Alot of the staff between 06 and Billy Hatcher actually overlap: Game Designer for both 06 and Billy Hatcher: Shun Nakamura (director) Atsushi Kanno Programmer Yoshitaka Kawabata (lead programmer for both) Takuma Komatsu Artists: Yoshinare Amaike Akira Mikame Yuki Takahashi Wataru Watanabe It's the movement of Sonic 06 that is precise and binary and less like the other 3D Sonic games up to that point. It's almost like controlling Billy without an egg. Am I crazy. And the combat too. The more enemies you defeat in an area within a time period you get more points. And it makes sense too, because the rest of the staff that worked on 3D Sonic games was at Sonic Team USA at that point. Shun Nakamura said he suddenly received a call on making a new Sonic in Japan (first time since Adventure), and it looks like he basically scrambled together the Billy Hatcher engine and hastily turned it into a Sonic game on new hardware. We see this happening often don't we? Sonic Rush physics was put into Sonic 4, Sonic Lost World morphed into Sonic Forces and now Frontiers is an amalgamation of Lost World, Forces and the battle portions of the new Sakura Wars game.
I would expect nothing less. Why rewrite from scratch what you have already put a lot of effort into building up? Billy Hatcher's code may be superior in some ways that we aren't privy to without a necessary deep-dive to determine so. As to the specific question, I can't answer that without first playing Billy Hatcher. But it wouldn't be too surprising to me if that was the case.
I don't know if this is right. It's probably the same philosophies for how movement should control (considering the shared staff), but 06 is so much more unstable and jittery that there's no way it's the same engine. Also Billy, when pushing the egg on a slope, has proper (albeit basic) momentum physics. You gain speed rolling down hills and can launch off of ramps and it feels natural. If they were working off of BH's code I'm sure that could've been tweaked for basic movement, or at the very least rolling/Spindashing. It's more likely the same designers and programmers of Billy were tasked with a Sonic game, quickly threw together an engine based somewhere between what they knew from BH + imitating Heroes and ShTH's gameplay, and were rushed. Very, very, very rushed.
I think it becomes jittery and unstable simply due to increasing the movement speed. In the end controlling Billy with an egg has some finesse not found in 06, so that did not carry over at all. Controlling without an egg was very very minor anyway, just talking about that part. But yeah, what you talk about seems true. Anyhow I find the Billy Hatcher and Sonic 06 connection fascinating anyway.
Let me amend what I said earlier for clarity: It wouldn't surprise me, BUT I would also expect them to borrow a certain amount of code from previous Sonic titles to make it "Sonic". I personally just don't think of it too hard. DOOM made Heretic, Hexen, Strife, etc. Build engine made Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc. Sonic 1 made Sonic 2, and from there Sonic 3. Wayne's World made B.O.B. Sonic Adventure 1 made Sonic Adventure 2. I suppose the fascination could be that something unrelated conceivably made a Sonic game, but they're both 3D at the end of the day. So I don't know, I just don't see it as anything but normal.
We know that often enough, this somehow seems unfeasible. Heroes changed it completely from SA2 IMO, only Shadow feels similar to it. The only thing that feels similar to 06 is...Billy imo
Here's my "I'm not sure I know as much about game physics as I think I do" post: For this period of gaming, would they still be cheating and using lookup tables for all things physics-related, or would they be calculating values on the fly? (I'm guessing Havok is running numerical solvers in the background, else what's the point of a physics engine, but I'm not sure how much of that applies to characters in Sonic 06). i.e. if it's all done with forces, e.g. pushing forward adds a "forward force" which is solved in real time, and they just changed the magnitude of that force from say, 1 (Billy Hatcher) to 2 (Sonic), then yeah they probably would copy-paste their physics engine... which in turn will probably be simulating something close to real life, hence why it'll feel "similar". If not... well they're probably going to copy-paste their physics engine anyway (or at least reimplement the same basic concepts), because there's no point reinventing the wheel if you don't have to. But I don't know how it works. If it were me I'd have built a physics library of some description which I'd carry through to each new game that needs it, but if you're working with 324890238403 platforms with various wacky limitations, maybe that's not possible, idk.
Sonic '06 physics is almost definitely not heavily derived from a previous engine as implementation of Havok + brand new platforms is going to render (pun intended) a lot of the old code useless. It's certainly not going to be derived from Billy Hatcher except possibly through the route Billy Hatcher -> Sonic Heroes -> Shadow the Hedgehog -> Sonic '06. Having said that, Sonic Heroes does feel like Billy Hatcher to me in many regards so there's that.
This obviously isn't the case for all games back then, but developers were definitely moving away from lookup tables around the 360 era. Back in the day it probably wasn't. Good luck porting GameCube code to PS3 hardware, for instance. Shouldn't be too hard anymore though when console hardware is less unique these days.
Billy Hatcher and Sonic Heroes were developed in paralell. It's a Sonic CD/Sonic 2 type situation. SA2 had no counterpart in Japan during the time it was made. But yeah you are right that 06 was made from scratch but I believe they referred to Billy Hatcher movement cause that it was the team knew - not Sonic Adventure controls.
