Sonic 2 HD

Here's a screenshot of the game running on my netbook, which is a Eee 1015B (AMD C50) with Win7 32bit.



High quality graphics, D3D9, scaled ? steady 50fps.

(Yeah, speedfan doesn't know where the fan sensors are… but the fans themselves work fine).

 

Was not able to get this to run past the title screen. Just a black screen forever. Are there any logfiles or anything I can post to maybe help determine what's up?

Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz OC'd to 3.6GHz
4GB RAM
nVidia GTX560 1GB @ 1920x1080
Win 7 Ultimate x64

Tried both 32 and 64 bit executables.

 

I feel the music hasn't been getting enough attention in this thread, because everything sounds so much fuller than the original tunes it's based on. Definitely a treat to the ears. The graphics work much better in motion than they ever did in screenshots, but there were a few parts that bugged me:

• I can't even tell what shape the base of the diagonal springs is supposed to be.
• The shaded effect on Sonic when he's in cave areas is just ridiculous. It's either all on or all off, which looks silly when you're standing on the edge of a cave area, and there's no real reason it should exist in the first place since the grass and everything else don't seem to be affected by the reduced lighting in any way.
• The falling-after-using-a-spring sprite is nice, but it could seriously stand to be animated. Right now it looks really stiff.
• The boss still looks like it's from a flash game. Smooth gradients everywhere.

I never really expected this game to get this far, and such minor details aside, it really does look and sound incredible. Good job and thank you.

 

Gameplay wise it's great.
The art is beautiful.
The music is great as expected from Tee.

The program? I'm not running that ever again. I'm just not trusting at all this code:

• Game only stopped halting on loading about the 5th time I ran the game. (And only runs some times past the title screen)
• Memory usage seems very unstable. Sometimes it can be up to 600 MB of RAM, and other times it runs fine off the bat it's at 70 MB.
• A 32 and 64 bit version for a 2D game? What's the code behind this that makes the 32 bit version unstable as hell as well?
• Referring to the point above, this game is hogging 100% CPU constantly(and it seems to be using both cores as well)

I understand this is an alpha, but I've never had so many weird issues like with this one, and this post just doesn't inspire any confidence.

A fan game with DRM? Even if it's just to put off the hackers that might try to distribute it without the license text, I'm just not gonna use it then.

EDIT: To come across less like an ass, I should clarify that all the work on the first 3 areas I mention was totally worth the wait, and you deserve absolute praise for that. The coding doesn't seem very reliable though.

 

I love how the 'S2 HD Team' is taking the credit for it and not the community and contributes as a whole. Another thing is, the load times are ridiculous. Takes about 45 seconds to load a level. What is this, Sonic 06? The physics, or at least collision is off here and there too. At the beginning of EHZ, running and jumping would land you right on the platform next to the shield. It doesn't in this. Everyone's praising this like it's some kind of gold, and when SEGA gets a miniscule thing off everyone bitches and hacks the fuck out of it.

 

Aside from the choppy framerate from my machine I had some fun playing the game. The graphics were pretty and I enjoyed playing it, but the butchering of the boss theme by leaving out verses is disgusting, frankly. To be an HD remake and not even do the boss theme properly is just wrong. The arrangement and production is great, but fuck me.

Otherwise I quite enjoyed this. Good job, now don't take another couple of years to make another zone.

 

Why is there DRM in a Sonic fangame?

 

Played through it again; this is a minor aesthetic nitpick, but the parallax movement of the bottom half of the background could afford to be cut to 3/4 or 2/3 of what it currently is. As it is, the bottom of the background scrolls by just about as fast as the foreground, giving it the impression that it's just as close to the camera. This clashes slightly with the visual contrast in lightness/saturation/overall design between foreground and background. Reducing the parallax will help distance the two spatially as far as the brain is concerned.

edit: To clarify the exact problem: In situations like this. horizontal movement has the background scroll by at the same rate as the foreground right at the bottom of the screen. This leads the eye to believe (temporarily, at that height) that the background elements should be at a height corresponding to the foreground's bottom of screen, but obviously this isn't the case and when falling back down it's a little jarring if you're paying attention to it.

 

The FileFactory mirror gave me a virus warning, Just sayin' . =\

Spoiler

Trojan:Win32/Anomaly.gen!C

Items:
containerfile:C:\Users\Ruben\Desktop\S2HD - ALPHA RELEASE V1.0.zip.crdownload
file:C:\Users\Ruben\Desktop\S2HD - ALPHA RELEASE V1.0.zip.crdownload->Sonic2HD.exe
webfile:C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\LocalCopy\{F1E8AD64-08B1-4891-AC40-E364780EBBFA}-S2HD - ALPHA RELEASE V1.0.zip.crdownload|http://ff06d05.filefactory.com/dl/f/7c7fok4s0hph//b/4/h/903afd0b2f4d286e98d248e4/m/6496e39fb1cd672d751d78fa183790fe/n/S2HD_-_ALPHA_RELEASE_V1.0.zip
webfile:C:\Users\Ruben\Desktop\S2HD - ALPHA RELEASE V1.0.zip.crdownload|http://ff06d05.filefactory.com/dl/f/7c7fok4s0hph//b/4/h/903afd0b2f4d286e98d248e4/m/6496e39fb1cd672d751d78fa183790fe/n/S2HD_-_ALPHA_RELEASE_V1.0.zip

 

It's a false positive. I got nothing with ESET NOD32, but Security Essentials flagged it as a virus.

