BIONEERS PLAYS BAD APPLE!! (2,190 Frames In-Game)

I PUT BAD APPLE!! IN BIONEERS. Yes, the entire animation. This is a full frame-by-frame recreation of the legendary Touhou Bad Apple!! shadow animation inside Bioneers using the game’s cell system. I wrote custom software that takes each frame of the animation, converts it into a format that works with the Bioneers cell grid, then automatically interacts with the game to rebuild the image one frame at a time. The final animation contains 2,190 individually rendered frames. This was not manually redrawn frame by frame, and it is not a normal video texture being played on a screen. The actual Bioneers structure changes to produce every image you see. My program processes the source frame, determines what each cell should display, translates that into the available in-game cell types and colors, then works through the grid and changes the structure to match. Once the frame is complete, it gets captured. Then the process repeats. 2,190 times. The resulting frames were compiled back together at 10 FPS to recreate the full Bad Apple!! animation. Bioneers had only been out for a matter of days when I started experimenting with this. What began as “I wonder if I can draw an image with these cells” quickly turned into an image-rendering system capable of displaying arbitrary pictures and eventually full animation. Bad Apple!! was the obvious next test. If a game gives me a bunch of controllable cells, apparently my first instinct is to turn them into a display and force them to play Bad Apple. One of my favorite parts is that the cells have subtle visual variation over time, so when thousands of separately captured frames are played back together, the display has this weird organic motion to it. Individual cells almost look like they are wiggling while the actual image moves across them. The renderer is not specifically programmed for Bad Apple. It can render arbitrary images. Bad Apple was simply the most ridiculous possible proof of concept. The screen also does not have to stay this size. There is nothing fundamentally stopping the renderer from working on much larger Bioneers cell displays other than the increasingly ridiculous amount of building and rendering required. This entire project is basically the result of looking at a building mechanic and asking, “Okay, but can I turn it into a computer screen?” Apparently the answer is yes. At this point, getting Bad Apple!! to run on something that was never intended to play video is basically a computing tradition. People have put Bad Apple on calculators, oscilloscopes, Minecraft machines, LED matrices, game engines, electronics, mechanical displays, and all kinds of ridiculous hardware and software. And now Bioneers can be added to that list. Rule 86 remains undefeated. If something has individually controllable states that can vaguely resemble pixels, somebody will eventually attempt Bad Apple on it. This time that somebody was me. That meant solving image mapping, grid alignment, color reduction, automated cell interaction, screenshot timing, UI interference, frame synchronization, and eventually compiling thousands of captured images back into one video. A single frame is easy. A few dozen frames are a test. 2,190 frames is where you find out whether your system actually works. Somehow, it did. If you are here from the Bioneers community, you may have already seen screenshots or clips of this project while I was building it. This is the completed version. I also have permission to upload the finished Bad Apple project to YouTube. I am definitely not finished abusing the Bioneers cell system either. I have already used the renderer for much more detailed still images, including larger multi-color images where shading, facial features, hair, and smaller details become visible across the grid. There are a lot of possibilities from here: larger screens, more colors, higher-resolution images, better color matching, faster rendering, different animations, and completely different ways of controlling the display. If you enjoyed this, leave a like or comment and tell me what I should force Bioneers to display next. If you like coding, game automation, weird engineering projects, simulations, electronics, and making software do things it was never intended to do, consider subscribing. Thanks for watching. Reece / ReeceDoesAll Bad Apple!! Touhou Project Bioneers Bad Apple Bad Apple in Bioneers Bad Apple animation Bioneers gameplay Bioneers automation Bioneers building Bioneers creations Bioneers computer Bioneers cell display Bioneers pixel art Bioneers art in-game computer in-game display Python automation game automation image renderer pixel art renderer hex grid renderer coding project programming project Rule 86 Touhou animation #BadApple #Bioneers #Touhou