When you roll and then jump in the Genesis/Megadrive versions, you hav

When you jump from a roll, only the air friction/drag is applied to the horizontal movement vector. Therefore, you can't gain any speed; only lose it.

You can't?! I think this is one thing I never noticed.

 

I'm sure I have many times gone faster from jumping from a roll in Sonic 2, namely Chemical Plant Zone. In act 2 when you are going down those massive blue tubes, I have jumped from a roll there and gone faster than the camera could keep up.

 

And in Hidrocity Zone, and in Flying Battery Zone, etc.

Because, when on a slope, the jump factor is calculated from the degree of the slope, converted and added into the vertical and horizontal vectors. Thus if you are in a downward slope, upon jumping, your horizontal speed will increase, while doing so in a upward slope, your speed will be reduced and/or be negative (you'll go to the left instead of right).

 

Personally I think that we could do with a hack of Sonic in 2 or 3 to see if what you say would happen. I'm sceptical about it because I have not seen the roll jump applied to any hacks.

 

Man, I never noticed that, and even when you said it I had to check in order to be sure... I guess I'm so used to playing these games that I don't even pay attention to what buttons I'm pressing anymore!

 

I always assumed the change in the SCD physics was to allow the player to maintain speed for time travel, to make it a bit more bearable. Being able to quickly change direction in the air from a roll allows you to utilise a small amount of space while still maintaining speed, or at least that's the way I always thought of it.

 

Maybe it wasn't intentionally "fixed" - the insta-shield behaves totally differently in Sonic Advance, so it might have been coded without reference to S3&K at all. In fact, I'd be willing to wager Dimps based their engine on Sonic 2's, and most of the S3&K features they wanted had to be done by winging it. For instance, Knuckles' gliding feels totally wrong.

This makes more sense than any other explanation so far. Good thinking!

 

Is there a video of a comparison of the physics across the different games? I'm not really following and a visual aid would be really helpful.

 

While Endri's explanation makes a lot of sense ("It's there because you'd notice the fucked-up speedcaps otherwise"), I've still got an issue here:

... What? No. It's like saying I prefer a game that doesn't grant me unlimited immunity to attack.

The way I see it: Play Sonic CD. Spindash. Jump, hold right. Hold down when you land. When you lose too much speed, jump, hold right. Hold down when you land.

You can complete a lot of levels... without even uncurling. Any badniks that don't fire projectiles? Congratulations, you've just been made redundant. This is the explanation I was trying to get at.

Although I'm liking Endri's explanation more now. Then again, there could be a combination of reasons for the lock.

 

Spindash is not very useful in Sonic CD because of the amount of time it takes to charge up, and because of the amount of jumping and basic platforming you have to do to navigate the levels.

 

How is this relevant? We're talking about rolljumping here.

 

I know what you meant. I should had written down badniks aswell when I was talking about broken physics. In all honesty I don't think it's a game breaker when it comes to attacking enemies. I mean, I see the badniks in the classics really only being a quarter, maybe less of what Sonic games are about in terms of gameplay, the rest is good platforming and traps, or hazards if you want to call them that. And to be fair, most of the badniks in Sonic CD are shit, nothing more than cannon fodder. If Sonic had that spin move in Sonic 2, I honesty believe that it would barely have any effect in terms of destroying badniks easier, it will just improve platforming loads.

 

Hey, you brought it up. Didn't notice you already covered it though. Yes it is practical to peelout and hold down to roll in Sonic CD for every situation you would normally spindash in a Sonic game.

It's not practical to peelout everywhere in Sonic CD though. The game has a lot of platforming and jumping. What that means is that you're not jumping out of a roll animation very much in Sonic CD. You're jumping out of a standing or a running animation instead, and you can control your air momentum when you do that in any Sonic game.

On another note, the inability to control your momentum when you jump out of a roll is not a hindrance to rolling in the genesis games. At least it isn't for me. I find myself in a rolling animation at least 90% of the time.

Staying a spikey ball of destruction the whole time isn't broken. That's just how you get good at Sonic games. It's not immediately obvious if you start playing Sonic after a lifetime of Megaman and Mario. Your instinct is to run and jump like a normal platform character. Realizing that you can just spindash everywhere, hold down through the loops, and jump when your roll loses momentum, and that playing that way lets you get through the game much faster... that's sort of the 'AHA!' moment.

 

...

READ MY POST AGAIN. No seriously. The Sonic CD spindash/Peelout sentence (and that's all it was) was there to say that there was another reason to run in Sonic CD. The complaint about being able to run was an aside. As for the one mention of "spindash" in the unquoted part of my post, that's not even needed. Okay, in-depth time.

In the MegaDrive games, you can only pick up speed:
a) when rolling down slopes
b) when running
c) when jumping from a run
d) with timed jumps

If you jump when your roll loses momentum, you cannot pick up speed during that jump. YOU MUST RUN, and therefore BECOME VULNERABLE, to gain speed in Sonic 1/2/3K.

In Sonic CD, if you jump when your roll loses momentum, you CAN pick up speed during that jump. Therefore, you can stay curled up for very long periods at a time with little skill involved.

You say you're in a ball 90% of the time in S1-3K. Sonic CD allows you (although you need a lot of skill in the later levels to do so) to stay in a ball 100% of the time.

THIS is what I've been saying. Forget about the spindash/Peelout rubbish, it's irrelevant.

 

It helps to have the spindash control lock because otherwise... well, otherwise you have something akin to Sonic Adventure. Holy crap the spindash was overpowered in that one.

 

These numbers, 90% and 100%, are completely arbitrary. Nobody is going to sit down and measure how many frames of standing or running are in a video of a Sonic game.

I can say that you don't need to walk or run at any point to complete Sonic 2 or Sonic 3&Knuckles, and many speedruns demonstrate that. It's very easy to avoid running in those games and anyone can do it.

 

One could argue that the move's power made it unstable and unpredictable to beginning players. Personally I love the spindash in sonic adventure. It adds a whole new tier of gameplay.

However, what you could do is make the 'control lock' an infinitesimal value times a randomly generated number, effectively making it harder to just mash the button. But then again using RNG's in gameplay reduces the potential for technical gameplay, so I don't know how much I like that idea.

 

I think you'll find 100% isn't arbitrary.

But you do need to UNCURL at many points, and thus become vulnerable.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there objects in Sonic CD that force you to uncurl? Springs, wheels? Are you saying all of those can be avoided?

How do you plan on hitting the Tidal Tempest boss?