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Engineering & Reverse Engineering (190 posts)
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25 years old
Birthday:
July 29, 1989
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Project:
Sonic 2 Retro Remix
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  1. In Topic: Sonic 2: Return of Shadow/demo and website.

    03 May 2015 - 02:15 PM

    You asked me to give this a go on SSRG a while back, and I feel bad that I didn't get around to it. That said, I tried it recently, and I'm a bit disappointed.

    The biggest concern is the amount of bugs. My first run through the game was cut short about one minute in when I inadvertently triggered Tails' flight and had him grab Sonic. A swinging platform moved between Tails and Sonic, separating the two and leaving Sonic stuck in midair until Time Over. On my second run, I spent a moment observing the odd collision with the jump ramps early in the act before playing onward. The Zone 1 Act 1 boss went well until the pinch phase, at which point the second rotating ball started moving in circles around the boss faster and faster until there was no way past it without getting hit. The second act went more smoothly, although I was disappointed that the boss arena was taken right from my hack. I have no problem with basing ideas on somebody else's stuff, but improve upon them if you do! My game froze upon entering a special ring in the Ice Cap expy, which has all but the lowest points in its layout copied directly from Ice Cap Act 2, and I quit playing at that point until the next day.

    Level designs leave a bit to be desired. Some sections of the first zone are pretty clearly left over layout parts from Emerald Hill, so I was able to gauge how close I was to the end of each act by looking for familiar things. The layout to the first act of Starry Night—a name that I'm pretty sure MegaMix has used and done better—is simply Star Light Act 3 but with an odd introduction. Starry Night Act 2 has some problems with getting stuck in loops when Sonic moves at high speed. The boss of Starry Night gets a bit hard to manage when every seesaw is constantly firing its spiked ball into the air; my first death was actually off screen when a spiked ball and Sonic were off the top of the screen simultaneously and I couldn't tell where either was. I eventually beat the boss by ignoring the seesaw catapulting completely and carefully jumping from the fulcrum of the middle seesaw. The Wacky Workbench expy (I forget what word you used in place of "Workbench") doesn't have thick enough collision set on many surfaces, so when you get fired into the air, it's very possible that you fall through the floor and die when you try to land. This happened to me at the boss arena twice.

    Utopia City is where I ran out of patience on my latest run. The blur effect applied to the water creates a serious amount of slowdown and makes gauging your remaining amount of time underwater difficult. The gimmick with switches that change the water level and platforms that float on the surface was also taken from my hack, so as with the first boss, I expected to see it done in a better way. However, I instead found several parts of the layout were copied straight from my hack, including the area in which you navigate through a passage in a wall to get atop a floating platform and the area in which you need to quickly jump across five floating platforms in a row to exit a room (both of which are from Chemical Plant Act 3 in my hack). I lost a life to a section in which a loop sends you underwater (if the water level is high enough) and a spring then pushes you left. The intent is that you go to the left, but since the curve used at the bottom of the loop is the one that has solidity on either collision path, I believed I needed to jump to a small alcove high in the right wall. I jumped there only to find it was the end of a different passage, not the start of one, and drowned shortly afterward. The boss battle finally did me in. I quickly jumped atop Eggman's head and bounced on him seven times. As the eighth hit almost connected, Sonic mysteriously died, as the collision box on the chemical vat Eggman holds seems to be way too big. At this point I closed Kega and gave up.

    My advice to you would be to not release a hack to the public until the bugs are unobtrusive and to truly play your layouts in every possible way to make sure they work for all types of players. For example, my instinct when playing is to jump off of any uphill slope when I'm moving at speed to gain lots of height and to jump off of steep downhill slopes and loop ceilings to gain speed upon landing, and these habits led to encountering many collision errors or having no sense of direction upon landing from big jumps. I'm sure other players' styles could lead to different issues. I applaud the effort you put into this but disapprove of the half-polished state of the release (and, of course, the stuff copied from me without improvement), so please give this hack much more time in the oven before its next release.
  2. In Topic: The Sonic 3, 20th Anniversary & Knuckles Thread

    11 February 2015 - 05:35 PM

    It looks like this is keeping momentum, so I've thrown a message up on TSC. I doubt it'll get more than a few signatures for you, but every one helps. If there's anything I should add to the front page message, let me know and I'll do it. Best of luck maintaining the campaign's pace. :)
  3. In Topic: The Sonic 3, 20th Anniversary & Knuckles Thread

    07 February 2015 - 03:00 PM

    View PostBlack Squirrel, on 07 February 2015 - 02:34 PM, said:

    Did anyone make good Mega Drive renditions of the PC Sonic 3 tracks? I can't stand those altered tracks myself, but presumably being able to swtich between the two would be a much requested option. And at least using those keeps it more authentic than trying to make new ones or ditching music entirely.


    Unless you can make something that almost sounds like the real thing, but clearly isn't. And isn't like a lot of Mega Drive-esque Sonic music that people compose, where it all sounds good but there's pretty much no melody at all.

    Tiddles' Sonic 3 Complete has Genesis versions of all of the PC tracks as made by ValleyBell. Various people have done a few tracks here and there as well; for example, Sonic 2 Retro Remix, soniNeko, and Sonic 1 Remastered all have Ice Cap Act 1 PC. (I couldn't find a quick link for the Remastered version, sorry ;P)

    That said, taking things straight from the fans could be a big legal gray area.
  4. In Topic: Basic Questions & Answers thread

    27 September 2014 - 09:36 PM

    ^ Welp, I take fault for having the wrong address. Disregard me, I hack Sonic 2, I'm strange, etc.

    Regarding the other question E-122-Psi edited in, it's really dependent on what you're doing. In some situations, it may be necessary to run other objects through the same routines Sonic and Tails use, but in other cases, it may make more sense to code a special routine just for the object doing the interacting. Can you elaborate on what you need?
  5. In Topic: Basic Questions & Answers thread

    27 September 2014 - 06:37 PM

    ^ IF $1C is an object's animation offset in Sonic 1, then that's correct. The other possibility is to load $FFFFB000 into a register aN and then check $1C(aN).

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