Diddy Kong Racing

This page details development materials of Diddy Kong Racing.

This needs some investigation.
Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page.
Specifically:

Compare the environment textures to final and look for any differences.
Investigate DB_TEXTURES.bin and TRACKS.bin in the SFA demo to see if they are actually "from" DKR development, or are unique to the early sequel.

Unused Textures#

Found inside the E3 2002 demo of Star Fox Adventures, specifically the files TEX.bin (and its accompanying file TEX.tab), are a number of leftover texture files that come from an earlier version of Diddy Kong Racing. These could have been reused placeholders to be used in DKR's proposed sequel (that would become Dinosaur Planet), leftovers from DKR's source repository, or something else entirely. The files date to June 1999, at the very beginning of Dinosaur Planet's development.
The textures in the .bin file come with palette data, but they don't have file names or any other information, unfortunately.

Download TEX.bin and TEX.tab (06/01/1999)

File: SFA_Kiosk_TEX.zip (817 KB) (info)

Characters#

Banjo#

A few textures of Banjo's backpack, which are in a higher resolution than what was used in the final game.

Bumper#

A large number of textures pertaining to an early version of Bumper, when he was blue. The "64" texture may be from a hat he wore in one early iteration of his design.

Early Bumper renders, courtesy of artist Kev Bayliss. Another early Bumper design shared by Kev, without gloves and goggles.

Roo#

Kev's renders of Roo.

A cut yellow kangaroo character with boxing gloves, who according to designer Kev Bayliss was named "Roo"¹. This character design eventually evolved into Pipsy, changing from a kangaroo to a mouse at a point in development when they thought the player characters would need to be able to walk around outside of their vehicles. The kangaroo's boxing gloves may have conflicted with this adventure game concept, considering the rest of the game's playable characters have their hands free. The team also wanted to include a very small driver and felt a mouse would be a natural choice for that, rather than a large kangaroo. Another factor in Pipsy's design evolution is that Bayliss had recently designed a different mouse protagonist for his "Astro Mouse" game concept - development didn't progress on that project, so he wanted to include a mouse character in another of his games instead.

(Source: Kev Bayliss' DKR poster design livestream, and his DKR 25th anniversary livestream)

Interestingly, her shirt textures are green, while they are pink in the rendered artwork. The leftover pink anti-aliasing pixels around the flower on the shirt seem to indicate that the original pink design was colored over with green later on.

Unknown Characters#

Textures for unknown characters.
Set 1, at offset ~000D6080

These textures appear to be for a chimpanzee-like character, similar to Diddy Kong, but the face structure is completely different from Diddy's, with a textured mouth, and the eyes are orange. The eye/nose and nose/mouth textures seem like they would not overlap correctly if placed on the same model.
The purple racing suit clothes, possibly a leotard, seem similar to Bumper's early textures above, including an identical safety pin and a modified version of the red belt, with two satchels on it instead of one.

Set 2, at offset ~0019E4C0

More textures for the chimpanzee placed in between Bumper's textures, seemingly with a different design, and possibly mid-conversion to Diddy Kong.

Set 3, at offset ~001A6AE0

Directly before Bumper's early hat are these white "shoelaces". If that's what they are, they could be for any character that wears (or wore) shoes. You wouldn't normally see shoes outside of the character select screen, though.

Set 4, at offset ~001D4F20