General Project Thread & Feedback

This, basically!

 

It absolutely works! The problem here is that the leaders think that with an open system you have to invariably take any suggestions or changes that people want to make to the project as law or have people vote on everything. This isn't true at all; in fact, that misconception is why it failed. Updating consistently on progress—posting completed frames and animations, works in progress, and overall letting people know where the project is whenever possible—is a good way to make people feel more involved. Allow them to leave feedback and even have someone to survey the general response; however, at the end of the day, stick to your established direction. Just because people suggest changes does not mean they have to be made. Read and consider them, sure—after all, that's the entire point of feedback—but don't let it slow down progress. That's the way to handle it.

They made me so hard <3

 

Yeah, this is pretty much how Open Source projects like Linux work. You have strong leadership and set people with commit status that figure out which work is worth incorporating. No sane person expects a product to come from complete chaos.

However, this "closed community" model doesn't sound much different from what RubyEclipse and SEGA are doing, frankly. How do you expect people to contribute if they can't see the current assets? You're setting up the community you supposedly value the input of for failure, as they'll be working off old stuff or not following the guidelines you've already set internally.

 

Hey, if it's good enough for the US government.

 

Exactly this is what's so puzzling to me. I see no reason whatsoever for how keeping such things secret does any good to the project. If anything, this is an effective way to break the engagement of the rest of the community, not encouraging people to participate.

 

I had a nice long post about this, and I lost it thanks to stupid Refresh in Chromium and my touchpad...

Thankfully, Tweaker seems to have got the point across quite well.

I'll just stick to talking about the engine then.

If you want to accelerate work on it, I'd suggest open sourcing the engine as a general engine project outside of Sonic Retro (Put it on Google Code or SourceForge, or something like that). Then go to places that open source developers hang out in, like Phoronix, doom9, Linux.com, gamedev.net, etc.

Lots of Linux people are developers, and some may be skilled at what you need. As an open source game engine, you can attract these kind of people. With Linux users having a higher ratio of developer users to non-developer users, you are more likely to find help with what you need.

Developers may not fall out of the sky, but you might be surprised at what might happen.

Failing that, go to other Sonic fangame sites and poke around and request help with the engine. Sonic Retro doesn't seem to be all that tuned for 3D stuff, so the 3D skills may not be in abundance here.

But the idea of making Sonic 2 HD a "walled garden" project just isn't going to fly.

 

I'm generally pleased the art direction here. The palm trees had been bothering me for a while, and I'm glad to see that smoother animations are officially in the cards.

EDIT: This was my 666th post....not that anybody cares.

 

Everything that I wanted to say has already been said by someone else. My position towards S2HD shouldn't be a secret by now, if it's not a "community project" it doesn't deserve a spot in the "community projects" subforum, so I'd agree with Tweaker if he'll decide to cut this space.

That said, I'll try to provide feedback and contribute as long as this is going to be around, as I always did. I'd still love to see S2HD finished, even if I disagree with the current directions.

 

You can't request this AT ALL. You have NEVER declared a license for the artwork that is publicly available. As it states on the Creative Commons website, copyright by default is to give everyone ALL RIGHTS. The only one who can change that is the creator of the artwork himself.

Sonic 2 HD project never stated something like: "We want all artwork submitted to us to be CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0, in order to protect everyone's rights and ensure proper legal attribution."

Without something like that, it is only up to the individual artwork makers to say something like that.

 

Great idea!

In fact, one thing you could do to accelerate the progress of this project huuuugely is by using some capitalist exploitation genius and going on elance.com or bestjobs.ph to find coders, programmers and artists. You'll get all kinds of people in the far east working for you for peanuts (you won't actually believe how cheaply they'll work), and working FAST too. It makes alot of sense considering that there's no way you guys can do this full time.

If necessary, I'm sure I can chip in for some work, and others probably can too.

Give it some thought.

 

Eh, I think it's more of a courtesy thing, or something like that. While he somewhat suggested otherwise by saying bits that of work were taken "without permission", that could just mean "of the original creators". I'm actually a culprit of doing that; I used the title screen background for a sonic 4 title mockup. I hadn't even given it a second thought at the time

Oh, and it's great to see an update. Everything's looking spectacular, and I can't wait to see more. I'll have to say, though, I would prefer the idea of "real" updates (more informative, less TUNE-IN-NEXT-TIME) rather than this marketing-esque thing you have going on. But, beggars can't be choosers; you're all developing this game for free, after all, I can't really complain. =P

I gotta ask, who's creating these lovely "presentation graphics" (for lack of a better term)? Like that S2HD logo graphic in the beginning of Vincent's post, that looks really nice.

 

I don't know about that bush. Maybe its the style, but I think it might just be the ears. Give them back.

Here is my take on the staff post:
I don't mind that there is work behind the scenes. Not everything needs to be posted for the reasons given. But you need to inform people what is going on. Like now you are adding more frames of animation. That's a pretty big deal that I don't think anyone knew about because the staff disappears and makes everything a secret. You don't need to post your art updates because artwork should be critiqued over and over again before its considered done so WIP's really aren't necessary.

But we should know what you are working on and your progress on it. Why?
To create organization outside of your circle. I've said this time and time again. The artwork/database out here on the actual forums are so completely unorganized that no one knows the status of the project and since no one updates anything it takes away from incentive/interest from everyone' artists, fans. and lurkers. Many artists have moved on since the project shows no signs of movement.

Not because the project hasn't moved but no one knows that there has been any progress. The only thing people can look forward to is next years staff update.

Artists now just took a shot to the morale as its not a community project, their artwork is very likely not to make it to the final product and rather just as reference for the project staff to make their own artwork from so why even try? One of the main reasons I contribute is to hopefully inspire others to contribute to actually feel like the project is going somewhere because that is how I was inspired to contribute; by viewing progress, and by viewing artwork. With lack of both and now my artwork will never make it anywhere outside the page I post it in, I no longer care for the project.

I want my intensive. Why am I here? I like the Sonic trilogy, I want to contribute, I want to be a part of something bigger than myself. But it seems like none of that matters here anymore.

 

Edit: Oh heck... you know, I'm not really all that worried about it. It is an issue that needs consideration. But I'm still going to support the project no matter what. Other than that I'm very satisfied with the update. What matters most to me, is that we end up with a quality product, and if that means being a "closed community project" then I can understand the reasoning for that. But Tweaker made some great points and the staff should think long and hard about what the community means to them. Contributions will be few and far between without updates and examples to be inspired by.

First and foremost, contributing to the project should be fun (else why bother?), it's only fun with an active community .

 

Sorry but what do you mean by AR?

And does this mean we won't see any official updates until S4? Man, if it were to release very soon after sonic 4 as a reparation to sonic fans who bought s4, then I would be satisfied with this^ declaration. But to withold all developments until it gets out? It would be bad if S4 became the Gran Turismo of platformers (to become known for delays, not realism, in this case)

 

I guess he means Alpha Release by looking at the context.

 

Oh god, depending on the release of another game before we see ANYTHING come out of this project?

Next you'll tell me pigs will have to be able to fly in Saturn before the first alpha is released....

 

I think some of us want a little something special before S4. Remember: that's in July at the earliest, Core Team. But I'm curious as well: why exactly must you make us wait? This will be free, so we won't be wasting valuable Sonic 4 funds, and heck, they're on completely different platforms. Unless there was some conversation over legal matters between the Core Team Alpha Prime Master Group and Sega, I find that this decision will be whined about more and more as spring fever infects us all...

 

Half of the new stuff posted are just silhouettes.


I don't see what the problem is with the leaders of this being "elitist", don't we want quality here? I just think that more little previews should be posted, and each artwork posted (by non S2HD team members) should looked and and considered for use. Otherwise this has no place being called a community project.

Lately is seems like all the things posted in this forum are just being ignored. Not even saying if it even needs to be done, how to improve it, or anything from the project leaders. Just letting people continue to work on stuff, hoping to get it good enough for this project, when there is no plan to use it is just dickish.

 

If you'd read all the responses, you'd see that this is far from complaining that they're elitist, it's that they're calling it a "Community Project," when they're really just keeping everybody in the dark. They can't do that and expect to keep a subforum.

 

I support whatever Tweaker wants about this being a sub-forum. But about the actual artwork, it looks great! I love how your getting rid of all of the intricacies in Badniks and the new promo art. The stuff about menus sounds kewl too.