[Hayate]

Latest Info is HERE: http://forums.sonicr...ndpost&p=737418

Hey, remember this?

after releasing the Casual Editions, I was still looking for something to do and figured I might as well go work on Cz some more.

Two days later and this is the result:



download

Basically my plan of action was to make the entire game playable as Amy, and now it is.

If you're wondering why I'd release something that's clearly unfinished, do note, I want to work on more bugfixes and features while anyone who wants to play it in its current state, can. If I waited til everything was done, I'd never release it at all. Actually releasing something motivates me to do more work on it, I guess. Besides, my name's Hayate, since when did Hayate not release things that were ridiculously glitchy messes?

Full changelog of what I've done in this little hacking spree:

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* Amy now has new sprites/animations for bouncing on a spring, being hurt, crouching, waiting, looking up and posing when you complete an act.
* Amy now has a dash hammer attack, which you can use by building up speed, then holding down. It uses up your inertia though, can only be used on fairly level ground, and doesn't last long! Release Down to cancel the attack early.
* Amy can now break AIZ/LRZ top-breakable rocks and LBZ pipe plugs with her hammer.
* Amy can still enter tunnels that force her to spin, but will now automatically stop spinning and go back to running when she leaves them.
* Amy can now break SOZ rising sand walls and corks, allowing her to complete the zone. She can also hit the act 2 boss properly without being invincible/Super/Hyper, but it's difficult to hit without getting hit yourself as it sucks the player character in assuming they'll jump into a ball and rebound.
* Amy can now break LRZ projectile shooting door opening enemies.
* Amy can't move LRZ dash elevators, but she CAN break them with her hammer! This allows her to complete the zone (act 1 boss requires Super/Hyper).
* Hyper Amy's afterimages now appear properly.
* Amy can now hit the DEZ3 post-final-boss Eggpod (the one that you're not allowed to be Super/Hyper for).
* Beating DEZ3 as Amy no longer crashes the game (beating DEZ3 as Knuckles still does, though).

I must admit I haven't tested the hammer responses for things in SSZ and DEZ, as I kinda just flew through them in hyper mode... so you may need to do the same. But I'm sure everyone on here can collect 7 emeralds

In addition to these changes, there were a ton of changes I made between the previous release and now, which I'd totally forgot even doing. I'll summarize what I can remember:

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* You now gain rings from killing enemies, ala SATSEE.
* You can now only enter the Special Stages from climbing all the way up to the top of the Magnet Ball Bonus Stage. And to enter that bonus stage, you have to get 80 rings and hit a checkpoint (20-49 gives you the slot machine and 50-79 gives you the gumball machine, neither of which have tops).
* While transforming still requires 50 rings (I may change this in future), transformation drains your score which has been renamed to Power, instead of your rings.
* You have infinite lives, anything that would get you an extra life gets you 10000 points instead. The life counter is no longer displayed. If you die, you lose 10000 points or all your points if you have less than that, but you don't game over even if you don't have enough points.
* Giant rings always give 5000 points (and don't give rings, and don't lead to special stages or HPZ).
* In Doomsday Zone, you start with 5000 points, and you gain 10000 points every 50 rings (instead of every 100 rings as elsewhere in the game).

Bugs worth drawing attention to:

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* For whatever reason, when you complete DEZ3 with all 14 emeralds, it goes to the credits, but when you go to load your file it shows up as ZONE14 not CLEAR. If you then play the file again, it'll take you to Doomsday Zone and then the same credits, and THEN the file will say CLEAR.
* Do not fight Knuckles' boss at the end of LBZ2. If you do, the cutscene where you fall into Mushroom Hill never ends, just like if you manage to fight Knuckles' boss as Sonic/Tails in the original game.
* In the LRZ1 cylinders and the SSZ cutscene tower that you run around, the game will lag a lot and may glitch up the graphics, but there will be no other unwanted effects, and the lag will stop once you leave the cylinder. If you're impatient, just hold TAB (or whatever your speedup button might be).

Oh, and for those who were wondering what Cz stands for? I've retconned it to stand for nothing. Yes the hack used to be called Customizable, but I don't really care to maintain that as Tiddles has steadily improved his customizable version which is far better. I've been thinking of what else to call it - called it Amy in Sonic 3 for a while because that's the main concept going on here, but then Psi came along with a far more fitting hack for that name once again. So because nobody else would ever have any good reason to use the name "Sonic 3 Cz", let's just use that and stick with it.

Now after this enormous post, guess I have a wiki page to renovate...!

