[Rainbow Dash]

Runs pretty well on my PC :D
Just wanted to say amazing job here, the only problems I have are the couple of camera oddities (shown in the video) and flickering water. Otherwise, it's great!

My specs:
Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.5GHz
Radeon HD 6970 (Upgrading to GTX 680 soon :D)
12GB DDR3 @1600MHz
2TB + 1TB Caviar Black

EDIT: Derp, here's the video - may be rendering for a bit:

This post has been edited by Rainbow Dash: 14 May 2012 - 03:44 PM

[Falk]

Weow, 1080p, 60fps AND in 3D, PC Generations is the best thing to happen to the franchise ever.

[Melpontro]

Runs really well for me, framerate never dropped below 60 when running at 1080p. My system is a Core i5 2500k at 4.3 GHz with a EVGA GTX 470 Superclocked. I took some 3300 x1830 resolution screenshots for anyone who cares. http://min.us/mStdPpgp6

This post has been edited by Melpontro: 14 May 2012 - 01:23 AM

[Lanzer]

Melpontro, on 14 May 2012 - 01:22 AM, said:

Runs really well for me, framerate never dropped below 60 when running at 1080p. My system is a Core i5 2500k at 4.3 GHz with a EVGA GTX 470 Superclocked. I took some 3300 x1830 resolution screenshots for anyone who cares. http://min.us/mStdPpgp6

Offtopic for a second here, Oh hey nice to see ya!

Sorry man gotta rat you out here. Everyone say Hi to Melpontro, I'm sure you have seen his works on youtube mainly with Unleashed hacking and the Wave Ocean level mod for Generations.

Its great to see you come to Retro.

[Twilightzoney]

I'll say that Generations lighting doesn't compare to Unleashed when you compare the models and see the lighting. Generations is much more brighter tone to it. While Unleashed has a nice softer tone. Still nice though either way.

[Falk]

Something just occured to me; How modifyable is the hub world, actually? Is the geometry replaceable? Are the sets going to be replaced with custom sets depicting the Unleashed levels? That'd actually be pretty cool and something the community could contribute to, from concept art to modelling to retrofitting textures, etc.

[Twilightzoney]

The cool thing about editing the hubworld is, that we can make it 3d actually and it will still work for pushing up on the control stick to enter a stage. So in theory we could have this huge hub worlds that are expansive that connect to one another. That fit each others theme.

So yes, it is very open to be edited. We just need a idea of what it should look like. If any concept artists would like to depict that. I say go for it then. Since pretty much everything in there can be remodeled.

Only thing that would be a problem would just be for Classic Sonic for his Spindash since he cannot do that in 3d. Unless we were to disable it in the hub.

This post has been edited by Twilightzoney: 14 May 2012 - 07:37 AM

[Dark Sonic]

Someone has to fix Classic Sonic's spindash in 3D. I mean spikes work in 3D, anyway we could use that in this situation?

[Falk]

More dum hub world questions. From my fraps footage of the hubworld and what I know about interactive scoring techniques, I am -convincingly- (not absolutely) sure that:

1) Each zone/boss has its own looping theme (hurr durr falk)
2) They're all the same BPM (138) and are 10 bars long - an 8-bar phrase containing the most recognizable hook from the music followed by a 2-bar turnaround
3) There's a 1-bar intro regardless on which zone you start in front of, this has to segue perfectly into the start of each zone
4) The 10 bar zone loops are divided into 1-bar audio files; incidentally the swaps also occur on the bar, and this maintains relative position within the 10 bar loop. (I'm convinced of the file split because of the noticable seams on barlines in songs which syncopate and skip the downbeat)
5) It is not sample-accurate the same way audio engines like Wwise, etc are- I'm definitely noticing irregular drifting across long periods of time

Stylistically:
Instrumentation is as sparse as possible, probably mirroring the 'unfinished' look of the hub worlds. The constant is electric bass and a very raw drum kit, either double-tracked acoustic or overdrive guitars, and at most 1 lead instrument, 1 backing line, most often violin or flute but also inclusive of harmonica and synths (e.g. CPZ, PW)

I'm going to attempt to make loops for all the Generations stages that -should- sound similar enough in tone that they can be believably segued to/from the current material if the mega-hub-world-thingoo takes off, but obviously since the sound of ESPECIALLY the drums won't be identical, I'll also recreate the 1-bar intro and Rooftop Run so that there's a discrete set of Unleashed loops that sound like they came from the same session, same should the Unleashed mod be completely seperate from the base game.

[CraigRobbo]

This works perfect for me other than the original named issues of the camera.

I am running the following specs

Gigabyte UD3R mobo
i7 920 (C0)
6gb Corsair ram
Nvidia GTS 250 with 512mb vRam (XFX Variant)

Hope this is of some help to you guys.

