like everybody insists. There's a function that should have returned the value of the flag, except this has been buggered so it only returns the ID for Brosnan. Otherwise, there's two notable cases that use the flag.

The most obvious is the folder menu, which swaps images for each Bond. It is still swapping images actually, except that each image was statically set to Brosnan's IDs.

Less obvious would be a special 'selected Bond' load feature assigned to cuff 8. Cuff 8 swaps not just the cuff but the head and model of a single-player character when used in a stage. The cuff should still swap actually, but the head and body table are both manually set to Brosnan's IDs. Cuff 8 is used in both of the bonus missions.

NSNA exploited this by simply assigning different ID values and repairing the selected Bond return value so it wouldn't be fixed at Brosnan. So, in fact, it uses the original system to swap suits.
(Actually, I rewrote the routine later so you could have a custom character slot beyond those attached to a false cuff ID, but that's beside the point.)

Oddities wrote:

7F01EBC0: This is the basis for a switch that detected which Bond actor was set to the current folder. It recieves A0=folder#, and would have returned V0=0-3. Originally, you selected the Bond on the folder menu, and this impacted various aspects of the game, including your character in the two bonus stages - Aztec and Egypt. Currently, it only returns V0=0. Note, this routine is read-only. A seperate would exist for write purposes. Cuff 8: Cuff 8 is a remainant of the 4-bond era. It calls the invalid 7F01D56C, and would have selected a body/head combo specific for the selected Bond for the folder. Interestingly, there is no attempt to set the cuff to the corresponding bond within this routine. Instead, it relies on runtime switches. To a degee this is still functional. It still contains valid switches, although the selections are all set to Brosnan's tux and multiplayer head. V0, again, will only be 0. By utilizing the folder number (OR V0,A0,R0) and setting different heads/bodies, you can simulate the original behaviour. The correct cuff list is: 0 Blue suit 1 Brosnan tuxedo 2 jungle camo 3 boiler suit 4 snowsuit 5 Connery tuxedo 6 Dalton tuxedo 7 Moore tuxedo 8 selected Bond actor Folders: Folders also retain most of the original code used to display the various Bond characters. It also relies on the deleted function to select them. Currently, an unhacked rom does not load or use the other Bond actor images. You must manually set each to its corresponding slot. Again, by utilizing the folder number and adding the images into the directory, the existing switches can be used to simulate the original behaviour.

There's disassemblies to back up all of it if you're very insistant. Also in the documentation.
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[martinhollis]

Hello!

I just wanted to thank you guys, and answer your questions about the screenshots I used in the talk.

Most of the apparently in-game pictures I found using Google images. I had to dig very deep for some of the images I wanted like that Archive-like shot of Mark Edmonds on the computer screen, so I did some fairly strange searches like "GoldenEye 007 glitch" and so on.

Still, yes I was aware the shots I used were from emulators or for example that Silo overhead was from the editor (thank you DB! - is that the right name?).

N64 resolution was 320x240 and that really does not work on a big screen, it looks incredibly, shockingly blurry. Also, most of the images on the net are not original N64 images anyway, partly for the same reason and partly because capturing screenshots from the N64 wasn't so easy.

A technical note on the emulator screenshots: Because we used a fairly undocumented and not-encouraged low-level RDP drawing command to draw the sky in one primitive (4 sided triangle, if you like) no emulator has been able to draw the sky, as far as I know. I'd be happy to fill in the general details if someone wants to tackle the problem, basically it sets step rates for the attributes per change in x and y for the rectangle; I guess only GoldenEye does this, because, well, I thought it was a good idea. Probably not a good trade-off of programmer time to performance gain in retrospect, and worse, none of the emulators can draw the sky which is a shame.

Lastly, the reason I came on here.

I'd like to take the chance to say a big THANK YOU to you guys and the emulator, hack, remake and 'redevelop' communities, otherwise a lot of this kind of information would be lost to history.

Best wishes,
Martin.

[zoinkity]

Oh, it is supported now by Glide.

The actual problem had to do with how that code compiled. It made a series of RDP half commands that split up the generated low-level RDP tri commands, and up until the Glide project neither of those were emulated (at least within GE's microcode emulation). Crazy code too. It's rather handy that the next generation of microcode removed the requirement for the half commands, so the RSP simply passed RDP commands along without modification.

Of course, low-level emulators have never had a problem with it, for obvious reasons.

One unemulated graphical feature was the LOD image swapping you could apply to textures--the one with its very own debug option so you could play around with distances and swapping them and such. It was being emulated backward, with the far image used as a base, and the LOD flag wasn't being detected.
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[Sogun]

Greetings and welcome, Mr. Hollis.

Thank you for creating the GoldenEye game. It gave us hundreds of hours of fun. And it still does!

There are a few "recent" plugins that emulate GE and PD skies, but only Glide64 does it accurately.

