Stunt Island - ADG Episode 318
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- Опубликовано: 23 июл 2024
- It's a bird! It's a plane! ...no wait, it's actually a bird dropping egg bombs...
Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Stunt Island, a very unique hybrid of a flight simulator with a linear video editing suite, developed by the British team known as "The Assembly Line" and published through Disney in 1992.
This is a well made program for the most part but it's a little tricky trying to figure out who the target market for it was, seeing that the two main aspects of the program, flying and video editing, are extremely different experiences which were not necessarily going to overlap with the interests of PC game players back then... though in a time well before video editing was something available at the consumer level there was a definite novelty factor in being able to work with such a thing!
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Additional Information and Corrections:
* For those of you wishing to grab a copy, here's a link to it over on GOG: www.gog.com/en/game/stunt_isl...
* Yeah, I messed up the transition for the "Episode 318" at the start of the video. Time wasn't on my side to get this video out on time so... whatever, it gets to crossfade instead of wipe for ONE video! :P
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Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
ADG on Pixelmusement: www.pixelships.com/adg
Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: www.pixelships.com/adg/index2....
Kris' Patreon Page: / kasick
@Pixelmusement on Twitter: / pixelmusement
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Chapters:
00:00 Title and Intro
02:31 Game Stats
04:15 Gameplay
08:03 Flight Model
15:35 Set Design
16:49 Video Editing
20:18 Comparison - Auto Edit
22:55 Comparison - My Edit
24:13 Overall
25:56 DOSBox Configuration
27:15 Credits 
Игры
Thank you for the great video! A few additions / comments:
- I think a third important part of the game is the giant sandbox that it is. I know you briefly touched on the Set Design Editor, but that allows you to create any stunt on that whole island that you can imagine (and pull off in the editor), which was pretty crazy at the time. To make that easier, the game came with a fold out map of the island, so you could find interesting spots to create your stunts in.
- Films could be exported with a utility that came with the game (MAKEONE) into a file that then could be played back on any other computer that didn't have the game installed with a freeware tool that came with the game (PLAYONE). A pretty unique feat, and a cool way to show off what you did to friends.
- Technically, the game is quite impressive. It ran really well on a 386, and offered Gouraud Shading on most planes. Compare that to the system requirements of TIE Fighter, which didn't have to render a world next to the planes!
Early flight sims were always hilariously ambitious, but this is on another level
It's interesting that your take on the hospital sequence is that they have Star Trek tier medicine... I had thought the joke was that they were going to ignore half the conditions and just let you keep flying with all of those injuries! 😅
I thought the joke was that it always ended with "... and bad breath" but I might be misremembering.
I heard a couple different endings from the doctor though I forget what the other one I heard was. There's likely a few. :B
@@Pixelmusement All the variations I could find are here: ruclips.net/video/q1YW0TSIxYU/видео.html Also, the doctor was voiced by Rodger Bumpass, voice of Squidward!
This game was so weird and fun (as many games at that age), as a kid i get totally engaged in both aspects of the game: some days I enjoy spending time editing like it was a job lol, and other days just flying and messing around with every object like buildings and tunnels; my only wish at that time was to drive cars trough the island.
By the way, you can find some real gems if you search for "stunt island movies".
p.s.: great video as always, this channel is awesome.
This shows the diversity of DOS games. Those who had consoles as children always played the same genres of games, but those who had PCs enjoyed these types of games, difficult to define and difficult to explain.
The main reason for that diversity is because consoles had incredibly underpowered CPUs but specialized graphics chipsets which were optimized in very specific ways, thus you could have higher performance games than on computers IF your game didn't need to do lots of things outside of those graphics optimizations. PCs were the opposite; WAY more CPU power and RAM but no specialized graphics hardware (at first) which meant your only limit was how much raw power and memory was at your fingertips! :B
@@Pixelmusement Wonder why the consoles of that era didn't power their CPU'S much higher, my guess it would be a cost issue, and perhaps things would run badly.
@@TheMoogleMaster Cost, first and foremost. I think it goes without saying that a 1 or 4 MHz CPU is WAY CHEAPER than a 33 or 66. Also doesn't require active cooling! :P
It was a grand time because coders were experimenting with new game styles at a very high rate. Genres hadn't been established as well.
cost of entry was cheaper too. not that stunt island didn't have publisher backing. although I'm unsure how much it was a product of making a game engine.
