General Project Thread & Feedback

I'm aware of S2HD's current and most important goals but the original question was:

and I was just informing that implementing new zones is a desirable aim.

My apologies if I implied that creating new levels was a high priority ^^;

 

Oh, sorry for voicing my oppinions.

 

Sorry BP, but there is much more than smooth shapes and blendings... the backgrounds we're making right now are own interpretations from the artists, my sets of emeralds for example are my own interpretation, not pixel perfect emeralds from the game... and everybody knows that.

 

MY GOD, PATCHES OF LIGHT GREEN!

WHATEVER WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT?!

 

Personally, I'm glad you do it. It makes sure we have a high standard of quality!

I think what this project needs more than anything is the entirety of Sonic 2 ported and running with upscaled graphics and a definitive tileset for people to take and HD-ify that way.

 

Comparing a sprite through a filter to a piece of art isn't an opinion, it's a nitpick.

 

He's stating how the sprite should look. CRT TV's properties were taken in to account when the sprites and tiles were drawn so they they could create effects the the hardware wouldn't otherwise allow.

Also why the sudden hate?

The Uber style has been in effect for a while. Why complain now and not when it was first proposed?

Personally I like the style. its clean and it looks like a sonic game. The jump from TD to Uber didn't change much just little touch ups to the art that had already been created.

When I saw the mockup for the HTZ BG I thought it was breath taking :D
Sonics smile ads a bit to the game.
those little flares of light on the walls block things in EHZ.

They are small touches but it adds a lot imo.

At the end of the day, it's too late to change now, so much has already been done, it would break the morale of many people here if the art was scrapped.

 

Actually most of us just sort of got disinterested and stopped really caring. It was only because of such a nice submission (the Balkiry - it had a nice use of shading and colour as it is, and showed actual improvision from the source art instead of simply scaling the art up, making the previous attempt look laughably bad in compraison) and the subsequent request to ruin it with the "uber" style that sparked this entire discussion.

Nobody has a problem with what you're talking about - the HTZ bg is nice, Sonic would look stupid without a mouth and the EHZ blocks are ok. There's lots of other stuff in this "uber" style that we have a problem with because adding so many shades of colour does not achieve the intended effect at all and makes the art worse, and this strange opinion of "visible colour stepping with shading = BAD BAD BAD" in every situation whatsoever.

Especially when exporting many of the images such as the Balkiry at the size they would be displayed at in-game, they already contain the right amount of shades to work correctly at the size without blending together and creating the gradiented effect!

Besides, the last I tried it took me less then 5 minutes to take Sonic's source vector file and remove shading to the point where it resembles it's earlier incarnation. Seeing as most if not all work in this project is done via vector, I do not see where this time argument is coming from at all.

 

Isn't this bitching about graphics what drove the nail into the coffin of Project: Sonic Retro? I know the point of this particular project is to enhance Sonic 2 to the point of high definition, but there has to be a difference between high definition and just art wankery.

Let's be perfectly honest, no one is going to sit back and stare at this lovingly as if it was the next Picasso or Van Gogh. It's not art. It's a video game.

F-Zero 64 for an example, that game looks fucking terrible to watch. But it plays amazingly. In fact, I'd say it was one of the best racers on the Nintendo 64. Sometimes, I think graphics come after the gameplay... you promise this fantastic game, and how it's going to have all of this stuff but you're all being held back by stupid little arguments about a fucking pixel.

What's there so far looks awesome, I'm not going to lie- that's what I honestly think. Other people are free to disagree, but that's their opinion. One or two disagreements shouldn't be enough to derail the development of a game...

 

No, he is not.

He is shitting over people's interpretation of the art because it doesn't line up with his interpretation.

Yes, we get it, TV inputs sucked back then. Sometimes developers used tricks to take advantage of this, sometimes they didn't. The fact that someone on here influences decisions on art based on some pixels appearing blurry on the television rather if it'll look well on the new medium is presented is pointless. You are no longer being held back by those restrictions. You can add in the details yourself, spice ups the original design so it doesn't look so flat and boring upscaled, not go by some low resolution blurred art.

Not even professional developers follow this bullshit method.



It's a backwards way of thinking and restricts the artist from making any of their own interpretations of the art to give it new life.

Well in that case let's just go play Sonic 2 on an emulator with a filter and call it a day!

Good job Sonic Retro, you've completed a community project.

 

¬_¬

if you don't like it move on...

 

He can't because he's too busy "shitting over people's interpretation of the art because it doesn't line up with his interpretation."

 

That's funny because I haven't commented on anyone's art, just the staff's methods.

 

Our methods directly correlate with the art direction in the game. Not only that, but a piece of art is what sparked this argument. You also seem to forget that a ton of the special effects have been slated to be programmed into the game and not just as part of the tiles that the level uses. There's still plenty of room for us to make things shine and stand out from the crowd. Hell, we haven't even finished the first stage of the game yet.

On a side note, art is controversial. Everyone has a different idea of what art is. I could throw a bucket of paint on a sheet of paper and call it art and some people would agree, others would say it's just a bunch of paint on a sheet of paper. Knowing this, what do you suppose happens when a lot of people work on a big project like this? A lot of people means a lot of different approaches and a lot of different interpretations, so unless the project allows or calls for it, the art direction must be set. Saying that you liked the original tech demo stuff is somewhat foolish simply because the stuff we have now is just more polished versions of what we had back then. As for the new entries, yes, they look great, but if they don't quite fit with the rest of the game it could cause a clash that nobody wants to see.

