Just want to say thanks again for making this, Eukaryot. If you weren't aware, Thorn has created a mod of my original ROM hack (Sonic 3: D.A. Garden Edition - Source Code and Sonic 3 A.I.R port) and it's so accurate. A great way to experience the project again. As a result, Thorn has been fixing some issues with the implementation, and we've found some that are in the stock Sonic 3 A.I.R you may want to look at. This spring from the wall in Death Egg Zone Act 1 is using some garbled graphics on the platform underneath it: This garbled graphic shows whenever the Sandopolis Zone Act 2 boss fires the laser:
Also great thing about this is now I can play DA Garden edition with other mods. I can play with Mania sprites as god intended lol
What's the problem with the S3K sprites? Is there something wrong with them? Also, an off-topic... Has anyone ever thought of porting to PC the Taxman version of Sonic1&2?
You're right, that is completely off-topic to Sonic 3 AIR. Please don't shit up other people's threads with completely unrelated crap.
Hey Sappharad and Eukaryot, Here is a screenshot of the glitch (top pic) that I had mentioned on the previous page with the screen freaking out on the macOS version of the game. The screen filter was set to HQ2x and I had the special stages set at random (but I don’t think that really matters). I also have another screenshot of the game freezing during the AIZ1 mini boss (Bottom pic). You can see the rainbow wheel in the middle of the screen.
Hey Jordan, I hope that's the same glitch that I was talking about earlier. At least the outcome looks very similar. Regarding the freeze - I've got no idea what could be the issue there. Maybe we're lucky and it's related, then this should be fixed with the next preview as well. Thanks for reporting. Looks like something that should better get fixed. First of all, great work @Thorn for the excellent port, and of course @D.A.Garden for the fantastic original ROM hack! The first bug is something I was too lazy to fix all this time and hoped nobody would notice. The spring is not meant to be placed in DEZ 1, so there's some changes needed first to make it work graphically there. The second bug, however, looks new. Or at least it's not known so far. Got to have a look at it as well.
Regarding the first glitch, I believe it is. Regarding the freeze, it was incredibly random and unexpected. It was a first for me too.. hopefully it’s a one and done. Not a game breaker though, was able to close the app out with a force quit. cant wait for the next preview build
@Eukaryot Question about music modding. Is it possible to implement an option in the menus to randomize the selection of sound test items? For example, say I found 3 pieces of music I'd like to listen to for Flying Battery Zone, act 1 (sound test #09). Right now, I can only program one piece of music into the list. I'd like to listen to any of the 3 I may have found because all three sound good. Could it be possible to make the game randomly choose the audio file to play for sound test #09 for FBZ Act 1? Like right now I have this in my list: Code (Text): "09": { "File": "A_RX1_FBZ1.ogg", "Type": "Music", "LoopStart": "642096" }, Could something be implemented like this, where the game randomly chooses one of N options?: Code (Text): "09_option1": { "File": "A_RX1_FBZ1.ogg", "Type": "Music", "LoopStart": "642096" }, "09_option2": { "File": "A_RX1_FBZ2.ogg", "Type": "Music", "LoopStart": "528694" }, "09_option3": { "File": "A_RX1_FBZ3.ogg", "Type": "Music", "LoopStart": "982558" }, EDIT: By the way, happy 1+ year anniversary to this terrific mod. My how time has flown, it's been since April 2019 that this mod came into existence. It feels like just a few months have passed, lol. EDIT 2: I just downloaded the latest stable version for April 26, 2020. I see that there were more mods made to the music selection. I'd like to add a second request, perhaps something more of a priority over the request above...can the Soundtrack music have its own section in the menu? For example, instead of being in the AUDIO section, can it be in a MUSIC section? Perhaps that would require an overhaul the menu option for soundtrack. EDIT 3: What's the difference between "28" and "28_sonic" in the sound test?
Sorry I missed this. Unfortunately, random freezes aren't easy to fix without being able to make it happen and I'm guessing it probably only happened once, right? If it ever happens again and if force quit brings up one of those crash reporter dialogs (I don't know if it will) don't actually send the crash report but instead copy/paste it and post it here. Sending the report just goes to Apple since it's not an app store app, which isn't helpful because I can't see it. Use spoiler tags or something to hide it, because the report will be large. There was a random timing related crash that got fixed prior to the preview release (very rare, sometimes you could play the entire game start to finish and never run into it; once I made it all the way to launch base before it happened) and I'm wondering if it's possible that the fix for that problem turned the crash into a freeze. Although it seems very unlikely for that to be the problem as someone would have probably run into the same problem on Windows maybe.