I kept trying to make some thing behave like a car? could you 'fly'/move car models in the game? that's what I remember anyway
I had a computer class back in 1999 and we had to pl,ay this game for several months. I loved it. We had to program our own sequences for a project and I enjoyed it so much, me already being a fan of DOS flight sims like Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and Tie Fighter. Thanks for bringing back the memories of one of my favorite high school classes.
that's a pretty nice way to teach computers
That's amazing! In 1999 the game must have felt pretty dated, but the possibilities it allows kind of overcome that.
It was a bit dated but it was still a very enjoyable experience. I think I was rocking a 486dx2 at home at that point, so I was used to janky gaming. Thanks for the cool computer class, Mr. Reid.@@LeftHandedGuitarist
Thanks for highlighting Stunt Island! It is a unique game. The SI film scene was quite lively during the 90s, with hundreds of user creations released online. Some film directors made incredibly complex films with custom props. I've been transferring and releasing them on my channel.
Exactly! On the GEnie bulletin board service, there was a group that created movies and shared them for download. I loved creating movies and sharing them on the service.
Man this would have been my JAM back in my childhood.
Got this with the Disney Software Collection 2 that came bundled with my dad's IBM PS/1 model 2133. Besides this it included Beauty and the Beast, Coaster, Mickey's Memory Challenge and Mickey's Jigsaw Puzzle. So, a very nostalgic game for me. Many good times were had.
I absolutely remember this game. One of the very few times I was just up and playing a game until the sun rose the next morning. (I was in a basement, and heard my parents walking around making breakfast not realizing how much time had passed). I was 15 at the time.
Those were the days!
a-men@@PlasticCogLiquid
What was also great that you could share the videos with friends that didn't have the game. There was this option to save a clip to a disk with a standlone player included. Practically RUclips before RUclips!
Yeah, I bet if it was made today or remade, it would encode to something like mp4 or even offer direct upload to video sites.
Yes indeed! I have a bunch of the best ones on my channel
Stunt Island is one of my fondest memories man. I made so much stuff with it back then. I wish I could relive that time because it's impossible to go back to it now, that interface O.o It has some of the most aggressive LOD going on ever, I'd love to see a hack of it that enables infinity draw distance and less LOD'ing on objects. I wasn't even a huge fan of 3D graphics until this game and Stunts entered my life and gave me these surreal worlds to inhabit.
The built in scripting language was a lot of fun too, you had pretty much complete control of everything.
This game was an amazing experience for me even years after it came out. In flight sims I loved to just flying low to explore the map and and admire what passed for scenery at the time. Other flight sims didn't really cater to that and their engines were mostly made to look good at a different scale/higher altitudes.
In contrast Stunt Island had an amazing level of detail close to the ground compared to everything else and actually tried to gamify the type of flying I liked and had a great sandbox map for it.
The novelty of an editor is also a bit overlooked because level editors for 3d games were not a normal thing back then (except for another game called Stunts) and I think it compares well to more simplistic scenario editors of other serious sim games with the scripting system and prop/plane variety.
The video editing part is weird because it isn't enjoyable by itself, but planning out and making a cool movie clip very much is and this it's kinda the best game for it where it's not just a side feature. CD-based FMV video editing games or things like 3D Movie Maker or The Movies had less freedom and focused on making a movie instead of making a movie out of your gameplay which was a need technology satisfied decades later.
Man I been waiting for you to cover this one for years. Literal years. I used to play this on my parent's Packard Bell 486 back in the day.
I was obsessed with this game as a kid. This and Coaster lol
Cool video.
What a wild game!
I must confess: I laughed out loud at the egg dropping feat
Now, my flight sim of choice that wasn't FS98/2000 was Flight Unlimited. I do like the concepts presented, but I'm not sure I'd find it novel enough to play.
After loving the original Stunts as a kid, I remember this Stunt Island being the next latest and greatest needing a NASA computer to run it. (I don't even know if the 2 games are related?)
I never got around to getting though :(
After doing some cursory research, it would not appear the two are related.
@@aaronmarko how? they're different developers in different countries
I love how at the end, it kinda looks like the in-game mouse cursor went down and clicked on on your end card graphic. Not sure you planned that, but its a happy accident. (EDIT: For clarity, I'm talking about at 27:09 )
I mean TECHNICALLY source film maker allows you to play in In game environments to plan scenes and every asset you port to SFM can work in a source engine game, but this is a self contained package!
Oh man me and my brother spent so much time just messing around in this game. Good times.
I remember this. It was a lot of fun.
