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Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by hxc, Jun 18, 2006.

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  1. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    I rarely did testing with cd's so if there's any more cd's out there, their contents will most likely be small modules of the game like that one. Burning cd's back then waas a huge pain and really slowed production down. By working mainly with code that had compiled in assets, adding more programmers to the project was eaiser, this gave them a starting to point to familiarize themselves with parts of the source, make modifications and see what their changes would influence more easily so their iteration time was better as well.

    Boss AI code was a seperate source file for each boss and custom coded by me for each one, 3 unique bosses (fang, metal sonic, and a sort of evil sonic clone) had some reasonably poilshed unique ai before cancellation, there was a 4th placeholder ai that was pretty dumb, similar to what you'd expect in the older 2d sonics that just required any properly rigged 3d model with a basic set of animations (move, melee attack, ranged attack, take damage, die animations) and collision spheres to work.

    I never got around to trying to support the ram cart that some games like KOF 96 used because it was most likely going to be something we couldnt totally take advantage of with our schedule and I was trying to tune gameplay and push for xtreme to require the analog controller that NiGHTS used because the game played so much better with it.
     
  2. Heran Bago

    Heran Bago

    Ah! It's Puyo battle then. Tech Member
    Thanks for joining Christina! It's great to have you here.
    I have a question.

    [​IMG]
    Is this picture related to Peter Morawiec's Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island minigame that was unfinished? Was it ggoing to be Sonic X-treme's bonus stage?
    [​IMG][​IMG][​IMG]
     
  3. Tweaker

    Tweaker

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    I have a follow-up to that question - Why is the spider in that picture the spider from Super Mario 64? Is that a hoaxed picture?

    Also, on each of them, the time is 34 seconds. Surely that can't be in-game?
     
  4. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    yes its is related - there was plans to include that minigame into extreme since the art style matched pretty closely what was developed for the xtreme boss engine. The technique they used to rendered sonic was very different looking than the polygon sonic approved for xtreme so the plan was to use everything from that minigame except their 'sonic'

    The bug model in one of those screenshots is legit if I recall, one of the technology tricks their engine used was a variant of software textured+phong style spheres used in the pc 'demo coder scene' at that time.
    It was used to render perfectly smooth spheres with shading at any size onscreen for those pool balls and the eyes+body of that bug creature, normal vdp1 polys were used to model its legs.
    I never got their source code, just their art assets and I replicated the sphere effect and gameplay myself in later builds of the extreme engine.
     
  5. Heran Bago

    Heran Bago

    Ah! It's Puyo battle then. Tech Member
    I was thinking of quoting that bit about the spheres but I didn't think it'd be relevant. Here's how peter described it:
    This is all from ICEknight's site by the way.
     
  6. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    Most likely the hud graphics were hard coded to certain values in their test builds.
    I was guilty of this myself by giving sonic 21 lives by default in every code build :lol: I also had the score automatically incremement among other weirdness that would be removed before making a burn that would be gameplay tested.
     
  7. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    yeah ofers engine is probably what he's referring to when he says 'spherical worlds' which would be correct, their bonus game environments would have not rendered correctly in that engine.
    In the extreme boss engine their arenas and textures were converted to mdl/sg3 poly models and vdp tiles and rendered without any fuss.
     
  8. Sazpaimon

    Sazpaimon

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    Hey Christina, you mind if I relay this info in the same topic hxc made at Sonic Cult? (Unless you'd like to yourself) If not tell me.
     
  9. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    you can relay the replies there if you wish, I'd prefer to only visit one site since I'm a very busy person and message boards can eat up alot of time before you know it :)
     
  10. Sazpaimon

    Sazpaimon

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    http://www.sonic-cult.org/newsx/fullnews.php?id=98

    How's that? :) Tell me if there's anything I missed that I should add.
     
  11. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    looks ok to me
     
  12. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    Hmm lets see what else I can share.
    Audio wise, I used the audio tracks and sfx from the japanese version of sonic cd (mega cd) as placeholders (because those songs rocked in my opinion), because xtreme's soundtracks were still being composed. Having to use something like the u.s. version of sonic cd music would have killed me :P
     
  13. Tweaker

    Tweaker

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    You automatically fucking rock forever for this post. <3
     
  14. Shade

    Shade

    Member
    One after our own hearts (Or a majority, anyway).

    Welcome to the community, and thanks muchly for taking the time to share all this stuff with us Sonic nerds. :)
     
  15. Sazpaimon

    Sazpaimon

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    Question from Stoko of Sonic Cult:

    Forgive me if Sonic Saturn and Sonic Xtreme aren't two different game, I believe Peter Morawiec told us it was an entirely different game.
     
