Sonic 2 HD

It was almost exactly what we got in the game, I'm frankly amazed they were able to even pull off that trailer

 

I'm amazed too. I would have never guessed in a million years that trailer showed fake game footage.

 

Well they didn't do it with malicious intent, they were just trying to impress people with their progress in the only way they could at that point.

 

The signpost flashing stars is the proof that it's fake.

 

Not necessarily, they could have just disabled it to not allow access to the bonus stages.

 

I'm sorry W.A.C. (and to anyone else) if you felt deceived - that absolutely wasn't my intention when creating the trailer, rather it was to best satiate the masses using the best of what we had at our disposal at that time. I would hope though, seeing as there is a playable alpha that shows at least what was shown in the trailer now that bygones may as well be bygones - better late than never, the alpha delivered as the trailer demonstrated.

The whole countdown thing prior to that was a fiasco and it put the team under alot of pressure to deliver something of substance by that date. Because there was sod all playable game to speak of (literally nothing as CK has described) this was agreed to be the next best course of action given the fact that something was expected of us by the 15th Jan and so I took it upon myself to create a 'target render' trailer (not an uncommon practice out in the industry) which was backed up by the commemorative website made by CN. To be honest, we were given the strong impression by LOst that the playable game would be ready not too long after the 15th, so the two would gel rather nicely together, rather than serving to be this long drawn out affair, making it look as though (based on what you saw in the trailer) we were sitting on some playable build for over a year and keeping it shackled up for no good reason. Additionally, it helped to serve as something of a bargaining chip to ensure LOst included everything that you saw and that the playable demo's graphics did not come in below the target set by the trailer.

Believe me though, we felt deceived at that time when we were all led to believe things would come to fruition in Q1 2011 and we were all ready too (bar that one critical aspect of the whole shebang).

 

All is forgiven. Seriously, if it forced LOst to be more cooperative, I couldn't care less now that the gameplay trailer was fake.

 

This Deserves quoting.
Provided the project is resurrected I am willing to devote some time to assist with programming. I am currently in my second year at University studying Game Software Development, I can program in C/C++, x86 assembler, PowerPC assembler, Actionscript, Python and Pascal. I also have experience in direct x, and have used basic Open GL. I know this reads like an application but this is a project I really want to get behind.

 

I'm wondering how much of the other zones' art is finished? Have you done only GHZ and HTZ or is there a significant portion on the rest of the terrains/gimmicks/badniks ?

 

The thing that gets me the most is that this project CAN still make it to completion. Most of the artwork for everything is done, right? This place has tons of members who have the talent to finish up the rest, and even more who can program the right engine for this.

 

With some of the admins/site staff/other members/certain tech members whining about how community projects are the devil's work? I think that'll be the thing that kills the project. I can see some of said members denouncing every attempt, no matter how good it might be, just to be spiteful or for whatever other reason they have.

If you can't tell, I don't have a very high opinion of that attitude.

 

Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_cat

There's nothing preventing interested parties from, for example, coming up with assets (or plans as to how to gear people into making assets) for CPZ or CNZ in the interim. S3HD is still going despite all the criticism, justified or not. Stop being a pansy w.r.t what the rest of the site thinks.

Or I could just give you my opinion that yes, all the talk about 'people' 'wanting to S2HD back into a community project' is literally nothing but hot air. What are you going to do about it?

 

Actually I was about to post something like this. Really nothing is stopping anyone from contributing to this, or making an engine, go ahead fellas!

 

I lack seeing any point into releasing S2HD assets just to be roughly cannibalized a second after by a plethora of subpar fan-games. It would only blur their quality and uniqueness -if out of the original context they were drawn. Not even mentioning the confusion some kids will generate by 'shopping a bunch of pixels and claim the work as theirs.

If you're going to make a fangame with your own art, it's mandatory to have the ability to draw new original content for it. Take Sonica's latest Sonic frames for an instance: I am sure He is able to draw an entire frameset just by taking inspiration and it will end up being a completely original new game with consistent artstyle.
Additionally, please acknowledge none of the current key-art members (myself included as a character artist), will be making new content for it as properly specified in my previous post.
Even if this position might change on my own personal future, S2HD as you know it now is officially discontinued.
Certain about Scanline99 and CN's present and future resignation from S2HD, with a big question mark on Gambit, Cornet, CK, SnickerSnack and Saxman; "If" there will be a reason to reprise S2HD and consolidate a new teamwork, the fact there isn't an engine supporting it makes this circumstance even harder to happen.
Unwilling to disrespect the immense programming knowledge several users have here, I've never seen a classic Sonic "HD" engine capable to do a quarter of LOst's features and accuracy (except Taxman and Mercury's SFR).

For this reason, before advancing any kind of requests on S2HD's legacy, if any of you programmers believes to have the skills, dedication and cooperative attitude to port "S2HD, in its entirety" into a better open-source HD engine, send me a demo of your engine with Sonic 2 sprites at 4X (including tileset). Until then I'm afraid there isn't much more to talk about.

 

What about releasing your character art in sprite sheets with some kind of watermark or something? Is there really any reason to deny people from being able to see what you've done that don't have interest in stealing your art?

I want to see Super Sonic's frames, Tails' flying animation and any additional animations not shown in the demo, any work done on Knuckles, and the rest of the bosses. I don't want to use them for anything, I just want to know what they look like, because I loved the animations I did see. Please don't deny me that after cancelling this project. The work you did on Sonic's standing sprite was the first thing I saw when I looked at S2HD's project and I was so impressed that I spent a long time trying to duplicate what you did in a bitmap program using your original Tails sprite (By "original" I mean the oldest mockup, before the uber-ish version that looked awful) as a reference in my browser.

In fact, S2HD was the entire reason I joined Retro. I thought I could contribute to it, I was wrong. The artists that were getting places were not only much better than I was, and still am, but were skilled and experienced with vector graphics which I still struggle to understand. They were amazing animators and people I learned from. There was a weekend in 2010 which I spent looking through 76 pages of art assets from the original community project, both rejected and mildly acceptable, and I took away a lot of inspiration from that. Some of my uses of color actually evolved from ideas I got from the art submissions. The discussion of Hill Top's lava made me really think about how light effects things like metal, and I still have a very high view of all of the things people worked on for the community project, just like I have a high view of your work.

I just want the chance to see it. Yes, I can see it in-game, but (and I am admitting something here that I am not making up, and that actually bothers me a significant amount to say) I have some eyesight problems, sometimes I have to watch segments of youtube videos 4 and 5 times to see what happened if the motion was too quick, and I found pausing and unpausing the game to see every single frame to be difficult not only because of that but because I have a delayed reaction time (And before someone makes an asinine comment, I will admit that, yes, this does make me suck at platformers and other fast-paced games, so ha, I beat you to it) and that's why I am so determined to see a sprite sheet. Still images that I can absorb and admire without the frustration of trying to printscreen them.

 

...Dude. That has got to be a stab in the soul, having that chance but being unable to reach it. It would have been breathtaking.

 

The community will always support this, so maybe a Hiatus or the hiring of new team members would be in order? Nobody wants S2HD to die. It simply doesn't have to, seeing as how the talent needed for this project is still right here.

At the very least, leave the future open.

 

Adding my sympathy. The sinking feeling I got when finding out that it wasn't even worked on must have been significantly amplified for you guys. I would feel the exact same way.