The End of the World

[Benvolio]

I've been thinking about the Tantalus Switches and how cool both the screen "shake" and the earth Explosion are.

I have read the Keenwiki patching pages on these and the basics certainly have beem covered.

To be clear the following are not patch demands/requests nor are they particularly rooted in reality

But I wonder....

- is there any way to integrate the shake effect into other triggers such as collisiom with a sprite, and to do so without moving to the second part of that sequence and ending the game. I.e. something more like a simple earthquake, akin to whst happens with the Blooguard in Keen6?
- can the "shake" be transposed into Keen1?
- can the explosion be made to occur in-level, in isolation i.e. not as part of the full "tantalus switch" sequence. E.g. you shoot some sprite and then the explosion occurs and then maybe the sprite is gone and/or you win the level
- can the above be patched into Keen1

I just think this is one of the coolest cinematics in the whole series and I do wonder if it has been truly exploited to its limit.

[Nisaba]

I don't think that really answers your question. Nevertheless, if you work with the source code, this is feasible in any case.
I have to agree with you that this cinematic feature is really impressive. One reason also why I included this effect in my mod

[Quillax]

- is there any way to integrate the shake effect into other triggers such as collisiom with a sprite, and to do so without moving to the second part of that sequence and ending the game. I.e. something more like a simple earthquake, akin to whst happens with the Blooguard in Keen6?

I don't know about the first part, but getting the switch to just make a simple earthquake is actually possible!

Back when I was making The Mortrix, I played around with creating patches for the Guard Robot and Tantalus Switch through trial-and-error (you can see some of them commented in the mod's patch file). For the Tantalus Switch, one patch I created made the shake not lead to the second part of the sequence and just made the game go on like normal (aside from an off-centered camera):

Code: Select all

#This makes the game continue after the 'Oops.' box, as if nothing ever happened
%patch $64F6 $0001W

Another patch I made seems to adjust the length of the pause at the "Oops." box; setting it to zero removes the pause:

Code: Select all

#This removes the pause at the 'Oops.' box
%patch $64F1 $0000W

If you don't want to see the "Oops." box flickering onscreen after the shaking, KeenWiki has a patch that skips the "Oops." box:

Code: Select all

#No 'oops' box
%patch $64D5 $EB $15

I just tested those patches with an otherwise unmodified Keen 2, and it's actually kinda fun! If you just stay there and keep flicking the switch, the camera will eventually have Keen not in view! You can even get the camera to go outside the level boundaries!

I'm sure the other stuff you asked about is possible too, but it would most likely take a very talented patcher to do those. Porting the "End of the World" stuff into Keen 1 would probably require some big sacrifices to be made, depending on how big that code is. My patching skills and knowledge are barely even at beginner level, though, so I might be overestimating.

The thing is, aside from an abandoned mod by KeenRush, there hasn't been a Keen 2 mod that does extensive patching that pushes the game to its limits. Keen 1 has at least several of those (Extinction, Sunset, Shadow Jack) and even Keen 3 has a couple (Ye Olde Pirate Modde, The Fastest Gun In The Universe). I think there's a lot of undiscovered potential in Keen 2; we just need someone with a lot of patching talent to prove it. I believe the source code for Keen Vorticons has never been released, nor recreated (as cool as that would be...), so for now it's only patching.

I do agree that the cinematic is really cool! I remember many years ago, I would constantly kill myself in Weaponry B just so I can see the Earth explosion!