I'm a person who likes to take preventative measures, rather than allow everybody to rape everything I hold dear before banning them. It makes us look bad, it makes our project look bad, and it makes Sonic look bad. Your optimism is completely unrealistic, because I guarantee that if the project leaders take your advice and develop such a system, exactly what I said would happen will happen, and in such extreme amounts that you won't be able to even believe it's actually happening. It'll be like the new shitty palette and sprite hacks, but in high-definition, and with a more straightforward process in fucking things up. You say you'll just laugh and go on your way, but that only lasts so long before it becomes more annoying than hilarious. And then you'll never be able go back and change that horrible mistake, but it's already done. I like to think I know how the Sonic fanbase works. If you want this project to have any future dignity whatsoever, you won't make it so anybody and their mother's Vietnamese whore can change the art in-game.
Unless there is some sort of encryption or special file-packing done, they'll be able to do it anyway by just replacing the image files. I don't seriously think you expect this to be done as a single executable? Better to let people do it "officially", shun the shit, and not require people to jump through the hoops of manually backing up and replacing the images. Of course, this is just my opinion, it's really up to those actually doing the brunt of the work coding the damn thing to make that decision. We can even go so far as to include in future bugfix updates blacklists of certain shit graphics packs so that they won't even work, through checksumming of image data. If it sucks too bad, we can simply say "we're not going to let you use it". I just find it funny that, in a community that prides itself on making it possible to customize every single aspect of the original Sonic games, that you'd be so restrictive on this project with regards to customization. I myself might want to replace a few graphics here and there for personal use, and I don't want to have to choose between original or customized, or having to manually copy all the damn images myself just to do so.
But at the same time I feel that making this as difficult as possible to customize only prevents other potentially impressive projects from using the created engines and/or art. I am certainly not interested in playing Sonic 2 for the umpteenth time, even if it has slightly better graphics, as I have many, many times before. Going back to the comparison with ROM editing, it's about as exciting as the hacks that start out with maybe one or two levels changed -- in Sonic 2's case this would pretty much always be EHZ and CPZ -- and leaving the rest in place. I got tired of that really quickly. I can't imagine this game, for all the effort that's being put into it, more than a minor distraction for me that I'll likely play once or twice and then get rid of to save HD space. (I thus now vote for changing the name to Sonic 2 HD Clog). Having as much of this game based on easily editable external files allows for easy creation of custom levels, art, and music, which given a stable engine to deal with allows for a much greater value to this work. The game can be extended and people who would like to see some of the graphical touches that have been shut down can implement them on their own. By allowing most of the properties that game uses to be easily editable/switchable, we also get rid of a lot of art debates; I, for example, am one of a few who prefer the title cards to have a few more graphical enhancements than the original. By adding extra custom enhancement / mod packs, we can get rid of a lot of debates over which set of graphics is the best and instead cut out ones that aren't very good and leave in most of the ones in that are, and the only real argument would be which set of art would be distributed in the main set of resources and which ones might be distributed in add-on packs. I don't think any intelligent individual is going to see the quality that we've been trying to hold this project up to, see a crappy implementation of Shadow or Big in an edited resource pack, and associate that with the project at large; I would assume that they'd be smart enough to recognize the difference in quality. If I were to take Megamix and add some lame graphics and gameplay so that, say, Kirby was a playable character, people would likely be suspicious of the nature of Kirby -- especially since the pages dedicated to describing Megamix would say nothing on the matter (anyone who did would be locked from editing the topic anyway, no?). For some reason I thought that, considering that this is how SRB2 worked, that it was fairly well-respected in the community.
While I agree with what LocalH is saying, if we do indeed use my NeedleMouse engine, editing graphis will not be very easy to do without my image editor. Images are split into 3 seperate files - a tilemap, a palette file, and a TSR file which tells the game engine how to build it all together into a sprite. While someone could figure out how it all works and put their own sprites into it (and honestly, it's not too complex), the amount of work that would be required would be very prohbitive.
I have a different issue against graphic packs aside from the "any turd can edit it" one... It would either be completely pointless (a graphic pack is a waste of time if it doesn't have the full set of tiles to go with it, and that's basically impossible for a single person) or completely counter-productive (to getting the current tileset made and getting everything in place)
My biggest concern of having graphic packs is project disemmination. That is to say, because so many derivatives start to appear that the original is forgotten. This for example is the problem with Mugen. Their project disseminated into thousands of many different derivatives, so much so that the original Mugen project has been forgotten. The focus of the Mugen project was lost, because interest was spread in too many different directions of fanmade communities all at once. In my view, I think it should be possible to satisfy the creative passion of the fans by simply having a fully functional level editor that everyone can create their own level art for, rather than being able to change the actual main assets of the game itself. With this, everyone would be using the same base only the creative focus would be channelled into designing new, original and exciting zones created by passionate fans. I would personally prefer the creative energy and talent of the fans to be channelled down this route, towards producing original levels, though this is just my opinion, and we of course welcome furter civil discussion on this issue.
