Of Data Tricks, Lizard Heads and Smugglers
Creativity
As you can see all 4 directions have 3 frames for movement and the middle frame is also the image for just standing. And there are 4 frames for sitting (1 frame per direction) and a single frame for sleeping. Yes the bed is part of that! How else could you display the sprite that nicely merged under the sheets?
As the same artists created the map tile graphics for Lyramion and Morag (which includes the bed sprite), it is no wonder that the beds on those two worlds look the same. Even though I think that there is no bed on Morag whatsoever. However at first I thought that the Lyramion and Morag player sprites were completely identical! The bed for the forest moon is very obvious and I thought that this was the only reason why there are 3 different sets of player sprites for each world.
Fun fact: Only as I started writing this post I noticed another cool detail about these graphics: the forest moon sprites slightly increase the size of the player! Quite logical if you should appear larger when you are surrounded by little dwarfs. Another epic detail though in my opinion.
To my defence I have to say, that until now I never had a full image with all the 3 sets, which allows easy comparing of the sprites. And the original sprites are much smaller on a modern monitor! Anyway I only noticed much later what was the difference between the Lyramion and Morag sprites: the cute little lizard head!
So this basically means: When you walk on any Morag map, you look like a lizard. Ugh!
While this might be an interesting fact, it will also matter later, so keep it in mind!
Strange "bugs"
Months passed and then as I started to fix and investigate original game bugs, I stumbled onto a very strange issue: the Morag hangar map and also the S'Angrila prison map have two versions. And those versions are basically the same map with the same tiles, texts, events and so on.
This was only found and reported as the english translations of the map texts for those two map versions were different. It seemed that someone back in 1993 translated the texts map by map and slighty did it in a different way for both versions. This was some lucky coincidence for us in the end.
We fixed the translations to become the same, but why the hell were there two map versions and what were the differences of these two maps? It was quite a mystery and I had to find out. I investigated everything.
- The map structure and tiles. -> Same.
- The characters on the map. -> Same.
- The texts on the map. -> Same, beside the translations.
- The events on the map. -> Same.
But what else is left? Two little things were different.
First of all, events on a map can be stored but there has to be some map tile which triggers the event. For example to trigger a text popup on a map, there has to be an event for it stored in the map data. But in addition there has to be a map tile which uses that event. Otherwise it would never be triggered. And this was the first difference. On the first map version some event was triggered on a tile and on the second map (even though the same event was stored inside the map data) it was not used by any tile. This wasn't that easy to find out. Back then I had no map editor to see that directly. I had to search in large hex files or in a debugger. And even then it wasn't easy to see. Especially when you don't know that this is a possibility. And of course there are several other events which are used on many tiles in both map versions!
But there was a second difference and this was really strange. It was considered a bug for a long time.
The first map version was flagged as "On Lyramion". Remember, those maps are Morag maps!
And this was true for the first version of the hangar AND the prison! Two identical bugs in two strange versions of an almost identical map? Very suspicious. And moreover those two are the only Morag maps which had that "bug".
Lizard magic
Spoiler alert! If you didn't play the game at least to Morag you might want to abort reading here, as it might spoiler some parts of the story. You can also just skip the gray text passage, but it might be important to understand it.
The first difference (the additional map event) and some playtesting led me to the first part of the reason for the multiple map version mystery. The additional event on the first map version was the teleport to the prison.
When you first enter Morag, S'Riel, a Moranian magician, teleports you to his prison cell, tells you about the Moranians and casts a disguise spell on you, so that everyone thinks you are one of them. Then he dies.
Ok makes sense. When you come back later to the hangar, the event should not be triggered anymore, so just use a second map version without the event then. Same for the prison. On a later return S'Riel is dead, so we need another map version without him.
End of story. Blogpost finished. Bye.
No wait! Wait a second! Luckily I knew enough about map events, map characters and that stuff at that time. I knew that you can just disable events. So why would I need a complete new map just to disable an event? I mean, they had not much space back then. And it is also very easy to hide characters like S'Riel on maps as well. It won't justify two additional maps. Something was wrong here.
It took me a while but finally I understood. And I am honest here with you: I felt a little bit like Sherlock Holmes.
You have to connect the dots. The second difference which seems like a bug, was the key. The maps were not flagged as Lyramion maps by mistake. It was a neat little data trick.
Remember what I said about the party graphics before? The world you are on determines which player sprite is used. So on Lyramion maps you look like a human, but on Morag maps you look like a lizard. But why do you look like a lizard anyway on Morag?
Right. S'Riel casts the disguise spell on you which lets you appear as a Moranian (lizard). But here comes the kicker: he only does this in the prison! So when you first enter Morag, you still look like a human of course. The same is true at your first visit to the prison (when S'Riel teleports you there). Those two maps, even if they are on Morag, are flagged as "On Lyramion" so that you appear as a human on them!
Then when you have the disguise, the maps are swapped and from now on you will always enter the map versions which are correctly flagged as "On Morag". You can test this yourself. On later visits to the hangar or prison you have a lizard head. And even though you won't notice, you effectively are on a different map! Only the english players could notice this in theory through the different translations.
This my friends is a very cool trick to achieve consistency with the storyline and by keeping this simple connection of world and party graphic.
In the end the developers spent much effort and disk space to add this small detail in a consistent way. This itself is very honorable. But it might have some side effects as well.
Side effects
At first glance this stuff looks awesome. But messing with data in such a way can backfire. There are some specialties for each world. Most of them don't affect the trick from above. I mean, only two little 2D maps have this manipulation and you will only stay on them for a very short amount of time. What could possibly go wrong?
There is one big problem. You can cast the spells "Word of mark" and "Word of return" on Lyramion maps. And only on Lyramion maps! For good reasons. I guess the developers didn't think of that back then.
Those two spells are a cool feature to return back to a previously saved location, but it was only designed for the huge island world of Lyramion. You should not use them on the forest moon or Morag. Imagine you could just return to Lyramion from Kire's moon with that spell. It would totally break the game.
The two spells together with the Morag duplicate map trick opened up another possibility which is now considered cheating and was "fixed" by me in the most recent patches. Normally if you would bring the witch's broom or flying disc to Morag, it would be destroyed by some map event. But on first arrival you are on a Lyramion map! So just go there without the mentioned items (so they won't be destroyed), pass the events which would destroy the items, mark a spot and then later get the items and return to the mark. Tada, you skipped the destroy events and smuggled the broom or flying disc onto Morag.
Maybe you can imagine how much time and brain cells I had to spent on finding those things and fixing bugs and backdoors in the original game solely by changing data. I could not revert the lizard head trick as it was integrated deep into the story and fundamental game structure. But I could avoid the abuse of the spells and the broom smuggle. But even this was a hard task. You still can use the spells though but you can't smuggle the items. At least not to the place where it would matter: the world surface.
If you are curious, just try it out. It works with the remake (1.1 and above) and the original Amiga version as well (1.09 german / 1.10 english and above). Smuggle the broom to Morag and see what happens. But be warned! Save before you try this. At least before leaving the town. Cheaters are punished hard! Sometimes even by myself.
Pyrdacor - 24-09-2021
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