How the Graphics Were Made

How to read this page. The facts about the workflow come from Peter Hegyi and from the game’s files. Period context notes are historical background on the software and computers of the time, not facts about the game. Anything we do not know yet is marked .

Backgrounds: airbrush on paper

The game has 53 rooms, each with a background measuring 640 × 400 pixels in 256 colours. In the game’s description the authors write: “Interesting hand-drawn graphics in the individual locations – more than 50 locations.”

As Peter Hegyi recalls, the vast majority of the backgrounds were made by hand: they were airbrushed on paper and then scanned. It was only later, in subsequent stages of development, that some backgrounds were created directly on the computer. That is why, looking through all the backgrounds, you can see two distinct styles. Some have soft transitions, cracks in the walls and organic shapes: the cave on Teleport Planet, the greenhouse, the sewer, the anthills, the hotel roof under a starry sky. Others, such as the green corridors of G-HERN’s station, the bar, the androids’ flat or the Boss’s office, have clean surfaces and sharp edges.

We do not yet know exactly which backgrounds were made on the computer.

Animations. In addition to the backgrounds, the game contains:

25 full-screen 3D animations (10,099 frames, 9,775 of them distinct) that play between scenes,
717 small 2D animations right inside the rooms (dripping acid, blinking lights, elevators, lasers) and other object images – 1,103 “objects” and 13,494 frames in all (7,959 distinct images),
three larger films in FLC format (the credits, THE END and the skull shown after a death).

There is more about the animations on the Animations page.

3D: Imagine and 3D Studio MAX

As Peter Hegyi recalls, all the intro animations and most of the ship fly-bys were made in Imagine. The animation in which Frank crashes into the greenhouse, and a few others, were made in 3D Studio MAX 1.0. We do not yet know exactly which program was used for each animation.

According to Peter Hegyi, the two animators from the credits split the programs between them: Roman Macko rendered the animations in Imagine, Kornel Kabele those in 3D Studio MAX. Imagine ran on a Commodore Amiga.

Period context (not from our files):

Imagine was a 3D program originally written for the Commodore Amiga. A PC version followed later.
3D Studio MAX 1.0 came out in 1996 and originally ran only on Windows NT.

Rendering on the Amiga and on 486 PCs

The game was originally planned for the Amiga as well, and most of the rendering was done on it. Later, rendering moved to 486 PCs, because development took more than four years (according to Peter Hegyi it began around 1993 to 1994), and over that time the team gradually moved over to the PC.

One second of animation consists of twenty frames. The game contains 10,099 frames of 3D animation (9,775 of them distinct), which is roughly 8.42 minutes (8.67 in the Slovak version, because Ending B runs longer).

Colour: 256 and not one more

The whole game uses only 256 colours at a time. For the painters and 3D animators, this meant that every image had to be squeezed into a limited palette. In the process, smooth colour gradients break up into bands.

The authors found several ways round this:

Every room has its own palette with 200 free colours. The remaining 56 are shared (see below).
The first 56 colours are the same throughout the game. They belong to Frank, the other characters, the cursors and the inventory. That is why Frank looks the same in the blue-and-white caves of Teleport Planet and in the green corridor.
Every 3D animation segment has its own palette. Each video segment carries 256 colours, chosen to suit its particular scene best.
A blending table. Each room has a table that says which colour you get by mixing two colours from the palette. It is there so that the characters’ edges do not look “cut out”.

2D animation and characters

The small animations in the rooms (dripping acid, ants, elevators, blinking lamps) are in the FLC format. As Peter Hegyi recalls, the characters were cut out and animated by hand in a program from Autodesk. The data suggest that it was most probably Autodesk Animator Pro (not the original Autodesk Animator). We cannot be completely sure, because the program’s name does not appear anywhere in the game. The clues in the data, however, are unambiguous:

FLC is the Animator Pro format. The original Animator saved FLI files, which are limited to 320 × 200 pixels. All 717 animations embedded in the rooms and the three big films are FLC, and none is FLI. The three big films are 640 × 480 pixels, something the FLI format simply would not allow.
The headers carry the program’s stamp. At the start of each of the three big films and of 701 of the 717 embedded animations there is a block of supplementary data (type 0xF100, the “prefix”) that Animator Pro writes. The headers of these files also hold the program’s serial number, always the same one (655, hex 0x28F) – in other words, one and the same copy of the program. This block also preserves paths to the authors’ files, for example to the font \animator\resource\FONT\=Ram6by6.FNT, that is, to the fonts folder of an Animator installation. Instead of the serial number, the remaining 16 small animations carry the tag “FLIB” (a library for writing FLC files that other programs used), so they were produced with a different tool rather than saved directly from Animator Pro.
A path with the .CEL extension. The header of one animation still contains the path D:\ANIM-NOV\DOLE\POSUNUTE.CEL. In Animator Pro, the .CEL extension denotes a brush, that is, a piece cut out of an image. In Animator Pro a CEL file is in fact an FLC file, and that is exactly what our animations look like. Other paths from the headers (for example D:\TOOLGAME.MS\GENBRUSH\16SEK.CEL, D:\-SCENES-\ZELDOOR\BR\35OPNBOX.cel) show that the authors really did work with .CEL files and organised them in folders by scene.

In fairness, there is one caveat. The frames of the digitised characters are stored in the game in a format of their own (DANIM files), not as FLC, so the program’s name has not survived in them. The claim that the Betacam actors were cut out in Animator Pro specifically is therefore an inference, drawn from what Peter Hegyi recalls and from the fact that all the other 2D work in the game comes from this program.

Period context (not from our files): the original Autodesk Animator of the late 1980s saved FLI animations at a fixed resolution of 320 × 200. Its successor, Animator Pro, released in the early 1990s, introduced FLC at any resolution.

Among those who made the characters and 2D animations was Peter Hegyi. The characters were filmed with a Betacam camera on a children’s playground, and every frame was cut out by hand (see Actors on Betacam).

The room files contain 14,095 frames of 2D animation: 13,494 frames of objects and animations in the rooms and 601 character frames. Of these, 8,415 are distinct images: many frames are repeated (see How many frames repeat).

Who did what

The game’s credits also list these roles:

Backgrounds: Ján Šicko, Kornel Kabele, Viktor Číčaj.
3D animation: Roman Macko, Kornel Kabele.
2D animation: Roman Macko, Peter Hegyi, Kornel Kabele.
Video production: Ján Valent.
Editing: Peter Hegyi, Roman Macko.

The credits do not say who drew which room or who rendered which animation. For the 3D animations, Peter Hegyi gave the split by program: Roman Macko in Imagine (on the Amiga), Kornel Kabele in 3D Studio MAX. We do not yet know which of Šicko, Kabele and Číčaj painted which background.