That's already in the game, it's called "Time Attack Mode." But seriously, once you get all the Time Stones in that Sonic CD Restored mod, you unlock a menu option to always start each level in whichever time period you want. That's kind of close! But yeah, I've always wanted a "Time Locked" mode where you can play the entire game in any time period. Though I guess that would require tweaked graphics for the third stages to have Past and Present variants.
Personally I wouldn't even need it to be that comprehensive, just let me do the Past/Present Acts 1 and 2 back to back while the Futures can be all three acts.
Is there a way to get perfect square pixels with Sonic Origins? This week I uploaded two videos to test out video quality with the Vizual PixelPerfect Upscaler for Adobe Premiere-Pro. Window mode for Sonic Mania allows me to set the resolution to 3x for the window size when I play the game at 720p, which gives me a resolution of 1272x720. Sonic Origins has its window mode for 720p as 1280x720, so some of the pixels are stretched horizontally even when I use the nearest neighbor setting with the Origins Blur Fix mod. You can see black bars at the side of the screen as a way to preserve the 1:1 shape of the pixels. There are no blacks bars for my video test with Sonic Origins because I don't know if there is a way to preserve the pixels into perfect squares. Also, is there video recording software that does a better job preserving video quality for pixelated games than Adobe Premiere Pro? Ideally, I would love to record at the lowest possible resolution, then use Adobe Premiere Pro to upscale the video. That would significantly reduce file sizes for video projects. My Sonic Origins video I previously shared in this thread took up over 700GB to make because the file sizes of the gameplay was huge. Recording at a small resolution in lossless quality, but upscaling everything in Adobe Premiere Pro with a nearest neighbor upscale effects filter would be ideal for preserving video quality and reducing file sizes.
At least with the USA Spencer Nilsen soundtrack, the bad futures have some of the best music. Especially Stardust Speedway and Wacky Workbench.
There's a whole bunch of unused cheats in S3K. The sound test combinations for them aren't there, so you can't normally activate them. Among the cheats are Egg Reverie Super Sonic control, all badniks are Penguinators, and all item boxes spawn bananas.
Personally, I use OpenShot Video Editor to upscale my 480p 60 FPS recordings to 1080p for Twitter and YouTube. It's free, open-source, and is no more or less stable than Adobe's video editors. While there is a good chance it's behind the proprietary alternatives' curve, it's the most feature-rich, open-source video editor that I know of. However, one of its key features for me is the lack of filters for videos. As long as I remember to set my trailer videos' bit-rate to 5MB/s and above, (Sometimes I pick 3MB/s by mistake ) the results are very clean for pixel art games. You would never know that I can't record at 1080p. I doubt it will replace Premiere for your workflow, but OpenShot upscaling cleanly for pixel art games is pretty handy!
I posted this one a few pages back. I hope those get reactivated in the mod loader at some point, I'd love a playthrough as Sonic & Knuckles with only penguinators and Egg Reverie flight. The Tails > Miles code is still in the game though but it's a title screen code not a sound test code (I'm guessing so it doesn't affect saving like the sound test codes seem to) I just love how random the penguinator and banana codes are, but it's so weird Sega seems to have forced can those. Why? They seemed like harmless fun. Really wish they didn't remove the sprite style options. I've been playing with a mod that gives Sonic a more unified set of Mania esq sprites and it just makes a world of difference for me. I honestly wouldn't have mind anniversary mode and mirror mode just using Mania sprites for everything by default and the original sprites were saved for classic mode, but I'm guessing others here wouldn't like that as much as I would. Most of Mania's sprites to me just seem to be a refined hybrid of Sonic 1/2 sprites with a nicer set of Knuckles sprites which is exactly what I wanted.
I remember when origins was first announced and everyone thought you could just switch sprites for any game (turned out to just be the character select screen). I really would have preferred that TBH.
There's code in the game even referencing said feature, they just either scrapped it or never finished it. I'm playing a mod right now that aims to Mania-fy all of Origins. It's not without its flaws, it's a WIP after all. Some animations are wrong in Sonic 2 as Knuckles for example, and Knuckles doesnt have a super palette yet, but it's definitely closer to what I wanted: https://gamebanana.com/mods/389758 I know some of us here prefer the purity of the originals but I'm not in that camp because if I'm itching to play the games as they originally were, I'd just pop in the Genesis and play them on that. I prefer new features and improvements over "just like 1992 but with the drop dash (basically the AM2 ports)".
What do you use to record gameplay footage at the highest possible quality? I don't think there are any issues with Vizual PixelPerfect Upscaler in Adobe Premiere Pro, but I don't feel OBS records gameplay in perfect quality. There are claims OBS can do lossless video, but I'm not super convinced that's the case. However, I will check out OpenShot to see if some of my video quality issues are a byproduct of Adobe Premiere Pro instead OBS. Thanks for the suggestion. Also, if your original video content is 480p, I recommend upscaling to 1440p instead of 1080p for YouTube because 480p content upscales perfectly to 1440p.
Personally, I always felt like OpenShot was god-awful. I used it a few times many years ago and it constantly suffered crashes and video coming out all broken. This blogpost shows some of my frustrations
Most of Premiere Pro's issues come down to dodgy media - as soon as you swap to an actual mezzanine codec (aka a codec MADE for editing, like ProRes, rather than delivery, like h264), it runs flawlessly and I've had no crashes in the last year or two. Premiere, when used in a professional capacity, is extremely stable, it's just the fact it can import pretty much anything (meaning it has a lower barrier of entry) that causes all of the issues. 90% of the crashes I've helped troubleshoot for others over the years are dodgy h264 media from random places. Your best bet would be to use After Effects, as that has nearest neighbour scaling. You can also take a look into Taran's Hybrid Scaling project file (give it a YouTube). Also means using After Effects, you can easily Dynamic Link it to Premiere Pro after the fact, or just export from Premiere in a low resolution in a mezzanine codec, and upscale in After Effects after the fact. Depends what mode its set to. Within the ffmpeg mode, it can pretty much do *anything* you'd want it to. It should be able to handle things like high quality lossy mezzanine codecs (like ProRes), or lossless codecs.
