Is Sonic hacking... "dying"?

I've noticed this. Over the course of the three years I've been a member of this forum, I've seen quite a few promising-looking projects either get cancelled (Sonic 2 Advanced Edit, Sonic & Manic: Brother Trouble) or seemingly disappear and get forgotten about (Sonic: Pixel Perfect). There has been throughout a very 'trendwhore' mentality with people adding The New Current Thing (New characters, air dash, homing attack, splash screens) when all I personally really want is new levels and content in the old Sonic games.

Breakthroughs are nice (like the Sonic Adventure DX stuff) but there seems to be more focus on showing off than actual content.

And then there's people like myself who flat-out give up because of the learning curve of hacking. It's not for everyone, and I may look into making Sonic One with one of the fangame engines, should one prove to be accessible enough.

I think it's a bit rash to declare the scene as 'dying', but it's definitely in a slower period than it has been.

 

You have no idea how many people in validation want to showcase their hacks.

I wouldn't say it's dying. It's not as active as before, but the quality of some of the projects that are active have certainly improved from the simple layout and pallet changes days. Good thinga take time.

You'll have to elaborate on what he means on the casual comment though.

 

This was what put me off tbh. The whole idea of hacking a whole game is a very daunting one, when you are kinda on your own. That Hackers Guide only reached Part 1 iirc.

 

There's a flipside to it, too. It's unfortunate that there are those who feel like they can't make say, a simple layout hack. Westside Island and The Blue Blur were both just layout (and palette but I really don't give two shits about that REALLY. It's like playing SFII Sonic Champion Edition) hacks, and I loved them.

I can't be the only person who occasionally wants to play just Sonic 1 or 2 with new levels and no tacked-on features, can I? I know D.A. Garden is working (slowly) on a S3K layout hack that looks to be a lot of fun (his layouts usually are), I can't wait.

Maybe the community should be looking to encourage more activity? I dunno.

 

What puts me off from hacking is that I never really got the basics of how to do things like collision and art insertion with SonED 2. I recall there being some guides, but the process seemed tedious (to me). I dunno.

 

I'm not seeing any research into Sonic Adventure, and SADX hacking has pretty much stopped.

Since you seem to be talking about hacks specifically, well, I'm no good at level design, and not very good at 68k ASM either.

 

Would you rather want a quick GHZ palette edit done in 5 minutes or a revamped level in a few weeks or even in a matter of months, depending on how you would prefer it. Things have changed, what people used to do years ago is usually frowned upon and people expect you to work harder, implement more stuff such as custom art, programming and music. Do people still want a new Emerald Hill Zone Act 2 layout or do they expect more to be added to it?

But then again, whilst I haven't done anything productive related to hacking aside from contributing music to a few good hacks and the creation of a few joke hacks, what am I to say about this? I've generally lost interest in the hacking side of things because I'm not suited to it much and I don't have much to do right now. I could make a bunch of music imports and only a few get taken, with some of those being edited by someone else to make them sound better. What's the point?

 

I don't know if these belong in this argument but I'll say them because these are some things I've felt for a long while now.

@SCHG: That's one thing: the hacking guide doesn't really discuss anything, or is very fine-tuned to a particular operation — in the case of the SMPS guide, it was written during a time when the idea was to put your own songs or other songs into Sonic 1. When I actually looked into the various SMPS-Z80s, I've learned a lot about how it works — which was another reason why I moved it to Sega Retro. However, we still have the rest of the SCHG; sadly I have little to no knowledge of how the MD Sonic games really work, so someone else will have to help fix that.

I put my disassemblies on the SVN in the hopes that people would look into them and continue research. I haven't seen much of that, unless everyone is keeping their research under wraps. I also haven't seen many people working on Sik's Sonic 3D disassembly in his absence (but he has returned...). Is it because the disassemblies are still in IDA format and consequently really incomplete? Or is IDA 5.5 that inaccessible? What about research now that Stealth added support for some of these games to SonED? Game Gear? Saturn (good fucking luck!)? There's a lot of directions we can go from here...

So far, the only Mega Drive Sonic games left are Sonic Eraser (I think some people are already working on that) and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. I have a disassembly of this... and of both the original arcade and Mega Drive versions of Puyo Puyo (with the MD one being the most developed; in fact my current avatar was ripped directly from the ROM). I have no clue how much overlap there really is (but I bet there's going to be a lot), and I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to have ever looked at a Puyo game that was not for PC... But the overarching question is: how much of an audience is there for research into these two Sonic games?

I also want to start general Mega Drive ROM hacking. I already have a large number of games disasembled, some specifically for translation. Where does that fit in?

 

We just got a new S3&K disassembly and people think the Sonic hacking scene is in jeopardy.

 

It's an interesting subject you've brought up, and I have sometimes thought about this myself, my opinion here is this:

Like many others here I don't think "dying" is the word here, I think "moved on" is more like it, Evolution, though not always for the best.

If you consider that a lot of simple things would've been impressive for it's time, we have now reached a point where we've seen the whole mile of ideas and creations, it's not that there's no ideas or that we lack the ability to create those ideas, but more that we've been down this road before and it's becoming boring for some who's done it before, I wouldn't start another hack myself because that's no longer exciting for me anymore, so I've moved on to a homebrew project, others too who feel that doing the same thing is no longer exciting or worth doing have also moved on to the next best thing, 3D Sonic Game hacks are around the corner and it's making 2D hacks look like last years old news.

I must admit, I don't have much interest in the 3D research (I respect what they do don't get me wrong!!), but it's just not of my interest and does kind of annoy me seeing the same topic reach its way to the top =P

 

And? Is that not the first step towards enabling major S3K modifications?

 

It's not dead, it's just sleeping very still.

It is daunting to actually do anything worthwhile. I've kind of taken a break from LD, and when I try to get back into it, I'm overwhelmed by how much stuff there is left to do just for CPZ, let alone the rest of the game. It takes a lot of perseverance and discipline.

 

The problem is that at some point we had an usual amount of promising projects, so that kind of skews the looks of everything. It isn't any different than it used to be besides that, really. What I'd like to see is somebody who makes a hack with just different levels (and maybe spindash if it's Sonic 1) without trying to do anything fancy. Why everybody needs to implement every single move possible without bothering to make any levels save for a couple or so?

I wonder what happened to this hack, though... Granted, I have been missing for quite a while but I haven't seen any news of that since it was posted =/

 

Oh please, I'd love this. Reiterates what I said above, but yeah. Nothing fancy, sometimes I just want more-of-the-same-but-somehow-fresh and new levelsets without any other changes pretty much covers it.

 

Many sonic hackers are secretive, which is why things usually appear mum when they aren't. There are many many projects in progress that have yet to have any sort of public unveiling, some of which are cancelled before anyone even knew they existed.