Sonic 2 HD

Bad programming. Plain and simple.

This thing has more wildly varying performance than minecraft.

 

I'd have to agree. At least when Minecaft is running like shit for me, it's likely running like shit for 80% of its other players as well. (See the original 1.2)

Also even though the code talk is going way over my head, I think it's hilarious.

 

First off, let me thank the S2HD team for taking the time to create something like this. It's pretty damn nice to see Sonic 2 remade like this. It looks really damn good. It sounds really damn good. It plays really damn well.

I miss my Vsync, but it's in alpha, so some technical shortcomings are quite expected. I'm very impressed overall. Good job everyone. I have to say though, my favorite part of the graphics may well be the drillcar, it's magnificent



Only one real bitch about it:

DRM

Son, I am disappoint. I imagine no one cares, but it be known that McGuirk is shaking his head in disapproval. I thought I raised you better than this.

 

I personally love how this game looks and sounds, except for some small flaws that have been pointed out already (shame that it seems we can't give anymore feedback, not being a community project), but all the drama behind it is ruining it...

Those people who don't like the style of "not reimagining the thing as a whole", just think of it as how Sonic 2 would have looked like had the Mega Drive hardware featured more colors, resolution and unlimited storage... Which makes me think that, perhaps, some talented programmer would be able to hack an open source Genesis emulator and implement all this.

 

Heh, on the contrary, if you look back a few pages - or maybe on the site's main front page...

Wasn't that a suggested concept? Thing was, such a thing would be unwieldy, and would be bound to a bunch of strange restrictions due to being ran on top of the original game's code - which is, among other things, made for a smaller resolution, computing the physics on a smaller scale, thus making all the movement blocky, and so on, and so on. That's likely why they chose to get a rebuilt one.

 

In which I flog my blog.

As pissed as I am at DRM and LOst's... paranoia, or whatever... I have to say that picking apart and laughing at his coding style is a little out of line.

But only a little.

 

You never know what a talented programmer can achieve.

 

I wish to stay out of this discussion, but I feel the opinion of the person who startes the physics guide itself should be known: http://intheshadeofawave.blogspot.com/

this is a sad day for the sonic hacking scene.

edit - oh, beaten by mercury himself.

 

Damn, I didn't even notice this was released on my birthday! Glad to see it runs on my old PC. I played through the demo once and was fairly impressed with the art and music. Not so impressed with the DRM, but I guess I can take the bad with the good. My opinion is that DRM in a fangame, a demo at that, is fucking ridiculous, but it's not as if it's gathering sensitive information from my hard drive and selling it to advertisers.

Also I just about came when I saw the smooth animation on the title screen. This game looks nice.

 

I feel late to the drama since I didn't feel like reading most of the thread until now, but wow. I don't mean to disrespect LOst, but what the hell were you thinking? DRM is pretty frowned upon as it is (especially in this community) and the type you added was so extreme that people's anti-virus programs are deleting the game on them. What a massive fuckup that's absolutely terrible to the reputation of the project! Not to mention it's clearly damning and demoralizing to the people you worked with. Shame on you.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p9IU4zp7mU

 

Whohohoa there, buddy. The sprites are nice and that's the only thing this project has going for it. I guess that's why you guys are so adamant against divulging your trade secrets, right? Because trying to hide things has already done this project so many favors! P.S. If your artists aren't outright lying and none of the methods I brought up are being used, it's no surprise coloring has turned out to be "a laborious and time-intensive process" when you're employing some painfully obtuse techniques in a program that really wasn't meant to accommodate them. At least tell me why you wouldn't use a vector program to create "vector" art.

So, anyone feel like wading through this thread and tallying up the number of people who've successfully ran this game, and have continued to do so without it breaking on them? The DRM is by far and away the least of the engine's problems. What are you people so chuffed about? Also this thread made me like Stealth and Gerbilsoft.

