General Project Thread & Feedback

I'm probably going to sound like a dick and everyone's going to jump on me but whatever. And I'm totally half awake right now so I may or may not be correct with my information. (Also, I'm pissed since I haven't played GTAIV yet, despite me owning it)

This whole idea of "My engine, my rules" is honestly pretty retarded. We've got artists and musicians contributing to this project, and now we have some programmers too. I'm not saying we should just let anybody who claims they're a programmer in, but to those people who do prove themselves as capable and who really want to make this project a reality, shouldn't we allow them chance to contribute? One guy + jman's not going to get this done (although jman is incredibly sexy) but maybe 8 guys + jman could.

(8 Guys = 1 jman)

I'm going to go stagger onto my bed now. Tweaker's a faggot.

 

You've completely misread everything I've said. I'm not saying "my engine my rules," I'm just asking to keep my graphics engine to myself. I.E. not releasing the source code for everyone to mess with.

I've said before that I'm flexible and willing to change quite a bit come the rewrite. I'm not necessarily opposed to having each object have it's own palette, for example. I've been trying pretty hard, in fact, to remain as non-stingy as possible with my engine and I really am taking everything that people say into consideration.

 

cooljerk - make your code a .lib then with a .h file
So that at least other parts can be distributed

 

Would you mind if I spoke to you a bit more privately about this? I've never done anything like this before.

EDIT: And to be sure, I was never suggesting that jman's engine code be kept private. Several people should be working on this project, I'm in no-way turning anyone away outright. My only concern is that I'd like to keep my graphics engine private, but the rest of the project can be open as we'd like.

 

Is there any kind of game plan yet? I.e get emerald hill zone done first then next zone etc,etc?
I think the project would be more focused if there was such a plan to perhaps release a one level proof of concept.

 

well, I just read a quick tutorial on how to use gcc to make a static library and that is exactly what I'd like to do. A trillion thanks SANiK, for suggesting it.

Can you believe I'm graduating soon and I've never once created a static library?

EDIT: just to make sure, wanna look over my reference and make sure I'm not missing anything important?

 

Up to now we are focusing on Emerald Hill Zone's necessary art and programming to create a playable version.

We are figuring it out that most "talented" users from every graphic/music/programming areas of S2HD, needs to coordinate the other users contributions to smoothly integrate everything into. Then we'll have a working team and a "project schedule".

 

Personally, I believe this project needs a project leader. Not necessarily a single person, but maybe a board of 5 or so people who officially decide the direction of the project, as well as what goes. I say 5 people because, ideally, the group would debate on stuff (with the rest of the project staff) and ultimately vote on decisions. An odd number like that would ensure no ties.

Not to say you and Athelstone haven't been doing wonderful jobs, but we'll definitely need to get more organized if we want this project to continue. I think the most fair way to do this would be a democratic vote, with nominations and official voting dates.

Of course, the downside is that this could lead to hurt feelings, but professional projects are full of such pitfalls. If someone is not mature enough to not handle being voted to the executive board, they probably aren't someone we'd need.

Opinions on this idea?

 

We are trying our best to organize the material on the forum, leading contributions to the position of being usable.
Believe me, it's not an easy task for me either to draw frames, find the many contributions into topics, and discussing privately with Athelstone and Blue Streak to which direction would be better to go for this project.

But I want to state that I am no God, I know how Sonic needs to go into the "artistic" way, but have no idea of programming or music.
So I believe we also need coordinators (or leaders) for that section and that is what I've written before.

Either way, if you feel we are not doing the best for S2HD or maybe we have not the required skills for leading it and there are better alternatives, I as a man who wants this project to see light, will step aside and do only frames.

 

You misunderstand, I'm not saying you guys need to step down. I was just suggesting a sort of executive board on decisions. By all means, you guys are doing a fantastic job keeping all this organized.

 

I disagree.

If it's not going to be open source, I don't think it should be used it at all. A project like this needs to be completely open source if its ever going to be ported to another platform. With the current plans to use SDL and C++, I could have easily thrown together a Mac port in a few hours. But without the graphics engine, that would be a pain in the ass.

I have a C++ SDL sprite-based graphics engine with scaling, rotation, and no color limitations (well, 32-bit) that I wrote for a game last fall. As others have said, engines like these are common. I think you should seriously re-consider locking the project into a proprietary engine if nobody can compile the code without an "official" library. In the worst case you'd just be helping in the creation of a competitor, because you'd be forcing someone to develop a library that's header compatible with yours that could be slapped in it's place.

