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

[Dragonsbrethren]

Here's another one I came across in my semi-annual search for prerelease materials. A relatively new blog devoted to GoldenEye's development:

http://goldeneyedecoded.blogspot.com/

This guy's sourced the actor and Aztec textures, has scans of Hollis' design document, some magazine articles, and even model renders of the old Bonds!

[SubDrag]

That is some pretty exhaustive research. Interesting stuff. I hadn't seen a couple of those magazine articles too, of pics of the development team back then.

[Dragonsbrethren]

The most recent post on that site is about the perimeter mission/dish setup. It is interesting how the internal level order goes, comparing it to Hollis's postmortem order:

jun - Jungle
dish - Temple
cave - Caverns
cat - Citadel
crad - Cradle

Jungle
Transmitter Perimeter
Transmitter Dish
(Control)
Transmitter Catwalk
Trevelyan

I'd say with some certainty that they at least reserved the slot Temple's in for a dish background, before dropping that mission. None of the names fit the Perimeter so that one was probably dropped early on.

cat is pretty interesting too, it seems to correspond to the old name for Cradle, but Cradle's final slot is crad. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but these are the only two slot names that make some amount of sense with the original plan names. None of the other unused/multi ones really fit the old missions (maybe "pam" was perimeter, but that's a big stretch compared to the other two).

[Jhirmer614]

After seeing the face scans this needed to happen....

[Kode-Z]

Just checked GoldenEye: Decoded out again today, and there has been some really cool uploads as of recent!

Among the cool uploads are these pics!
http://goldeneyedecoded.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/q-watch-v201-beta-bond-arsenal.html

How and where did these high-res images come from? Are they fan made, or possibly from the doomed GE XBLA?!

[MRKane]

To be critical of the images: they're a bit much work for just a crank (if you look at the distortion of the watch screen it appears to be dynamic, and the models don't look like anything you could just pull off t3dm or any similar free site. Plus a Google search of the images themselves reveals no matches that I'd consider fitting...are they Goldeneye source (just asking because I'm a devils advocate kinda guy). Either way they're very very smooth
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[fredspider]

Kode-Z, MRKane:

He really seems to be involved with the making of Goldeneye XBLA, check out this post:

http://goldeneyedecoded.blogspot.com.br/2014/02/bbfc-vs-tbgc.html

You can see he has all the high-definition sprites from the classification screen, plus he shows the screen on his final stage at a resolution of 1280x720:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kngNjaKXqHE/Ux6kUz0BW7I/AAAAAAAAA1U/j3XIrxWxnjk/s1600/tbgc_hd.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nqRazjQRX-8/U0I__k1F0vI/AAAAAAAAA-s/golk3hhGGbo/s1600/intro_text.jpg

And by the way he has a lot of promotional material and magazines at full resolution, no scans.

This guy is great!! Did someone try to contact him?

[PacmanPlush]

Fredspider: I completely agree. There's a lot of stuff on this blog that I don't think ordinary fans would be capable of finding. It pretty much has to be the work of a Rare insider--most likely, as you suspected, someone who worked on the XBLA port. After all, what better use would there be for all the high-res graphical assets they've uncovered? Tracking down a lot of what's on there would be a tremendous undertaking for anyone not directly connected to Rare, and I'd wager that some of the stuff they've posted didn't even exist outside of Rare's archives before it went up on this blog. It blows me away that some random person could find, for instance, the exact promo photos and screencaps used to create the character's faces, given how low-res they are in-game. Same story for much of the Soviet artwork and the Aztec paintings/carvings.

There's some real oddities to be found there--the set photos of the Statue Park, for instance. I'd never seen them before this site came around, and I can't find any other source for them. More than that, it looks to me like these are the exact photos used by the Rare team to create their art assets, probably taken during the film's production. Check the shadows on the last photo, in particular: http://goldeneyedecoded.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/statue-park.html.

I've cropped out the source photos for the Statue Park set and the original Aztec artifacts and run them through both TinEye and Google's "Search by image" function. In all cases, I've found either no results at all, or no results apart from the GoldenEye: Decoded blog. It seems likely GoldenEye: Decoded represents the first time these mages were ever made available online.

If this was a fan effort, you would assume they'd be posting here, or maybe over on TCRF. If this were my site, I'd definitely want to publicize the work I was doing and the cool stuff I'd found! It just strikes me as a lot of work for one person to do, and then remain completely anonymous. Unless, of course, they're connected to Rare and have no choice but to remain anonymous...

