A picture request!

Panzer Dragoon
1

I am rarely on this site but I am so effing glad it’s still around. Eagerly awaiting the news for Panzer Dragoon Funf! :anjou_love: :anjou_love: (whenever that will be :anjou_embarassed: )

I haven’t played my Sega Saturn in the longest time, but I recently dug it up to re-play PD (the only system I have hooked up is a 360…and PDO is STILL not compatible!!). Anyway, on a new PD high, I replayed PD on hard, until I beat it and then began my next mission: PDS. Instantly falling back in love with it, I did an unexpected speed run…that is to say, I spent the next 7 hours straight until I beat the game (my battery died…CAN’T QUIT!!) so yeah I beat it, but it was a severely hollow run. The same night, i had a dream that pds got ported to the Nintendo DS…hmmmm.Whatever.
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Anyway! My request! :anjou_embarassed: I really thought the end screen of Saga, where they give you all the stats, was very cool looking. I scoured the internets for a nice size of the pic, but alas, I couldn’t even find anything of it. Does anyone have a nice shot of the last screen? The one that tells you spiritual closeness, etc?** I took a pic with my digicam for some reason because I always considered Saga to be a insanely long game, but after beating it in 7 hours, it went by fast. I really wish Sega would just port it or something, I hate when my Saturn battery goes belly up.
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Thanks.** Sorry for rambling on and taking forever to ask my request.

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[quote=“The 9th Emporer”]I am rarely on this site but I am so effing glad it’s still around. Eagerly awaiting the news for Panzer Dragoon Funf! :anjou_love: )

I haven’t played my Sega Saturn in the longest time, but I recently dug it up to re-play PD (the only system I have hooked up is a 360…and PDO is STILL not compatible!!). Anyway, on a new PD high, I replayed PD on hard, until I beat it and then began my next mission: PDS. Instantly falling back in love with it, I did an unexpected speed run…that is to say, I spent the next 7 hours straight until I beat the game (my battery died…CAN’T QUIT!!) so yeah I beat it, but it was a severely hollow run. The same night, i had a dream that pds got ported to the Nintendo DS…hmmmm.Whatever.
**
Anyway! My request! :anjou_embarassed: I really thought the end screen of Saga, where they give you all the stats, was very cool looking. I scoured the internets for a nice size of the pic, but alas, I couldn’t even find anything of it. Does anyone have a nice shot of the last screen? The one that tells you spiritual closeness, etc?** I took a pic with my digicam for some reason because I always considered Saga to be a insanely long game, but after beating it in 7 hours, it went by fast. I really wish Sega would just port it or something, I hate when my Saturn battery goes belly up.
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Thanks.** Sorry for rambling on and taking forever to ask my request.[/quote]

I also love the end screen with stats and I’m surprised its not around the nternet somewhere. I would get it myself but i don’t have anything to take a screen shot of the tv. My average PDS time is about 13-15 hours which is probably because 1. I take my time when I need to do things in Zoah and 2. I make the boss battles as long as possible cos they’re so fun and the musics brilliant. If PDS did get ported to DS, I and my friends wouldn’t let me forget about it. I owned a DS but sold it since I didn’t buy any games for it and my friends know how much I love PD and we tend to take the piss out of eachother so yeah it would suck but in a funny way.

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Here is the best I can do. It’s the pic you get for getting a 100 % complete game.

Link

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Wow. Thats neat, I’ve never seen that before. It’s not really what I wanted, but I appreciate your help anyway.

Based on my memory, the stats pic is busy like this one
moonapples.com/lagi/pd3/post … verart.jpg

but has a ‘sad’ Azel same as this one
moonapples.com/lagi/pd3/post … ckcard.jpg

Ah well, my hunt continues :anjou_happy:

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If I’m not mistaken, there are different pictures on the last screen depending on what rank you get at the end of the game. Sorry I don’t have any on me at this present time.

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Long-time lurker, first-time poster here!

I was actually about to make a topic about precisely the same thing, but it seems as though no one has a complete set of end screen pictures; a few days ago, I pulled out my Saturn from the corner in which it had been sitting for nearly seven years, wiped the dust from it and vowed to get through PDS again before going back to school. Shocked as I was by the liberties taken with the English translation, I was even more surprised by the final image I received upon clearing the game: a picture of Azel astride a Coolia, looking over her shoulder with her right hand over her brow, drawn in bold tones with more definite outlining.

