How did they make attract screens?

Sectorseven

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Are they just scripts that the game follows, or does someone actually play and the games sort of recorded it?

Sometimes I find myself watching the computer die against itself and wonder why it (or whoever) decided to make certain gameplay choices. Was there some methodology to how best "attract" people, or did some programmer just script the attract mode however he felt?

Also were there memory limits to how long an attract mode could be?
 
Good questions! Just yesterday a few of us were staring at the Sprint 2 attract mode wondering how it was done.
 
I have thought about this many of times with my Vs Super Mario Bros... because the choices Mario makes is stupid, almost like he is on drugs... lol
 
l bet most were just programmed that way. If you watch the attract mode for Pac games, the movements every time are very sharp and precise with no turnarounds while most players use the "cut corner" method. Similar with Galaga.
 
Sometimes, it's done be simulating the buttons and joystick actions. So, the whole scene is running like it would be if you were playing it, and the character is moving around based on a set of instructions: "Right for 3 seconds, Jump button for .5 seconds, etc.". These actions could be decided by watching someone playing it, or by setting up a system to record them.

If you have an enemy who's movement is partially random, like Ms. Pac-man, it can make it look like the player is just making bad decisions. The person who recorded it was basing his decision on an enemy who went left instead of right.
 
Something I noticed though is that the ghosts on Ms. Pac's is that the ghosts always follow the same patterns, seemingly picked at random.


But barrysfarm's explanation would likely explain why you can play Galaga during attract mode.
 
I have thought about this many of times with my Vs Super Mario Bros... because the choices Mario makes is stupid, almost like he is on drugs... lol

We were just talking about this at my house also. It is really terrible in VS SMB!
 
I think that it depends on the game. Frogger must be an input emulation one because if you wait till the correct time you can control the frog.
 
That depends. Defender & Stargate were scripted. I don't know if they were from actual gameplay or were just designed. Joust was totally scripted. Bubbles is random. It drops a bunch of characters on the screen and uses a modified A* algorithm to randomly move and puts up little hint messages. Mystic Marathon is scripted.

ken
 
Jungle King goes through attract mode by executing the actual program but it pulls input that would normally come from the control panel port from a sequence of data bytes in the ROMS instead.

This I know.
 
Some games I know - usually more modern games - there was a special version of the game that would "record" the demo (Record the player movement, store the random seed used so any randomness that occurs in the game will be the same and match the player's movement, store other variables). Once it was finished recording, it would spit out all of the data then that data would be placed in the programs data and be "played" during the attract sequence. This helps add realness to the demo so it looks like someone is playing the game, not like SMB... :D
 
Modern games generally record what a player does and plays it back. For any game have worked on, this has even done by recording the network stream and playing it back since most of our games have some sort of client/server division even in single player modes. I can't remember if any of our game actually did his in an attract mode though.

I've always wondered about arcade game attract modes. Like Tol mentioned, would be interesting to figure out what is going on for attract mode and AI in Sprint 2.
 
When I first got my Street Fighter I opened up the back and this little Asian kid was in there actually playing the attract mode. No wonder those kids are so good!
 
Some attract modes are funny like smb and I always hated watching the mk or sf fights during attract mode. You never saw who won or a fatality!
 
I am anything BUT a professional programmer but I was programming in BASIC from 1982 and built a lot of home-brew versions of games from breakout to battlezone BITD. The simplest, most efficient, and most resource-friendly way I could conceive to program an attract mode for a game would be to have a routine running the game routine for a fixed time (ie from a starting point to an ending point) with "control input" data read from a file. Whether or not the [main, attract mode] routine feeds the data to the game routine, or that the game routine's control input polling subroutine contains a switch variable which during attract mode forces it to read from the file instead of from the joystick, buttons, etc., is a matter of preference and, most importantly, efficiency in time. In either regard there is all but certainly a file of numeric data representing control input and this data is read by the game routine as control input during the attract mode routine.

The question is, does the programmer choose to author said file manually, or to record a segment of game play and use this data as his attract mode file? 10 seconds of 1982 attract mode time could necessitate up to (and maybe greater than) 600 units of numeric data, data resembling: 11111222333888844477733333383626190000006346101625610333334444444057623409123089..... or the like (which, yes, ultimately would be converted to binary; still, the programmer would have to enter it in legible form, first). Personally I would rather, during the final design phase of programming the game, write and execute a routine that would record, during my playing of a run of the game, the control input and write this data to the questioned file (to be read from on "playback" during the attract mode routine). Irregardless as to how much this might slow down the execution of said process. (Today it wouldn't be noticeable; in 1980 it may have been.)

Blah blah blah.

Yes, imho it would always be FAR faster and easier to record the control input than to enter it into a file manually. Unless playing on a 10-key is WAY more fun than playing the game in question, in the first place. In which case you aren't going to attract anyone, anyway.
 
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