This post has been edited by Hayate: 01 April 2013 - 05:05 PM

[Tiddles]

Nice to see a new version of this again.

Hayate, on 30 October 2012 - 09:39 AM, said:

* For whatever reason, when you complete DEZ3 with all 14 emeralds, it goes to the credits, but when you go to load your file it shows up as ZONE14 not CLEAR. If you then play the file again, it'll take you to Doomsday Zone and then the same credits, and THEN the file will say CLEAR.

The pre-Doomsday bailout may be to do with loc_803D6/loc_8040C, which controls where you go at the end of DEZ3. SaveGame will look after how the save gets stored, but I'm going to assume that's not the bit that's wrong.

This post has been edited by Tiddles: 30 October 2012 - 02:27 PM

[Hayate]

Tiddles, on 30 October 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

The pre-Doomsday bailout may be to do with loc_803D6/loc_8040C, which controls where you go at the end of DEZ3. SaveGame will look after how the save gets stored, but I'm going to assume that's not the bit that's wrong.

Oh wow - I knew I recognised 8040C when I read your post - I had been studying the code around there for ages and never noticed the access to $FFFF08 until now... and now it's blindingly obvious - as well as immediately following is code saying, if you're playing as Knuckles, go to the SEGA screen!

I always thought the game actually crashed if you cleared that act as Knuckles - but this makes it clear that it was a deliberate choice by the original programmers.

As for the Amy behaviour - it's sending anything that isn't Sonic, Sonic+Tails or Knuckles to the credits - which in the original game would be just Tails alone, but here, it would be all the new combinations as well.

This has been very insightful, thanks very much

[BadCopNoDonut]

Awesome. Amy adds something new and interesting to S3K. Glad to see someone breaking into hacking it, as so few hacks of it are out there. I'll be following this one for sure. I don't have much technical feedback unfortunately, as I've always been purely an art hacker.

[Putmalk]

I downloaded this without reading anything really about it. I just saw the picture and thought it would be worth the time.

Anyway, here is the result:

[Hayate]

Hey, thanks! It's always good to have feedback, and a video is a bonus

1. Taking Knuckles' route in AIZ, you CAN get to the boss arena, but you can't complete the zone as the boss doesn't appear yet. This and the respawn issue will obviously be fixed in the future.
2. It's a shame you didn't get to the top of the bonus stage. Try it!
3. You were so close in HCZ. You're not supposed to go through the loop, I guess I should put a solid object there so you can't go down even if you somehow gain the momentum like you did. There's another path to take from that checkpoint.
4. ICZ yes that bit is annoying. I'm not sure what to do about it yet. But at the moment you have to kill the penguin, then get some speed for the swing, and continue as normal. It's fiddly, but doable.

If you haven't done so yet I wouldn't mind seeing your reactions to 2 and 3 in another video

This post has been edited by Hayate: 01 November 2012 - 01:43 AM

[dsrb]

Oh, hey, it's pretty cool to see this showing signs of life again. What are your plans for future development? Can we expect any more fun little surprises like the one you omitted from the ‘full’ changelog?

[KingofHarts]

Great to see this hack back in the making. S3 Customizable was one of the first hacks I played from Retro back in the day.

I don't really care for the alternative method of accessing special stages, but it's something new and different, which is a plus no matter what.
That, and seeing a hack with a complete Modern Amy is always great.

Looking forward to more of this Hayate! AND Welcome Back!!

[Hayate]

dsrb, on 01 November 2012 - 08:02 AM, said:

Oh, hey, it's pretty cool to see this showing signs of life again. What are your plans for future development? Can we expect any more fun little surprises like the one you omitted from the ‘full’ changelog?

What's this surprise you mentioned?

If I omitted a change from the changelog, it means I made that change back in 2010 between the last release and putting the hack on hiatus and then forgot about it.

All the planned changes that I want to make public will be on the wiki page.

There are some more things I've been thinking about that I will keep quiet about for a while though

KingofHarts, on 01 November 2012 - 09:08 AM, said:

I don't really care for the alternative method of accessing special stages, but it's something new and different, which is a plus no matter what.

I put that in for two reasons - one, I thought it was far too easy to get there in the original game, and two, I felt the ability to climb off the top of the bonus stage was a missed opportunity.

It's more challenging when you have to get a certain number of rings (in this case 80) - plus you have to beat the bonus stage as well.

