[Relick]

dsrb, on 28 December 2011 - 03:55 PM, said:

I would hope so! Parallax scrolling is a basic feature of all the 2D games. I presume and very much hope that they're aware of this and that the current background is just a placeholder.

Yeah parallax is definitely going to be in. It was planned for this pre-demo but it didn't get put in for some reason . We have all the layers and stuff (other than the very back 2, that still needs recreating).

[Cinossu]

I'd work on at least getting the physics and every object of a zone (bar mayhaps the boss) properly programmed before showing off something new. While tech demos are nice, all they really do is show us that you've done something intermittent. By showing something complete you show us that you're committed to doing solid, good work.

saxman, on 28 December 2011 - 04:16 PM, said:

I'm not interested in petty flamewars, but I'll just say this: you would never say the same to Tweaker. He was a dick to the guy who posted this topic. Yet you want to call me out for actually doing the right thing.

Actually I would, and have done many times. Stop playing the fucking martyr.

[Irixion]

I agree with saxman here. This isn't perfect, and it needs work done, but there's absolutely no reason that this needs to be trashed or bashed. If you're going to be saying people's releases are garbage, then why don't you look at your first release of Sonic Megamix. I don't understand why people criticize other members' first releases and call it garbage when their first release wasn't any better. Kind of hypocritical, no?


Keep working on this, and it could get somewhere. Kind of reminds me of S2HD except without the nitpicking on the minute details. This, at best, is proof of concept, and should be named as such! Physics and collision need some work, but I like where this is going. I can offer to do some music if you wish, soundfonts pasted over MIDIs are usually a bad idea.


You could bundle XNA Framework with your release, or have an extractor do all of the work. Complaining about having to install that is like bitching at having to install VB6 for xm3smps, which Tweaker didn't do by the way.

So, if you can't get rid of the XNA dependency then just bundle it in some way.

[Cinossu]

Irixion, on 29 December 2011 - 02:39 AM, said:

I agree with saxman here. This isn't perfect, and it needs work done, but there's absolutely no reason that this needs to be trashed or bashed. If you're going to be saying people's releases are garbage, then why don't you look at your first release of Sonic Megamix. I don't understand why people criticize other members' first releases and call it garbage when their first release wasn't any better. Kind of hypocritical, no?

Times change, standards rise, and the fact that said ROM hack was done by one person rather than a group, means this point is nullified.

[Tweaker]

I think it's hilarious that people are finding every insult and demeaning analogy they can pull out of their ass to try and slam me with just because they're so offended by my opinion differing so drastically from their own. Keep it classy, guys.

[LordOfSquad]

Tweaker, on 29 December 2011 - 02:49 AM, said:

I think it's hilarious that people are finding every insult and demeaning analogy they can pull out of their ass to try and slam me with just because they're so offended by my opinion differing so drastically from their own. Keep it classy, guys.

I really don't think they're offended by your differing opinion, so much as they're offended by you being so harsh with your criticism. It doesn't seem like there was really any need for you to be so passionately angry about it. And, you know, calling the team "lame" isn't really classy either.

Just my two cents.

[Walnut]

A few thoughts:
- Not really a fan of the art style. It looks clean for what it is but the world kind of loses a lot of its charm somehow. This is probably a result of the game being vectored, not sure how you would fix this though and I recommend you stay steady with the style. Although if you can find tweaks to make it feel more organic the game would be better for it
- You weren't kidding, the engine's pretty buggy. Specifically collisions. Its weird how I'm programmed to expect things to react in this stage. When I fly through enemies and spikes like I shouldn't in the Genesis games it threw me off guard. This'll be fixed though, and I'm really impressed with what you've got on the engine so far. What's done feels almost exactly like the Sonic I know and love

I don't really know what else to say besides the game looks awesome, can't wait to see it progress. Keep up the good work y'all!

[Tweaker]

LordOfSquad, on 29 December 2011 - 03:09 AM, said:

I really don't think they're offended by your differing opinion, so much as they're offended by you being so harsh with your criticism. It doesn't seem like there was really any need for you to be so passionately angry about it. And, you know, calling the team "lame" isn't really classy either.

Just my two cents.

