Assembler games member has Sonic xtreme POV stuff

Jollyroger is Breaking it down!

Kind of a recap of what's going on. The code we have here is like a snapshot in time caught in the middle of an engine overhaul, and because of that many aspects for the Editor/engine are broken.

JR states that One example is the code that calculates the shading of polygons based on their distance to the camera. When they are far enough from the camera they are supposed to fade to black but the original programmer forgot to initialize a variable, so ALL the other polygons were rendered with a pretty much random value.
That value turns out to be completely transparent most of the time... it doesn't make sense at all for them to be all alpha blended, it is a waste of processing time, JR will eventually change the code to blend only the polygons that actually need blending.

The editor has essentially two modes, in one you navigate the level with the mouse and you can edit the level, one block at a time or by strips of blocks.
In the second mode sonic is playable. Sonic can jump, run up and down slopes, He can even run loops inside the long tunnel in the map.
There is also a separate build setting which lets you build only the engine, with no editor. (gameplay only)

You guys may recognize this area from one of the magazine screens. although the camera and sonic are off to the right of that magazine screenshot.

 

Is that development engine seriously called Sonic Boom. bahahah.

 

It is indeed called Sonic Boom, in fact the whole level editor project has that name.

 

Really great work that's coming out from this guys. Keep it up. There are lots of people interested in this, and I can't ever remember there being a case where a Game was left on the chopping board, and it's dedicated fans and programming enthusiasts are putting it back together and fixing it.

Thank you.

 

I just want to add on to the pile of people who are really excited for this. The idea that we'll get to play this, no matter how bad it may be, is so exciting.

 

It's amazing this has finally been found! I am however interested by the fact that the Saturn build shown in Jollyroger's video on YouTube runs at such a high framerate (faster than it should be judging by how fast the rings are spinning) and has a working fisheye lens. If I recall correctly, Senn said that the Saturn conversion shown to Nakayama and the Japanese representatives ran at like 3fps and fisheye wasn't working. Is this because of the emulator, or was the port to Saturn worked on more past March 1996?

 

Okay guys ! I'll keep this short but sweet.
Here Sonic can run around and have some fun in this now famous area. (I like to call it the Gold Tile level myself, as the name is referenced in the .def code)
Its running in version 37 Engine/Editor which does not seem to have Fisheye functions.
Enjoy !

 

Looks cool

 

Will we see a public release for this soon?

 

That looks like the version of the engine shown in the E3 trailer:

You can just barely see the menu bar with "Options" and "Help" at the top of the screen. Can rings and badniks be interacted with in the 004 version, or are they non-functional like the E3 version?

 

Not anytime soon as it would need to be ported to modern hardware first. But before that there are still a lot of issues that need ironing out with the code.

 

There's something I don't understand, sometime ago you or JollyRoger posted that "it looks like the version of the engine we have does not contain the "paths" code..." " This means it will be essentially impossible to reconstruct the path functionality from the original code, unless we code it from scratch."

What does that mean?

I thought that it wouldn't be possible then to compile and/or execute the Windows versions of the game because of the missing code, but your new update proved the opposite, at least with one version of the game.

I have no knowledge of programming whatsoever, so I'm sorry if my question seems dumb.

 

One feature of the game seen in the videos is the one that allows Sonic to run on complex curvy and spiraling paths that are suspended in the air, which are not part of the basic level layout.

The engine version we have, and which we can compile and run, does not have that capability.

 

Oh I see, like that platform in the background of the first image where Sonic could do a 360º around it in the trailers.

Too bad it's not there but I'm happy we're getting a(n almost) workable version the game.

Thank you very much for everything that you're doing JollyRoger..

 

No, I think what jollyroger was talking about were those cool looking loop-de-loop things that pop out after Sonic presses a switch, like in this video:

It's a shame we won't be able to play some of the more complex levels, at least not the way they were intended, because of this missing code. It's still very cool to have a working version of Ofer's editor, along with early Saturn builds we didn't even know about.

 

Correct. some of them were fixed, some others were activated by switches apparently, but neither of them are present in the code or the levels we have.

On top of STI's work we also have the preliminary tech demos that POV was working on for the Saturn, which have also never been seen before, so it's not all bad...

 

It's not all bad? As someone who has been sort of obsessed with the game every since I first saw those gameplay videos a few years ago, I would say that it's amazing that we all will gonna be able to play it in the future, thanks to you.

I personally don't care all that much for the path, it's a shame that we won't be able to try a few of those stages as they were intended to be played, but I can't wait to put my hands on X-Treme as it is so I'm already extremely happy and satisfied.

But those stages from Spehiroth's video are very cool though, who knows what else they would be able to implement in the final game had they finished it.

 

The NTSC Cartdev is here and seems to work fine.

During the holidays I will do some work on the Saturn code and see if I can get some screenshots from the running hardware.

The code hangs after a very short time, seemingly due to an infinite loop waiting for the VDP1 to complete drawing the frame, lots of work to do to make this stable...

 

I just really want to make sure this thread doesn't get lost in the shuffle. This is one of the coolest discoveries in the history of Sonic digging, and I'm certain I'm not the only incredibly excited individual.

Keep up the great work, guys.