Rayman 2

[Eurotool]

Has anyone tried going up that tube in the Iron Mountains?

I think the PC version has a grille blocking the end you spawn from, but I'm unsure about other versions.

[PluMGMK]

Can confirm about the PC version, and presumably the others are the same because it seems like something they wouldn't bother changing. But then, random version differences have shown up in weird places before!

[RayCarrot]

A Rayman 2 Beta demo has been found and dumped!

There are a lot of interesting differences, like Murfys from cages, a telescopic fist option, early HUD, early controls and more. It also has higher resolution textures and .wav sound files among other things.

[Greengoop]

That’s extremely interesting! Who found this?

[Master]

Oh wow, this is quite interesting, what's the "mapkit foret?" morbide seems very much to be ToTA which fits the filenames from what I remember, but I don't remember there being an equivalent for a mapkit foret. It looks like The Walk of Power going off the screenshot, is that the case?

[RayCarrot]

Yep!
And these are other file names mentioned in the demo, but not actually on the disc:

Code: Select all

beach
canopy1
canopy2
Coast1
Forest1
mape3_temple_terre
morbide_clark
morbide_tst
Volcano1
Volcano3
cube

[The Jonster]

Ooh wow! I’m curious to see the other maps. Looks like what could be ToTA AND Walk of Power from those pictures.

[Greengoop]

Do you have a download link anywhere?

[Master]

Yep!
And these are other file names mentioned in the demo, but not actually on the disc:

Code: Select all

beach
canopy1
canopy2
Coast1
Forest1
mape3_temple_terre
morbide_clark
morbide_tst
Volcano1
Volcano3
cube

Ahh interesting, naming scheme seems slightly different, but if it's the case with the Walk of Power, I'd imagine they probably do still correspond to levels in the final game, I'd assume beach and Coast would be either Whale Bay or the Sanctuary of Water and Ice. Canopy seems self-explanatory. Forest1...I'd assume Fairy Glade/Woods of Light? They all fall under the LEARN name in the final game if memory serves.

Mape3_temple_terre I'd assume is Sanctuary of Rock and Lava, given the earth element.

morbide_clark, huh so I'd assume that's the Clark boss, is there a date on when this beta was made? It'd be interesting to see how far back that idea was. morbide_tst, I'm assuming that's also ToTA, but I wonder what it means by tst? I'd assume test, but of what?

Volcano1 and Volcano3 makes me think of Sanctuary of Stone and Fire but can't say for certain there. And then there's cube...another test area?

I'll be interested to see what y'all find when you look at all this, it's always fun to see the modders and devs in the community at work ^_^

[PluMGMK]

Oh wow, interesting! Quick, someone put it on archive.o – oh wait!

Volcano is more likely to be the Cave of Bad Dreams, given that that's called "Vulca" in the final version. But then that does use all the same wall textures as tSoSaF, so maybe they were one and the same at the time! Either way, its positioning after the morbide levels is intriguing... (Maybe it's just alphabetical, but then where does "cube" come from at the end? )

[Greengoop]

Speaking of archive.org, the wayback machine appears to be back online, unfortunately I can’t say the same for its other services

[Fifo]

The WBM has been online for a while now.

[Greengoop]

Has it? I hope they manage to get the downloads sorted soon

[RayCarrot]

Oh wow, interesting! Quick, someone put it on archive.o – oh wait!

Yeah that's the current issue

Edit: Here's a temporary download link https://we.tl/t-YvzISmleTS

Edit 2: Gameplay by Robin:


Edit 3: Apparently the beta only works on Intel CPUs and not on AMD

[Fifo]

I’ll store the file here for now: https://nextcloud.fifo-f.eu/s/fJ8LLCBq8gFDssB

at least I’ll get to use those leftover system resources on my server haha

[Droolie]

It feels so weird to see that janky version of Rayman 2 in higher quality!
I like the scared teensy at 9:50 in the footage too.

In the meantime, I finished adding support for it to the Unity version of raymap (old code in binaryserializer branch only for now). This was a lot of work as the game's formats are a weird mix between Tonic Trouble's and Rayman 2's - much closer to Tonic Trouble too.
The scripts aren't very readable at the moment as I wasn't able to open the exe properly in IDA.
At a first glance it doesn't seem to have a lot of interesting stuff that you can't see in the game, however I was able to find this among Rayman's animation states:

The pushing animations from Rayman Raving Rabbids DS! Between this and the return of the telescopic fist, it seems quite a few of that game's "new" mechanics were in fact just reused old mechanics!

For whoever can run it, it seems the following keys are checked: (non-numpad) 1, 2, 5, T, J, Q, W, all numpad keys including + and - and Shift. You guys probably already checked it, but maybe one of these will do something interesting?

[RayCarrot]

Here's another video of the beta levels:

[StrangeSolo]

For whoever can run it, it seems the following keys are checked: (non-numpad) 1, 2, 5, T, J, Q, W, all numpad keys including + and - and Shift. You guys probably already checked it, but maybe one of these will do something interesting?

As someone, who have tried the beta, I can say what worked and not worked for me!

Non-numpad 1 and 2 worked, as they switched modes between light balls and fists to shoot with!
Non-numpad 5 didn't work for me at all unfortunately.
Same with T, J and Q letters.
Q actually works, but in noclip mode only, which can be activated by pressing B. It makes you move faster in noclip mode and it can be useful!
As I mentioned before, you can enter into noclip mode by pressing B.
Numpad + and - didn't work for me.
Shift changes the way your camera moves in free-cam mode (which can be activated with numpad 1), so instead of moving around, you can change the position of it.
As I mentioned earlier, numpad 1 activates free-cam mode and numpad 2 (which is the only key, that for some reason recenters on Rayman's back), numpad 3, numpad 8 and numpad 9 disables free-cam.
A makes you move up in both noclip and free-cam, and Z - down.
And also D makes you enter into this vector (?) mode.

[Master]

Oh wow, this is amazing. Given the differences, is this the oldest playable Rayman 2 build we've ever had at this point? (I read the descriptions, it's from 1998, which I think makes it the oldest as from what I've read the rest are from 1999?) It's incredible to see things like the old HUD that we've only ever seen in old trailers, or the presence of the telescopic fist, and the pushing animation you've shared, Droolie. Sounds like there were a lot of ideas that never saw any fruition indeed. It also seems like the Power Fist also behaved slightly differently looking at the footage, didn't have quite the same rate of fire.

It'll be interesting to see what other things y'all find in this build, cause just looking at the footage at those two levels alone, there's a lot of interesting things as-is. The Walk of Power in particular looks a lot different. I'll definitely enjoy nosing about the levels in Raymap xD

EDIT: Oh now that's interesting. So at this point in time the optional area did go directly to the final area of ToTA 2, they weren't warps like they were in final. Was there ever a reason as to why that shortcut and also that drop ended up being warps as opposed to just going straight in? It's clear the path was there to go through directly. Memory saving? I know in Revolution the shortcut was reconnected so that you directly walk from the one part to the other without warping. However the drop leading to the area after fighting the spider is still a warp. I ended up looking at the level design for the PS1 version, which does split the optional section (and makes it mandatory), but it's interesting to see that the shape of the path towards the drop leading to the final segment is actuallly lined up so you do drop into the final area. It makes the path a different shape that I think seems to be more in line with what the beta footage seems to be showing...I know it's been said that the PS1 version seemed to take a basis in an older revision of Rayman 2, but could this be further proof?

Yeah...I'm gonna have a lot of fun messing with Raymap...

[lyndo64]

I just saw this, very cool!