I know i've seen a 320x240 image sequence of the ZG as the sole sample on some old CG-related magazines coverdisc (that pro artists would buy etc). Whether that had permissive licensing i'm not sure.

s0ren wrote on 2023-09-27, 08:31:

leileilol wrote on 2022-05-24, 18:15:

Bumping this because I had forgotten to share some definite information about everyone's favorite fireball just to nail this mystery down for good.

Cheers ! I have updated the top post to include more info.

I still think it is a little intriguing why this particular explosion from the stock set was used so often in game production. I recognize some of the others from games as well, but the "ZG" one is just all over the place.

haha, we found this sprite a long time ago, I forgot to report it https://hlfx.ru/forum/showthread.php?s=&threa … 15&pagenumber=1

this year it finally became possible to download it
REMOVED

leileilol wrote on 2016-10-07, 22:54:

Indeed. there's loads of games in the era that used the same few professionally licensed mpeg clips as graphics. these explosion […]
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Indeed. there's loads of games in the era that used the same few professionally licensed mpeg clips as graphics. these explosions are as ubiquitous as Sound Ideas 4000 / 6000 abuse

Hexen not only has used it once, but... twice!
hexen_008.png
hexen_018.png

Even Quake2 used it at one point
quake01.png
...

Well, reality abuses them even more ...

that's a big cheeto

I made a video about this 😀 https://youtu.be/XNxy_RbXRVE

leileilol wrote on 2022-05-24, 18:15:

Bumping this because I had forgotten to share some definite information about everyone's favorite fireball just to nail this mys […]
Show full quote

Bumping this because I had forgotten to share some definite information about everyone's favorite fireball just to nail this mystery down for good.

It comes out of Visual Concept Entertainment's Pyromania 1. Peter Kuran is the guy behind it.

VCE Films used to have the clips for sale until 2021. Only some of them went to Pond5 in a cropped altered form, THE explosion not present, but duke/CNC's nuke is, along with diablo's fires.

It would be really really cool if he unearthed and relicensed the original SD versions of the clips in a liberated/PD license for the sake of pop culture preservation as it's the VFX industry equivelant of the wilhelm scream, but that's probably wishful thinking. On the other hand, I haven't seen any recent commercial productions with the familiar Pyromania stuff for decades. ArtBeats sure. but not those.

I made an account just to point this out. You can, in fact, purchase THE explosion from Pond5. Dunno when it was added, but it's here:

https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/2556 … sion-plus-matte

There's another explosion sprite that I've noticed in three games so far and I'm not sure where it came from. The earliest appearance is MegaRace (DOS), and I was able to properly rip it for the first time recently:

I found out yesterday that Rise of the Triad uses the same explosion sprite.

And lastly, the same sprite can be seen yet again in the 3DO port of Microcosm. All three examples are in the image attached to this post.

The MegaRace explosion file used RLE to compress the pixel data and then it was further reduced in size with Cryo Interactive's custom HSQ compression. I highly doubt any dev at the time would've have done all this work to get access to this asset, so it has to be from some image or video clip library.

The Rise of the Triad explosion appears to be slightly different as well, there's extra detail on the edges of the explosion that don't show up in MegaRace; ROTT and Microcosm's sprites are also missing the little bits of debris at the end of the animation.

I hope whatever library this explosion is on has been preserved. Unless I missed something, I don't see anything similar in Pyromania, Pond5 or even GettyImages.

EDIT: Someone did a sprite rip of Rise of the Triad and there's several other flame and explosion animations in here that are most likely from the same library, so that could be useful.