When I first beat the game all those years ago, I did notice that the end screen changed after beating it a certain number of time (in the interim I had probably cleared more areas, gotten Solo Wing, etc.), but I think the only images I saw were the ensemble image (which was the picture used as the Japanese box art, right?) and another one of Azel on a Coolia, but done in softer colours, with a close-up of her face (in profile, if I remember correctly) superimposed over the image of her and her mount.

So, the question is, how many end screen pictures are there, in total?
By my count, including the Sleeping Azel posted above, there would be four, but… are there more?

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The different ending artworks were something I always wanted to investigate, but (given that the most obvious method of “investigation” would be plodding through the Sestren battle a ton of times with different stats) I’ve never been bothered to do so. I definitely haven’t seen that “new” picture you mentioned though, the_atolm (with Azel looking over her shoulder), though I think I’ve seen all the others mentioned in this topic.

I noticed that Arcie’s guide on GameFAQs has some info on this (it might just be the only English-language source that does):

After the credits have rolled and you see Azel running off into the Sunset, you’ll get your
rating for the game you’ve just played. It’s split into several catagories:

Dragon Model
Distance Flown
Break Target Destruction Rate
Field Map Coverage
Enemy Data Collection
Spiritual Closeness Points

Depending on what you got for the last 4, you’ll get a different ranking. Here they are:

“There is still much for you to see” (One or more catagories under 60%)
“You have lived the adventure of a lifetime”(All catagories above 60%)
“Your quest will live on in Myths and Legends” (All catagories above 85%, at least Light Wing
Dragon Model)
“You are worth to live among the Gods.” (All catagories at 100%, Solo Wing Dragon Model)

IIRC you always get the same picture with the same message, so did the one you found match any of those…?

EDIT: Ah, a quick peek at the RESULT.PRG file from the game discs reveals that there should be five ending messages:

The adventure is over.
But more quests are awaiting you.

There is much you have not seen.

You’ve lived the adventure
of a lifetime.

Your quest shall live forever
in myths and legends.

You are worthy
to live among the Gods.

These are changed from the Japanese version, where (as I noticed when I played through it a while back) the ending messages were in wonderfully Engrishy English. Their text is:

The adventure is over.
But more quests are awaiting you.

You should see more
truth of this world.

Well done!
Great adventure you made.

Congratulations!
Your adventure is almost perfect.

The wing of your dragon cut through
the entire sky of Panzer universe.

EDIT 2: This got me curious, so I did a bit more digging in the game’s data files. I’ve managed to dump out all of the ending images, and I take it this was the pic in question…?

View image

Sorry about the lack of colour by the way, I haven’t worked out how the palette info is stored yet. When I do I’ll upload the full “set” of images in some lossless format (seeing as they don’t seem to be available elsewhere…)

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Yes, that is the picture! Amazing what secrets are hidden away on those little disks. I have, though, been outed as being unthorough this past playthrough, though. I could have sworn that all my scores were in the nineties, though! I did neglect to get Solo Wing, but… Having fallen from “Myths and Legends” to “Adventure of a Lifetime…” Shameful. Just shameful.

Thank you for posting that, though! Now I no longer feel like I’m crazy.

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Hey Lance. How did you tease the pix out of the files? I would like to have a go at Ein and Zwei, if you haven’t.

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I used my rough and ready knowledge of bitplane graphics and wrote some code specifically to dump this stuff, I’m afraid. Normal practice to extract old game graphics would be to go through the file(s) with a tile viewing / tile editing program to find out where the graphics are, then use either that program or a more specialised dumping program to get the data out and convert it into a “normal” graphics file format.

Unfortunately my attempts to use existing programs to dump these met with very little success. Most tile editors seem geared towards viewing the specific (low-bitdepth, planar) graphics formats common to older console games (NES, SNES etc.) Even worse, I couldn’t use my graphics dumping program of choice (Feidian) to get the graphics out because of an unfortunate limitation it seems to have.

