[speedyink]

This build is pretty damn cool, POV definitely knew what they were doing. Also, very cool that Mike Wallis was able to give us some more info. Awesome work, Jolly and Andrew!

Polish Pete, on 07 May 2015 - 04:41 PM, said:

That's very nice of Mike to respond to your question and give some more of his insight on those builds.

Now out of curiosity, do you think he's ever seen miiyouandmii2's three-part video documenting the development process of Sonic X-treme?

...

I think it's a pretty nicely made video and it definitely shows that there was effort and research put into this. It'd be nice if Mike could tell us if there are any facts that this guy got wrong or if there's anything Mike would like to add to this that we don't know yet.

That's a long documentary, quite a bit for him to watch. Still well done, I watched it a while ago and found it interesting. There are some facts he got wrong, like Chris Coffin being a dude, and POV's involvment. I doubt they showed a demo as crappy as he says in the video, given how high quality this latest POV build is. It sounds like it got even further too, would be interesting to know how far they got before SOJ pulled the plug.

This post has been edited by speedyink: 07 May 2015 - 09:07 PM

[winterhell]

speedyink, on 07 May 2015 - 08:57 PM, said:

There are some facts he got wrong, like Chris Coffin being a dude

I don't think he got that wrong, even though Christina Coffin is currently a woman.

On the POV topic, maybe their pitch was really a crappy 2 sprites on screen, maybe it wasn't. That doesn't exactly say if they were experienced and adequate for the task, but sure I wouldn't have hired them based on that demo alone. Maybe it was just that Senn saw only that demo.

As for the Offer's Saturn port being slow, there could have been a plethora of reasons. Sometimes the culprit could be as simple as culling the geometry on the CPU or doing batching or basically making one chip doing stuff that the other does 100 times faster. This happens even today with modern engines, where the CPU might cull a 1 quad mesh while the GPU does actually do it 100-1000 times faster.

[Lostgame]

I'm willing to code a multi-boot loader for the different builds assuming I can get the original ISO working on my Saturn this weekend, aha

Been meaning to get my hands dirty here, please advise - I'm thinking of building a compilation ISO with the POV/40 builds in a little menu, is there any way you guys think we could add this build without access to it's source code as well?

https://www.youtube....h?v=N6TcKAjAiN0

[speedyink]

winterhell, on 08 May 2015 - 01:08 PM, said:

speedyink, on 07 May 2015 - 08:57 PM, said:

There are some facts he got wrong, like Chris Coffin being a dude

I don't think he got that wrong, even though Christina Coffin is currently a woman.

ooOOOoohh, I didn't know that. I guess I take that one back then =P

I'm glad that sort of thing has become so accepted.

[Skeledroid]

This is friggin' awesome. I love all the Sonic X-treme releases recently. It makes my inner 90s child that never got the game he wanted happy -- even if they're pretty unplayable. I'll be waiting around till we have a nice version to play for forever if I have to.

[Andrew75]

Hey Guys I heard back From Chris Senn a few days back in response to what Mike had written. But I did not have the time to post it here. Chris suggested to do some paraphrasing.
His response felt pretty positive and understanding.

Here goes:
Chris is sure that Mike has a much better recollection for the POV aspects of the project than he has ( among some other aspects).
Basically, the Faq were written as best as Chris could recall from memory at the time. (I feel that yeah I would agree with Chris in that who can remember everything that happened 19 years ago)

One thing that Chris pointed out was in regards to Mike's comment:
"POV was brought in to port the build to Saturn because Ofer could not do it. His original attempt ran at 2-3 fps with 4 colors. He had no concept of how to optimize the performance to run well on the Saturn."

Chris couldn't say for sure, but what he "knows" comes from other STI members. Chris heard that Ofer's development system which would allow him to be able to port it to the Saturn wasn't given to him...
So he literally could not do it... (It was due to politics). Also, emails were supposedly being sent to Japan claiming that Ofer was incapable, while this situation occurred... At that time, Mike was not the head producer, so he might not have known about this (again, if it actually happened).
As to other things like POV joining 2 months before instead of 6... sure... Chris says, that he could not quite recall.

