Taking a look around, I am thinking Mighty should have normal muzzle colors: he has been portrayed like that in all the games he has been shown in (SegaSonic, Chaotix, and even the missing person's poster in Generations). Ray has been consistently shown as having a darker muzzle, so he should keep it like that.
This leaves me thinking, what would Ray and Mighty's distinct abilities be? Mighty has at least a couple odd moves, but neither have particularly shown enough distinctive abilities to make them Power and Flight respectively.
I am guessing that Team SegaSonic will be the first team to break the power/speed/flight mold; I am planning gliging and climb for Ray (flying squirrels can do them, so it makes sense) and give Mighty his wall jumping ability from Chaotix (plus wall-breaking, like all other powerhouses). Any further suggestions for Mighty?
I have an idea that I'm looking to start test-coding for Mighty... for my own work, but would be happy to collaborate with you on if you wanna use it. I'm thinking to give Mighty an ability to pick up and throw certain objects. It can make use of his Chaotix hold sprite AND be a good way to display his supposed strength... which was all but ignored in Chaotix. Perhaps you could add to it and have him throw teammates as balls at enemies too. If you're interested, I'll start coding and PM to you what I can get started.
You could maybe do something like Ray is capable of getting extra air with a precise jump (maybe something like the glider in 8 bit Sonic 2, though I'm not sure many would appreciate that). Mighty I'm not sure of. I'd love to see move that makes use of his removable shell from SEGASonic Arcade though. :P
How about a stronger spindash that breaks certain objects (like Sonia's spin move from S Factor), because of his shell and all? Or maybe Mighty can gain more 'bounce' off of enemies than everyone else.
Would be cool if you two working together on that feature would make it more possible. I really like this idea. I'm not sure how game-breaking that abilty would be, but it could open the posibilty of hidden bonus rooms or a passageway for the team. Since there was no response about Espio's rolling animation being triggered in s-tubes, CPZ tubes, etc. I guess that there may be an issue with it. If so then maybe he can use a standard spin-attack/spindash like the rest of the characters and his whirling attack can be used as a special move. It doesn't have to do anything special other than just having a bigger attack hitbox, but I could see it have a higher jump and being invulnerable to spikes as options as well.
Out of curiosity, how many here know that Mighty's wall jumping in Chaotix can shoot him at high speeds in any of 5 directions controlled by the D-pad? He shoots out at a whooping speed of $A00 (for comparison, Hyper Sonic's dash in S3&K is $800) in the direction chosen (so his X and Y speeds are less than $A00 for diagonal jumps by a factor of sin(45) = cos(45) = 1/sqrt(2)). And it can be chained (stick to wall -> wall jump up -> stick to wall -> repeat) for some really fast wall climbing. It would be interesting in discussing it, yes; but any code you wrote would probably not be useful for me except as a reference: SCH has seen several significant internal engine changes from stock S2 (on which SCH is ultimately based) that would basically force me to rewrite significant portions of the code anyway: there is zero chance of it working unmodified, and I am not exaggerating. Writing the code as if for S3&K would help slightly, but I would still need to rewrite it -- due to different OST layouts, among other things. I can elaborate more on all these changes, but I don't want to derail the discussion on Mighty's abilities. That would also be useful for the future, as I would be able to use all this new code again (hint, hint). That is easily doable in my setup, yes; I already have custom bounce handlers in place to handle the golden shield's homing attack. Most of the existing custom bounce handlers just say "use standard bouncing" to the calling code, so changing Mighty would be a matter of changing that. I am not sure I follow you here; those tunnels already have auto roll. Unless you mean auto-roll without crashing (next revision will do this), or rolling instead of twirling or whatever, in which case I will need to code it. That actually fell through the cracks; it is something I can do, yes. I will have to add a couple of entries to the players' virtual function tables (to set jumping and spindashing animations) and alter the current functions to set rolling state make Espio use his ball form. I will also to alter the programming of some objects (like breakable walls) to treat his spinning state as an attack form (currently, the spinning state is internally treated as rolling). I can also make Espio use an 8-way spinning like Sonia, yes. FYI, Espio's spin already has a bigger hitbox size.