I was as harsh as I felt was necessary given my past knowledge with this project and the people involved in it. These guys have been trying to make this project for at least a year or so now and did little more than go from forum to forum begging for people to join their staff team, despite having literally nothing to show that the project even had any substance to it. Several people made validation topics with their sole argument being that they should be validated so they can give the project publicity despite having nothing to show for it. A few months back a topic was even made on here showing nothing substantial, once again, to prove that the project was worth even paying attention to. Now that they finally have content—and god knows how they managed to scrounge it up, because all of the big talent in this community wouldn't dare invest unpaid time and effort before being shown it was worth it—it's been shown to be extremely sub-par and underwhelming whilst being given this huge, overblown promotion campaign and introduction post.

So yes, I think this project still has little no compelling substance to it and I feel that the actions taken by the team's staff members on the whole have been pretty goddamn lame. I think that the only reason they tried so hard to post so much of it here is because they want to do exactly what Sonic 2 HD did and see how much talent they can suck out of the forum before fading into obscurity or otherwise contributing little on their own. I've seen their original website, I've seen their original mockups and I've seen their approach to the whole thing—it's an insult to the talented community members they wanted to badly to help them make this project. It feels like an awful plea for attention and that rubs me the wrong way.

But I guess a few downscaled screenshots, a "work in progress" engine test and the empty promise of better content is more than enough to sway people here, so whatever. I never forced anyone to share my opinion and frankly I don't care if you do or not. I just want it to be known that I think the dude who started this project (I can't even remember his name anymore; I don't think I ever knew it) was just another little pretentious guy with a "cool idea" and it's shocking that it's actually come as far as it has given the circumstances, despite that not actually saying much about the project's quality as a whole.

[Walnut]

I don't know any of these guys working on this thing but I feel like if they have enough drive they can get their shit together and make this work nicely. There's really no reason to be so critical over a simple tech demo (Unfinished but at least they're showing some progress) Like, it'd be one thing if they were legitimately boasting around the internet about how great Sonic 3 HD is and how people should leave Retro and various other communities to come work exclusively on Sonic 3 HD, but from my view its basically some dudes who decided to do a fan game and put a fair amount of effort into it. Its not perfect by any means, and if they were calling it a finished product I'd be just as critical, but with time they could make something ok.

No reason to be so cynical about it all. Even if it does turn to shit and they abandon it completely, so what? We wasted a little bit of bandwith and got to see somebody's attempt at a fairly cool idea. I mean you said it yourself, you're surprised they got as far as they did. Give 'em time and see what they can do

[Elratauru]

Well, let me add my grain of sand:

I believe that the art should be looking more "HD" and less resize and retrace... something like this:

Original:


My version:


As you can see, I did not just retraced it, I added my own details based on the artwork. It is just a quick example of where the art direction of this project should base of I guess...The original artwork pieces were great and had tons of personality that the original artists had to recreate using low res sprites. If I really overthink it, I'd scrap that off too and just use pre-rendered stuff... I mean, Sonic 3 played with contrast A LOT...maybe my example would fit a lot more in Sonic 2 than 3 actually :P...

Aside that, the engine is not bad... At least its language is decent and easy to run. I have seen some nasty bugs but then I saw that it was an unfinished-rushed pre-demo so yeah...Makes sense. But I look forward to see more progress about it.

Ps. don't forget parallax scrolling

[Eduardo Knuckles]

I could enter this "it's good or not?" discussion by give another personal opinion about the graphical content itself or even the music stuff or the engine used. But I think that if we pay attention, no one of us are going to the wrong way here. Everyone of us are giving our own opinions about how the art is going as the knowledge we have about these stuff. In my opinion, all that is lacking in this project is a bit more of a sharing, by open up the project for other people to contribute on this on the way as they can help, without taking the stuff as "finished" without a revision or other people's eyes. I mean, eyes from people wich aren't from the team and wants to contribute to it with something. If they needs fix, why don't to contribute to it instead of only be talking about without giving to this project a true and deep contribution?

I'm sorry dudes if I'm sounding like offending people with this, just be sure that this isn't my intention.

[Conan Kudo]

Dario FF, on 28 December 2011 - 08:55 AM, said:

I say don't worry about the artwork too much at the moment, focus on getting up a playable engine that is able to replicate the original gameplay decently and handle anything you need for all the levels. You wouldn't like to see running into a problem which means you have to entirely rework your map's save data because you had to add sequences or something. Also, don't merge the game logic with graphics rendering at all. Heck, you got XNA available, who says you might even have the idea of making it 3D later!

