Reidak Prototype Picture found in Bionicle Heroes files!

[Toa_Kralich]

Hi all, I've been datamining and modding Bionicle Heroes for about two weeks now. I have a much bigger article planned including documentation on how to make your own mods and such, but for now, I just stumbled upon this really cool find and I had to share it: 

I checked this against another picture of the Reidak prototype we have, and it seems this one has a lot of his features, like the differently coloured Piraka weapon, the upside-down Zamor Sphere launcher, and the different head mould. I'm not sure if we've already had this picture before, but finding it whilst datamining Bionicle Heroes was a really cool find nonetheless. 

There's more stuff in Bionicle Heroes worth taking a look at and in not too long I'll have a full article up detailing mods I've made, documentation on how they were done, and also linking a wikia I've setup just for modding and datamining the game and documenting modding techniques and/or findings. 

Edited August 28, 2020 by Toa_Kralich

[Xboxtravis]

The weapon kind of has the look of an unpainted resin, either casted off a prototype mold or maybe some form of early 3D printing. Its pretty neat for sure!

[Toa_Kralich]

Yeah, it might be even older than the existing prototype image we have with the weapon looking like that. A shame it's so low-res in the game files, it would've been nice to look at it in higher detail. 

[Bambi]

Interesting, the head mold looks quite similar to the one on the cover of Dark Destiny:

[Master Inika]

4 hours ago, Bambi said:

Interesting, the head mold looks quite similar to the one on the cover of Dark Destiny:

Plus they both have a silver weapon.

[Toa_Kralich]

Would this suggest that the TT Games crew got given a prototype model to use for splash screens or promotional art? They state in the "wacky.txt" file found in the game that many models in the game were constructed by being 3D modelled strictly to the original pieces. I suppose the only caveat with this is the Reidak model in the game is very clearly not the prototype version. Perhaps an older version of his 3D model used the prototype? My datamining has suggested there was an older Thok model in the game files with visibly different features - he looks closer to the prototype version of Thok, at least in his texture detail. Perhaps this was the case early in development? Heroes took around 10 months to make, I think - if it released in November 2006 for the first time, it very well may have started development before the Piraka designs were finalised.