Now to be fair, there may be programs out there that are quite capable of displaying and dumping these graphics, but as I was more or less sure which of the game’s files they would be in and how they would be stored, I didn’t feel like spending the time looking. Also I wanted to arrange the dumped graphical tiles into the actual images you’d see on the screen, which is usually beyond the scope of general-purpose tools.

(For the record, each image is stored in a single file (e.g. RESULT1.SCB) as an 8bpp linear bitmap (each byte of data gives the colour of one pixel in the image). Each set of 64 pixels are interpreted as a square 8x8 pixel “tile”, and these are then arranged some more to build up the final image.)

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Nice job Lance! :anjou_love:

It really is a shame we will never be able to reconstruct the 3d models from the game disks since the custom 3d library TA used is way too complicated to disassemble from scratch… and the saturn actually doesn’t use “3d” at all to display the 3d models, it displays the faces of the transformed models as lumps of distorted 2d sprites (which does explain the strange texture warping on some faces) :anjou_sad:

Saturne lets you view the textures stored in memory as many of you will already know, but the are all cut into the 64x64 (or any smaller power of 2) pixel tiles. It would be nice if we could get a programm that actually pastes these tiles together in the right order…

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Really cool Lance- Please put them all up as I’d like to add them to the collection …

I still have some images I’ve never put up yet for my site- this year it has been online for 10 years …

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As a side, wasn’t that final cinema ‘outsourced’ to a diffeent group than the rest of the cinemas (with teh exception of the first cinema, it does seem to be a higher quaility)

Also the courea always seemed way more reptillan (like a Dewback) than the ones the series usually had- I wonder if that is some of the cinema preproduction vs game art work …

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Hmm, sorting these images out isn’t going as swimmingly as I’d planned I’m afraid: after quite a bit of looking and poking at the files in question I’m still not sure how the palette data is stored. Now that I’ve got a handle on how (some of) the graphics are stored though, I’ve decided to go through the discs and see what else I can reasonably get out; I’m hoping I’ll stumble across the answer to the palette mystery in the process…

In the meantime, if anyone was particularly interested in seeing the various ending images, I’ve uploaded the greyscale dumps here. That zip contains the four ending images, the four “change disc please” images, and the Japanese and English title screens (all those things were stored in the same manner).

It turns out that there are only four ending images, despite there appearing to be five “rating” messages. Not entirely sure what’s going on there…

Nice! I don’t keep up with Saturn emulation much and didn’t know the new version of that emu had finally been released. I’ll be checking it out shortly…

I hadn’t really noticed this until now, but the coolia Azel’s riding in these illustrations looks very different to its on-screen counterpart from the ending; it seems much more bird-like in these (much more like the ones from the PD1 opening sequence, too).

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Hi guys, haven’t been here in a while. Wow, I’m impressed Lance, nice job! those ending pics are awesome. Most of them I’ve never seen in all my playthroughs of PDS. It would be great if you could find out how to get them in color, as they make great desktop wallpapers!

With your permission of course, Lagi_webmaser should ask you if he can upload them to moonapples.com/lagi/. They would make a nice addition to the already abundant PDS artwork. :anjou_happy:

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Those pictures almost made me cry :’(

We need a new PD game damnit!!! :anjou_sad:

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He posted a few posts up. :wink: Seriously though, no one really needs my permission to do anything with these as they’re just raw dumps of copyrighted images from a commercial game (and thus I really have no “ownership rights” of any kind, and would not try to claim any).

I’m not sure how much use the images are in their current colourless state anyway, though. I guess if you converted them to a sort of sepia tone they might look more presentable…

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How’s your progress going in searching for the color palette mystery? I wonder if you could ask someone to help you, that is if they know what they are doing.

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just downlaoded them- huge thanks!

I think only 2 of them are purely new, but some are nice for their clairty. I may overlay the color information of the ones I have over it to get the cleanest, perfect picture

thanks again!

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I took Lane Way’s advice and converted the black and white images to a more panzerish earthy tone, rather than just one shade of sepia tone.

Lagi_webmaster if plan to put these on your site try putting them in an image editing program like fireworks or photoshop and change/adjust the hue/Saturation. This is what I set mine to:

Go to adjust color in the filters menu and adjust the hue/saturation to

Hue: 36

Saturation: 43

Lightness: -7

They look much better this way. :anjou_happy: