Here's something I noticed a while ago: Mirage Saloon is split to two lines even though Chemical Plant (edit: and Flying Battery) is longer. What's up with that?
It's because, from a designer's standpoint, the word 'Plant' is smaller in width than 'zone' so it creates a really bad alignment. Mirage Saloon title card may have been made earlier than CPz's. If it were created after it it would be surely be put in one line.
Worth mentioning: The storage requirement on Steam was upped from 100MB to 400MB at some point. Not surprising, considering the opening animation, soundtrack and the sheer number of sprite frames, but good to know regardless.
An interesting observation. So I have enough free time on a Sunday morning and I edited the title card for Mirage Saloon to fit on one line: Due to the size of "Saloon", largely due to the massive "O" characters, Chemical Plant and Mirage Saloon share the exact same proportions on the title card. Here's the two overlaid just for size comparisons. So I'm not entirely certain why Mirage Saloon takes two lines over Chemical Plant. I'm sure there's a good reason, probably that it just looks good? I would assume that they don't like text getting too close to the edge of the screen due to potential problems with overscan, so anything that's aesthetically pleasing that mitigates that problem would likely be used.
Considering the size of the download, it is pretty huge for a sprite based game so I assume it's going to be pretty lengthy though comparing Mania to the length of Generations is not exactly accurate as most of that game was just missions being repeated in the same 9 zones but they recently mentioned it having more zones than any classic game made it far more clear to me about its size and what to expect as S3K had (13 - 14 Including The Doomsday) if you play as Sonic and seeing so far the size of the levels we have saw on Mania, I would say it has many hours of gameplay and that is excluding the special stages and exploring to find special items, just going from start to finish. Of course, I welcome the pain and suffering of collecting Chaos Emeralds in a new Special Zone anytime, even if it makes me punch the screen since I think we all share a hatred towards those UFO's. To me, Mirage Saloon's title card was probably an early layout so I would not be surprised to see it set out like Chemical Plant or Flying Battery when it is released, it looks a lot more tidier on a single line.
So, this may be along the lines of dissecting levels via toy packaging ala Sonic Generations, but something interesting came about today. Midio, one of the pixel artists for Sonic Mania, made these three images and posted them on his (?) twitter: Lovely stuff, showing the three characters running through stages that happen to be in Mania. But originally Knuckles wasn't in Flying Battery. This morning Midio posted another version of this picture showing Knuckles running through Hydrocity zone instead (which I unfortunately didn't screencap), but then it was taken down and replaced with the Flying Battery version. Could that imply that Hydrocity is a stage in Mania? If so I'm all for it, I loved Hydrocity Zone. I don't think I would have suspected it as much had it not been taken down.
Usually if something is removed quickly it means it wasnt supposed to be shown, so i'll take that as confirmation for hydrocity in sonic mania.
I think most of us were expecting Hydrocity anyway. Best water level in the series. Ice Cap, although the most popular S3 level, was always a long shot for the usual reasons. Also, the introduction manual showed some ice stuff in another setting via concept art.
Yeah, after Chemical Plant was announced I was expecting Hydrocity over Aquatic Ruin as the water zone, so it wouldn't be a surprise to me.
To echo everyone else here it does look like Hydrocity might be our Sonic 3 zone. Usually when something is posted and taken down it's because it's too early to reveal and show it off so the mistake should be confirmation that we're getting Hydrocity. It was always going to be either Hydrocity or Ice Cap so it looks like we now have our answer. Just over two weeks away. The time has flown by. Can't believe the game is so close.
The panel last week already confirmed that the length was similar to Sonic 3 and Knuckles but probably slightly less. This file size to me indicates the possibility of something else we have wanted. I thought about spoiler tagging this theory, but honestly if you're reading the thread at this point so close to the release of the game you're probably not trying to avoid information. From my iTunes Library: Sonic 1 2.1.2.ipa - 33.4MB (Current version with extra Sega Forever shit is 65.8MB, which is why I used the ) Sonic 2 3.1.10.ipa - 44MB Sonic CD 2.0.1.ipa - 191.9MB Total: 269.3MB (Note these sizes were pulled from macOS and reflect hard drive manufacturer math, where 1KB = 1000 bytes and not 1024.) I know that .IPA files are compressed, but with the exception of Sonic CD's movies all of the game data is in the Data.rsdk files which don't compress well since they're encrypted so this gives us a reasonable estimate of how much space each game needs. Considering Sonic CD was somewhat wasteful when it came to space (the opening, good ending and bad endings all used 2 videos, one for each soundtrack instead of embedding 2 audio tracks in the same video file like Gems Collection did) if the 3 duplicates were omitted it would decrease the size of the game by about 100MB. Also remember that Sonic 1 and Sonic 2's audio was not emulated, it was pre-recorded as .ogg files. So the music takes about the same amount of space as any normal CDDA would. If we assume that Sonic Mania has about the same amount of game content as Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 combined, and the video takes up as much as Sonic CD not counting the duplicates, it's only going to need about 120MB. (If you're thinking the special stages would eat up a lot of space, don't. Remember that Sonic 3D Blast on Saturn, which had fully 3D special stages, used only 57MB for it's data track. The rest of the game was CDDA) In other words, what I'm saying is if Mania is 400MB, they have room for the previous games in there too. I'm really hoping that's the case, because it would justify the name and make it worth more than they're selling it for.
Daily reminder that nobody has said we're only getting one zone from each game. I'm still expecting both Hydrocity and Ice Cap.
I'm hoping for both since they're two of my favourite zones from the Sonic series. Just trying to moderate expectations. Think a Sonic Mania black-out might be necessary quite soon since everything from the game is destined to leak around release. I'd love to play the game and have at least have some zones saved as a surprise. So might check out of this thread soon to preserve the secrets we're not aware of yet.
It's also a matter of math. We know there should be a 60:40 split between returning and new zones, and we know there are 5 hard boiled heavies, so there are at least 5 new zones. Thus, at very least there are 6 returning zone from 5 games (1, 2, 3, K, CD, and yes, Taxman said 3 and K are considered separate), and I wouldn't be surprised if there are at least 7 (and there is still the possibility there is a sixth new zone, the final Eggman base, which makes more sense being new as opposed as bringing back Deat Egg again).
lol, why are you guys taking the math so seriously? It's just as likely a number they pulled out of their butt in the spur of the moment.
Sonic CD's videos were in standard definition (maybe even less? I kinda remember the resolution kinda sucking), but I expect Mania's videos to be in HD, since they were made in the era of HD video and all versions of the game are meant to be played in HD monitors. That probably explains most of the difference in download size.