I'm sure that Subdrag, Wreck and Zoinkity have lots of interesting questions for you as they have been hacking GoldenEye for over a decade.
Probably you have some questions too about what we were able to create. I'd like you to see a level created by timeh1337 that exploits some of the uniqueness of the GE engine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWBki8JhE1s
Did you know this was possible? Playing something like that in 1997 would be mindblowing,

Here's my question about the GoldenEye development days. You had no hardware except the SGI Onyx unit that had like 1/10 the power of the final Nintendo64, and you didn't even know how the controller would be. How can you start planning a game like that? It happened the same with other systems? Was there a time during development when you thought "This is too ambitious for the final hardware"?

Lastly. When did you hear about the GE scene? How much do you know about it? Are you surprised some of its accomplishments?


It's nice to have you here even if it's not as a regular member.

[SubDrag]

Martin,

Welcome and what a huge honor to have you post! Just to clarify, Dragonsbrethren will be stoked to see his Office level in the talk, while the Silo picture I took in the early version of the editor Zoinkity, Wreck, and I made to show it off (because Silo was the most interesting in full form, and most unseen!). I'm not sure if that version even supported vertex shading, but it does show a very unique view of silo.

The two biggest projects we are working on (besides making an editor itself, and adapting it to Perfect Dark), are GoldenEye:X and Goldfinger 64. GoldenEye:X being led by Wreck has seen early releases, but it is taking all of GoldenEye, and moving it to PD (to add sims, lighting, have some more fun with the solos, such as rain, etc):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltmne88eAWc

The second big one is Goldfinger 64 led by myself which is an ambitious total mod of the game to the other James Bond movie Goldfinger:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afzov4DkcGg

Those are perhaps the culmination of years of research, but there's of course quite a bit more levels people have made and fun miscellaneous patches on the www.goldeneyevault.com

I had a couple questions if you are able to answer.
1) How long did each solo mission take to develop, from start to finish (ignoring programming). From modelling, setup making, etc.
2) Can you explain the full rules of how portals work, and how fog relates to it? There seem to be two room #s, and then some sort of overlap value, and while we mostly have a grasp on it, sometimes portals needed to have the room numbers swapped, and more than one per room connecting to another room seem to be interesting. The only known existence is here from an emulator:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy7ljCf7Mgo
3) I know you left early, but was there anything interesting on the PD Master Control Menu different than GoldenEye? Not sure the official name, but the set of debug options you could do live. Was it very similar to GE (I'd imagine initially), or was more added, since it never made it to the final version.
4) There are B9/FC commands, not sure if you have any technical details on when to use what (how did this work in multigen as well, to decide which triangles used what type of drawing):
B900031DC8182078 FC26A0041F1093FF
They seem to change whether for example, things have transparency or not, vertice shading or not, etc.
5) Do you still play GoldenEye? Sure would be cool as an event to break the old team back for some playing together.
6) There is a ton of debug features in GoldenEye, but was started to be stripped in PAL. Was this an accidental (ran out of time) release for NTSC that was started when making PAL?
7) Oh final note, your updating frigates -mt setting in the 21990 is pretty nuts, but you must've also redone the CRC on the ROM (perhaps a tool did that). I also imagine you must've done a very brief test just to be sure Frigate loaded, if you go too high on settings as you know level will not load.

Thanks for reading! Certainly can't thank the creator enough for many many many great years playing and reverse engineering GoldenEye!!! And also for leaving all the unused stuff in
Mitchell

Last edited by SubDrag on Fri Sep 07, 2012 7:26 am; edited 2 times in total

[SilverEye]

My goodness...the creator of goldeneye HERE?!!
Greetings, mister Hollis. You won't know me at all, but I wish you the best to happen because you gave us the best thing in history!
God, i really can't believe this

[The Extremist]

SilverEye wrote:

My goodness...the creator of goldeneye HERE?!!

Boss of many creators.

1. Although you weren't around for much of it's development, is there anything you can share about the inner workings of Perfect Dark? Several of it's features are very tricky to emulate (although once again Glide has done many wonders with it), such as the Camspy, IR scanner, Slayer cam, frozen backgrounds when paused, motion blur (I've yet to see it emulated just right), and smoke (still not quite perfect).

2. What was the purpose of Line Mode (the pen-and-ink mode unlockable via button code)?

3. At what point was Citadel created and for what purpose?

4. Anything cool to reveal about either GE or PD in their beta stages? We've had SO much fun unraveling the history through hacking. Many strange programming quirks & items found!

5. Both GE & PD can be played online via emulator now, and with the custom levels we've made too! Have you tried it?

P.S. I'm only a big fan. I haven't made any mods, personally.
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[Wreck]

I don't want to bombard you with questions, and scare you off from wanting to come back to our community. I just want to give you my sincerest thank you for GoldenEye 007. It is, without a doubt, my personal favourite video game. Not just for the N64, but for any gaming console. To say this thing has given me years of enjoyment is an understatement. Guys like SubDrag, Zoinkity, and myself, have literally made it a part of our lives. There is something magical about it, and with the ability to hack and modify the game, it has become something even more. My hat is off to you and the incredible team behind GoldenEye. Thank you.

By the way, we've set permissions for you to view additional forums. They contain more technical discussions, as well as some secret projects. Hope you have a chance to browse through them sometime.
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