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Assembler games member has Sonic xtreme POV stuff

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Spinksy, Oct 21, 2014.

  1. Spinksy

    Spinksy

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    Nice to see a video and you even put space queens music on it too :)
     
  2. Energy

    Energy

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    The video seems to be working better than I thought extreme ever did.
    Can't wait to see more :)
     
  3. Rosie

    Rosie

    aka Rosie Member
    Not gonna lie, I welled up a bit seeing Xtreme in motion like that =3

    You guys are awesome and should feel awesome.
     
  4. Andrew75

    Andrew75

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    Guy got a few facts bent just a tad, but ehh nice video anyhow. Thx for the nice vid TailsChannel !
    http://youtu.be/dEWAACyGh34
     
  5. Andrew75

    Andrew75

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    There is nothing on my end, although Jolly has not shared the .anm files yet. As for the bosses, there is nothing at all whatsoever from the boss builds except a flower texture that was scaled down for use in Nack's stage floor.
    What we have is basically a snap shot in time of around E3. JR does not have the engine or later levels that chris Senn has shown for Jade gully , Red sands, New paths and Crystal frost. That engine is much more recent and a lot more playable than what we have here.

    The 3 available versions of engine that JR is sharing are also pretty ,,,,,,(Bad shape) um how should I put it,It's the original team's Work in progress. According to Jolly, the engine is in mid re-wright so some of the code that did work ( and that .def files have parameters for) was stripped out and or commented out of the source code. a lot of it will need to restored after he finishes all 3 ports to Modern windows. He'll be able to mix and match attributes between 2 versions: 37 and 4 to get a more complete version that has restored functions that the .def files depend on.

    As for other technical news that I can share, ( or recap on) To help JR lighten the load, I've been asked to assist with setting up tweaked level physics. Every level has its own Physics Parameters. Some levels you can see that STI was tweaking physics from level save file to save file. And later builds have busted physics all together making levels completely unplayable. ( OUCH!)

    So yeah I've been looking threw a lot of the .def files in both Jolly's Leak and HXC's leak, I Found some comfortable parameters within both leaks. The HXC leak parameters however did not work out of box, since that engine used different coding attributes. I had to multiply or divide the parameters by even numbers. So with a marriage Between both types of parameters the results are very close to what was shown in the E3 video footage.
    Things that were tweaked include :bounce effect, air drag, run friction, jump up and down gravities, and a few more.) ( Sure its not 100% authentic but , at least its more comfortable to play than lets say jumping half way up a level with single bounce, or floating down to the ground slowly for 30 seconds. or having the camera right up in Sonic's face. ( for you guys who want something untouched, I think that it may be best to release 2 level packs separately so you can have something to play and something in original state.)

    Now, onto the rings and objects news. Many of the levels are using Actual cubes with odd cube collisions for rings and other props like badniks. These can be passed threw from the back to the front, but they have a force that pushes sonic making levels virtually not at all very fun to play threw)
    What Jolly has asked and that I've already started was to take Actors (like the rings actor) as found in older .defs and get them moved over to the newer .defs that lack the Actor section.
    Thank God that the engine can still load up the actors ( although some broken)

    First we need to tell the .def to load textures, than the pallet, than after the Cube section definition area, we need to add the new ring definition code.
    Inside the Actor's parameters we can tell It do the following:
    Bubble, FollowEdge, Follower, PingPong, Static, or leave it blank and the actor will have no collision.
    Some of these seem broken at the moment, Follower and static seem to be reversed actions, and bubble does not work,
    The real follower has an interesting action ,( I can not reveal that at the moment, You all will have to wait for future videos)

    I've also made a small chart that tells us which color to use for the .pcx layout image maps when drawing Cubes and Actors. The engine uses the index of the color to lay out the objects and not the color itself.
    (color is only important for the artist's to use it as a visual when designing layouts. What I mean is for example we could change the color of the index chart in Photoshop and the engine wouldn't give a shit another words)
    C starts the cube actors and A starts the Actors pallet index color.

    Please note since this image has been screen captured , its color attributes are not the same as a real indexed color and can not be used when editing a real .pcx map file. ( yes I learned the hard way)
    [​IMG]
     
  6. TheKazeblade

    TheKazeblade

    "Our Life is More than a Side-Effect" Member
    Has there been any indication that Ofer Alon knows that this build has been discovered yet? I'd hate for your progress to be hindered if he doesn't like what's going on.
     
  7. Andrew75

    Andrew75

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    Done with rings tests. and spawned multiple Sonic's that are all controllable , its funny to make them get stuck on geometry while steering them around. And when the main sonic catches up to them, you can move em around as a cluster group.
    (I don't think spawning has a limit, if it does I did not attempt to reach it lol)
    Now with these initial tests done, Feedback will be given to Jolly so he can check for things in code and make adjustments if necessary.

    [​IMG]

    If he knows about it, he hasn't said anything.
     
  8. Vipershark

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    Just to clarify: unless I was reading previous pages wrong, there are five builds total in this leak, right?
    If I recall correctly there were four that we know of and one that hasn't been seen by anyone yet?

    You say that JR is sharing three builds but you only listed versions 37 and 40. Is one of them a duplicate (or incremented) build? What about the other two builds?
     
  9. Energy

    Energy

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    Not sure about the 5 builds, but I believe the 3rd build is the saturn build. So version 37, 40 and Saturn attempt?

    I seem to remember JR or Andrew75 talking about POV having some very early test builds that just load an object or something. So that could be the other builds, basically a few engine tests? But then again I've only followed them really talking about the 3 builds.
     