If the scenes are fixed and deterministic - no randomization in behavior of at least using a fixed pseudo-rng table, it might make the "movies" by recording only player inputs without the need of tracking the position and movements of every object individually. Doom games do this this way at recording demos, too. This way the game would essentially "play itself" each time exactly like the first time by just substituting the listed inputs (instead of live ones) to the engine and running the scene for the "raw footage". And of course with some additional markers/flags for camera switching or effects to accommodate the edited version.
Very possible! Also, if you have full control over the RNG it doesn't matter if you have any of it tabled or anything, though I don't think there's any RNG in this game at all. I mostly just wanted to give a "worst case scenario" as it were to highlight how big of a gap there was between doing the recordings the traditional way versus tracking other values in the engine. :B
yeah the game essentially just knows the 'script' of the scene that's the setup and inputs
stunts aka 4d sports driving does a similar thing for the replay and indianapolis 500 as well. it would've been pretty neat though if one could have exported the scene frames for povray or something.
The trouble with that method is that time manipulation is impossible. You can advance the action just fine from the start in a forward direction, but you can't jump forward or backwards along the timeline. A lot of games with demos didn't worry about this because the player doesn't interact with the movie itself once made, but in games that used this method and did have movie making tools such as Red Baron or Driver, the only way to ever go backwards on the timeline was to rewind all the way back to the start and go from there.
Since Stunt Island does in fact have the ability to scrub backwards and forwards along the timeline, and jump to any point or even separate sequences within a single stunt, this suggests that Stunt Island does in fact know the position, attitude and speed of every placed object in every frame, as Pixelmusement suggests.
@@_Braised you can do it surprisingly well provided that your physics engine isn't complicated at all.
you'd just calculate from the beginning, even if jumping backwards.
@@lasskinn474 In which case you'd have to wait for the whole sequence to fast forward from the beginning through to the point you wanted before control was returned to you. Every single game I've seen that has the player input-only method of recording does not do this. Presumably they all toyed with it, and all reached the same conclusion that it's better for the player to fast forward through to the spot they want themselves rather than just sit there and wait for it, since at least the player is actively in control the whole time.
This is pretty cool!
I had this as a kid, but I couldn't get into it because the editing and scripting were just too daunting for my little brain. And I didn't know enough about cinematography and editing to have any idea how to make things look good. Some tutorials would've been nice.
That said, I'd LOVE to see a modern remake. If anything, it might have more appeal *because* video editing is less esoteric today.
your channel is awesome
I agree. Kris does a great job with this channel.
Great to see this game appear in any kind of discussion. I think it's a special one, incredibly creative for the time it was released. I have so many fond memories of trying to recreate scenes from my favourite films back then (largely Terminator 2, The Fugitive, Lethal Weapon). It's a shame you didn't touch much on the pure sandbox side of this game which allows for you to really run riot, within the limitations of the engine of course. People are still doing wildly creative things with the game to this day, for example here's the Top Gun Maverick trailer recreated in-game: ruclips.net/video/JEs4N6CZQxs/видео.htmlsi=_XizzXnY-RD3bzHn
i'm actually happy i didn't have this game as a kid. otherwise i probably would have never gone outside.
reminds me of aces over Europe/Pacific
Another thing which might have not aged well is the buttons having engraved text on them. I associate it with them being disabled, due to being accustomed to Windows 9x conventions :-)
The game looks really gorgeous. I would love to see a remaster (same rendering primitives but highres). Some kind of SVGA mode.
I kinda want that for just about every 3D game from the 80s and 90s. :B
This was an early training for the future gaming youtubers :P
Is that Frank Morris @3:59?
How were you able to launch the game from GOG with that resolution? It launches as a really small screen for me.
I don't launch DOS games from GOG using GOG's launchers or shortcuts, I build my own and set up my own individual DOSBox config files for every game I play, thus allowing me to set custom window sizes,. set up OpenGL surfaces to allow for proper scaling, setting up scalers to pre-scale the pixels so that they don't get blurry, among other things. That's kind of the nuclear option though; If you'd rather not go through that hassle I recommend grabbing a DOSBox frontend, setting up your DOS games through that, and then learning how the different settings affect the resulting window, though I made a filler video a long while back on how some of the DOSBox settings work: ruclips.net/video/0a8tswmKzWI/видео.html
"The scripting series is basically a series of if-then sequences"
So... the basic foundation of programming?
Sort of. You don't have any loop or execution control and only a small number of "flags" you can access which are just signed integers, so while you can do quite a bit with it you can't get overly complicated, especially given the limits as to how many objects and scripting blocks are available. :P
you don't need to save the rotations for every frame, just the "script"
This is Ultrawing VR, but not VR