Trinidad
Group: Members
Posts: 295
Joined: Mar. 2005 |
|
Posted: Oct. 22 2007, 23:24 |
|
I would distinguish two reasons for the "unnoficial worlds" "existance": flaws in the programming, and flaws in the design:
Being able to be on worlds like, for example, Space Arrow World, Ants World, Firebeings World, etc, seems to be caused by flaws in the design of the game. As Ugo has pointed, the game is programmed in a (relatively) simple way: "the player (or a projectile) enters a definite area in space" --> "something happens" (colours change, objects appear/disappear/move, animations start, the player get tied to something, etc). The problem is that, while designing the different situations, some assumptions were made, but they're not always true.
An example is the trip with the firebeings. You enter, or shoot something, through one of the ringheads, thus "entering" a definite zone. Then something happens: sky colours change, fog changes, ..., and the firebeings appear, but that's all. Mike (or whoever) thought that, if that happened, you would be very close to the firebeings, so he designed the trip to start when you're in a small zone around them. As it doesn't necessarily happen, you end in Firebeings World. But in this case the program just does what it's been asked to do, so that's not its fault.
And the other kind of "anomaly" is related to flaws in the program itself. In this category I would put things like Pegasus World, the Crazy Pause Effect, and probably Volcano World and the "Sprite Master World" * (though I'm not so sure about this one). In those cases, the game is perfectly designed to do something, but if you are able to create some special conditions on which the game finds problems to work properly, then the normal rules are broken, and there're changes in whatever was supposed to happen. I would say that most (if not all) of those strange situations are related to the game's "internal clock", and also to how it deals with the things that happen between two concrete moments in time (to say it some way, while the game is "blinking", and it doesn't actually know what's happened).
And also, there could be a combination of both situations. I would say that some of the slight differences we can experience when visiting the unofficial worlds at different times could be an effect of those little flaws in the programming. But that's too much guessing.
* The "Sprite Master" is that strange thing that's above the mountain near the Thin Men. Sometimes, if you run close, but without touching it, you end in a world without barriers. Did we talk about it in the guide?
|