Craig

[Twilightzoney]

Falk, on 14 May 2012 - 08:24 AM, said:

More dum hub world questions. From my fraps footage of the hubworld and what I know about interactive scoring techniques, I am -convincingly- (not absolutely) sure that:

1) Each zone/boss has its own looping theme (hurr durr falk)
2) They're all the same BPM (138) and are 10 bars long - an 8-bar phrase containing the most recognizable hook from the music followed by a 2-bar turnaround
3) There's a 1-bar intro regardless on which zone you start in front of, this has to segue perfectly into the start of each zone
4) The 10 bar zone loops are divided into 1-bar audio files; incidentally the swaps also occur on the bar, and this maintains relative position within the 10 bar loop. (I'm convinced of the file split because of the noticable seams on barlines in songs which syncopate and skip the downbeat)
5) It is not sample-accurate the same way audio engines like Wwise, etc are- I'm definitely noticing irregular drifting across long periods of time

Stylistically:
Instrumentation is as sparse as possible, probably mirroring the 'unfinished' look of the hub worlds. The constant is electric bass and a very raw drum kit, either double-tracked acoustic or overdrive guitars, and at most 1 lead instrument, 1 backing line, most often violin or flute but also inclusive of harmonica and synths (e.g. CPZ, PW)

I'm going to attempt to make loops for all the Generations stages that -should- sound similar enough in tone that they can be believably segued to/from the current material if the mega-hub-world-thingoo takes off, but obviously since the sound of ESPECIALLY the drums won't be identical, I'll also recreate the 1-bar intro and Rooftop Run so that there's a discrete set of Unleashed loops that sound like they came from the same session, same should the Unleashed mod be completely seperate from the base game.

That sounds good, I'm willing to start modeling something, soon as someone has some ideas of how they want the hubworld to be. I'd have to limit things like no spindashing and no drifting, possibly no boosting either to be fair. But I'm willing if you people would like a hubs that interconnect that are like Unleashed's hub-worlds. It sounds a lot better than just having some model replacement and having the same setting in that white world. So if you got any ideas on it, shout it out since I rather not be unoriginal and just clash hubworld models together.





Yeah the HDR lighting is handled differently in Generations than it was in Unleashed. To get a right tone for it. Generations is too high contrast. I just need to find a right middle man for the values to make it seem just right. I can't stand the over brightness it gives me a headache.

This post has been edited by Twilightzoney: 14 May 2012 - 08:46 AM

[Falk]

I was definitely scratching my head wondering if Apotos Act 1 was during dusk and I just forgot, but it definitely looks like the lighting needs a touch-up pass. As it is it really does imply evening or late afternoon and the shadows are all wrong for that.

Regarding the Hub Worlds: I'm actually still of the mindset that doing up Unleashed level set pieces in the way the current hub world is would be a really nifty thing; especially if they looked like they could have been official work when put side by side with the current zone set pieces.

Also, rough mix: http://soundcloud.com/falk-2/apotoshub

edit: You know, this is actually quite lethargic. While some of the hub world remixes in Generations (I.e. Rooftop Run) manage to pull off some crazy arrangements to make them sound right at a lower BPM, the Unleashed soundtrack as a whole is just higher, like 150BPM+ off top of head for the day stages. I'm assuming though that the hub world music is hard-coded to a certain extent and we can't really mess with the BPM or loop length.

This post has been edited by Falk: 14 May 2012 - 09:38 AM

[Lanzer]

Dark Sonic, on 14 May 2012 - 08:23 AM, said:

Someone has to fix Classic Sonic's spindash in 3D. I mean spikes work in 3D, anyway we could use that in this situation?

^This. I posted a video a few pages back showing the spike-dash working in 3D, maybe theres some way to use that?

[Dario FF]

@HUB world: Honestly I think it would just be really neat to redesign them in the generations style HUB world, since it makes travelling around easier. Except with a better design for mission spots since the ones in generations are just annoying to get to. Modelling a fully 3D HUB world would take more work than what's needed IMO. Definitely not a top priority.

@HUB world tune: I love whatever tune you do, and I'm sure you can make it sound even better. That's lovely and inspiring, kinda like that mockup for chun-nan.

Alright, so I've been looking at all the videos and issues reported. Thank you all for this feedback, it's really helpful, here's some conclusions.

• Performance: It's fine in a wide range of systems, with comparable performance to generations, but it seems memory bloat is an issue. This is due to the platform differences. Terrain in the XBox 360 format takes about 44 or more bytes per vertex, and what I did was use Devil's Details common format they used for most models, which is 104 bytes. So for example, that stage was designed to have a certain amount of geometry in memory(hence the abundant instancing of grass), which is causing the freezes once it reaches the memory limit. So next up I got some coding to do, which is making an optimized vertex format, writing only what's necessary(and probably compressing RGBA from 16 to 4 bytes, since that's the precision on the original data anyway). I can't guarantee that will totally fix the problem, but it should alleviate the ram usage in about 30-20%, which is enough room to work with.
  
  
• Graphical glitches: The water material and bloom glitch, and the coloring is the same in everyone's systems. I'm gonna have a look at fixing the materials even more for this, since it seems the Unleashed materials lack some definitions Generations materials normally have. Seems like an engine update in that regard as well. Hopefully adding the extra stuff will make some issues go away.
  
  
• Material blending problems: Now this one seems a bit hardware dependent, but as a matter of fact it seems it can be fixed by simply making those materials blending materials back again. When I was debugging this stage, that red seam(Korama's) and the blue seam(Falk's) don't show up on most playthroughs I've seen. I assume just fixing those materials like I manually did with others should make the issue go away, but perhaps this means stages will need some testing on different hardware to fix them up to be consistent.

All in all, this went far better than I expected, honestly! I was just expecting a lot of crashing and weird graphical glitches, but it seems the engine is pretty consistent all around. I'll start implementing some of the changes above and might upload another revision later(hopefully it'll be even smaller due to optimizations). Testing this small stage helps quite a lot in fixing these issues first hand. So thanks to everyone for participating.

[Twilightzoney]

So I've just been messing around. Learning more about how the sceneeffect.prm.xml thing works and I love the stuff that I'm finding.

Also I liked the specular map on Unleashed more than Generations bronze look.