Collectables and Completion

This is a sub-page of Proto:Spyro: Year of the Dragon/September 4th, 2000 build.

While the final egg and gem counts had clearly been decided at this point, a number of oddities result in what the player is able to collect - and how that is reflected in their completion percentages - differing dramatically from the final game.

Collectables and Totals#

The total value of gems that can be collected throughout the game is lower than in the final game. This is due to a number of oversights present in this version of the game. The total you will have at the end of the game depends on whether Lost Fleet or Super Bonus Round is visited first.

Standard Playthrough (Lost Fleet First)#

Should the player go through the game as intended, they will reach Lost Fleet before Super Bonus Round. Due to a small oversight, a few important lines of code for the SBR submarines are also present in the Lost Fleet submarine code - specifically, when destroyed, the submarine reads a value in its corresponding dynamic moby tag to decide which of the Super Bonus Round submarine progress flags to set, and the player's gem count is increased by another value within that same moby tag. This is usually only meant to be used in Super Bonus Round, as the submarines in this level each drop a number of gems a single time, referring to the progress flag on re-entries to ensure the player doesn't get the same set of gems from a given submarine multiple times.

All of the Lost Fleet subs are incorrectly assigned flag 0 and 150 gems. As there is no check for whether the player is in Lost Fleet or not, the first submarine destroyed in Lost Fleet will set flag 0 and give the player 150 gems. When the player reaches Super Bonus Round, they'll find that the corresponding submarine in this level does not drop its intended 175 gems, resulting in the player being 25 gems below where they should be at this point.

In addition to this, five green gems in the left-hand tunnel in this same submarine area of Lost Fleet have their state incorrectly set to 1 in this version. This state bypasses the value and appearance setting code, which would normally be run if the gems were state 0, and results in each of these green 2-valued gems looking and acting as red 1-valued gems instead, resulting in 5 gems being lost. All in all, a standard playthrough of Lost Fleet will leave the player on 745 out of 600 gems, though this will revert to 600 out of 600 (meaning another loss of 145 gems) should the player save, quit and reload the game at any point.

Further, the dog enemies in Haunted Tomb fail to drop their gems in this version, but are supposed to drop 5 gems each. The effects of this can be mitigated somewhat by setting the game's difficulty to its easiest setting, which causes all but four of the dogs to immediately drop their gems when the level starts. As such, 20 gems are impossible to obtain in this level.

This playthrough will award the player with 15000 - 20 - 5 + 150 = 15125 gems before Super Bonus Round, and in Super Bonus Round they'll be able to collect 5000 - 175 = 4825 gems, ending on 19950 gems. Note that they will still be able to collect enough gems to enter each of the sublevels of SBR, aside from the final boss area, which is inaccessible under normal means as a consequence. Fortunately for us, the area portal into this area is huge in this version, so the player can enter it anyway by flying above the doorway.

Playthrough with Glitches and Cheats (Super Bonus Round First)#

If the player doesn't mind using cheat codes and glitches, they can use a level warp code plus some movement exploits to enter Super Bonus Round and its submarine sublevel before entering Lost Fleet. This circumvents the gem loss which results from the Lost Fleet oversight, and as such the player will end their run on 19975 gems.

Additional Notes#

Usually, the end-game sequence involving Moneybags allows you to retrieve all of the gems you have paid to him throughout the game. In this version, after the arduous task of collecting them all, it's possible (and indeed likely) that Moneybags will have given you the wrong number of gems, so you'll usually be a small handful off of the intended total. In general, it seems like he pays you back more than you deserve, so it's likely that there was no protection against giving you gems which would make the player exceed the amount they were supposed to be paid, unlike the final game. As such, the gem total according to the Atlas can desync from the total written in the HUD.

Completion Percentage#

The game presents the player's game completion percentage in a few different locations in both this version and the final game. Most notably:

• The title screen displays the completion percentage of each save file on the currently loaded memory card.
• The Contents page in the Atlas displays the completion percentage of the current game.
• Each level page in the Atlas also displays the completion percentage of that level.

The final game uses the same formula for all of these:

100 * (100 * eggs + gems) / (100 * totalEggs + totalGems)

This means that in effect, each egg is "worth" 100 times as much as a gem. The factor of 100 out the front is to display the percentage as an integer rather than as an actual percentage, and as all variables in this calculation are ints, any decimal part is not considered in what is displayed in-game.

The values of "totalEggs" and "totalGems" depend on where the percentage is displayed. For the game as a whole, the eggs and gems listed in the Atlas totals for all pre-Super Bonus Round levels are summed - resulting in 148 eggs and 15000 gems, rather than the true total of 150 eggs and 20000 gems. The secret Moneybags egg in Midnight Mountain Home, and the egg and all 5000 gems in Super Bonus Round are thus not counted towards the "total" values, meaning that a full game completion is 117%, rather than 100% (though the player can receive 100% completion by avoiding all of the "secret" postgame collectables). For individual levels, the totals are simply the totals for that given level.

Taking the totals into account, and removing a common factor of 100, the formula can be simplified as follows:

(100 * eggs + gems) / 298

In this version, only the individual level percentage matches the final game. All other percentage calculations differ in ways that are, frankly, a complete mess.