  10. Andrew75

    Andrew75

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    Build 37 is the NV1 build, Build 40 is Saturn build and there is a POV build also for NV1.
    I'll recheck with JR to make sure.
     
  11. TheKazeblade

    TheKazeblade

    "Our Life is More than a Side-Effect" Member
    Have you been noticing significant differences between the STI and POV versions of the engine? From what we heard from Senn, it sounds like they literally did nothing to improve the engine after receiving it, but I always wondered if that meant changes were made but improvements weren't reflected, or if there were any changes at all.
     
  12. Jollyroger

    Jollyroger

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    The five builds we have are:
    - v37 engine and level editor for Windows 95 + NV1 (we have the source code)
    - v40 engine and level editor for Windows 95 + NV1 (we have the source code)
    - v40 engine for Saturn (we have the source code)
    - v53 level editor only for Windows 95 + NV1 (we have a very small amount of the source code, I reconstructed it from mostly binary object files)
    - POV engine for Saturn (we have the source code)

    Jolly

    The POV engine does not share a single line of code with the STI engine, not one.

    As for the data, POV wrote a tool to convert levels written for the STI engine into the format used by the POV engine, which is very, very different, completely in binary format, and much, much more efficient and faster to load from CD.

    Jolly
     
  13. TheKazeblade

    TheKazeblade

    "Our Life is More than a Side-Effect" Member
    It's really interesting to hear this after Senn's claim that POV had nothing to show of the engine, especially because whatever they did looks to be more efficient. At least it doesn't look like POV were just twirling their thumbs wasting time. Which Saturn build ran better in their found states, STI or POV?
     
  14. Jollyroger

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    The v40 engine barely runs on the Saturn, it was obviously in the middle of a large code refactoring to improve the performance, and clearly work in progress. The frame rate on the only level I tested is around 15-20 FPS, but there is essentially no game logic and the level is very small, with only one texture used for the entire world.

    The POV engine we have is more similar to v37 in that it has no fisheye lens, but the only level that runs in the engine (FRESH) seems to runs at a more consistent frame rate, around 20 FPS, and has Sonic that runs, jumps, has many animation frames. There are rings and enemies in the level too, but they don't do anything. It is obviously a technical demo, but it isn't too bad at all.
    I guess very few people have seen this version...

    Jolly
     
  15. TheKazeblade

    TheKazeblade

    "Our Life is More than a Side-Effect" Member
    To my knowledge, before you released this content, no one outside of maybe some Sega bigwigs and POV themselves had seen POV's engine.

    The latest version of this iteration of the game I believe the public was shown was probably either v37 or v40; after that, the development was split between Alon and Senn, who went on to refine the engine further and create what was seen in the Four Worlds footage, and POV created this. POV's was never shown to the public, and honestly, based on Senn's testimony, it might not have been shown in this state to Sega either, since it sounds like all they showed was a sphere and texture, or something like that. At the very least, the testimony was that POV's engine ran just as bad as STI's before Senn and Alon revamped it. I'm wondering if that just comes from resentment for Sega demanding they go to the boss engine only, or for the eventual cancellation.
     
  16. Jollyroger

    Jollyroger

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    The most recently dated file in the POV archive dates October 20, 1996.
    The most recent version of STI's engine we have is dated June 30, 1996.

    Of course, this archive coming from POV, they received snapshots of STI's work along the way, or at the point they began their work.

    We do not know if they (POV) continued working on this after October 1996, we do know that STI pushed further forward with the PC only version of XTreme, which is what the more recent gameplay videos have been made with.

    In terms of the Saturn, POV's technology is considerably superior in my opinion, but it is a general purpose multi-platform engine, which they used to create a tech demo that is their interpretation of XTreme, and using the data from STI.

    Jolly
     
  17. Willie

    Willie

    Each day the world turns Laugh 'til it all burns Member
    Judging from that trailer, Project AXSX's physics look a lot better. lol Excellent work guys. It'll be cool to see how this all continues to evolve.
     
  18. Andrew75

    Andrew75

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    I think that if STI had kept working on the engine the physics and gameplay feeling would have Improved. its not that the physics are super bad, they feel different than Sonic's physics, ( for me while playing the beta, the air and bounce physics feel more umm... how should I say this,,,, real world simulator based in a since than Sonic's physics.)
    I think I'm going to receive a lot of flak for that last comment. (Oh god here it comes !)
    Collisions and interacting with walls on the other hand are pretty rough around the edges.

    STI only worked on that PC/Saturn version of the game for like what? a year? Sure AXSX has more refined physics! It uses Sonic GDK's physics that were fine tuned using GHZ 2.5D as a testing ground to tweak them up a bit.
    Xak also had the Sonic physics guide on his side. A great help indeed. I don't know if STI would have had such information made available to them. ( We could Ask Senn about that )
    I don't think its fair to compare the 2 games since they are different in a lot of ways. ( And keep in mind that at the same point in time , (a full year) AXSX was still in game maker and did not even have a vertex based fisheye lens yet, Hell the gameplay feeling was worse off than any of the STI engines here.
     
  19. Vipershark

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    Great, thanks.
    I'm assuming there's no possible way to reconstruct the version 53 engine with only the level editor available?

    Are there any v53 assets (levels, etc) that can be retrofitted into the older engine(s) at least?
     
  20. Jollyroger

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    Unfortunately there is no way.

    We may be able to reuse some v53 assets and retrofit them to work on v40, but v40 needs A LOT of work...

    Jolly