[Tweaker]

Very well put, Granville.

Personally, I'm just hoping this release doesn't upset Senn or Ofer that much; I remember the last time some material was leaked there was a rush to keep it under wraps since it was never meant to get out. I don't think Ofer was that upset, but I think he could have lived without more people going against his wishes. This is a bit more significant, though; if he refused to release stuff based on the Sonic community's attitude towards him—a fate that many developers have unfortunately suffered—then continued leaking of his work against his wishes isn't likely to change his mind at any point in the future, near or otherwise.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if it'd be worth finding a way to convince him that we're not the immature little kids who gave him so much hardship in the past. There's a big difference between ten year olds with an email address and Sonic Retro.

[Skeledroid]

Okay so wait... these textures are from a fan game? Or someone who had these real tiles and was going to use them in a fan game but didn't want anyone else to have them? And he edited them? I need clarification, please.

[0r4ng3]

@BlazeHedgehog: Maybe that is a boss (like the robots used in Sonic 2 8 Bit) ?

Also, a screen collection:



The tutorial zone looks like a beta Chao Garden, a Mip Garden XD.

*squints*

Does the one on the top left work with transporters or those roads that appear out of nowhere? I suppose Jade Gully and the one on the top left look somewhat interesting.

I saw the video. It looks jarringly unfinished. :\ I had seen the demos before I think. One thing that always bugged me in the snow demo was that one hardly saw what the heck was going on, the camera was too zoomed in. The New technology demo just reinforces what I've always thought. This game design would've been great or as a new franchise or a special level. Sure it has some neat ideas, but despite those (and they aren't that many), I can't see anything that relates to Sonic.

[SegaLoco]

This is the real stuff written by Ofer and Senn. Not all of it appears to be from back when though. I know that they have to still play with it now and then, it just seems like too fun of a thing to pass up if you ask me. Anyways, the viewer was written by Sanik iirc so if we can get some sourcecode to that, it could potentially be modified into a rough engine or even an editor. I doubt that Senn nor Ofer would like that, but whatever, it would be our work this time, so they can't tell us what to do with it. (They could tell us not to use their .def files =P, but we would already have a pretty good idea of how the format works by then.)

[Syniphas]

Actually from what I see the levels are just faux-multilayered PCXs, the DEFs just organize PCXs by which are levels and which are textures.

A very lazy framework, if you ask me, but alas it's just the same thing I've repeatdly done.

[Granville]

@Tweaker-

Well the thing about Ofer came from Chris himself. Several times, videos were leaked that Ofer didn't want leaked (not the level vids, the system videos that showed off some neat level design concepts). I don't know if Ofer was aware that they were leaked, but I guess it's possible. At any rate, people have different way of taking things and of course have different levels and concepts of emotions. Some people might not be upset by a bunch of retarded kids emailing hate mail out the wazoo (I'd probably just change emails and ignore them). On the other hand, Ofer was a primary part of a huge project- creating the first true 3D Sonic game. He created the engine, and a lot of other valuable aspects about it. An amazing feat for any developer. A lot of heart went into it, you might understand what it's like with hacks like your awesome Sonic Megamix. If I did something like your work, I'd be proud of it, happy with myself for what I did, and angry if people randomly flamed me over it for no reason (or for choosing not to release it). I'd also get angry if someone betrayed me and leaked it without permission. When you create something that's like art, it sort of becomes an important part of you. Hard for people to understand who have not really put their heart into something of their own. Ofer's creation was Sonic Xtreme.

My point is that although a bunch of retarded kids might not seem like a big deal, you have to factor in a few things-

1- Ofer went through a lot with Sonic Xtreme. He put hard work into something only to have it canned by SEGA. Kind of like losing an old friend
2- opening up old wounds probably brought back a lot of old emotions, both good and bad
3- sometimes a little thing can set off a huge chain reaction of emotions, especially those bottled up for years

Or then again, maybe I'm just blowing this out of proportion. But people have been known to become emotionally attached to their work. At any rate, we probably won't ever know the full extent of what happened with Ofer. We just know that he was planning on sharing some awesome aspects of the game, had and was thinking about releasing his engine, and then cut off all ties when some idiots decided to flame him.

And there's now a topic on Senntient about this leaking of new content. I expect we'll see Chris Senn's response before too long, whenever he sees it-

http://www.senntient.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=910

[GeneHF]

Which is exactly what I was implying in my post. He may likely not be very thrilled this was released and is now pretty much accessible to everyone, especially with some of the posts in that topic.

I know Chris is a cool dude. I've spoken with him before during SAGE, but someone can only remain so cool when a trust is broken. Pretty much everyone's on pins to see what happens now.