One more thing. I think that Sega had a certain way they wanted the game to look, and using the filter is basically refining that look. Yeah, it's rough, but that's basically its purpose. I think that yeah, this project and the filter look similar, but our project looks a ton better and it keeps the same visual appeal. I say the art style looks just fine right now. Also, to be quite honest, I'm sure there will be times when I like the original version of something before it's "überized," but if they don't fit in right, there isn't much you can do but try and keep the same spark that the original had.

 

Yeah, the art from the artwork and the art ingame are completely different! Some piece of the artwork had black outlines and anime shading and there are pieces that are 3d shaded with no outlines. But we heard you before, every edit of every art was a result of an active interaction between the communitty and the S2HD Staff. The Über art was because, Sonic 2 HD is not Sonic Retro exclusive. Lots of sites criticizing us telling S2HD was ugly, a common flash game and even a bad amateur work. We can't leave Greek and Troyans happy, but we can leave both half-happy. Über is staying, we need to maintain the art consistency, we will not waste our time de-überizing überized frames, why? Sonic Retro is important, but we have to hear the majority, in this case, the non-members.

For the ones whom never did anything, never posted anything here, never gave us any (positive and negative too!) feedback that are trying to change Sonic 2 HD from water to wine now, as people did with "Sonic Retro", I say you'll not reach any objective you have.

<div align='center'>~Sonic 2HD - Keeping it classy.~</div>

 

Let me just get this out of my system first: I've never wanted to see this project die quite so badly as I do right now. I can't emphasize this enough. I... I'm so angry. I'm not even going to bother getting into this shitstorm now, as Chimpo and Tweaker have both covered just about all the bases, and I've already ranted plenty about this over IRC, so I'm just going to cut to the chase here.

I don't even know how to respond to this, man. I've already said it in #retro, but it really needs to be said here: This is about as painful as watching a man grow up, from birth all the way up through childhood, with the dream of becoming an astronaut, right? So he wastes his entire life away trying to achieve this dream. He has neither the means nor the smarts to take up college to learn the finer details of aerodynamics, though, so he sets out to mimic NASA's success with his own backwater logic, something he's dubbed The Uber System, a tacky and entirely pointless buzzword he uses to convey his ideals, which subsequently spreads like wildfire amongst his redneck peers. So he works at it for, like, 40 years, until he's finally convinced himself that he's on the verge of realizing said dream. And then you, the viewer, having been forced to watch him silently as he blissfully stumbled through one folly after another, are charged with bursting his bubble by telling him that space travel has absolutely nothing to do with furiously jerking off farm livestock. That's what this feels like to me.

Surprise, dude: Odin Sphere had absolutely nothing to do with vectors. I just- I mean- where did you even get this from? I mean, you seem to realize that the backgrounds were raster, so why should the character sprites be any different? They were simply digital paintings- raster, that is- rendered at approximately 300 DPI, probably scaled down somewhere along the way, and texture mapped onto a number of polygonal planes that could be interpolated in their movement. They weren't pretentious enough to call it "Uber Style" or whatever the fuck, and there certainly weren't any vectors involved. It would have been wasteful and costly to render vectors in that manner on the PS2, and it's not like they did the actual art in vector format before rasterizing it for use in the game, either- achieving that level of detail with vectors would've taken ages. I guess that's why you still haven't finished EHZ yet.

Honestly, what were you even thinking? You shot for Odin Sphere and wound up somewhere in the realm of, I don't even know, Asteroids or something. This wouldn't have been such a huge problem for me if this weren't the grounds upon which the entire project was built. I guess it doesn't really matter, though; hardly anyone here actually has the skill to resort to full-on digital painting, so you just trace shit with vectors, click and drag gradients here and there, and deviate from the source material as little as possible to ensure that no skill or individual style is required, which lands you with that plastic digital sheen you all covet so much. And then you get to call yourselves artists! Well, if that's how you get your rocks off, fine by me. Just, please, leave Odin Sphere out of this from now on. She wants nothing to do with this sordid affair.

 

Is everything I know a lie, Vincent? Will jerking off livestock really not contribute to the success of S2HD?? TELL ME!!

 

Sorry to bother you, but Im a graphic designer myself, I work with a tablet and I know how to paint, and not just me, we got Flare and CornetTheory that knows how to paint digitally, if you didnt know, they are making the backgrounds... not using any vector, ever, they are painting... but, do you want also painted sprites?...

by the way, vectorizing is just a way to preserve detail when upscaling art, after all its all math, but rasters are going to be use ingame...

 

That's why I said "hardly". The backgrounds are just about the only truly competent bits of art I've seen around here, and frankly, I think it's a wonder IceKnight or anyone else hasn't shot them down for not perfectly adhering to the source material. Now, if you were allowed to take those sorts of liberties with the actual sprites and foreground art, this project would be good to go!

 

I reiterate my past post more simply here- can we just have a game which plays and looks awesomely, instead of whining "OMG ITS NOT LIKE THE ORIGINAL GET OUT GET OUT GET OUUUUUUUUT!"?

If it was like the original, as Chimpo said, we'd just get an emulator and play Sonic 2 in a hq4x filter. I for one don't care for arguments about how Sonic shouldn't have a mouth. Why the fuck do I care if he has a mouth? I just wanna play this sweet looking game. I don't want to argue about how Tails is the wrong shade of orange.

The work you've done is okay to go, why shit all over it now?