[ChristinaCoffin]

SANiK, on Jun 21 2006, 02:34 PM, said:

Haha, well it's good to know that whoever bought the Beta can't do much with it. I was expecting to see them "drop down" to the Metal Sonic stage to show off, but I'm glad that ain't possible =P

Geez, thank God for emulators nowadays =O
I remember when I used to do Dreamcast Dev for the fun of it - would go through like 30 CDs per day - no joke

Did you do all your testing with CDs? Some devers would burn the game maps and stuff to one CD, and then send the newly made app through a serial cable or so, speeding up development tremendously. Although, when the betas were found, all they contained were data and no binary code

So I'm wondering if you had any builds like that - with only game data and no binary code? I think they had a special name for the system... although it might have consisted of cartridges instead of CDs ... bleh, my memory's fadin

I rarely did testing with cd's so if there's any more cd's out there, their contents will most likely be small modules of the game like that one. Burning cd's back then waas a huge pain and really slowed production down. By working mainly with code that had compiled in assets, adding more programmers to the project was eaiser, this gave them a starting to point to familiarize themselves with parts of the source, make modifications and see what their changes would influence more easily so their iteration time was better as well.

Boss AI code was a seperate source file for each boss and custom coded by me for each one, 3 unique bosses (fang, metal sonic, and a sort of evil sonic clone) had some reasonably poilshed unique ai before cancellation, there was a 4th placeholder ai that was pretty dumb, similar to what you'd expect in the older 2d sonics that just required any properly rigged 3d model with a basic set of animations (move, melee attack, ranged attack, take damage, die animations) and collision spheres to work.

I never got around to trying to support the ram cart that some games like KOF 96 used because it was most likely going to be something we couldnt totally take advantage of with our schedule and I was trying to tune gameplay and push for xtreme to require the analog controller that NiGHTS used because the game played so much better with it.

[Heran Bago]

Thanks for joining Christina! It's great to have you here.
I have a question.


Is this picture related to Peter Morawiec's Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island minigame that was unfinished? Was it ggoing to be Sonic X-treme's bonus stage?

[Tweaker]

I have a follow-up to that question - Why is the spider in that picture the spider from Super Mario 64? Is that a hoaxed picture?

Also, on each of them, the time is 34 seconds. Surely that can't be in-game?

This post has been edited by Tweaker: 21 June 2006 - 06:57 PM

[ChristinaCoffin]

Heran Bago, on Jun 21 2006, 03:47 PM, said:

Thanks for joining Christina! It's great to have you here.
I have a question.


Is this picture related to Peter Morawiec's Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island minigame that was unfinished? Was it ggoing to be Sonic X-treme's bonus stage?

yes its is related - there was plans to include that minigame into extreme since the art style matched pretty closely what was developed for the xtreme boss engine. The technique they used to rendered sonic was very different looking than the polygon sonic approved for xtreme so the plan was to use everything from that minigame except their 'sonic'

The bug model in one of those screenshots is legit if I recall, one of the technology tricks their engine used was a variant of software textured+phong style spheres used in the pc 'demo coder scene' at that time.
It was used to render perfectly smooth spheres with shading at any size onscreen for those pool balls and the eyes+body of that bug creature, normal vdp1 polys were used to model its legs.
I never got their source code, just their art assets and I replicated the sphere effect and gameplay myself in later builds of the extreme engine.

[Heran Bago]

I was thinking of quoting that bit about the spheres but I didn't think it'd be relevant. Here's how peter described it:

Quote

Our sphere-renderer was used for things such as Sonic's body parts (head,
belly, hands) and other characters/enemies. Sonic X-Treme was doing 'spherical worlds' which was really something completely different. There was no code or graphics assets shared between the two projects.

This is all from ICEknight's site by the way.

[ChristinaCoffin]

Tweaker, on Jun 21 2006, 03:53 PM, said:

I have a follow-up to that question - Why is the spider in that picture the spider from Super Mario 64? Is that a hoaxed picture?

Also, on each of them, the time is 34 seconds. Surely that can't be in-game?

Most likely the hud graphics were hard coded to certain values in their test builds.
I was guilty of this myself by giving sonic 21 lives by default in every code build :lol: I also had the score automatically incremement among other weirdness that would be removed before making a burn that would be gameplay tested.