 

Well, I think we should take inspiration from the artists:
1) Artist A makes a picture called X
2) Artist B improves the picture called X
3) Artist C makes his own version of picture X - which is better than artist A's or B's

With that said - I think programmers should be allowed to code their own engines, even competing engines
Those who want to keep their code closed should be allowed to do so, but if another coder can't improve upon it, it'll only be hurting the coder
The winning code is the one that has the best tools (map/sprite editor) and is the best recreation of Sonic 2 (so don't wait for the artists to provide the 4x sprites, use the Sonic 2 sprites and upscale them as temporaries)

In other words, let competition solve this
The more competition there is - the better the programmers code.

But personally if I was coding this, I'd rather use C over C++
And, I'd also setup a standard wrapper so that game code/engine code can be kept separate/interchangeable
e.g., instead of using SDL directly, provide macros/custom functions which redirect the flow of code. This way people can easily replace SDL with let's say GL or GDI

Also, I still think palettes should be abandoned. Why? Take for instance a tile with a blinking light. With a palette, one would just be changing the color of the pixel from off to on, etc.
But using animated images, one can add aura to the light.
This is HD let's not forget - why cripple the colors

For the collision detection, don't use "collision" pixels. Write a tile editor that allows one to plot 2D collision vectors per tile instead

Finally, for the enemies/bosses, I'd write a simple scripting language (like Taxman did for his game)
It'll simplify a lot - trust me

 

I think that this is a good idea, that we should have different people programming different graphics engines or different physics engines so that we can evaluate from among the choices which best suits the project. Now that there seems to be additional interest in coding for the project this does not seem unreasonable to me. In any case, these matters are not my expertise, although generally speaking a system with fewer limitations is preferred.

 

In this case, I come out ahead since my engine has already been doing this for 2 years. I've even read directly from the rom before.

Again, as I already explained, I already do this. I use SDL only for the purpose of putting a picture onto a screen, my engine encompasses a single SDL layer and everything else is written from scratch.

My engine can already add the aura to the light in addition to changing the color/alpha.

For the purpose of this project, using a collision detection system identical to sonic 2 seems ideal. Why go through and create collision vectors per tiles when we could simply import the collision data from sonic 2 instead?

Again, all these are ways in which my engine has been custom built for a project like this. The engine was built for sonic.

 

Having palletted images is an important limitation because we need limitation to really come out with a quality product. Look at the original games—only 16 colors per palette, but it's extremely detailed and colorful! 256 colors is way more than enough to revamp all of the art in the game in considerably better detail and resolution. Using excessive gradients is lazy and unnecessary—you didn't see that in the original games (and believe me, it was very possible), and there's no reason we should have it here.

Limitation leads to creative solutions. Creative solutions lead to a unique game that stands out as something special. Let's remake Sonic 2 with that same ideal in mine: Creative workarounds based on imposed limitation. It'll only be better for us in the end.

 

Bingo. Spot on. These are exactly my sentiments.

I believe that, without limitations, you miss out on a lot of really awesome stuff. Take for example Konami's Contra Hardcorps. A lot of the best graphics effects in that game were born out of ways to work around the limitations.

 

I can't speak for Cooljerk, but my PC port will remain closed-source until the project is completed, after which I'll decide what to do with it. I likely will provide the source for easy editing, no problem there, but the ideals of open-source development are just that: ideals. An open project without quality control rarely ends well, and more likely than not ends in disaster. On that note, as far as "leading" the project goes, the absolute worst thing we can do is lead the project by committee. If this is going to be directed properly, we need one person that ultimately decides everything. It's preferable that the person takes the opinions and suggestions of the entire team into account, but it still needs to be one person. And before you ask, no, I don't want this person to be me. I'd suck at it.

As far as the engine itself goes, I could definitely do the porting on my own, but having others to delegate work to would make things move faster, so I don't have a problem with getting other programmers into the action.

 

Should I lessen the effect on my spikes?

 

I like your spikes, but it might be a neat idea to sort of "roughen up" the shading—using less colors, but still giving it a defined, sharp, shiny look, just like the original art did.

Believe me, people, working with limitations is not easy. It's a challenge, for sure; but it's one worth taking on with full force.

Let me be blunt—I don't appreciate you barging in after a week of inactivity demanding a superior voice in this project, despite the fact that your contributions were sub-par and that Athelstone, Blue Streak, and Vincent have proven by example that they're capable of leading this project well. If you want a place in some sort of "executive board," then you need to earn it—coming up with the idea of the project based on somebody who already had the idea does not entitle you to it.

If you want to talk about "fair," then this is fair.