All the guys in charge were talking about there being only one programmer, and there was no way someone was going to convince me that SANiK wasn't working on it (short of an alibi), so that threw me off.
Man, that demo was awesome, great job Lost! Sorry to cut the party short, but now that the demo is released, are more people allowed to help program now? And what will be the process for that?
ICEknight brought up a good point in one of the other topics regarding the special stages, and now that we know who the programmer is it seems like a good starting point for them. Myself and others have proposed concepts and art for them, but I'm still at a loss for their implementation. Will we be going for repeated frames if done in a vector art environment, a pre-rendered movie, a basic 3D renderer for the game engine? LOst (or SANiK I suppose), any ideas on that?
I would go for an actual 3D stage, since after all the art were 3D renders, it would make sense. Btw, my suggestion is to get more people involved in the work of the engine. The core itself as I see it is pretty much done, but porting 200? objects can actually take quite some time for just one person - if 5 people work on it each one can focus on the work of different objects and stuff, would get done faster.
An actual 3D stage would show its polygons everywhere unless the poly count is quite high, so it would just look better, faster and just more faithful to the original engine when using pre-rendered movie clips. It should be seamless if done properly. Also, seeing how the 2D portions need such specs, you'd probably need like five 2Gb processors to run a decent real-time 3D Special Stage.
Really, a 3d real-time special stage would need lower specs than the 2D sections. It also doesn't need to be that high poly to look good...
we don't need too many polygons... the textures do all the work.. and in this case, the texture can be 256x256 (or 512x512) and use a 32-segment mid-cylinder to the tunnel... I remember the bonus for the sonic 3d for saturn... I think someone post a video but I don't remember where... we can use that as reference.
Spot on. Texture size aside, this describes exactly what I did back in the concept thread. Building this won't be the difficult part, it's finding what could be an obstacle and ways to overcome it that I'd be most concerned with. The template for the main game is being well taken care of now, which is why I've been anticipating a response from LOst on this 'other half'.
3D special stages are definatly the way to go, even if its just to make sure that older pc's can run it as I couldnt imagine my pc playing a 960p video.Yyou would also run into problems such as transitions between the different video clips for the different sections in the track (left turn, right turn, staights... etc) the 3d sections don't have to look amazing either, just good, just make sure the textures are crisp and you have a decent model for Sonic
I will offer you this, It's something I made a long time ago. Although, the head is just an fixup from xtreme, as I can't make heads very well. The model itself was based on xtreme, it's nearly identical to that, so it''s a bit off from the S2 special stage style.
Lighting considerations aside, that's quite a nice low poly mesh you have there! Do you have one for Sonic as well by any chance? Vincent or another staff member, could one of you guys get that moved into the character art or concept art threads?
Interesting model Polygon Jim! However, no 3D character models into this project! Special stages may use 3d cel-shaded BGs and can be perfectly blended with 2D Uber-shaded, hand drawn characters. I don't think a "basic" 3D like this should cause slowdowns, but even run smother than tons of pre-rendered tracks pngs. You can check the previous experiments rendered. Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3
Making it 3D would be much more flexible. I'm sure you've seen the video of the special stage from Sonic 3D (Saturn). I really like the way the camera zooms up for the closeup during Sonic's little celebration. Plus, the existing special stage sprites are among the ugliest in the game, in my opinion. It would be like "Revenge of the Corkscrew Sprite", only without he luxury of being on the screen for only a few seconds at a time in only one level.
I have no doubt that doing well drawn 2D characters would be easier, but I am concerned with the consistency it would have. Until someone creates proof of concept frames for those it will be difficult to tell. You have a knack for adding to your own workload Vincent :v:
