General Project Thread & Feedback

Well here's a wild idea, why don't you put your current art in the database instead of doing everything privately.

 

That would be awesome!!!!!!1!!

 

I gotta say, the new art that HAS been shown looks much truer to original concept art, and that's what the team SHOULD be basing their stuff off. Keep up the good work!

 

HAHAHA WHAT?! It absolutely does. Like Maximus said, now he won't know if his artwork is accepted or not so why even bother submitting anything. Why even waste his time at that point? You're discouraging people entirely. This isn't semantics, don't play this off with bullshit definitions you don't even understand.

You forgot to add "and what we do have the final say on is kept to ourselves". The whole purpose of this project was for everyone in this community to get together and work on accomplishing the same goal. With your actions you've basically fortified a wall keeping people out and refusing to show them anything you've deemed final. On top of this, you're keeping the source code private. Not only does your little group have full control over the art assets but anybody willing to contribute on the programming line is shut off because they can't access to it. You're asking for programming help, but you're not sharing any of the bloody programming.

You released silhouettes of things we've already seen worked on in this very forum. Whatever "updated" art style you have is shrouded in mystery and the only pieces we have to work with is a single badnik and a flicky that in no way represents the scope of the new artstyle being used for this project. An art style that seemed to have been changed behind our backs and no one knew about. To tease the people that are helping you work on this project is one of the dumbest moves you can pull because now you leave everyone wondering "what the fuck do you want?!". That effectively made any recent contributions by the community obsolete if they don't follow the new art style because we aren't aware of it.

Congratulations, you've just split the "Community" part from "Community Project". Now it's no longer semantics!

 

My impressions of what the Sonic 2 HD leaders have been saying isn't very good at all. You guys are being either evasive or outright ignoring concerns of people.

I definitely agree with this. Nowhere did anyone say that community projects have to be entirely democratic, but we need the ability to freely contribute if we feel that we want to. Additionally, work and ideas that the leaders have need to be publicly available so that the community as a whole can be properly informed and feel like this is actually going somewhere...

About the only really impressive piece of artwork released was the new title image. The rest of it was a huge letdown.

Here's the thing. There is a huge difference between being connected with the community and working with it, and stopping with EVERY SINGLE conflicting comment. Not everybody is going to be happy with the project. When a majority of the people who do follow the project are upset, and when the people that are above you are upset, that is when you know you are doing something seriously wrong.

So far, I've seen two admins, a mod, a wiki sysop, a few tech members, and a lot of project enthusiasts very upset about this. Maybe you should ask the important people what they want to see out of the project.

The programmers really want to have access to the codebase. Open source it and let the people contribute. There are a number of great programmers in the community, and enhancing the game engine shouldn't be limited to community members alone. Other people could work on it too, and we'd benefit from it!

Release a set of completed artwork that people can look at for referencing when designing new art to submit to the project. People need to feel that they would be useful, and they want to feel like their work is going to be used. That means having a way for the rest of the community to know exactly what the direction that the art needs to go in.

I would love to see Sonic 2 HD as a project succeed, but you guys NEED to cooperate with the rest of Retro if we all want to have the experience we want and deserve.

 

I'm in 100% agreement with all the complaints against the Sonic 2 HD staff for keeping all the project assets hidden from view, and nothing that needs to be said hasn't been said already. Seriously, have you not been paying attention to the Sonic 4 hype these past few months? It should be painfully obvious to you by now that building up massive amounts of hype for a disproportionately small release only causes extreme amounts of rage and aversion. And if you had any common sense, you'd realize that when anybody is involved in the creation of any work, they will rightfully feel that they deserve to be let in on the product under construction. I mean, hello!? What were you thinking!?

By the way, I hate the new Masher.

 

I promise you, if you make a better one, it will be used, as long as yours is the best choice available.

Not even the staff can say the current masher is the best, if the majority of the community disagree.
The communty means this forum, and that require this forum to stay open, and not to be reduced.

 

I think it's a big improvement, but it has its own flaws. Had it not been kept as a secret, all those flaws might have been noticed and ironed out by now... I hope you guys get what we mean.

 

I though that the main point of using the concept art as reference was to add more detail to the sprites, but with the Masher you guys somehow managed to remove detail from it (except for the tail fin, which is awesome).

I'm glad to see that the days where everything had to match the original pixels perfectly are gone (remember when people would scale the HD sprites down to see how well they matched the original ones?), and now we can change shapes and colors if we feel it'll improve the quality (after all, not even the original artists were perfect, and we certainly have people in this community that can do better).