MRKane wrote:

To be critical of the images: they're a bit much work for just a crank (if you look at the distortion of the watch screen it appears to be dynamic, and the models don't look like anything you could just pull off t3dm or any similar free site. Plus a Google search of the images themselves reveals no matches that I'd consider fitting...are they Goldeneye source (just asking because I'm a devils advocate kinda guy). Either way they're very very smooth

They definitely aren't 3D models. Here's the source photo they used for the PP7: http://www.deactivated-guns.co.uk/images/ppk_slienced_2/ppk_silenced_2.jpg, found by searching Google for "PPK silencer." This is the only source photo I've been able to pin down, I'm sure the rest are out there but at a cursory glance I couldn't find them. Alternatively, if these images do originate from within Rare, it's possible that the photos of the Golden Gun, Moonraker Laser, and remote mine were provided by the film studio as references, and the photos may not be available elsewhere.

It looks like some Photoshop work was done to enhance its appearance: the contrast was modified to accentuate the brightest highlights, and the red paint dot under the safety catch was removed. Maybe they thought it looked silly? If this site really is the work of a Rare insider, then these images would definitely have been produced for GE XBLA. It's entirely possible that they're in-game shots, but I suspect they were probably done as a proof of concept. While the static effect does appear to be dynamic, the hands on the watch are identical in each picture--in the N64 version, they moved in real time. I assume this feature would have been brought over for the port. The distortion and grain are likely Photoshop filters set to different randomness values for each shot. For what it's worth, the source photo was uploaded by deactivated-guns.co.uk in June of 2008, so it would have become available around the end of GE XBLA's development. (This might seem odd, but keep in mind that we don't know how far along the game was when it was cancelled. It's completely possible that in-game assets would have been worked on first, with UI elements like the watch menu coming later.)
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[MRKane]

Niiiiicccceeee! Thinking of crazy ideas: we could make a goldeneye watch iPod application

From a design perspective, frequently studios don't fully dissolve a production - take Duke Nukem Endangered Species and Vivisector for instance. If Goldeneye XBLA was fully shelved (and isn't possibly hanging around in silent development) could it have become anything?
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[AL64inthedark]

I found this website few days ago, and came to the conclusion this can only be one of the guy who worked on the remake.

The pic with the images they used to create the facemapping textures of main characters is gold. It would require crazy work for a fan to find them all.
That guy, too me, obviously had access to the files they used to make the original game, so, it is or was a Rare employee.

Interesting thing I realized is that using those original pictures with actual photoshop version gives me usually a better looking result than what rare did back then. For example see oddjob :

Rareware 1997
Al64inthedark 2014

Comparison :

Left is the result when I resize to 32x64 and right is the original from Rare.
Imho mine looks way better
Not a single step more than resizing the source image they used was required. I think it just look better and less "grainy".
I tryed other character and managed to get similar result but that require a bit of work compared to Oddjob which was just "save as 32x64".

Another example, Ourumov

Look at the mouth especially.

Last edited by AL64inthedark on Thu Sep 18, 2014 5:37 pm; edited 2 times in total

[Wreck]

Very nice update on Oddjob! Definitely looks nicer, for sure. Will you be tackling other characters, as well? Would be interesting to see what you do with them. Costumes might be fun for you to mess with, too. If you end up doing more, you should post a thread with images.

Oh, and welcome to the message board!
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[AL64inthedark]

Wreck wrote:

Will you be tackling other characters, as well? Would be interesting to see what you do with them. If you end up doing more, you should post a thread with images.

Well after trying a few (oddjob wasn't my first) I was planning to recreate them all (well, I can already say Valentin is one I couldn't improve) and make a post. But my first project is to create a perfect face of me first.
It prove to take a lot of time already and I should stick to that first. Preview of this is my avatar.

My project is to create face for all my friends I use to play GE with back then in the 90s and do an epic deathmatch. Like we could have do with the canceled PerfectHead. I'll work on the main characters in between.

Quote:

Oh, and welcome to the message board!

Thank you mr.Wreck

[Kode-Z]

Yay! More GE XBLA renders have been released!

Natalya:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xERTFab2Kjw/VH75MraOJWI/AAAAAAAABvY/eFlST_L9Spw/s1600/nat_headxb_test.png

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Eyk5EsMWHY/VIfz9SMw-7I/AAAAAAAABwM/KZcWu3AzWQU/s1920/natalya_reprogramming_1920x1080.jpg

There were more, but it seems they were taken down? The site did have renders of XBLA versions of Ourumov, Valentin, Bond, Jaws and Baron Samedi!

[Dragonsbrethren]

Been a while since I checked that site, and this just blew my mind:

http://goldeneyedecoded.blogspot.com/2014/12/from-bond-to-blonde.html

[HackBond]

Dragonsbrethren wrote:

Been a while since I checked that site, and this just blew my mind: http://goldeneyedecoded.blogspot.com/2014/12/from-bond-to-blonde.html

Wow, my mind is blown too.
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