 

I just came by to mention the false positive issue. I shared this release with another forum I'm on and got reamed by some idiot after his Microsoft Security Essentials flagged the game executable as a virus. I had to drill it into his head that it's a false positive and he's still being an idiot about it. I got the same red flag but obviously I knew better and ignored it. Malwarebytes didn't raise any red flags.

Is there any particular reason you can think of about why MSE flags the game .exe as a threat? I mean obviously people will be turned off by a red flag even if it is a false positive - and it definitely won't help the project any when people who are just now hearing about this project think it's just a virus :-/

 

Here's why MSE thinks it's a Trojan: obfuscated code.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Threat/Encyclopedia/Entry.aspx?Name=Trojan%3AWin32%2FAnomaly.gen!C

 

obfuscated code

edit: man u sonic fans shure r fast lo0l

 

Yeah, um. For the sake of credibility towards those outside of the Sonic-hacking community, I think it might be a good idea to hold off on sharing this with others until this issue is fixed.
I mean it's one thing for people within the community to trust eachother and go "Oh don't worry, it's just the way the program was written", but another to share it with others and have them go all "Ummmm nope, that's a virus, my computer says so :I"

 

Ok, I've played through it. First of all, let me say that I'm really impressed by the quality of the graphics and the details. Really, really good job, guys! Personally, the game experience is very close the the original Sonic 2... Yes, there are some physics issues, but I don't want to be annoying with this, since it has already been said.

So I focused on monitoring the performance over the full game playthrough. This is my current hardware:

Intel Core i7 950 3.07 GHz
NVidia GeForce GTX 560

The first thing I noticed is about the CPU usage:
Core 0 - 100%
Core 1-7: 0%

It seems the game runs on a single thread, and since the multicore architecture is very popular nowdays, it would be good to use it in this game, and could give a massive performance improvement even on older machines. Personally, I would split the game in 4 threads:
T1) Audio streaming thread
T2-T3) 2-pass rendering pipeline: T2 takes the input polygons and renders the colors buffers, T3 does post-processing and renders to screen. Note that this 2 threads can be parallel (when t3 renders frame X, t2 can render frame X+1), and they should run at the maximum frequency allowed (it will be forced to 60 Hz if v-sync is enabled)
T4) handles physics engine. I think giving it a maximum frequency of 200 hz or so, should be enough even for high-speed moments.

I understand that all these things are related and cannot be splitted into fully parallel threads, but with some smart locks it can be done.

The second thing is about video memory usage: I noticed that it increses over-time, hitting 430 mb (100 windows aero + 330 s2hd) at the end of act 2. This is not a problem for newer graphic cards, but maybe some textures could be released when they're not used.

Anyway guys, from a big Sonic fan, let me say it another time... GREAT GREAT WORK!

EDIT:: omg 21 sec speedrun :DD

 

Thanks for making my working day that little bit more bearable. I'll be downloading this as soon as I get back tonight!

 

Hahaha, some of the youtube comments

"WTF YOU GAVE ROBOTNIK GOGGLES WAAAH"

Sonic fandom at its purest.

 

I don't really understand this project, because sometimes it wants to copy the game to the letter, while at others it decides to be its own beast.

I suppose this sums it up fairly well

The ground tiles are so similar that they're practically the same colour as they were in 1992. But the background clearly isn't. It's been lightened, and the flowers... simplified, and the result is something that looks a bit gradient-heavy. The rings are shinier, but Sonic isn't (and in some frames I'm sure the back of his head gets too big). Also I'm sure there's was previous iteration of Sonic that looks closer to what you would expect in game. I don't want to criticise it too much since clearly a lot of effort went into producing this, but a lot of the "ARTISTIC LICENSE" doesn't really work, and many are probably going to ask questions as to why it's there in the first place.

And again, as great as Tee Lopes is as a musician, the music doesn't sound very Sonic-like to me. And there's a few instances where the composition is wrong. And it sounds worse because it's wrong.


Seriously when taking inspiration from the original game, don't play it in super sharp graphics modes with super crisp audio, because that's not how it was meant to be witnessed. Shove it in Kega Fusion (or whatever), turn on the CVBS and sound filters and then give it a go, because the experience is ever-so-slightly different to what you get from the raw output. The music stops being as squeaky, and it's a bit easier to hear what they were going for.


But the engine is very impressive though. Didn't expect it to run so well on this setup. And Tails seems about spot on.

 

I've been pretty much a critic on the side of "why bother" especially when that kind of effort being put into original content would in my opinion be so much more well invested, and I agree with the graphics being a little too... gradienty for the sake of being upscaled, but I dunno, the music is stylistically pretty spot on. It's what I imagine the soundtrack would have been like conforming to the style and expectation of that era without being limited to the chipsets. You're definitely 100% right on the transcription errors though, those kinda stick out like a sore thumb if/when you want to nitpick about it.