 

Well, thanks to this topic I finally made a new signature :v:



So good

 

I really hope this project doesn't die from all this. Get rid of LOst. Find someone else. Tell him to fuck off and get someone to fix "his" engine. Do whatever. Just GET RID OF HIM.

 

I can't seem to unlock debug mode. Pity. Perhaps it has something to do with beating it with ten lives instead or some such.

I rather do hate the idea that half the content is entirely undocumented secrets. I suppose Tails is cool, though. Yeah, Tails is a bro.

It's interesting today that videogames are made by artists, not programmers. The art is what you see, what you hear. The art is what's good here. I rather wish I were an artist rather than a programmer myself, sometimes.
It would be a lot less stressful to put in four hours to four days of work on a single piece of work and then be able to simply move on from it. Rather than having it develop into my baby, a big conglomeration of things I wasn't even asked to program to begin with. You just sort of go off on a tangent of ideas sometimes, the key is to have someone there to tell you what's a good idea and actually listen to them when they tell you what's not.

Reverse gravity, recolorable Sonics, multi-sonic replay support, with the camera switching all around, in an engine so protected its own programmer cannot stand the idea of patching in new content particularly often because he's made it to be so much work? ... You've programmed yourself into a corner, then attached shiny balloons to it, and then hidden those balloons such that people who find them have very little idea how. But you'll be damned if it isn't the best corner ever. I guess I can understand that.

I'd love to program a new engine for this, not because I hate LOst or DRM or whathave you, but because it inspired me, the potential for even greater good. One which can hold objects which use sprites of ANY size, animations with ANY number of frames, interchangeable to the point where one can simply drop a single file into the data folder and suddenly robotic monkeys populate the trees, akin to the end-user result of Bethesda's engines... Such a true infinity is a dream I hope to reach one day, completely regardless of open-source or closed-source nonsense.

But I suppose that day is not today. I have rather pressing engagements of my own to attend to this month. Other things I'm already expected to be programming, not to mention a huge slew of anime and gaming conventions to attend. ... I am quite mired in things I adore, and that is just fine. <3

Thank all you artists for this work, even if it's from last year or earlier. It has truly been a pleasure.
Brofist to Kogen, Ritz, Gerbilsoft, and anyone else who happens to recognize me. 'Sup.

 

<Puto> so, obvious question
<Puto> <Puto> why does everything in S2HD look like it's made of plastic

 

I played this alpha release a few days ago, fortunately having no antivirus issues there. It is good that a project that is years in the making has finally had some sort of actual release, but unfortunately I believe that this could have been better if it wasn't for ridiculous decisions such as obfuscating code and adding DRM to a fan game of all things.

What annoys me further is the fact that because of LOst, this release was delayed for more than a year, the community project status was nothing more than an absolute lie (and everyone pretty much knew this), yet the staff at Sonic Retro were being mislead into the project status until just now. It was clear that this no longer had any community involvement of some sort a long time ago, yet things were still around. Hopefully the remaining community projects here will remain as community projects, and the staff at Retro will try and help with this.

But, at the same time of me downloading this alpha release, I was gifted Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I on Steam and even though that game is outright terrible, at least I can change some files to suit my own preferences, such as the texture mods available here. So if the S2HD Team is actually looking at real game development, lets hope that the same mistakes aren't made here, even that means developing without LOst.

That's just my opinion on this subject. I know everyone has done things to death about this, but I have not had the time to post my feedback on this until now.

 

Why not.

 

Yeah, right you are. When Sonic 2 HD were a community project there were a lot of people working and coding it like Endri said previously on this thread. I believe that L0st wasn't even necessary back then, I mean we're on a community dedicated to hacking Sonic games, so talented people isn't really hard to find in here. And perhaps if the game stayed that way, beeing a community project it could've been more polished on the engine (which is still very glitchy) and even have some better graphics (not trying to drag back to the previous discussion, just saying).

Also, I'm not into law stuff but this DRM thing couldn't get the people working on the project in trouble? I mean, they're not selling but they're taking property by something that they don't really own (Sonic related stuff).

10/10 HAHAHA