Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Claxon - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Sik, on Jan 14 2009, 02:11 AM, said:

With luck that will happen, but I'm still supporting phones released back in 2001 (and the phone networks demand that these devices are supported, else they won't sell the game), so even if every new phone started using Android, it would still take the better part of a decade for publishers to be able to support Android only. :'(

Yes I am condemned to work with not merely java, but j2me... A particularly nasty strain! I'm trying to return to the land of pc's and consoles, but java experience is a nasty blot on my record. On the plus side I've had the chance to work on a number of games that others can only pray for.

Overlord, on Jan 13 2009, 07:14 PM, said:

The key word there is SHOULD. but in the mobile industry that means next to nothing. My job as a java porting engineer shouldn't even exist due to the whole "build once, run anywhere" concept of java, but it does.

Overlord, on Dec 25 2008, 09:49 PM, said:

As Sanky said, the special stage & chaos emeralds text appears briefly. The actual special stage was one of the first things to go due to various reasons. I was working on a Monkeyball game at this time so I'm not sure exactly what the reasons were but I'd imagine the main one was the lack of free rotation in j2me graphics, so the additional overhead of having a whole extra tileset of graphics when build siszes were already over the limits on many devices would be too much to handle.

As for having all of the zone names in the image, the Part 1 & Part 2 code was all actually a single codebase, the levels that were included with each particular build was configured by our preprocessor at build time. At different points in time, different levels were going to be used, originally they were all going to be in, then they were split into 3 alternating zones (I think it was Green Hill, Spring Yard, and Star Light for part 1), but as you probably know the level structure in Sonic 1 alternates between fast levels, and slower-more puzzle based levels, so that would have meant part 1 had all the fast levels and part 2 have all the puzzle levels. So it was changed to the current configuration. Since we could use any or all levels we would have to either store each zone title in a seperate image or keep them in a single image (which meant we didn't have the overhead of the header chunks for all the png files, and it compressed better).

Compsense, on Nov 13 2008, 05:37 AM, said:

Not any more I'm affraid. I was one of the programmers on Sonic mobile parts 1 & 2. These days I'm working with Namco instead working on many unique and original games ( PAC-MAN, Ms. PAC-MAN, Super PAC-MAN, PAC-MANIA.... the list is endless). I miss the days of good old Sonic.

*starts muttering about the good old days*