 

So I'm not going to complain, I'll just ask a question I have so that the staff can, hopefully, make people understand more. Ok so I agree democracy is overrated, and I am happy there are leaders... However, how does this statement change anything. For example, I've been watching the debate over which fireball gets used for Ghora. People had said they liked the Mario style, but thought the CG versions were much easier to efficiently create... Did the staff ever decide which they preferred? Do they have a verdict, and are you just leaving the rest of us in the dark? I generally agree with the staff so I'm not worried about what they decide, generally, but I at least expect to know where things stand, or else why am I even a "member"?

And also, I think there is added value by having the "community" critique what is being made. For example, I recall making some suggestions to CN which were considered and often implemented, but when he disappeared from the scene, so too did any value I felt I could give.

 

Hear hear. As I remember, the fuss about the term 'originalpixelfag' was because of the slavish devotion to this practice, which was incredibly conservative and short-sighted. It annoyed folk here, especially when the hypocrisy in doing so and yet talking about pointless extras was highlighted (two words: PAUSE MENU).

Glad to see the guys coming around, as I've said. I'm disappointed in Sonic 2: Silhouette Edition, and like most other people here I absolutely insist everything be made public, and give the community project back to the community. I just ask that you (and Tweaker) reconsider the approach that is banning anyone who's too vocal a detractor to what goes on here. Sure, if someone's being an ass it's out of line -- but if you were to look back at how this project's direction has changed since the 'originalpixelfag' and PAUSE MENU, you'll see that your most vocal detractors turned out to have told you so.

By no means let the trolls stomp all over your efforts, but don't refuse the tough love, eh?

 

This looks VERY sexy!

 

Wait. So the only things that people can complain about and work to improve is the few assets that you bother to release to the public? I see an issue with that. :specialed:

 

Where do contributers go from here? What is their part in the big picture?

Clearly not every artist is up to par in ability to match the quality expecting of the core team. But what about those artists in the middle? Who spend time on their art with revision after revision through forum goer requests until they arrive at a final product only to be shoved into concept art when the core team disapproves. You need to intervene here so things aren't worked on and worked on for nothing.

You told users not to work on Emerald Hill so from that point it was kind of assumed that you guys were working behind the scenes so it wasn't at all a shocker. And I'll say it again, I don't have a problem with you guys working behind the scenes. But you need to make it clear where contributers go from here; what is their say?; Can their voices be heard whether it be through art or opinions.

Like subsubstantive said, are all those users just wasting their time trying to create fire and revise it over and over and put in their two cents? You guys are great artists, and its nice that you have all your shit together and your ship is going full steam a head, but out here on the forums its an unorganized mess and with this announcement of a closed community project you just swung at a hornets nest.

Please clean up the forums with organization and updates and repair the useless database and tell us where to contributers go from here. What should people be working on and why?

 

You want your art to be there? All my art in-game are the rings and the menu font. >.>

The things goes this way, the people that makes nice art and is active gets promoted to staff. In fact, the good contributors (not only visually but in activity too) end up being staff, so all the art is from the staff lol. But that doesn't guarantee your art will be there, if someone makes it better, bye bye original art =P.

 

That's a given. The problem was no one felt that doing work would amount to anything, because of no involvement by staff in community and no organization in handling community collaboration...

 

What I don't like is that by keeping everything secret it's like all of a sudden the only opinions that matter are those of the staff. The community looks to each other, and occasionally the staff for advice. But the staff couldn't care less what we think about their own work. Even if some suggestions are useless. They're still just suggestions, and it's just one more way of involving the community and making them feel valuable to the project. Value our input, and we're more likely to stick around.

And teasers shouldn't exist (really contradicting myself here, but I've had a change of heart). This isn't Sega, and contributors can't be treated like "fans".

Ahh, perfect.

 

He's not asking for his work to be there so he can be smug about it. Maximus just wants the database cleaned up so he can do his part just like the rest of us here and add contributions where needed. I wish someone would give him the access to sort it out because it would have been cleaned up like yesterday. He has been on about it for weeks about it being a shit hole and I agree.

The house keeping needs to be sorted immediately. It will please alot of us here because from our end it will look like the project is moving forward.

 

We've been considering the requests made so far, and we've found some of your proposals extremely interesting. They're being discussed by the staff; we'll have more answers for you tomorrow.

 

As I stated earlier, we have been meaning to clean things up. It's a mess for us too, really. We've recently made a backup of all the stuff in the database to prepare for some cleaning. We've had a couple occasions when it's got screwed up so a backup is always a good idea, but anyways, we've had it planned, we just haven't had time. As some of you may have noticed we're gonna have a meeting with the site staff tomorrow (unless something comes up) and if things go well you'll most likely see us start to implement some changes.