Sonic Superstars Ultra Mega Spoiler Containment Thread for Spoilers [SPOILERS]

Yes, we've known that for quite some time as it was shown by accident *somewhere* but I forget where.

 

A Sonic Origins styled Sonic Orion logo was shown in a video thumbnail image on the Sonic Superstars website when it initially launched, before being replaced with an image containing the game's final name logo.

 

I don't know why you'd assume cel shading is less resource intensive. The way you outline a model in cel shading is to render a second, all-black model behind the current model, so every character takes a second draw call on top of their base rendering when you do cel shading. The actual shading is whatever, but cel shading with that kind of outlining requires at least one more draw call than normal rendering.

 

Just as long as the main game but harder and tbh, better. A lot of the extra levels become acts and suddenly they make more sense. Trips story feels like hard mode / the actual game.

 

I see Eggman has some issues to sort through still...

 

I mean, in a game like this that's already built with an existing lighting engine, sure? But I guess I was thinking that games with cel shading as a normal part of their art direction tend to be simpler in terms of lighting and models on the whole, and because it's a good style, they tend to not need and kind of crazy fidelity.

 

So is there any secret in the carnival act 2? I've looked around to see if I've missed any bombs to blow up the Eggman statue further but not sure.

 

Cel shading doesn't have simpler lighting. Cel shading works by calculating out the normal lighting per vertex, then quantizing it (on the dreamcast using a lut on the sh4, in modern shaders using heavy division math). Its an extra step after regular lighting calculations. Everything about cel shading requires an extra step over normal rendering.

I can give a real-world example of the heaviness of cel shading. The Dreamcast PVR can only command to draw to one buffer per vsync, be it the screen or a texture or whatever. You have to wait til the PVR stops drawing to change the buffer target. This is why Jet Set Radio is locked to 30 FPS on the Dreamcast: it takes two draw calls to different buffers to achieve the toon outlining. You first render the black model to a buffer, then render the cel shaded model over the black model on the buffer, then you stop drawing, wait for the PVR to become ready again on the next frame, switch the buffer back to the screen, and render the new texture buffer to the screen. You can see the process consume an entire frame because of the way the Dreamcast works.

The actual "shading" that makes the colors look quantized is actually pretty easy math, it's the same thing as normal lighting calculations. You take the dot product of the direction of the lighting by the normal vector of the face of the polygon, which gives you an intensity value (the "percentage" the two vectors align) like any normal lighting calculation. The extra step is, once you've figured out the value for this face of the polygon, you then compare it to a quantized look up table, to turn your continous color value into a discrete color value. Then you just set each vertex on the face to the quantized value, and that's how you cel shade. It's a whole extra step, you take your normal lighting calculations that you'd use otherwise, and then perform quantization on top of it.

 

Alright fair enough, I didn't have a complete picture of how it worked.

I still think it's a good and more-efficient choice for Sonic though, since the series is clearly struggling to keep up with the linear progression of graphical fidelity and should abandon that pursuit entirely and become more stylized.

 

I just finished the regular story mode today and I have to say Tails = easy mode. Sonic was kind of harder to play as especially vs the final boss of Story mode. I ended up giving up and replaying the game as Tails who successfully cleared it. The special stages were meh, but I hated the 5th one trying to catch the green emerald. Figuring out the trajectory took some time.

 

While obviously cel-shading requires extra processing when slapped onto an existing product, I think most people are referring to how when designed with it in mind from the beginning, developers can save resources on other elements (textures, modeling, etc.) when pursuing a more stylized aesthetic.

It also just looks better in general and I’m pissed I can only use the skins on the uglier Switch version whenever it comes from Amazon JP

Btw, is there a way to get the rabbit and Mecha Sonic with a physical Xbox copy? I’ve been looking around on the DLC and it looks like it’s only a bundle. I could have sworn some people were saying it’s available separately.

Edit: JP Switch copy just arrived actually lol. Very nice looking! I prefer how the back cover looks to the EU design.

 

Cel shaded models aren't any less complex than non-cel shaded models. And in today's material-based world, "textures" are just shader data which cel-shaded models still need in order to hold glyph information. You still need textures in cel-shaded models, they just perform different functions. They're not a series of RGB lookup values, they do things like hold normal vector directions.

I'm speaking from experience here, cel-shading isn't a way to reduce workload. It's the opposite, it requires more work to do cel shading, both in workflow, and in execution. You need to design your models around the particularities of how cel-shading works, which, for example, can require vertices to be doubled up along edges, increasing complexity.

 

I see. But when you’re utilizing a more stylized aesthetic (which is why I said that and not specifically “cel-shading”), can you not be more abstract in what you’re trying to represent? My point is that a human made in a cel-shaded game will be modeled differently than one in a game that’s more realistic, not because cel-shading inherently requires less complexity, but because the art style of the game lends itself better to less detailed models.

 

Put more bluntly, the point being made is you could get away with something closer to the level of Jet Set Radio if covered up in stylisation of cel-shading etc, even nowadays; and the expectation is that would be easier to make, considering JSR is a 20 year old game.
No idea if that actually translates as linearly as all that.

 

Cooljerk is saying that doing such a method is not as easy as its being claim or less expensive in technical processing. The end result may look simple but there's a lot of work background work required to pull it off.
I think we all agree that the end result looks good. We've already seen a very well executed modern takes with Hi-Fi Rush, Bomb Rush and Guilty Gear games, but all of those games heavily invested in the development of their look. It would be sick for a Sonic game to go that route, but ultimately SEGA decided to just take the cheapest route and give us a costume DLC for a set amount of characters rather than build an entire game around it.

 

I guess it's also that people just sometimes make cel shader mods for games as it is. Frontiers, Generations and Lost World all have them, and while they're not quite my style, I think that's largely because the art direction seems overdesigned without being built with such a look in mind (also because they don't add outlines to things). Obviously I know that doesn't automatically mean it's easy for professionals (and it certainly isn't for amateurs), but what exactly makes the difference?

 

Extracted and dug through the files and made some findings:

- Trip is referred to internally with her name as "Brie" in a lot of places
- Holiday Costume Sonic DLC is coming

Beta level names:
- Sky Temple was "Wind Sky Castle"
- Lagoon City was "Water Ruins"
- Sand Sanctuary was "Flow Desert Temple"
- Golden Capital was "Gold Rush Palace"
- Frozen Base was "Forest Spaceport"
- Everything else was the same

- The zone for the final boss is officially called "Black Dragon Zone"

 

That explains where the "12 zones" came from, since the final last story zone did once have a name.

 

I have no idea what this game did to me but when I try to play Mania now everything seems jittery and clunky

 

That seems to be it, yes. I wonder if it's clever detail or just coincidence that the world map entry for the final boss is between zones 1 and 2, so there's essentially a big "1 2" on the screen.