Well guys that's the response.

This post has been edited by Andrew75: 10 May 2015 - 09:00 PM

[akirahedgehog]

So Ofer never actually worked on the Saturn hardware then? Is the v40 build we have now the result of only POVs efforts with Ofer's PC code?

[Andrew75]

akirahedgehog, on 10 May 2015 - 09:38 PM, said:

So Ofer never actually worked on the Saturn hardware then? Is the v40 build we have now the result of only POVs efforts with Ofer's PC code?

Looks like he worked on it but didn't have the correct tools from what I understood.

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

Andrew75, on 10 May 2015 - 08:50 PM, said:

Hey Guys I heard back From Chris Senn a few days back in response to what Mike had written. But I did not have the time to post it here. Chris suggested to do some paraphrasing.
His response felt pretty positive and understanding.

Here goes:
Chris is sure that Mike has a much better recollection for the POV aspects of the project than he has ( among some other aspects).
Basically, the Faq were written as best as Chris could recall from memory at the time. (I feel that yeah I would agree with Chris in that who can remember everything that happened 19 years ago)

One thing that Chris pointed out was in regards to Mike's comment:
"POV was brought in to port the build to Saturn because Ofer could not do it. His original attempt ran at 2-3 fps with 4 colors. He had no concept of how to optimize the performance to run well on the Saturn."

Chris couldn't say for sure, but what he "knows" comes from other STI members. Chris heard that Ofer's development system which would allow him to be able to port it to the Saturn wasn't given to him...
So he literally could not do it... (It was due to politics). Also, emails were supposedly being sent to Japan claiming that Ofer was incapable, while this situation occurred... At that time, Mike was not the head producer, so he might not have known about this (again, if it actually happened).
As to other things like POV joining 2 months before instead of 6... sure... Chris says, that he could not quite recall.

Well guys that's the response.

It was probably a pretty horrible experience in general for all these guys, so I'm not surprised if memories are fuzzy - certainly some of them WANTED to forget. It's pretty unfortunate how the project turned out, what with the politics causing the project to repeatedly shift developers.
If POV joined 2 months before the project was canned, and got this far only for the cancellation to happen before they could show their work to Sega, I'd be especially disappointed - it'd be like Mega Man Legends 3 levels of soul-crushing corporate stomping. I also feel bad for Ofer, as while it does indeed seem that he was in over his head, I can't see it as being his fault in the greater context.

[Andrew75]

Just checked the front page of retro, which isn't very often.
Anyhow,
All these new and different builds of Sonic X-treme flying out left and right and no news on the front page? Ahh man, well I suppose Sonic X-treme isn't so important to Retro as say a Sonic 1 beta Magazine image. I kind of feel sorry for Jollyroger because of all the hard work that's being put into the restoring each and every one of these. (this is just my own personal opinion here and not reflected on anything else)

At least give the guy Tech status or something. ( not that he's asking for it, It just does not seem fair (in my eyes) to see all his hard work go unrewarded)
Sorry guys, but Its been bothering me for sometime now.

P.S. I'm not trying to start any drama or anything like that. Just sharing some thoughts.

This post has been edited by Andrew75: 11 May 2015 - 01:39 AM

[Spinksy]

Andrew75, on 11 May 2015 - 01:19 AM, said:

Just checked the front page of retro, which isn't very often.
Anyhow,
All these new and different builds of Sonic X-treme flying out left and right and no news on the front page? Ahh man, well I suppose Sonic X-treme isn't so important to Retro as say a Sonic 1 beta Magazine image. I kind of feel sorry for Jollyroger because of all the hard work that's being put into the restoring each and every one of these. (this is just my own personal opinion here and not reflected on anything else)

At least give the guy Tech status or something. ( not that he's asking for it, It just does not seem fair (in my eyes) to see all his hard work go unrewarded)
Sorry guys, but Its been bothering me for sometime now.

P.S. I'm not trying to start any drama or anything like that. Just sharing some thoughts.

I have felt this since this whole thing started to happen.