[ChristinaCoffin]

Heran Bago, on Jun 21 2006, 04:25 PM, said:

I was thinking of quoting that bit about the spheres but I didn't think it'd be relevant. Here's how peter described it:

Quote

Our sphere-renderer was used for things such as Sonic's body parts (head,
belly, hands) and other characters/enemies. Sonic X-Treme was doing 'spherical worlds' which was really something completely different. There was no code or graphics assets shared between the two projects.

This is all from ICEknight's site by the way.

yeah ofers engine is probably what he's referring to when he says 'spherical worlds' which would be correct, their bonus game environments would have not rendered correctly in that engine.
In the extreme boss engine their arenas and textures were converted to mdl/sg3 poly models and vdp tiles and rendered without any fuss.

This post has been edited by ChristinaCoffin: 21 June 2006 - 07:29 PM

[Sazpaimon]

Hey Christina, you mind if I relay this info in the same topic hxc made at Sonic Cult? (Unless you'd like to yourself) If not tell me.

This post has been edited by Sonic Hackr 2000: 21 June 2006 - 07:48 PM

[ChristinaCoffin]

Sonic Hackr 2000, on Jun 21 2006, 04:48 PM, said:

Hey Christina, you mind if I relay this info in the same topic hxc made at Sonic Cult? (Unless you'd like to yourself)  If not tell me.

you can relay the replies there if you wish, I'd prefer to only visit one site since I'm a very busy person and message boards can eat up alot of time before you know it

This post has been edited by ChristinaCoffin: 21 June 2006 - 07:59 PM

[Sazpaimon]

ChristinaCoffin, on Jun 21 2006, 05:58 PM, said:

Sonic Hackr 2000, on Jun 21 2006, 04:48 PM, said:

Hey Christina, you mind if I relay this info in the same topic hxc made at Sonic Cult? (Unless you'd like to yourself)  If not tell me.

you can relay the replies there if you wish, I'd prefer to only visit one site since I'm a very busy person and message boards can eat up alot of time before you know it

http://www.sonic-cul...lnews.php?id=98

How's that? Tell me if there's anything I missed that I should add.

This post has been edited by Sonic Hackr 2000: 21 June 2006 - 08:16 PM

[ChristinaCoffin]

looks ok to me

[ChristinaCoffin]

Hmm lets see what else I can share.
Audio wise, I used the audio tracks and sfx from the japanese version of sonic cd (mega cd) as placeholders (because those songs rocked in my opinion), because xtreme's soundtracks were still being composed. Having to use something like the u.s. version of sonic cd music would have killed me :P

This post has been edited by ChristinaCoffin: 21 June 2006 - 08:33 PM

[Tweaker]

ChristinaCoffin, on Jun 21 2006, 09:32 PM, said:

Hmm lets see what else I can share.
Audio wise, I used the audio tracks and sfx from the japanese version of sonic cd (mega cd) as placeholders (because those songs rocked in my opinion), because xtreme's soundtracks were still being composed. Having to use something like the u.s. version of sonic cd music would have killed me :P

You automatically fucking rock forever for this post. <3

[Shade]

ChristinaCoffin, on Jun 21 2006, 05:32 PM, said:

Hmm lets see what else I can share.
Audio wise, I used the audio tracks and sfx from the japanese version of sonic cd (mega cd) as placeholders (because those songs rocked in my opinion), because xtreme's soundtracks were still being composed. Having to use something like the u.s. version of sonic cd music would have killed me :P

One after our own hearts (Or a majority, anyway).

Welcome to the community, and thanks muchly for taking the time to share all this stuff with us Sonic nerds.

[Sazpaimon]

Question from Stoko of Sonic Cult:

Stoko, on Jun 21 2006, 07:51 PM, said:

CulT News Post said:

In the previous update by hxc, you were shown screenshots of Chris Coffin's build of Sonic Xtreme and Sonic Saturn (two different games).

If "Sonic Saturn" is a different game, then, what was it? And why were the screenshots of it thrown in with screenshots of Coffin's build of Xtreme randomly?

Forgive me if Sonic Saturn and Sonic Xtreme aren't two different game, I believe Peter Morawiec told us it was an entirely different game.

This post has been edited by Sonic Hackr 2000: 21 June 2006 - 10:12 PM