Reference

Freeplay and debug mode

Direct-control Johnny, plus the runtime debug menus that make it safe to test.

~4 min read · 1197 words

Freeplay is the first mode in the PS1 port where Johnny is not just being replayed from a captured foreground pack. The player walks him around the island directly. The rest of the world still uses the same hard-won PS1 runtime pieces: the ocean backdrop, sparse clean-rect restoration, holiday overlays, SPU sounds, captions, and the pause-menu UI.

The important distinction is architectural. fishing1, fishing2, and the other story scenes are .FG2 playback. Freeplay is live C code. Every frame reads the controller, updates a small state machine, restores the background from clean rects, draws Johnny and any active prop, and presents the frame. That makes it useful as a play mode and as a debugging cockpit.

On this page

How to enter and leave

The normal boot still starts in screensaver mode. Press Start, choose Freeplay: OFF, and the game tears the current scene down, shows the MEANWHIL.BMP frog clock, builds the freeplay island, and hands control to the player.

Inside freeplay, press Start again to open the same pause menu. Choose Freeplay: ON to exit back to the screensaver loop. Exit also shows the frog clock while freeplay releases sprite slots, clean-rect memory, captions, and its live island backdrop.

BOOTMODE.TXT token entry remains available for test discs:

fgpilot freeplay

The default release path is menu-driven because that is the real player flow we need to test.

Final controller map

Freeplay deliberately keeps live controls small. Anything uncertain or catalog-like belongs in the pause-menu debug pages, where it can be named, described, and selected without memorizing button chords.

Control Action
D-pad / left analog Walk Johnny 4-way around the island. Any movement cancels the current gag/action immediately.
L2 held Slow walk. Useful for lining Johnny up by the water or tree.
R2 held Fast walk.
Select Clear the freeplay screen, rebuild the clean background, and return to idle. This is both a player escape hatch and a heap/fragmentation safety valve.
R1 + Up Toggle day/night immediately.
R1 + Down Toggle high tide/low tide immediately.
R1 + Left Cycle raft stage 0..5 immediately.
R1 + Right Cycle holiday overlay immediately.
Start Open pause menu.

In menus, Circle is always Back. Cross is Select. That rule is now global; no freeplay submenu is allowed to invent a second meaning for Circle.

Pause-menu debug pages

The pause menu carries the rest of freeplay/debug mode:

Menu Purpose
Freeplay Options Entry point for gag catalog, visitor catalog, controls, and clear screen.
Freeplay Gags Named one-shot Johnny actions with source BMP, frame count, and rough memory cost.
Freeplay Visitors Named outside-world events with source BMP, frame count, and rough memory cost.
World Options Day/night, tide, raft, holidays, and island position. In freeplay, changing a value closes the menu, shows the frog clock, rebuilds the island, and applies immediately.
Sound Test Selector-style SPU test page for individual sound effects.
Accessibility Closed captions, sound mute, ocean ambience, and the Sound Test selector.
Controls On-device reference for the freeplay controls above.

This split is intentional. The joypad is for walking, clearing, and the four immediate world toggles. Everything with a catalog or metadata lives in a menu — including fishing, which moved off Circle to the Scene Set selector during the Scene Set rewrite (see the “Fishing” section below).

What the debug catalogs expose

Gags and visitors are fail-soft. If an optional BMP cannot load, freeplay prints the skip banner instead of crashing. The catalog pages make that visible by showing the asset filename and frame count before you spawn it.

The current gag catalog includes simple Johnny actions such as eating, wiping his brow, getting angry, bonking his head, strutting, and running. The visitor catalog includes seagulls, the tiny parade, biplane, canoe, boat, King Kong, Mary, pirate/fisherman cameo, flock, clouds, and the meanwhile panel. These are debug-selectable first; we can tune frame ranges and coordinates without changing the player-facing control scheme.

Fishing

Fishing in freeplay is reached through the Scene Set menu rather than a dedicated joypad button. Cycling Scene Set to Fishing Only constrains the screensaver-loop random pool to the validated fishing scenes (fishing1..fishing8) — the same captured .FG2 packs the normal rotation already plays, so the visuals match the source frames exactly. The earlier Circle-as-fish freeplay action is gone; the live control surface is reserved for walking, clearing, world toggles, and the menu.

The Scene Set lineup also covers the rest of the catalog by family: Johnny Stories, Mary Visits, Visitors, Activities, and Misc & Suzy. At v0.8.12-ps1 every scene in every pool clears the FISHING 1 bar — the pools are reader-preference filters, not staging areas for unvalidated content.

Rendering and memory rules

Freeplay has to run forever. That means the frame loop is boring on purpose:

  • no malloc/free in the normal per-frame path;
  • no BMP load in the normal per-frame path;
  • clean-rect restore, sprite draw, overlay dirty marking, present;
  • optional sprite loads only on menu/action boundaries;
  • all optional action assets release their slot before replacement;
  • freeplay exit hard-frees its clean-rect snapshot instead of leaving a dormant 300+ KB allocation behind;
  • the frog loader uses a local TTtmSlot and releases MEANWHIL.BMP unconditionally after drawing the loading frame.

The overlay system has a separate dirty-rect hook for captions and banners. That matters because those overlays draw straight to the framebuffer. When they disappear, the underlying island rows must be marked dirty or the bottom of a caption/banner can leave black pixels behind.

Wave animation is intentionally throttled in freeplay. The shared island wave routine advances every fourth freeplay frame now, not every second frame, because the live-control loop was making the surf read too fast compared with the normal screensaver cadence.

Telemetry

Freeplay has level-gated telemetry:

Boot token Effect
freeplay-log periodic summaries: frame count, mode, action count, summon count, clean-rect count, failures, largest heap probe
freeplay-detail asset load details and clean-rect rebuild detail
freeplay-debug on-screen debug line with mode, position, rebuild count, and asset-failure count

The default path keeps heap probes out of entry/exit and out of the frame loop. Heap probing is still available when debugging a crash, but it is not part of the forever-run player build.

Source