  16. SANiK

    SANiK

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    Sonic Saturn info, from hxc's interview with Peter Morawiec:

    "Sonic Saturn (or Sonic3D) was a different project, which Adrian and I started at STI Burbank in early 1996. It was supposed to be a 3D Sonic game for the Saturn ? those concept images I sent you previously are from that game. Adrian had a very nifty and fast spherical renderer going on for it, for things like bodies and heads. This game was going for a more realistic rendition of Sonic?s world, but Naka didn?t like it so the project was axed. (Ironically, the subsequent Sonic game for the Dreamcast was much more realistic). Following that, there was a slight chance of salvaging our tech and assets to create a bonus game for the Travelers Tales developed Sonic 3D Blast, although we will never know just how seriously this was ever considered. Nonetheless, we quickly whipped out a prototype, which we called Sonic Pool, but it never went past that."

    Pictures for the Sonic Saturn project, from hxc's interview:
    http://xtreme.projectsonic.com/Index.php?dir=PeterStuff%2F

    I think that pretty much answers what Sonic Saturn was... but if Sonic X-treme got renamed to Sonic Saturn and why Sonic Pool (Sonic Saturn) was considered as a bonus for Sonic X-treme is for Christina Coffin to explain =O
     
  17. Sazpaimon

    Sazpaimon

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    Which is essentially what the question was. I'm not sure if the last 3 pics are from the same game or not.
     
  18. ChristinaCoffin

    ChristinaCoffin

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    'sonic saturn' that was worked on by peter/adrian was a completely seperate game project and was considered a satellite office of sti by most.
    However that sonic head wrapped with the saturn 's' on the 1st page was made by ross harris on a whim for the xtreme project and used as a loading splash screen.
    That screen was inferred to mean 'sonic on the sega saturn' - not be the new or tenative title of our game.

    Harris also was responsible for modeling the 3d sonic and other objects in 3d studio/soft image that were rendered into 2d sprites and did other pieces of artwork for xtreme.
    Back when I was using the sprite sonic in xtreme, harris agreed to my 'experiment' by modifying the original sonic model into amy sonic since it wasn't going to really require any extra animation/skeleton work. It only took a couple days work to model the new shoes,eyes and ribbon and render all the sprite frames out. I wonder if those sprites will ever surface because she came out awfully cute. It was basically a sprite swap in game to play amy in the boss engin= I never got around to modifying the spindash/spinslash/jump/running speed mechanics in the hopes we could make the game play differently if we ever allowed people to play as amy. Having amy in the game was not chris senn's original plans but something I explored myself - I figured if we were going to add more playable characters amy would be the easiest one to prototype for obvious reasons.
     
  19. Eric Wright

    Eric Wright

    Born into this. Oldbie
    —I know it's been said a bunch of times already, but Christina, just want to extend a thank you for bothering to come here and humor a dying breed of Sonic fans :)
    —Also want to specifically thank you, simply for hearing how much work you put into learning how to circumvent a lot of the Saturn's graphic "problems"; your work that tricked the hardware, that begat real transparencies, etc etc... (and the fact that you were completely aware at how god-awful the gridded polygons looked when people tried to do pseudo-transparencies like in shadows or glass and stuff...I thought programmers were completely oblivious to this and how Playstation was trouncing the Saturn with its capabilities.) I'm a rather large Wipeout fan too, so hearing anything about how they managed to get the poor Saturn to run the game is icing on the cake. It's unfortunate Sega didn't have you on their Saturn front sooner. ....and I especially like the fact that you and Naka didn't exactly get along ;3
    —Sorry to clog the flow of posts, but it's not often I get a chance to have my words read by someone who worked on two of the most influential aspects of my childhood (X-Treme and the Saturn itself); as sad as it may be, the prospect of X-Treme as it was in development, and my personal experience with the Saturn in general are both very sentimental to me....You are/were part of my 'karass', if you will :P ("Cat's Cradle" reference).

    PS: the US Sonic CD music wasn't that bad... ?_?
    EDIT: sorry again to type so much, did not realize an immediately following post would deluge you with questions.
     
  20. SamIAm

    SamIAm

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    Greetings, Christina Coffin, and thank you so much for taking part in this community. Your recent insights and information alone are proving to be some of the most fascinating and exciting things ever to surface in the Sonic Xtreme investigation. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you something.

    To me, the most interesting part of the Sonic Xtreme saga isn't the game itself - that was never finished, after all - it's the people and history behind the project. There is a lot of information out there about what happened to this game, and as you probably know, much of it conflicts. At least as far as the programming is concerned, you seem to have the clearest memory of what happened, and I am going to guess that you have a very good idea of what events surrounded the development of this game. If you have any kind of plan to write your own account of what happened, then by all means, carry it out. If you do not, however, I wonder if you might start by taking a look at this (never mind the article about Xtreme on the site, it has all sorts of errors).

    This timeline was made by Mike Wallis in the sonic-cult forums some time ago. However, his memory seems hazy, and some things he says in this timeline conflict slightly with things he says in this interview. For example, when did Bernie Stolar come on as head of SoA and influence the project? When exactly did the NiGHTS engine fiasco happen? When did the SoJ president come and request that the game be executed on the boss engine?

    If you could comment however briefly on this timeline, and perhaps add some of your own perspective to it, I think it would give us a terrific idea of how the Sonic Xtreme story goes.

    Thank you for anything and everything!
     
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