Title Calculation#

The title screen uses a similar calculation to the final game, but with a few different values. On its surface, the calculation appears to be the following:

100 * (200 * eggs + gems) / (200 * totalEggs + totalGems)

In particular, eggs are worth twice as much as in the final. However, unlike the final game, the gem count is calculated by summing over all 40 level entries, whereas the final sums over the first 39 entries. This would usually make no difference as the final three level slots are unused (only the first 37 level slots are actually used), but the game stores the total gem count that the player has received from Moneybags in the post-game in the 40th level slot. The total value of any gems paid to Moneybags is already included when summing over the individual level totals, so this has the effect of doubling the value of any gems once paid to Moneybags. Thus, a more accurate formula is as follows:

100 * (200 * eggs + gems + moneybagsGems) / (200 * totalEggs + totalGems)

There are a few additional ways this calculation ends up differing from what the player would usually expect:

• The values of totalEggs and totalGems include Super Bonus Round in this version.
  • Additionally, the value of totalEggs is 154, as Super Bonus Round is listed in the Atlas as having 6 eggs in this version instead of 1.
  • The value of totalGems is thus 20000.
• The value of moneybagsGems can deviate from the actual amount you're supposed to receive from Moneybags, by a small amount, in this version. Not taking this deviation into account, moneybagsGems can be anywhere from 0 to 8000.
• The actual gem total collectable in-game differs a lot from the final and depends on which route you take through the game.

Taking the totals into account, and removing a common factor of 100, the September 4th formula can be simplified as follows:

(200 * eggs + gems + moneybagsGems) / 508

Some example percentage values are given below:

The player can remove the inclusion of gems collected from Moneybags from the title screen percentage calculation by using the following code on the title screen:

80078264 0027

Atlas Calculation#

While the final game uses the same calculation as is used on the title screen for the Atlas completion percentage (and this calculation is also used by individual levels, including in this build), this version instead adds up the calculated percentages of every level, and divides them by the value this sum would have if the player were to 100% all pre-Super Bonus Round levels - that is, 3600. This is multiplied by 100(%) prior to the division so that it is presented as an integer. In addition, the Super Bonus Round completion percentage is only included within the numerator of this sum if the progress flag indicating that the player has defeated the Sorceress is set - in this version of the game, this flag is erroneously not set. Super Bonus Round is never considered in the denominator of this percentage calculation.

The flag in question can be set with the following code:

30070b97 0001

Interestingly, when the Sorceress defeat flag is not set, the shown gem and egg totals in the Atlas contents page erroneously double the contribution made by the Sparx levels. This effect does not seem to carry over to the completion percentage.

Since different levels have different collectable counts, and each level contributes exactly the same amount to the Atlas percentage, this effectively makes collectables more valuable in earlier levels than later ones. For example, Crawdad Farm has 200 gems and 1 egg, and so collecting 200 gems in this level contributes 66 percentage points to the calculation, which is enough to bump your completion percentage up by over 1.8%. By contrast, reaching the same contribution in Super Bonus Round, with its 5000 gems and (according to the Atlas) 6 eggs, would require collecting at least 3696 gems.

This makes the calculation very wonky and messy. In addition, the following levels may all have non-100% completion, after completing:

• Lost Fleet may have a completion of up to 112% if the player collects the extra gems from the submarine. If the player completes Super Bonus Round first, they can only achieve 99% in Lost Fleet.
• Midnight Mountain Home may have up to 111% completion, just as in the final game, due to the extra egg.
• Haunted Tomb may have a completion of up to 98% due to the inaccessible gems.
• Super Bonus Round may have a completion of up to 87% normally (if 175 gems are lost due to the Lost Fleet bug) or 91% if Super Bonus Round is completed before Lost Fleet (which is still below 100% due to the Atlas claiming the level has 6 eggs).

The table below displays a few different percentage values the player may be on if they were to complete the game to varying degrees. These are to be contrasted with the title percentages above.

As a result of the uneven way in which collectables contribute to the overall percentage, a playthrough which visits Super Bonus Round before Lost Fleet will have a higher gem count than a standard playthrough, but a lower overall percentage!

Summary#

Put simply, the collectables in this version are a mess:

• 5 gems are missing in Lost Fleet due to five gems being set into the wrong state.
• Lost Fleet also has a bug where it incorrectly uses some code intended to only be used in Super Bonus Round, which results in you getting an extra 150 gems in Lost Fleet. In addition, 175 gems are taken from Super Bonus Round as a result of this issue, and so the total completion depends on the order you do the levels.
• At least 20 gems are unobtainable in Haunted Tomb due to an oversight that stops some enemies from dropping their gems.
• Moneybags will usually give you the wrong amount of gems during the end game sequence which causes the HUD total and the actual gem total to desync.
• The title screen, the Atlas, and individual levels all calculate their completion percentage differently.
• The Atlas calculation in this build sums up the percentage obtained per level and divides by 3600 (which would be the same as 100%ing every level via the "non-secret" route). This means that collectables are worth more in earlier levels, because there’s more gems in later levels.
• This gem total collected from Moneybags is erroneously included in the sum the title screen uses to calculate its completion percentage, meaning that any gems paid to Moneybags are essentially doubled in your completion percentage after he gives them back to you.
• The game says there’s 6 eggs in Super Bonus Round, and this impacts all of the completion percentage calculations. There’s actually only 1.