Two ideas come to mind. One a little far-fetched, one more suitable. For Mighty, while holding down, projectiles will bounce off of Mighty's shell. (This could include rolling). While for Ray, when near a tree. Holding up and pressing the jump button could have Ray climb up it and then jumping into the air to get more height, where he can glide. Also, Squirrels are known for climbing pretty fast. It wouldn't be too outlandish for Ray to be able to scale walls. Between Knuckles' climbing and Espio's wall walking would be a good place/speed to put it.
This is a weird request but how feasible would it be to have the option of playing as individual characters as opposed to teams? (I was thinking it might be nice to have teams of two as well so the combi ring stuff works properly, but that could get confusing). Would be a nice edition. A convenient way to have all those "xxx in Sonic 1" hacks in one place, and presumably code would equate to just turning off the AI partners
It already does that. edit <_< >_> Spoiler Here's something I spent a little while doing to give an example of how Ray climbing would look. To make it less of a clone of Knuckles' wall-climbing ability, momentum should be required, if the player slowly stops, Ray begins to fall. I'm no sprite artist but here are the frames used to make the above GIF. If wall-climbing for Ray does get implemented, feel free to have your artist use this as a reference of some sort. If he can't, hit me up. I can always make them more hack-implementation worthy if necessary. If the ability doesn't get implemented at all; whatever, no biggie.
You could see if you could work a nut throwing ability into Rays moves. Would make sense for a squirrel to throw nuts. And also yes, toggling the number of characters is a good idea. You could get the ring attatchment thing controlling like Knuckles Chaotix, and if you want to play a single character you could do that too. I imagine people would be eager to try to beat the game with Big.
That would be (wait for it) nuts. (sorry) More seriously (or not): maybe have a "joke mode" for Ray solo where instead of rings, there are nuts everywhere? Or maybe replacing "Sol emeralds" by "Chaos nuts" for Ray solo? As JojHeywood pointed out, you can do that already -- and this feature has been there for quite some time (since I implemented the options screen). If you mean the way it pulls, I spent a lot of effort trying to get it to work better than the one from Chaotix; the very first version I made played exactly like Chaotix (I used its code as reference) and it sucks, especially with 3 players (and not to mention the AI). Unless you mean the arms and rings (an unlikely proposition in itself) or the graphics for the bands (I only have the 1 tile it is using; I could use the ring sparkles, but this means lots more sprites on-screen).
You can already choose the number of teammates you have in the Options menu, so you can solo the game with any member of Team Sonic or Chaotix at the moment. I've beaten the game solo as Tails and Espio so far, for example. Beat me to it. xD Anyway, as far as SegaSonic goes, I like the idea of giving Ray some gliding and wall-climbing abilities, which kindof makes him a hybrid of Tails and Knuckles. I also like the idea of Mighty being able to pick up and throw stuff; Any chance he'd be able to do that with monitors?
THAT depends entirely on flamewing and what he wants to implement... That being said, I can tell you that in what I'm proposing to him, that's exactly what Mighty can do. I'm starting code for it this morning. As flamewing said, he'd likely only be able to use this as a reference, BEST case scenario... but I'll provide a test via Sonic 1 to preview this. Just bear in mind my coding ability pales in comparison to his, so mine wont look quite as good.
That might make a good buttoncode, replace rings with nuts and force Ray solo. Maybe you could make a button code for all the characters, or a universal ring graphic replacement code. Tails rings could be replaced with wrenches, Amy's could be replaced with hearts, creams could be replaced with bows, etc.
If anyone has a good suggestion for a button code combination, I have already one such mode for Charmy (it was planned for the hacking contest version, but I didn't have time to implement it) which currently requires only playing as Charmy solo. I would prefer nobody speculated about the mode, and wait until the new version is released (which should be soon).
xxxyyyzzz You should change the sound the items make when you collect them. And maybe let us change what items are in levels in debug mode, like how Taxmans Sonic 1 lets you enable features in debug mode that you can't save. The items could use each characters sprites to allow the items to appear in multiplayer mode.
I completely removed all traces of debug mode in SCH -- there is nothing at all left of it except for the cheat code, which enables night mode instead (and 15 continues if you didn't enable it already, but only because the debug codes start with the continue code).
