Thank you!
Solar Jetman is an old favorite. It's a hard game, especially the final planet and its auto-scroller section, and the controls takes a while to get used to. It's also a bit repetitive with almost the same objective on 13 similar looking planets. But the graphic is good, the music is very atmospheric, dealing with gravity and inertia is an interesting concept and overall it's quite entertaining to explore the mysterious large planets. Luckily warps exist so you don't have to clear all planets (I wonder how the skipped ship parts were collected though?) and choosing a route is also an interesting part of the game. My favorite is taking the warp on planet 3 to planet 6 and there take the warp to planet 10. Not the shortest way, but one of the easiest. You also got to love Rare's humor. A planet named Shishkebab and some of the treasure chest contents and analyses are also funny:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/7c21posdu1o4g31/solar_jetman_humor.pngCan anybody explain why a robot kit apparently consists of marine species? Some joke I'm missing?
Solar Jetman mysterious feel is also helped/caused by its succinct manual and leaves it up to the player to discover most things. Even today I learn new things about it. In
FatRatKnight's TAS I learned that you can spin orange crystal for bonus money and that there is a short-lived warp on planet 1. While mapping I also discovered a similar warp on planet 4. Rare really like these kind of warps in their games e.g. Snake Rattle 'n' Roll and Battletoads. The orange crystal spin is a game-changer and the extra money makes things a lot easier. You can even do this infinite times if you release the crystal before the final spin for ridiculous amounts of money. I used to wonder why the little green enemy ships went berserk whenever you towed an orange crystal. Now I know why.
Mapping this game was quite hard, but thankfully I found some useful codes from
TASVideos. Together with some I found myself I could put together a lua-script that screenshot whole levels. I also looked at the ROM-file and realized that Solar Jetman uses 128x128 pixel metatiles. That is big. Most games use something like 16x16 or 32x32. Here is an image with a grid and index (white number) overlay to make it more obvious:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/574t79drdem7y5n/solar_jetman_metatiles.pngIndex is an 8bit value so max number of metatiles is only 256, but they can have different pattern sets and palettes so it's not that bad. Thanks to the big metatiles all level-layout in the game only takes a few kilobytes in total and explains how Solar Jetman could have such huge levels. Detail and variation of level's structure suffer with such big metatiles, but I think the game-designers managed to hide that well and make interesting layouts with them anyway.
The metatiles are also used to directly render the pretty good in-game maps instead of storing them. Each metatile is converted to an 8x8 pixel map tile. It's probably because of this that the map screen takes longer to bring up on the bigger planets. This also means that all levels can be viewed in the in-game map viewer with some trickery. Here is planet 13's ship part level for example:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/uacvrn8z9op25wl/solar_jetman_planet_13_part_map.pngThe in-game map renderer uses a fixed width and will use whatever data comes next to fill the whole width and not stop drawing rows until the height of the level is reached. So on narrow levels that means the renderer will continue with the next row (levels are stored linearly, 1D) and whatever comes after the level. The infamous
Preludon map is also a great example of this behaviour. You can see the start of planet 4 on the last row which happens to be stored after planet 1.
There are many interesting things in Solar Jetman to talk about, but this post is already to long. I'm very happy with the resulting maps. It's pretty awesome to look at the huge planets (both zoomed in/out) and the mini-maps are very helpful when playing the game. I'll finish with this
funny spot on comic.
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