Yes this has only happened once at the moment.. and when I had to close the game via force quit, no crash report popped up.. so idk maybe going too fast was too much?? Lol it happened right after I came across the results glitch (the first screenshot I posted) when I blazed to the mini boss and was attacking it (I think I had the invincibility power up at the time as well; it’s hard to tell because Sonic is not on screen lol)
In regards to the overhauling of the menu for Soundtrack items, perhaps there can be a sub-menu called Advanced, with a table of different customization options. I noticed it takes time to scroll through the music selections just to choose one to listen to. I don't know what the table can look like to be simple enough, yet advanced for custom tweakings here and there. Here's something I came up with. I uploaded a ZIP file with the Excel sheet inside:
I just wanted to throw this idea out there, even though I wouldn't be able to do it, in case someone with the time is interested in picking it up... Sonic 3 A.I.R as a Retroarch core would be really cool now that source code is available (well, I thought it was... I can't find any trace of it now). It would allow us to play the game on many different platforms!
This is super weird but I had a dream about Sonic 3 A.I.R. last night. ...That there was an unlockable secret Encore-inspired mode that did all sorts of cool things with the levels. It even added Hyudoros to the dark section of Carnival Night but they wouldn't attack as frequently as in Sandopolis Zone...but they came up from the water instead with some different animation going on!!!!! I now really, really want to see this in-game one day! I should learn modding.
The request for a native Linux version came up here in the thread quite a while ago already. Guess what - I finally put together a Linux port with all the features known from the other versions. That includes all the same content, full mod support for the existing mods, Discord Rich Presence integration (which now works on Mac as well, thanks to Mac version developer @Sappharad ), and the Oxygen development application. And of course, Windows and Mac version got updated as well. You can download the new preview and the changelog on sonic3air.org .
Damn, that's fantastic! Makes me wanna set up Box86 on my Raspberry Pi and see if I can get it working on there.
I'm not sure how many people agree with me, but could the competition mode be moved to the main menu? I always feel like it was an important part of Sonic 3, and I feel like there's enough space for it there, too. Blue Spheres makes sense to be in the extras as it's a secret minigame, but competition mode, considering the fact that it has 6 unique music tracks and its menu is based on the save select menu, feels bigger to me. To be honest though, I'm not sure if it's even possible, I'm not a game developer
There’s a link going around the Internet saying that you can download Sonic 3 AIR on either your Android or iOS device. I’m pretty sure it’s BS but there’s a video on YouTube of someone actually playing a mobile version of the game.. so when checking it out myself, the link leads to one of those “having to download certain apps and do this on each for the content to work” ordeal. So yeah unfortunately it’s a scam and it’s a shame this is happening. I don’t even think there’s an iOS version of AIR being developed (at the moment; would love to see it) so don’t fall for the clickbait! I already reported this on YouTube.
There does seem to be a way to run it on Android, but it's far too slow to be playable. The videos i've seen are using ExaGear, which is an x86 emulator for ARM chips. I can vouch for the app being real at the very least. I tried out a previous version that was geared towards older strategy games. Tested it with Civilization 3 (which that version of the app was optimized for specifically) and it actually did work well for that purpose. They made a newer release that opened it up to the entire PC library, to a certain extent. Though performance is abysmal on most games. As can be demonstrated by it trying to run Sonic Adventure DX, a game that once ran full speed even on my ancient Pentium 3 computer from Y2K- It's even possible to get Sonic Mania running on this app. Again not at full speed. Seems better than 3D games at least. But even the best ARM chips won't get you to full speed. Sonic 3 AIR seems to have extremely aggressive frameskipping and/or slowdown based on what i've seen. In addition, I think ExaGear was removed from Google Play and has been discontinued for almost 2 years now.
This is exactly what I wanted to do. I tried it yesterday and was just getting errors from Box86 which aparrently imply that Sonic 3 AIR for Linux is 64 bit which means it is unsupported by Box86. It could be something else causing the error though! I would be interested to know if somebody gets it working in the Pi.
I’ll admit I just got excited and posted about it without knowing off-hand if AIRwas 32 or 64 bit, haven’t tried messing with it myself yet.
