In numbers

The numbers on this page are not marketing claims. We counted every one of them in the game files on the original CDs (the Slovak one from June 1997 and the Czech one from September 1997). Where the two versions differ, we give both. The game was made over more than four years while its authors were still studying.

Overview

Notes on the table:

• The Slovak voice track is more than five minutes longer. Both versions have the same number of lines. The data does not say why the Slovak one is longer.
• The 3D animations have two running times. In the Slovak version, the header of the file 12_END_B (ending B) specifies half the speed (10 frames per second), so it runs for 30 s instead of 15 s.
• There are 19 music tracks, not 22: the files HUDBA9 and HUDBA11 are not on the CD, and HUDBA21 contains one second of silence.
• “Text” is the number of messages the player can see or hear in the game. Developers’ notes and empty lines are not counted.

How many frames repeat

There are more frames “in the game” than pictures that somebody had to draw or render. Animations repeat: the picture freezes for a moment, an animation returns to an earlier picture, the same object appears in several rooms, and a character facing right is the mirror image of the one facing left. That is why we give two numbers: frames in the game (as they are played) and distinct frames (drawn or rendered).

How we looked for repeats. We unpacked every frame from the original files of both CDs (14,095 frames of 2D animation, 10,099 frames of 3D animation and three standalone films) and compared them pixel by pixel, using progressively looser tests:

1. Same picture. Every pixel is the same. The empty margin around an object does not count, so the same object on a canvas of a different size is the same picture. The comparison covers all rooms.
2. Mirror. The same picture, only flipped left to right or top to bottom.
3. Colour swap. The same picture with its colours merely swapped around (for example, by palette cycling).
4. Nearly the same picture. It differs in no more than 2 % of its pixels (we also tried a stricter 1 %).

For the 3D animations we look only for exact repeats: a frame identical to the previous one (a frozen picture), to an earlier frame of the same video (a loop) or to a frame of another video (the same shot used twice). Frames that differ from the previous one in fewer than 1 % of their pixels are merely almost static; they had to be rendered anyway.

What the results show:

• Distinct pictures in the 2D animations. Of the 14,095 frames, 8,565 are distinct by exact comparison, 8,415 once mirror copies are merged, and 6,532 once nearly identical ones are merged as well.
• The 2D animations repeat a lot. Exact repeats make up 39 % of the 14,095 frames, 54 % if nearly identical frames are included. Most of these are frozen pictures and jumps back within a single animation: of the 13,096 frames in 705 animated objects, 2,422 are holds (a frame identical to the previous one) and another 1,939 go back to an earlier frame of the same object.
• People in the room animations. Of the 705 animated objects, 401 are people in action (Frank climbing, crouching and operating panels, the androids, the guards, the barman at the bar). They look just like the photographic figures of the digitised actors, but they are stored as room animations, so they are not included in the 601 frames of digitised characters. They have 6,519 frames, of which 3,280 are distinct (3,188 once mirror copies are merged).
• Digitised characters (DANIM sets). Of the 601 frames, 514 are distinct, and 456 once mirror copies are merged. For the barman, three pairs of directions (left and right) were made by flipping one direction of each pair (33 frames); for the cloned guard, almost all of them were (28 of 33). Frank, the android and the original guard have every direction stored separately. A standing frame often matches one of the walking frames (37 of 65).
• Plants. Only 5 objects are animated (the carnivorous flowers in room 16 and the climbing plants in room 12): 118 frames, of which 89 are distinct. The other plants are painted into the backgrounds or are single-frame pictures, so plants hardly affect the animation count.
• 3D animations. Exact repeats are few: 324 of 10,099 frames (3.2 %). They are frozen pictures in the MAGIC and UVOD logos, a loop in the NEXT title animation, and the first 135 frames of the 9_FIWORM animation, which are the same as the whole 11BARFSH animation. Another 667 frames are almost still, but they still had to be rendered. The number of frames that had to be rendered therefore falls only from 10,099 to 9,775.

What these numbers do not cover. We look only for identical, mirrored, recoloured and nearly identical pictures. An object that has merely moved or been enlarged, or a picture someone redrew by hand, counts as different. The split of the objects into people, creatures, plants, machines, doors and effects is our own manual labelling based on thumbnails, not something taken from the data.

A few ratios worth remembering

• Picture: 3D and 2D animation together come to 24,194 frames (10,099 + 14,095). At 20 frames per second that would be more than 20 minutes of continuous film. Of these, 18,190 (9,775 + 8,415) are distinct pictures – roughly 15 minutes’ worth.
• Sound: voice (2 h 54 min) + music (34 min) + effects (11 min) = almost 4 hours of audio. Plus 16 minutes of dialogue that is never played.
• The average line lasts 3.5 seconds (10,414 s / 2,935 lines).
• Logic: more than three and a half thousand rules take up only about 87 kilobytes in total.