Alright, I think this has gone on for long enough now. If you want to back Stealth, back Stealth. If you don't want to pay, that's fine, he's not forcing you to.
I am genuinely, truly confused about the fact that somehow people think they're being "milked" for cash. You've been given an OPTION to support a highly respected, highly talented member of our community. Take it or leave it, but don't accuse him of money-grubbing.
This isn't a matter of reward as much as it is a matter of practicality. Stealth isn't even holding Megamix for ransom for fucks sake. He's saying he can work on it more if he's financially supported to do so, which is a fact of life. He wants to make it happen, and is doing everything he can to create it, so he's not even fucking artificially padding development time as a ploy for money. This is purely a matter of giving people the means to make it happen faster than normal, which is ultimately a good thing. This is an optional donation, emphasis on donation, and not some greedy cash grab. Don't like it? Don't donate. Like it? Do. It's that simple. Look at it this way. People are individually responsible for the use of their money and the consequences of what they spend it on. Are you trying to protect them? Trying to tell them what they should or shouldn't be doing with it? And, if Stealth were hypothetically holding Megamix over us for cash, what are you going to do? Convince him not to do that and make the game for free? Get the community to boycott? Call him dirty and try to make him feel like a dick? What would you hope to accomplish by making a fuss about this that wouldn't just make matters worse? It's his project, his plan, and the community's decision on how to respond. If a bit of financial support helps the scene, and people are willing, then so be it. This is not the first time at all that money has been thrown around for community interests.
Congratulations, Stealth. You've achieved the holy grail of Sonic hacking! More impressive than any technical wizardy or innovation ...you've found a way to monetize it (albeit by proxy.) Most of these responders, on some level, have a pang of bitterness/jealousy that they didn't do it themselves. I don't think you're the first person to wish they could be paid for doing their hobby, instead of trying to squeeze it in around a job and a life. Lots of them have long term projects too, and I'm sure can actually relate to that feeling pretty well... [to be concluded] *Unfortunately, due to work commitments, I was not able to complete this comment. If you want to read the rest of my comment, please donate to my Patreon. Everything you donate will help me support myself so I can get on with writing the second half!
For what it's worth, I backed Stealth and I look forward to his future projects, not just because of what he could potentially make but what others could make by utilizing his development tools.
Bottom line for me is. I'd like the community to continue to thrive off of each other and not ask for money. Ever. This isn't about money... It's about us growing together. Let's not profit off of one another, let's grow. Jobs are for money, the community is for fun.
That's fine and all, but a lack of money can drain the fun out of things disturbingly quickly. Time is money, after all, and the more money you have, the more time there is for other things... like, say, friends, community, hobby projects, etc.
Gee, I love how this thread went from "omg yay Sonic Megamix" to "most of us are bitching because god forbid someone opens a Patreon to help support themselves." It's really mature of you guys. ...yeah I'm gonna shut up before someone beats me into next Tuesday.
When a mod says stop, it's best to stop. Change of subject. What's the rationale behind creating your own scripting language rather than roping in one already made Stealth?
Hey guys, guess what?! That's right, it's time to play the fun game of "let's warn/tempban everyone who talked about things after a mod says to stop"! Wow, we haven't had one of these in a while, have we? Stop it, guys, seriously. As Overlord said, back him if you want to, don't if you don't. His Patreon is not about Megamix, but as he will be working on it he needs to mention he'd be dedicating time to it as well as any other Patreon projects to be completely honest about things-- ah shit now I need to warn myself too. Derp. tl;dr, if you don't like it keep your reasons to yourself and out of this thread and public discussion. It just makes you look like a dick. <div style="border-bottom:1px dashed rgba(255,255,255,0.25)"> </div> BACK ON TOPIC. A small thing I don't think has been posted about yet at all but what the hell.. No, we haven't decided to remove all characters except Shadow because we're sick of the bullshit. [inlinespoiler]Although it was tempting.[/inlinespoiler] The title screen will reflect the last character you played as. It's a small touch, but it's the little things that count.
I'm so glad that you guys removed Sonic and made Shadow the protagonist instead. Seriously speaking, this is a really nice attention to detail. Did you guys change the title text to "Shadow" just for this screenshot or are we really going to see "Knuckles The Echidna Megamix" in the title screen?
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG TAILS MILES PROWER KNUCKLES THE ECHIDNA SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG MIGHTY THE ARMADILLO BIG THE CAT AND FROGGY
Ah, fantastic to see Stealth's projects popping their head up and getting noticed yet again. I've watched Stealth create and create for years now. Always been awesome, watching the incredible creations that have come about because of Stealth's work. I'm a huge fan of HCGE and quite honestly, Megaman: Triple Threat is one of my favorite Megaman fan games. To you specifically Stealth, I ask this: The problem with patreon is that it's a monthly thing, which doesn't mesh well with the way I manage my finances. Is there perhaps a way I could kick you a few bucks as a one time payment kinda deal?
I'd rather keep this thread on-topic for Megamix, but I'll answer this one HCGE (then E02) evolved from another project I began in the mid-90's, which was an engine dedicated entirely to Sonic, at the time. The first time anything like my scripting system showed up was when I implemented a custom titlecard script so you could make add-on games with different title screens, titlecards, level score counts.. It was more of an "opcode" sort of thing in that numbers that corresponded directly to specific forms of specific commands were used to tell it what to do. It went along with the other stuff I was trying to do to make mods possible; primarily, avoiding having to compile anything was important, particularly because it took upward of an hour to compile the actual game code at the time. It helped me a lot to have some aspects of the game where I could just type some stuff in and run tests without hassle When I was unhappy enough with the engine to start over, one of the things I salvaged was the script system, and I started expanding it to cover more things like handling objects and aspects of the player character, eventually adding more advanced stuff like the alias and keyword systems that still respected the lack of having to compile anything and still required little parsing at load time Aside from that, it was an exercise in doing things myself. If anything went wrong with it, it'd be my own fault. I'd know what I was doing with it, and it'd work exactly how I needed it to, especially in relation to how I designed the engine itself We can talk elsewhere if you want to know any more; I've got a dedicated forum for one thing. There was an HCGE thread somewhere around here, maybe on the fan-game subforum, but I think that one's long dead It took a bit to get it set up as well as it is now, but I think it's really going to be worth it by the time it's actually rounded out. It's a shame this sort of thing wasn't more common during the SegaCD's lifetime. The whole "MainCPU"/"SubCPU" naming scheme probably didn't really help much As far as Patreon goes, you can make and cancel a pledge at any time, so you only pay if your pledge is active when the payment term is up, which I think is either at the very end of a month or the very beginning. If you cancel at any other time, you shouldn't be charged again no matter how long the pledge was active since the last payment If you want to send something one-off, though, you could also send by PayPal to my aol.com address "MStealthA" Thanks for asking!
Well the Sega CD was only really a thing for what, a year? Maybe two? Developers stopped working with it so quickly I would be surprised if anyone outside of Sega actually knew what to do with the Sega CD's architecture other than porting media streaming drivers and adapting their native Genesis code to accommodate the loading of optical media rather than ROM cartridges.
What? No, the Mega CD was launched in Japan in 1991, and wasn't discontinued until 1996. All-in-all, it has about 150-160 releases. It didn't do all THAT well, but it wasn't quickly abandoned like the 32X, either.