...

Yuzoboy, on 28 December 2011 - 11:14 AM, said:

...
I also commend your use of XNA, my experience with it was good, but felt it was a bit slow for a feature-ridden game. Take into account the feedback and go about it with your own well though-out direction, will be interesting to see the level of quality you can produce with this project:)

Irixion, on 29 December 2011 - 02:39 AM, said:

...
You could bundle XNA Framework with your release, or have an extractor do all of the work. Complaining about having to install that is like bitching at having to install VB6 for xm3smps, which Tweaker didn't do by the way.

So, if you can't get rid of the XNA dependency then just bundle it in some way.

Okay, first: XNA is a bad choice. XNA immediately limits you to Windows Vista and Windows 7 and makes it difficult to port later to other non-Windows based platforms when you want to do it later. And you will want to do it later. It is also bloat. You don't need all of XNA. Heck, for a Sonic game, you don't need ANY of XNA. SDL works well enough because it's just a 2D game with some 3D layering if needed.

Second, requiring the .NET 4.0 Framework is just awful. If you required .NET Framework 2.0, that's fine, but .NET Framework 3.0 and higher is unacceptable.

Third, despite common belief, .NET works just like the JVM. It's only faster because it doesn't render everything by itself, and lets Windows render stuff for it.

Fourth, open source if possible. More people can freely contribute to an open source engine, and it benefits more people in the long term, too. Writing a game engine is freaking hard as hell. Nobody should have to reinvent the wheel if what they need is potentially available for use. Of course, I don't think that's something that Retro people really understand, since that's something that is more appreciated in the programmer's realm rather than the artist's realm.

Honestly, I'd recommend writing the engine in C or C++, using cross platform libraries like SDL and OpenAL. Or if you need the full repertoire of APIs, then I'd recommend using Qt4. Though using a full toolkit like Qt4 for a game isn't usually done...

This post has been edited by Conan Kudo: 29 December 2011 - 09:23 AM

[dsrb]

Elratauru, on 29 December 2011 - 04:48 AM, said:

I believe that the art should be looking more "HD" and less resize and retrace

Great! I've been saying this all a-

Quote

... something like this:

Oh. More gratuitous shininess that makes me want to do a Horatio Caine in case the sun hits the wrong angle and blinds me forever.

Sure, for absurdly shiny art, it's pretty damn nice, but it's still absurdly shiny, and I think that's what a number of us have been trying to steer all these purportedly HD projects away from! (Also, that flame makes no sense. Physics)

Quote

Ps. don't forget parallax scrolling

They haven't; go back about ten posts.

This post has been edited by dsrb: 29 December 2011 - 09:44 AM

[Eduardo Knuckles]

Conan Kudo, on 29 December 2011 - 09:19 AM, said:

Fourth, open source if possible. More people can freely contribute to an open source engine, and it benefits more people in the long term, too. Writing a game engine is freaking hard as hell. Nobody should have to reinvent the wheel if what they need is potentially available for use. Of course, I don't think that's something that Retro people really understand, since that's something that is more appreciated in the programmer's realm rather than the artist's realm.

This is the main point. Public contribution is everything for a project of this big size to grow in the correct way. And this one isn't that bad at all.

This post has been edited by Eduardo Knuckles: 29 December 2011 - 09:38 AM

[Falk]

There's also a saying - "Too many cooks spoil the broth".

In terms of code and/or development, that's what SVNs are for; in terms of art and audio assets, it's a lot harder to have a cohesive feel the more people contribute, unless many/most of those people really know what they're doing and are versatile enough at their craft.

Successful projects typically require a person with good organizational and communication (or sheep herding, call it whatever you like) skills.

edit: To put in an additional two cents: How many fangames can you list have split or just plain died because people couldn't agree on a direction? I mean even in this thread you have people who want a straight out remake, others who want a Generations-style re-imagination, and so on and so forth. Asking said people to contribute is a risky proposition unless some things are already set in stone as a baseline.

This post has been edited by Falk: 29 December 2011 - 09:58 AM