Good to see you again too

[Putmalk]

Hayate, on 01 November 2012 - 01:43 AM, said:

Hey, thanks! It's always good to have feedback, and a video is a bonus

1. Taking Knuckles' route in AIZ, you CAN get to the boss arena, but you can't complete the zone as the boss doesn't appear yet. This and the respawn issue will obviously be fixed in the future.
2. It's a shame you didn't get to the top of the bonus stage. Try it!
3. You were so close in HCZ. You're not supposed to go through the loop, I guess I should put a solid object there so you can't go down even if you somehow gain the momentum like you did. There's another path to take from that checkpoint.
4. ICZ yes that bit is annoying. I'm not sure what to do about it yet. But at the moment you have to kill the penguin, then get some speed for the swing, and continue as normal. It's fiddly, but doable.

If you haven't done so yet I wouldn't mind seeing your reactions to 2 and 3 in another video

Here you go.

[E-122-Psi]

Sorry I stole your thunder. :P

Nice to see signs of life with this again, and you're making some interesting twists on the actual setup here and there.

Most of the problems with bosses seem to be identical to ones I had with mine. You need extra flags to recognise when to switch to Knuckles' coding. I can try sorting it out, though it's been a while so it may take a while to refind where I edited everything.

I'm still baffled how you got some of the break coding working, examples such as the Ice cap stuff is lot better done than mine.

[Hayate]

E-122-Psi, on 01 November 2012 - 11:13 PM, said:

Sorry I stole your thunder. :P

Ahaha, don't worry about it, you already had Amy in Sonic 1/2, I feel bad about making you change the name for Sonic 3. :I

Besides, your Amy is different! :p

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Nice to see signs of life with this again, and you're making some interesting twists on the actual setup here and there.

Yep, there will be more to it later on too
The only annoying thing is that every time I look at the wiki page and see "redo Knuckles' ending completely", I wonder what the heck I planned for that, cause I don't remember at all.

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Most of the problems with bosses seem to be identical to ones I had with mine. You need extra flags to recognise when to switch to Knuckles' coding. I can try sorting it out, though it's been a while so it may take a while to refind where I edited everything.

I actually made a couple of handy subroutines. One checks for Tails' presence, one checks which route the player is on independent of character, and two more set whether Amy is on Sonic or Knuckles' route.

This way, when she selects a route at each of the branching points, it remembers which route you're on, and then it calls the checking subroutine later rather than comparing to FFB038 or FFFF08 directly. So all I need to do is track down where the code is that does the checking, and fix it. However, tracking that code down is sometimes extremely difficult.

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I'm still baffled how you got some of the break coding working, examples such as the Ice cap stuff is lot better done than mine.

Similarly I made a subroutine to check for collision with Amy's hammer, and hunt down the objects that need to be breakable and call it. I also set $1E and $1F for these objects - which is a height and width normally unused - to the hitbox for colliding with the hammer. That's why many enemies are possible but very difficult to hit, because they have a 0x0 hitbox but because they're standard enemies they do still do the hammer check even without me coding for them specifically.

Also, did you get my PM?

Going to watch Putmalk's video now

This post has been edited by Hayate: 02 November 2012 - 02:05 AM

[Hayate]

Putmalk, on 01 November 2012 - 10:44 PM, said:

Here you go.

Shame that your first video didn't work. :I

Some comments though:

1. It's intentional that Amy can't gain momentum from nothing. This is one of the ways her gameplay is more difficult - you have to build up your speed. Her high jump compensates for most problems this causes.
2. The entire reason I made the HCZ midboss in the first place is because Amy can't do the normal wall crushing section due to no spindash. So she skips it by taking a different route.
3. Yes, Amy is supposed to be the hardest character to play as.
4. There aren't supposed to be many level edits - only what's necessary. I'll just say now that the only level edit so far is the HCZ midboss, so there's no need to keep playing through all the zones if you're just looking for level edits.
5. Amy's not supposed to jump into a ball - it's another case of loads and loads of objects individually force the player into a ball when they jump out of them, and I have to go through and change them all one by one.
6. You gave me an idea for the HCZ2 Knuckles cutscene... I'd intended you to be able to take Knuckles' route here, but wasn't sure how to go about it. But now I'm thinking, if you hit him, it should unlock the screen and allow you to progress
7. Didn't know the bubbles in the HCZ2 boss were glitched actually, but I will see to fixing this. The reason is a bit of a long story, but ultimately it's due to adding the new signpost art - it causes problems in the LBZ midboss arena as well.

[Putmalk]

I'll continue to LP it - might as well, seems pretty interesting. Also might help you out.

[Putmalk]

Okay here it is. So many bugs and glitches prevent this from being completed past Marble Garden Zone.

This post has been edited by Putmalk: 02 November 2012 - 05:27 PM