Sonic CD's Time Travel is really flawed but I think the fact you don't go through all time zones of all zones is kind of the point. It's designed for you only to need to see parts of the level in past and present. Good future is there as a reward, so you can mess about in the level to see what you've accomplished. I find it quite immersive that there's loads of time zone space in each zone I don't see. Makes the levels feel more real, like there really is loads of stuff to explore. Again it's very flawed but I don't think it's a fair criticism that it doesn't demand you play through all time zones of each level.
Lukewarm take: classic mode should've just been emulated ROMS for purists' sake instead of just the Retro Engine versions in 4:3
"Why is just an emulation?!? Developers are just greedy assholes.They were too lazy to invent something new!" "Why it's just remakes with 4:3 screen size? Developers are greedy assholes. They were too lazy to put original ROMs for old-school fans!" I think, it's cool, having an remakes of ROMs with smoother gameplay, and fixed bugs from O.Gs. When i look at all opinions- I start to think, for most peoples would be better, if this compilation will newer created. All is just bad, bad, and very bad. Seriously! I'll don't be surprised, if many times later will be created thread with title "Compliment the Sonic Origins", lol Also, I don't want to offend anyone. Sorry, if I looks like an jerk
Thing is there's to point calling it "Classic Mode" if it has Spin-Dash for example; we already have Anniversary Mode for that reason. Like, having the bugfixes for like spike-bug or no speedcap for Sonic 1 is fine, but adding Spin-Dash miss the whole point of it being called 'Classic Mode'.
That is a blog post from 4 years ago, so its contents are no longer relevant to the modern builds. One thing about open-source software is that it's always improving. (Assuming a project's development is healthy and steady.) If it doesn't work well now, check back a year or two later, it will be better. Usually when OpenShot crashes on me, it was my fault, or I was seeking through the timeline too aggressively while editing. OpenShot is so much better now than it was when I first tried it five years ago! This explains so, so much! I didn't know it was possible to avoid these crashes simply with better codecs. I'll look into recording with ProRes via OBS, if my hardware can handle it; that might help me in more ways than one! I'll consider 1440p, but we'll see if I have the patience to upload even larger video files to YouTube As for how I record gameplay footage in OBS: I pick Lanczos as a Downscaler filter, using the NVENC hardware encoder instead of x264. And for most casual gameplay footage I upload for Twitter, I just record at 1.5MB/s. (Whereas for trailers, I might record at 5 to 15MB/s) Personally, I feel like as long as your footage is at least 1080p 60 FPS, with a bit-rate above 15MB/s, most people aren't concerned about minor compression artifacts in trailers or recorded footage; the footage is usually playing back fast enough to mask smaller instances of those artifacts, while in motion. (Whereas I would prefer a higher bit-rate for recording 30 FPS-locked games.) So, I've never recorded perfectly pristine footage with OBS- more-so while my PC doesn't have the space for AVI files. (I'll need to buy a 2TB hard drive at some point if I truly want to record lossless footage.) However, OBS had evolved so much with time, I'm sure you'll have all the options you need at this point. 18 year old me could have only dreamed of having such a competent open-source tool for recording, when I was a fresh Linux enthusiast
Not to derail a Sonic forum thread with video editing talk, but basically codecs are the instructions to create and read a video file. h264 is generally an interframe codec (otherwise known as long-GOP), which just means to load one frame, it has to load the frames around it (it has i-frames, aka full frames, and p/b-frames, predictive and bi-predictive frames, which use those i-frames and move them around as a puppet). As you can probably imagine, this means smaller file sizes, but poor performance as it has to load multiple frames to load one! The alternative is intraframe, otherwise known as all-I, which as the name suggests, is made up entirely of i-frames, meaning file size is usually larger, but performance is smoother as it only has to load in one singular frame, rather than multiple frames. We call editing codecs mezzanine/intermediate codecs. We also have proxies, which are lower resolution versions of your files that you toggle on/off for smoother performance (but the export uses the full resolution files).... Basically, reach out to me on Discord if you want to learn more about codecs and such, I'm always willing to each (I'll put it in my signature). What it should have been, is "Classic Mode" was emulated, with an options screen implemented to toggle on/off features like the spin dash. Then it should've had the "Anniversary Mode" which was the Retro Engine remakes, with the same options present (including a 4:3 aspect ratio option too). At the very LEAST it should've had the ROMs as an option, even buried within the options, or as an unlockable. I don't think having the originals being playable is a big ask, especially at the price Sonic Origins has launched at. I'd be more lenient if the game launched at £14.99 like Sonic Mania did (that price was an absolute steal!), but at £32.99, I expect a lot more. (I expect the reason the ROMs are nowhere to be found, is because of Sonic 3K. That's not an excuse, but I expect that modifying the ROMs to replace all the music would've been too much hassle in SEGAs eyes.)
Really? I was using OpenShot just a year and a half ago and it still sucked for me. Perhaps it's gotten better since I've uninstalled, but at this point I can't really go back since switching to Kdenlive. OpenShot's left a bitter taste in my mouth.