Easy - just make hashes for the sprites to stop noobies. Hash fails, printf("Booyah bitch!\n"); while(1){Sleep(1); printf("\a");}
I'm all for releasing different graphics packs. As I mentioned in the badnik's topic, there could be two sets of them, because both the CG and 2D versions look good in their own right, but some people might prefer one or the other. So there could be CG and 2D packs for badniks, backgrounds and (if somebody bothers making them for some reason) for characters... And music packs would be nice as well, of somebody wants to make remixes that deviate too much from the original. If somebody wants to make something horrid out of it, we can just laugh at it like we do with pallete-only hacks. But there will also appear good sets from artists unrelated to us that hear about it and decide to give it a try, I don't think we should keep this closed to anybody. Think Mugen, among the (sometimes hillarious, by the way) crap characters, there's some truly amazing things that have been done by people who just did something because he/she could add his/her own stuff. But this project should be finished first...
Yes, I agree with what you're saying. I think it would be best if we just stick to one style (which would be the one we have currently). Of course, if someone really wanted to they could make graphic packs in the future, so why are we even discussing this now? EDIT: Oh, I just noticed Knuckles was added to the front page of this thread. It really looks great, but um... obviously Knuckles wasn't in Sonic 2, so what is he doing here? (I would LOVE a Sonic 3 HD though, hehe...)
Since he's in the game via Lock-On with S&K, we're entertaining the idea of adding him to the project with the understanding that everything from the original game should be the current focus. He's an extra that we might add at the end, but since some people have expressed an interest in making art already, I felt that was best contained in this thread.
<!--quoteo(post=190257:date=Apr 24 2008, 11:54 AM:name=Vincent)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Vincent @ Apr 24 2008, 11:54 AM) [/quote] the SPOT!!!! its a lighting effect, it can't move like that. as it is, it looks like a crazy wart-thing. otherwise, its AWESOME
<!--quoteo(post=191259:date=Apr 27 2008, 03:43 PM:name=hibbity)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (hibbity @ Apr 27 2008, 03:43 PM) [/quote] the SPOT!!!! its a lighting effect, it can't move like that. as it is, it looks like a crazy wart-thing. otherwise, its AWESOME [/quote]Actually if you look at the in-game sprite. The shine does do that in-game also.
I like this version of Tails the most, the second one's eyes are too small and is too much like Tails prior to his Adventure look. This Tails looks much more like the old one. I have to say, this is pretty great and I can't see many flaws in it. Though I don't think that the little shine on his head is necessary and kind of clashes with the shading used on the sprite. It's a tiny flaw, but if you're to keep it make it look more like the one on his foot, the lighting on his foot clashes less, if not at all, than the lighting on his head. It's really hard to explain, sorry for that.
I think it needs to move less, and maybe be a little more diffuse, or less bright at least @DDRKhat on the original sprite it moves less, but you're right, it moves
I noticed that Knuckles' feet are not flat on the ground, while all the other character's feet are. Here, take a look. The position of Knuckles' feet give him sort of a 3Dish look, more-so than the rest of the characters who, upon thinking about it, look more like cardboard cut-outs when compared to Knuckles. It isn't a big deal, but I like the way Knuckles' feet are positioned more than the rest of the characters.
<!--quoteo(post=191352:date=Apr 27 2008, 10:12 PM:name=Solid SOAP)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Solid SOAP @ Apr 27 2008, 10:12 PM) The position of Knuckles' feet give him sort of a 3Dish look, more-so than the rest of the characters who, upon thinking about it, look more like cardboard cut-outs when compared to Knuckles. It isn't a big deal, but I like the way Knuckles' feet are positioned more than the rest of the characters.[/quote] Well that's because the Knuckles is based on the Sonic 3 sprites which were a bit more 3-dimensional looking.
That's true, but this IS a Sonic 2 remake, so sprites should resemble Sonic 2 more. And I recall Knuckles' Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles sprite having flat shoes. Either way, I actually like the 3Dish look better than the flat look, and think it'd be great if all the characters were to be designed this way. But if not, changing Knuckles' shoes to look more flat would make sense too.
Yeah, the difference in art style between Knuckles and EVERYTHING ELSE seemed a bit jarring to me back then.
So here's my tryout... Silver Sonic in ball form. I stuck to the original color pallet, I'm sure much more could be done with it if I stretched my coloring legs a bit.
