Messages

1

Map Gab / Re: Jurassic Park (Sega Megadrive/Genesis)

« on: April 02, 2025, 09:05:27 am »

I've just finished Hidden Ruins for Grant, and thought I'd post the +hints version here to show the new format. Unfortunately Imgur has decided to convert this one to a .jpeg, so there's a white area along the top that should be transparent, and the whole thing is somewhat blurrier than the .png.


https://i.imgur.com/MvxhKA0.jpeg

This one was pretty fun to do. There's a lot of macro detail that you don't necessarily see when you're playing - I had no idea there are three Mesoamerican pyramids, for example. There's also a glitch unique to this map (because it's the only map with death drops) - if you fall into one of the drops while using the "moon jump" Game Genie code, you become kind of... undead. You can jump around the map to explore it, but the AI doesn't react to you, so you can see what their resting behaviour is (normally they just attack as soon as they come into view). The agents run around constantly, the dilophosaurs occasionally hop around, the compies wriggle on the spot or mill around slowly, the soldiers stay put but occasionally change direction, and the raptors never move, but turn to face the player while they're off-screen. It's certainly a lot easier to map using this glitch.

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Map Gab / Re: Jurassic Park (Sega Megadrive/Genesis)

« on: March 29, 2025, 10:20:32 am »

Thanks for explaining Jon. Okay, I'll submit the whole lot when I'm done, it's just that it will probably be a while.

I've just finished Savanna for both players. This time it's the exact same layout for both campaigns, and the beta's the same too. Just different object placements (and some of that's the same too, eg. the helicopter, compy and pterosaur positions). Grant's version feels weirdly unfinished even in the retail build, there aren't any health pickups or checkpoints in the second half of the map.

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Map Gab / Re: Jurassic Park (Sega Megadrive/Genesis)

« on: March 24, 2025, 05:04:22 pm »

Brilliant, cheers!

I dimly remember that comic, and back then 2025 felt so far away that surely it could never happen. Time had other ideas 

***

I've just finished mapping Rampage Edition's Aviary for both characters, with and without hints. Jon, would it be better for me to submit them now, or wait until I've finished the whole game (which will be a few more weeks)? There's a chance I might edit those maps, but I think they're all done now.

I was surprised to find that Aviary's layout is significantly different between the two campaigns, even though the most memorable landmarks are almost identical. I'd thought that Cargo Ship was the only level with a different layout for each character, but no. It's also a bit different to the WIP version I attached to my last post: that layout is from the July 8th 1994 beta (which I was using because it's the last version of Rampage Edition with a stable noclip mode). The retail build of the game has a handful of different foreground sprites in the canopy and along the edge of the right tree, and a couple of changes to the ledge configuration.

Anyway, now on to the l-o-n-g Savanna. If anyone's curious just how long it is, here's a rough video autostitch from the beta...

4

Map Gab / Re: Jurassic Park (Sega Megadrive/Genesis)

« on: March 12, 2025, 08:18:53 pm »

I've made the mistake of getting going with Rampage Edition before figuring out a way to automate anything... the game really is vast, here's my progress after 3 days. Still a lot left to do even just in Grant's version of this one map. The whole game is going to take at least a couple of months, at this rate.

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Map Gab / Re: Jurassic Park (Sega Megadrive/Genesis)

« on: March 07, 2025, 02:15:40 pm »

Thanks, you two!

Really neat, all the same. And thanks for providing the links to the maps on JP Wiki, but you know, Vertigo, they can be simply submitted to VGMaps, too. Just saying. Love to see it in the Atlas.

Yeah, this was my way of submitting the maps. I could email them over if that would be easier, but I noticed that the Bubsy maps had been submitted via links on the forum kind of like this, so thought this way might be okay.

And I see the game's first level is entirely made in an endless vertical loop, but you've given the necessary guidance to overcome it. No wonder I had so much trouble getting through that stage when I played it before. I ended up losing more lives than winning many times.

It is a *weird* way of doing it, especially as the loop is technically a tiling effect, rather than the Sonic style of teleporting from the bottom to the top of the level. I'd guess it's part of why that level lags so much, there's a lot of geometry loaded into memory.

The game is generally super hard. I got started mapping by just doing River and Pumping Station, because those levels are *designed* to make the player die repeatedly - there are drops and jumps that you can only learn to do safely via trial and error. The game could really do with an Ecco-style system in which you have unlimited lives, so can afford to throw them away. I think there's a Game Genie code that can do that, but in my version it makes Grant unable to jump off moving objects.

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Map Gab / Jurassic Park (Sega Megadrive/Genesis)

« on: March 07, 2025, 06:45:42 am »

This week I finished mapping all the levels for both campaigns of Jurassic Park for the Sega Megadrive / Genesis. There are two versions for each map - one is basic, just how it looks in the game (albeit with the backgrounds slightly edited to fit the frame). The other is a +hints version, which highlights enemies/items (I was watching a lot of Person Of Interest when I got started ), start/end points, climbable/pushable objects, brightens some of the backgrounds to make the foreground more legible, and occasionally has tips in places where passage requires a technique that's not immediately obvious.

I've attached the basic version of the Raptor's Canyon, and the +hints version of the Grant's Pumping Station. The whole set is up on the JP wiki:
Jungle
Grant (basic) (+hints)
Raptor (basic) (+hints)

Power Station
Grant (basic) (+hints)
Raptor (basic) (+hints)

River
Grant (basic) (+hints)

Pumping Station
Grant (basic) (+hints)
Raptor (basic) (+hints)

Canyon
Grant (basic) (+hints)
Raptor (basic) (+hints)

Volcano
Grant (basic) (+hints)

Visitor's Center
Grant (basic) (+hints)
Raptor (basic) (+hints)

They aren't direct engine rips, I made all of them by just stitching together screenshots; thankfully Jurassic Park has a noclip mode built in. The backgrounds were a bit trickier - this layer scrolls at half the rate of the foreground, so the resultant image is half the size of the foreground layer. The obvious thing to do would be to enlarge it or tile it, but I thought this looked a bit odd. So instead I went through the background images (sometimes pixel by pixel) stretching/moving/copying them in specific places so they'd fill the visible area while still looking more-or-less how they do in the game. Another issue is that JP has a high-priority foreground layer that sometimes occludes the sprites; in most cases I've kept this occlusion in place, but some items in Grant's Visitor's Center are completely blocked by the occlusion, so I didn't bother implementing it in that level.

I'd like to map out JP Rampage Edition too, but it's a *vastly* bigger game. I mapped the penultimate level (Raptor Rapids) last year, and it was about the same size as the entirety of JP1... I think I'm going to need an auto-stitching tool to get it done, so if anyone has any recommendations for guides, or tools that still work in Windows 10, I'd love to take a look.