Zoid Kirsch, a former developer of Retro Studios co-developed the legendary Metroid Prime For the Nintendo GameCube, he shared on Twitter interesting details about artistic feature The video game as a celebration of the twentieth anniversary, which will be the next November 18. As explained by Kirsch, the effect that appears on the screen when the enemy approaches the helmet of Samus Aran is achieved through a very special method: the presentation of the token of the helmet itself. software from the game.
In this clip as Samus approaches the Pulse Bombu, the screen is filled with a static to show interference with her viewer. While we were working on this, the big problem was the memory usage of the noise texture. Gamecube has only 24MB of RAM, so every texture should be carefully considered. pic.twitter.com/vc9gJNgpT0 Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF) November 8, 2022
Due to the limited RAM of a veteran Nintendo console, the Retro Studios team had serious problems creating a noise texture – similar to TVs when they’re not picking up a signal. Doesn’t take up much space, although the developer had a pretty clever idea. “While working on the effect of the defect on the Samus headset, we had a huge problem with the use of the noise texture memory. The GameCube has only 24MB of RAM, so each texture must be studied carefully,” we read.
How did they get the effect without affecting the RAM?
“If we use a low-resolution texture (64×64) to save memory, the ‘constant’ will be blurry and faded. One of the engineers on the team had a great idea: And if we use memory that contains the same code Metroid Prime? We tested it quickly and it was great,” the developer explains. When you see a Samus mask affected by electrical “noise” in the game, it’s actually You are looking at the bits and bytes of the code itself. software From Metroid Prime represented on screen. The machine code turns out to be random enough to work well as a static noise canvas,” explains how this effect works.
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