I don't know if theres just a general 'not interested' feeling going on with Sonic Xtreme or something but these threads in general never really get much attention which is a shame - yet a thread about something such as Sonic:Boom (which is pretty much the worst sonic game ever released) gets updated all the time. All the hard work thats gone into reviving this lost stuff and people are more interested in a slightly clearer scan of an image seen years ago?

Keep up the good work guys - for all that visit this site almost only for news on this (and AXSX lol) such as myself - thank you.

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

Spinksy, on 11 May 2015 - 03:33 AM, said:

I have felt this since this whole thing started to happen.

I don't know if theres just a general 'not interested' feeling going on with Sonic Xtreme or something but these threads in general never really get much attention which is a shame - yet a thread about something such as Sonic:Boom (which is pretty much the worst sonic game ever released) gets updated all the time. All the hard work thats gone into reviving this lost stuff and people are more interested in a slightly clearer scan of an image seen years ago?

Keep up the good work guys - for all that visit this site almost only for news on this (and AXSX lol) such as myself - thank you.

Front page is more interested in stupid joke articles most of the time anymore, it seems (Nothing against stupid joke articles, mind, but it's pretty frustrating that the ONE TIME I was on the front page, it wasn't any of my Sega Channel or Sega Pico stuff I had worked on for years,). Don't take it too harshly - a part of the Sonic scene's been like this for years.

[Skeledroid]

I think it'll get more press when there's something like more of the levels in one of the releases or some such. I don't think things like Sonic 1 GG Proto etc. got a front page article but I may be mistaken.

[GeneHF]

Andrew75, on 11 May 2015 - 01:19 AM, said:

Just checked the front page of retro, which isn't very often.
Anyhow,
All these new and different builds of Sonic X-treme flying out left and right and no news on the front page? Ahh man, well I suppose Sonic X-treme isn't so important to Retro as say a Sonic 1 beta Magazine image. I kind of feel sorry for Jollyroger because of all the hard work that's being put into the restoring each and every one of these. (this is just my own personal opinion here and not reflected on anything else)

At least give the guy Tech status or something. ( not that he's asking for it, It just does not seem fair (in my eyes) to see all his hard work go unrewarded)
Sorry guys, but Its been bothering me for sometime now.

P.S. I'm not trying to start any drama or anything like that. Just sharing some thoughts.

Honestly, I've been a little inactive because of working on my own programming projects (and suffering. So much suffering.) So I'm only just getting caught up with goings on to do a few stories. Sonic 1 was more pertinent because we were LITERALLY just talking about how I wouldn't news it unless we got confirmation proof it was legitimate, and right as that happened, the guy uploaded the full page scan.

Anyway, it doesn't mean Sonic 1 is greater than Xtreme. It's really, "Man, that front page staff needs to stop doing other things." Rest assured, it's getting its post made as we speak, because it absolutely is a huge discovery (and I personally think it's the best build of Xtreme, but that's a little editorial bias. />/> )

No drama here, my friend. You're always more than welcome to poke us about it if you find we're being a little slow on things. It would actually be very much appreciated at times.

Kiddo Cabbusses, on 11 May 2015 - 07:54 AM, said:

Front page is more interested in stupid joke articles most of the time anymore, it seems (Nothing against stupid joke articles, mind, but it's pretty frustrating that the ONE TIME I was on the front page, it wasn't any of my Sega Channel or Sega Pico stuff I had worked on for years,). Don't take it too harshly - a part of the Sonic scene's been like this for years.

Segabits, mate. We've been over this, so no lip. I get your frustration, really, but Sonic Retro side largely maintains Sonic stuff because every time we deviate even a little from Sonic, out comes the deluge of tears.

Newsflash: Sonic is not interesting to cover 9/10ths of the time outside of proto findings or stupid things happening. It amounts to PR regurgitation or backhanding Sega for being silly. If anything, keeping Sonic only is a good enough reason to keep a well-furnished liquor cabinet nearby.

And that's why Gene is a miserable old man.

[TimmiT]

Oh yeah, if any of you want us to cover something cool from the forums or something, feel free to tell us. We really don't do enough with the front page, and admittedly I've been neglecting it too much as well.