[Phos]

From the looks of the layouts, this would have been a genuinely GOOD 3D Sonic game...

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, here. This is interesting, but I have my doubts that it would have made a "good" game. Don't let the quest for "Getting what we weren't allowed to have" cloud your judgment.

IIRC, weren't impressions of the game in 1996 very less than favorable? This always seemed far too ambitious a Sonic title to me.

It seems to me as though they didn't really know what they wanted this game to look like in motion, and didn't really have a clear idea of what they were trying to make.

I'd also like to ask a quick question: How do we know this isn't a hoax?

[Cooljerk]

From the looks of the layouts, this would have been a genuinely GOOD 3D Sonic game...

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, here. This is interesting, but I have my doubts that it would have made a "good" game. Don't let the quest for "Getting what we weren't allowed to have" cloud your judgment.

IIRC, weren't impressions of the game in 1996 very less than favorable? This always seemed far too ambitious a Sonic title to me.

It seems to me as though they didn't really know what they wanted this game to look like in motion, and didn't really have a clear idea of what they were trying to make.

I'd also like to ask a quick question: How do we know this isn't a hoax?

If its a hoax, it's a damn good one, because they've accurately recreated the levels compared to what we've seen in videos.

The amount of work that would have had to go into this would... well, rival the real sonic xtreme.

[Shoemanbundy]

So is the level or any of its textures in this video contained in here?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftNgzZ3Ovig


Besides the boss stages, which are confirmed to have been on the Saturn, is it safe to say that any fish lens levels that we've ever seen screens or video of(like the above Jade Gully) were in the PC version of the game?

[Vangar]

OK!

I think this place is familiar to Sonic:



We can see the fisheye camera was a lot more pronounced and the portion loaded from the map was smaller.

Thats because the original is running off the real game engine and the other is a viewer made by Sanik, you are comparing apples to bananas im afraid. Also, im sure the act 1 / jade objects are there as placeholders, but it's still interesting.

[SonikkuForever]

If you want more information and resources about X-Treme, check out Chris Senn's website here. If the information there is combined with the textures and defs we have now, we should be able to get a fairly good idea of what the game would have looked like. And if we add the leaked test field to that, we have almost all the resources one would need to get started on an accurate recreation.

[BlazeHedgehog]

Ofer went through a lot with Sonic Xtreme. He put hard work into something only to have it canned by SEGA. Kind of like losing an old friend

It's too bad, then, that Sonic Xtreme didn't actually end up looking that good in the end. A lot of what is in these data files shows a very ugly, easily dated, blocky game. The art direction is kind of haphazard and all over the place. There are color palettes used in some of these levels that are outright ugly. Videos show controls and physics and animation that just look plain sloppy.

Maybe there could have been a good game in there eventually, and maybe, judging by these data files compared to early footage of Sonic Xtreme, they were just finally starting to understand how the game should play...

But there's still nothing I've seen about Sonic Xtreme that would indicate that it was actually a good game (at this point in development). It's interesting to look at because it was trying a lot of radically different ideas, but it's nothing more than that. You see the sentiment a lot around websites that discuss content deleted from games, and I definitely see it deeply rooted in Sonic Retro - the concept that just because the content was removed, that makes it awesome.

It's "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" syndrome. People see something that they aren't allowed to have, so they immediately start thinking its awesome and they want it even more. Even if, when they finally get what they want, they find it wasn't actually that cool. They still want it, simply because they can't have it.

If it hurts Ofer so much that he put so much time and effort in to the game and had it ignored, I am sorry about that. But there comes a moment where you have to take a step back and look at a project not as "your baby", but for what it really is. While I'm sure it was a lot of work to get Xtreme to what we see here today, it still had quite a ways to go before it was up to standard.

[Lobotomy]

Ofer went through a lot with Sonic Xtreme. He put hard work into something only to have it canned by SEGA. Kind of like losing an old friend

It's too bad, then, that Sonic Xtreme didn't actually end up looking that good in the end. A lot of what is in these data files shows a very ugly, easily dated, blocky game. The art direction is kind of haphazard and all over the place. There are color palettes used in some of these levels that are outright ugly. Videos show controls and physics and animation that just look plain sloppy.

It was shitcanned very early in development. Something isn't the finished product until it's a finished product.

Like I said before, if it ran on the Bug! Engine, it would have played well. (Can someone confirm this?)

This post has been edited by Lobotomy: 08 December 2009 - 08:45 AM

[Mad Echidna]

I just noticed something on Chris's site: this was taken with sanik's 3.1 viewer!

It seems pretty clear Chris had this same package we do when he made these images