Sonic 2 HD

That's what private testing is for; either that or if you're not going to bother, you say "I need performance reports" and not "this absolutely requires x". To me, this seems more like a case of a developer convincing himself that the program running for him is all that matters regardless of his system spec, spouting off the numbers for that spec, and calling it a day

 

Haha, that's brilliant.

 

LOL!! That was awesome.

 

This just made my day.

Back to the note of requirements, though... and I am aware this is NOT the first alpha... but regardless, I would think that if they had little resources to test from, they could've come up with a better solution than what they did, just basing requirements off of their own machines... if all game companies did this, I'd imagine that Crysis would not be the only game that would make us shudder...

I'm no expert on this... but I'm confident that I, or any of you all... could've come up with a better solution than what they did.
That said, I was able to play it on my machine, so I wont winge about this too much.

 

This is Brilliant! Made me Smile.

+ - I wonder if any of the other codes work...  

 

That locked my browser up yo :|


Anyway, yes this is an alpha, but seriously? With all the nitpicking over how SEGA does this or that, and then you release something like this, then put DRM in it, like what the fuck?

 

That was the best thing ever.

 

The alpha demo = pretty awesome.
The cheat code for the website = epic beyond belief

 

I hope that's immortalised forever into retro. Best parody ever.

 

Well,
1) Taxman's done it.
2) Stealth's done it.
3) There's Game Maker and MMF scripts for Sonic engines mostly coded by one guy.

All of these have comparable accuracy with significantly less bloat.

So... yes! Yes we do!

 

Am I the only one that's just waiting for LOst to show up and announce that this has all been just a ridiculously elaborate April Fools Joke, releasing a finished, DRM-free Sonic 2 HD?

 

Oh god, I'm laughing so hard. Retro is run by such massive fucking trolls.

That would be pretty epic. (Also serving as a convenient scapegoat.)

 

I understand where Black Squirrel is coming from and what he's trying to do, but there are a few things:

As far as the older members go, I'm sensing a "LOst has crossed the line and broken the camel's back" vibe. Postcount whoring, Area 51 thread ranking, and LOst Library woes culminate in this, plus some other things I have a hazy idea about (the older members could elaborate but I'd rather not start another scene that will inevitably be ignored, like this one) and they're done dealing with him.

There is the fact that other people have made similar engines that run smoothly on a wider range of hardware... are there? I'm not too well-versed in the whole indie scene so what is there?

Plus, other than "I re-downloaded it and there's no virus on my end", there has been no response to everyone's problems yet, nor has any reason been given for the whole DRM thing!

And then you do have the fact that the project has completely drifted from the roots that Stealth points out.

And now I'm not sure what side of the fence I'm on anymore either, probably because I ... don't know? I'll just keep sitting on it

 

I don't think LOst is a idiot when it comes to programming - I think the differences between this and the tech demo from a couple of years ago suggest there's been significant improvements. Room for more, maybe, but these are big resolutions and they're not pleasant to work with current hardware.

The code which makes Sonic move will be insignificant and yes, can be done by one bloke. Yuji Naka did it all in 1991 - that's not what I'm talking about. Heavy optimisations require people who know exactly how graphics chips work and, unlike the Mega Drive, there are dozens of GPUs out there, all needing special treatment to get the most out of them. The assumption here is that LOst should know everything about every chip ever and I don't think that's right. 1GB of RAM for a project of this nature built by one guy sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Maybe Stealth and Taxman have better solutions but the point I'm making is it's not fair to assume everyone has these solutions. Stealth beat an entire team of programmers with that Game Boy Advance Sonic port and Taxman got his engine to Sega (though there were still people tweaking it to make it run better where possible!) - these aren't normal circumstances. There shouldn't be an expectation for everyone to be the second coming of Christ.

Get Game Maker or MMF or whatever to render a 1920x1080 window with assets this large and it will probably cripple. Nothing is immune, although I'm happy to see something that can prove otherwise.

and again it's an alpha. I don't understand why the code needs to be perfect when the game isn't even close to being done. By the time it's finished we might have terabytes of RAM and nobody will care. I couldn't care less about how much RAM this uses if it runs at 60FPS full screen - Sonic Fan Remix doesn't.


either way there have been calls for more special effects and more advanced lighting. So if you wanted, say, Oil Ocean Zone's scenery to reflect light in fancy ways to simulate shiny metal, a big chunk of memory is going to be required regardless of what you do. In essence, the RAM usuage is unlikely to go down and stay there.



the DRM stuff, virus false positives, previous convictions - all valid concerns. But this idea that because it's 4x the size of a Mega Drive game it should only use 4x the memory... I don't think is fair. It might be a bit bloated in areas but good lord there are bigger problems out there. And again that's why you have more than one programmer, because people make mistakes.

EDIT: Actually I'm going to take some of that back. I tested the memory usage myself and it peaked at about 420MB, averaging about 385MB. That's not close to 1GB.

 

What's this attitude supposed to mean in an age where smaller, less powerful devices are becoming more and more popular? You can't program a game exclusively for the big black box in the room that you can shove full-sized memory modules into without concern.

 

This is likely a timing/threading problem, this is hogging 100% cpu(both cores) for me whenever I run it. Other people claim it takes one full core. Sounds like a timing problem to me since the GPU activity doesn't go beyond 10% here.

 

Well, I plan on doing just this, so I hope I'll prove you wrong...

 

Not MMF or GameMaker, but I run Garry's Mod on a 5 year old Macbook Pro with only its original 2GB of RAM - and I run it at 1152x870 [yes, less than that resolution you mentioned] on not the absolute highest settings it can go, but really good settings... and not only do I not have problems running it, but the game doesn't even take up a full GB of RAM [EDIT: 343MB when idle, up to 650MB when running. And that is for a game that is EXPECTED TO EAT ABOUT A GIG OF MEMORY if not more because of all the rendering of maps/map elements, props, etc - the physics, and multiplayer shit. On Windows, I'm sure the MBs of RAM used may be a little less, if not a lot less.]

[in fact, the Steam client that we're forced to keep open has been known to, when idle, eat up as much if not more than the game runs - especially on the OS X port].

That is a game where, with the map rendering, props, physics, etc, is EXPECTED to take up memory.

 

You wouldn't be the first to wonder that, from what I've read here and on the Retro Home page's comments. Too bad the release was at least two whole days before now, but that could have been just to throw people off, hmm...

If the opposite is true, LOst has proven himself to be TAlented, but not COmpetant. I don't its called for to insult him with annoying adjectives, he definitely has talent, just not enough common sense to direct something of this level of importance to a fan project. If the worst-case scenario doesn't play out, there's a good chance, I think, he'd still be on the team, but with less control over the engine.