Without meaning to sound cheeky - have you thought anymore about a future release of some kind? I know the POV stuff must be hammering you time wise but really looking forward to some more play able stuff from AXSX :-)
Yeah some more AXSX stuff being released is in the cards for this year. (At least I think so anyways hahaha) And yeah all the leak stuff has eaten into my time, although a lot of new content has come from it.
Questions: Will this game be titled Sonic X-Treme? Will Sonic be the only playable character? And, finally...How close to release/finishing would you say you are?
Yeah it will be called Sonic X-treme Sonic is the only playable character. It's going to be many years before the game is completed. But there will be levels released every once in awhile. ( once the main engine is done)
I'd love to play as Tiara B. To be honest. Pardon my ignorance but how hard it'd be to create a Tiara model with animation and just rasterize it?
I'd say when the engine is done, open-source it but in a restricted-environment and get some people to help out modelling, coding in a team. Though it's a lot of effort, but in the end whatever works best/to each their own.
Wouldn't be super hard, its more along the lines of, do I have time to do all of that? If someone is willing to model and animate Tiara in the retro Sonic x-treme style, than I could render out the sprites for her and use them in AXSX with my Sprite rendering maxscript. The thought to open source it crossed my mind, If that were to happen it would be when we reached a specific point. (not yet) At this point in time, modeling blocks is pretty much done, anyone could come in and place any of the over 4000 block types to produce almost any type of level layout imaginable within logical reason.
While that sounds pretty nice at first, I personally can't even think of how she would even play like. I'm still trying to understand why she was planned to be playable in Xtreme in the first place, because she looks like a reskin of Sonic in this mockup footage: I've heard that she would've had powers using some sort of scepter... which sounds silly to me.
I honestly wouldn't open-source it if I were you. Creates too much fragmentation sometimes, not to mention you've worked on this for like a decade :v: Once the main engine is done, people won't need the source to add levels and stuff anyway.
I guess people can add levels without the source. (at least I think so) I'll need to look into how to modify already released UDK projects. if we did Tiara B., I think she'd end up being a re-skin of Sonic like you said, but with additional abilities. to be honest I've never really put any real thought into Tiara B's gameplay or abilities since we lack any real sprit sets or enough info. Chris had suggested if we do a Tiara, that she should be added later as an extra add on after release, or in a sequel of sorts. I'd rather get the main game going with just Sonic as playable for now, since adding in more characters means a lot longer turn around time in development. Regarding T.B.'s abilities, Sonic would have had a Ring toss move. but we don't know if any sprites were produced. Perhaps Tiara could be the one to toss the rings. but ehhh, not sure how fun that'd be. I can check with Chris Senn to see what he had in mind for T.B.'s gameplay.
Yeah, better just get the main part of the game done first, and worry about other characters after a full release, as you've said. Looking forward to whatever you're making next!
I don't remember the source, but I think that Tiara B. might have had strictly 2.5D level design just as it is shown in the .gif. Knuckles has a similar .gif that shows overhead maze-like gameplay, which leads me to believe that each character would have had a different gameplay perspective.
I don't think that's really an issue with fan games. SRB2 has been open source for a really long time, is still under development, and doesn't really have any problems like that. Fragmentation is only an issue if multiple people are trying to continue development of the game down a different path. For a mostly finished project, you're more likely just to get modifications out of it.
I had read about that, and honestly, it feels like a silly way to treat a character. It pretty much feels like "This character runs only in a straight line, and this other character pretty much goes wherever he wants to go". Something like that should be saved for a different game, not a different character, that's just... dumb.
Fans made use of her scepter in this game: [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4fEh9JDuIw[/media] Check out the level that starts at 3:49 in the video. They have her using her scepter to shoot projectiles to pop the balloons which is one of the level goals. This is the first fangame I have seen use Tiara at all. Not bad for Sonic Adventure/Sonic Heroes style models. If only the game controlled as well as it looks. I downloaded and tried it. The controls are pretty wonky most of the time. I heard the existing video of Tiara was actually from part of the 32X stage of this game's development. Not sure if that is true though. From the graphics it seems likely.
