NiGHTS Into Dreams: Pedestrian Challenge

NiGHTS, but with less flying

If you’re playing NiGHTS Into Dreams correctly, you won’t do much walking around as Elliot or Claris: it’s a short distance from the beginning of each stage to the Ideya Palace where NiGHTS is, and if you don’t run out the clock, you’ll be flying the rest of the time.

Pre-release coverage of NiGHTS suggest that the Elliot / Claris gameplay might have been more substantial during development — some videos show the Ideya Palaces in other locations, so maybe you had to hunt for them?

Prototype Spring Valley’s Ideya Capture in another location, via nightsintodreams.com

What would NiGHTS be like with more platforming? I decided to make the dream real. Introducing NiGHTS Into Dreams: Pedestrian Challenge, a mod that makes NiGHTS into a 3D platformer — get it from SegaXtreme.

This article will describe the mod and the changes I made to the game’s code to implement it. Here’s a video of it in action!

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Gameplay basics

In Pedestrian Challenge, you need all five Ideya to free NiGHTS from the Ideya Palace. At the start of each Dream, approach the Ideya Palace to stash the red Ideya.

Bring the Red Ideya to NiGHTS to kick things off.

You’ll be knocked back from the Ideya Palace once you touch it. Now the first mare begins! Collect 20 blue chips on foot, then follow the arrow to the Ideya Capture. Once you’ve obtained the Ideya, proceed back to the Ideya Palace.

The arrow leads you to the Ideya Capture when it’s red, and back to the Ideya Palace when it’s blue.

Repeat the process for the rest of the mares. Once you’ve finished all of them, you’ll fight the Nightmaren boss as NiGHTS like usual.

Elliot and Claris have a few advantages in this mod relative to the normal game: They bounce off hazards (like the purple void) rather than being knocked down. Also, they’re much faster, and get up to speed more quickly.

Elliot and Claris are more athletic in this version of the game.

The scoring system has been adjusted. You can get an A even though it’s much more difficult to get links — just be sure to collect as many chips and stars as you can. Don’t forget to jump through rings: they’ll boost the dash gauge for the boss fight — orange rings increase it by 1; yellow by 2.

Some other features:

• The Alarm Egg won’t bug you while you’re running around.

• The camera camera controls have been upgraded, so you’re not restricted to 90 degree viewport movements.

• You can access every stage from the beginning; there’s no need to unlock them one at a time.

All stages are available from the get-go.

Enjoy Nightopia! I hope this gives you a fresh appreciation for the level design features in Spring Valley, Splash Garden, Mystic Forest, Frozen Bell, Soft Museum, and Stick Canyon.

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Technical details

The most important patch in this mod is the one that prevents you from turning into NiGHTS when you enter the Ideya Palace. The function at 06026880 handles the transformation, and the only thing we have to do is prevent it from being called:

0603e46e 0009  # Avoid the function call

Hitting an obstacle normally knocks you down, which totally zaps your momentum. We can tell the game to keep us on our feet by changing the function that triggers the “getting up” animation.

06026346 0008  # Avoid the animation comparison

While we’re on animations, let’s find a cooler one for our jumps. Animation 0035 fits this bill — it’s a flip used by NiGHTS for the “Sonic” acrobat move:

060235f2 0035  # Replace the jumping animation
06023776 0035
0602385c 0035
060237d4 0035

And we can make the “knocked back” animation use the flip, too. The table at 06029ed4 has data for all the animations. If we replace the entry for 00AE with the one for 0035, we’ll avoid having to change every single obstacle (which will prevent us from having to decompress the stage files):

0602a9b4 002b1c60  # Replace the "knocked" back animation data
0602a9b8 00000000
0602a9bc 00040002
0602a9c0 00350000
0602a9c4 002b2be6

Making Elliot and Claris faster involves changing their acceleration, walking-to-running cutoff speed, and running speed:

06023336 0800  # Up the acceleration
0602333c 0100  # Go from walking to running more quickly
06023340 0600  # Double the running speed

Strangely, there are two sets of parameters: one for the analog controller and one for the digital. Digital is kind of janky when you’re going fast, sorry!

06023282 0800  # Up the acceleration
06023288 0600  # Double the running speed
0602328c 0100  # Go from walking to running more quickly

To banish the Alarm Egg, I used the secondary debug feature that I discovered last year. Normally the bit array at 060FFC95 is set to 0000. One of the flags controls the Alarm Egg, and another allows access to all stages — let’s set both of those:

0600403c e003  # No Alarm Egg, allow access to all stages

This is a little too generous: it lets you skip mares with the X button, and also suspends the clock during boss fights, however. Let’s restore the time limit there:

0602f4cc e000  # Ignore the debug flag for skipping mares
06034cc4 0018  # Ignore the debug flag and restore the boss timer
0603de06 7fff  # Set time before Night Over

I’ll leave a little mystery about the changes to the scoring system, but here are some breadcrumbs for hackers who want to mess with it:

• The score for your current mare is stored at 060FFE90.

• The function at 0601d136 converts your score to a grade.

• The table of pointers at 0601d210 controls the cutoffs for each dream.

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Outro

I’d love to know how people score in this different version of the game, so tell me if you play it! Thanks to everybody who tested out this mod.

For more mods from me, see:

• Burning Rangers — restore 2 player co-op

• Fighting Vipers — enable unused character costume

• Fire ProWrestling S: 6Men Scramble — restore unused characters

• High Velocity — restore unused 4 player mode

• Clockwork Knight 2 — change gameplay styles

What other games should I be tweaking? Send me your suggestions.