Sonic 2 HD

There are invisible plane switchers that cause the tunnels to "close off" if you approach them from the ground. You need to to a long jump straight in from far away, which is easier said than done due to the spikes around the area. In the first cave in Act 2, you can also cheat by going over to the 1-Up in the waterfall, then slowly walking out to the right and landing directly on the tunnel without touching the floor.

 

I'm interested- what sprites were those? After spawning 140 Sonics I start to see noticeable slowdown. I certainly understand that he's one of the more complicated objects, but all of them are doing nothing but standing there, and so this shouldn't really have very far exceded a load of 200 other lesser objects. That seems a little ridiculous for a 3.2ghz system, dual-core if somehow that actually does matter

As a test, I just rigged E02 to process Sonic's movement and drawing in my engine (which, as the released demo itself points out, uses more complicated collision methods than the original game as well) 140 times, and had absolutely no slowdown, based on watching my system clock and the game timer for one full minute, while moving Sonic back and forth (all 140 iterations were mobile). I use software rendering, as opposed to using hardware to draw the sprites, so 140 Sonic's-worth of drawing load was on the processor at the same time as the movement processing. I bumped this number up to 400 to see what would happen, and the slowdown I did notice was far less than what I saw in S2HD at 140 Sonics. Once I toned it back to draw only one Sonic, but still process movement for 400 of them, I was back to having no slowdown at all (This is all to say, I was able to keep a stable 60fps framelock. Obviously unlocked speed would and did vary)

Edit: I forgot to mention, though it's an important factor in the comparison- matter-of-fact movement and reading/positional reaction to level collision data is hard-coded in E02, but anything that gives the game its unique characteristics (such as anything that makes Sonic really behave like Sonic) as well as a few other things are scripted, which adds processing overhead. I'm under the impression that those things are hard-coded in S2HD

 

Lack of texture seems to be a problem for this game. By default a higher resolution should mean more detail that couldn't be seen under the original settings; staying 'faithful' to the original game despite the resize means the assets feel empty, as shown in this before-after image. You won't necessarily want to just throw lines and details over all the objects and backgrounds in some hamfisted attempt at "realism" though, if it really hurts the deco artstyle of the classic games. Finding the right balance between the two extremes (detail vs accuracy/style) is the challenge for the artists. Gradients are the lazy way out as they hurt the assets all round.

 

Well that's exactly what they are in the original Sonic 2 :v:

From what I've seen, though, they were onto something nice with the background. Not sure how much that will change, though, and it's clear that the lava/fire is only a placeholder.

 

Yeah, as the front page post points out, the PC version of Rayman Origins has way more conservative system requirements, and based on ripped sprites I've seen of that game, a single character can be made up of as many as 12 individual sprite pieces all animating and stretching and motion tweening separately from one another.

There's levels in that game where you have can have a good 10+ characters on screen at the same time. So that's a good 120 objects just for characters, plus foreground and background (and there are quite a lot of parallax layers), and even more than that if you start talking atmospheric particle effects and whatever else.

It does not make sense for Sonic 2 HD to require so much for the way this game looks.

Though I guess it's worth stating that the system requirements may be overstated a bit - I definitely do not meet the minimum as far as processor requirements go (Core2Duo here, 3ghz) and I get a solid 60fps normally and around 39-45fps when recording video.

 

I believe in Sonic 2 HD... If the project does continue, which it should, at this point IMO...

Get rid of that piece of shit LOst. Keep doing an excellent job with your graphics and music and sounds, and get behind an engine put together by a programmer with morals and merit.
Don't give up...

 

Very excited to download this! Thought the day would never come

 

This kind of disrespect is really uncalled for.

Yes, maybe it wasn't the best idea to add DRM to this project, but Lost (and the rest of the S2HD team) has worked countless hours on this game -- for free. Where's the appreciation?

 

It's just a dick move to do that sort of thing with something that started as a community project. There is something uniquely appalling about a project built on the back of reverse engineering to be actively preventing (and seemingly demonizing) reverse engineering. Of course it failed as a community project and I guess that's why it went closed, but I just don't think that would have been as much of a problem if the engine had been a collaborative work though github on day one.

EDIT: In retrospect, was github even around when this started?

 

Mashers... I'll try it with Sonics.
I admit, the framerate did drop to 30fps. But I really mean it's as if the client didn't notice. No chugging, no slowdown, just a game running at 30fps perfectly solidly. I consciously noted to myself yesterday that things are actually more pleasant to play with 200 sprites on screen; that's how solid it is. More pleasant because instead of my framerate hiccuping between 60 and 40 fps, it just sits stable. If I didn't have the counter on I would have noticed it feeling smoother (though this is likely because it didn't need to present new terrain). And when I bopped all those Mashers, again not a flicker. Just explosions and scores.

Trying with Sonic just now, at about 150 it stopped letting me put more on screen. Still no slowdown at all.

I grabbed an invincibility and tried with Buzz Bombers. More than 200, again 30fps, again no chugging, flickering. Just perfect.

I just tried with rings. After 248 it stopped letting me place more. Still no slowdown. However while collecting them the score would disappear, so there's something a bit strange.

Bizarrely, after I collected them all it wouldn't let me place more than a handful at a time anymore, to the point where I could only place 1 on screen, collect it, place another one, and so on. The most rings I have placed in 1 go is 300, in 3 visible piles. With the 248, I made sure there was at least a small difference in position for every ring.


In all this I haven't ever seen the game slow down once, and never go under 30 fps.

 

You're not wrong... Perhaps I took it too far,but don't mistake that as a lack of appreciation for the others. I've played the alpha... And all of them, LOst included, have done amazing work. But I will not regret or feel remorse for my comments... (matter of fact, I deleted out quite a bit. That comment you saw is. Itching compared to what I originally said.) As talented and gifted as LOst is, he is the definition of hypocrisy at its finest, and the project would just be better off without that cancer slowing them down. Remember, as talented as LOst is, he's not the only one... And if the other don't share the paranoia, overinflated ego, and hypocrisy that he exhibits... I for one believe it's worth the trade off. I stand by everything I said... And if I offended you or anyone else, then as long as you're name isn't LOst... Then you have my sincere apology. (especially to Canned Karma and the rest of the S2HD TEAM.

 

Dammit, LOst.


Anyways, I'm glad to see things are going to be worked out. If we're lucky, the game might be done by this year if most of the artwork is ready.

 

What the fu--

Damn. I was looking forward to seeing how that would have been drawn.

 

Is there a way to turn off debug mode so I can have my 3-button spin dash back?

 

Here is something I've known about for quite a substantial amount of time now:


Look carefully at the frames of this flower, 2 of them need flipping in order methinks.


But yeah.

 

No it's not.

LOst managed to take Sonic 2—a game that initially fit comfortably within the Mega Drive's 64KB of RAM—and make it hog upwards of 1GB. There is no excuse for this. Seriously, how does it make any amount of sense for a port of Sonic 2 running at 4x its original resolution to be this demanding?

LOst doesn't deserve anyone's respect. He's always been incompetent, and manages to obfuscate that fact by talking with an (artificial) air of secrecy, as if he's up to something legendarily marvelous, when in actuality he just has his head up his ass. The man is as arrogant as he is clueless.

 

This. I don't think I'd even need to forward any of the allegro.cc posts of complete incompetence to support this point.

The project is fantastic, but the engine is poorly coded, inaccurate, and eats up FAR too many resources. Years ago, (2004-ish, IIRC) Damizean made a fucking GAME MAKER 5 Sonic tech demo with better physics than S2HD.

 

Again

in the industry people are hired to make the most out of graphics cards and optimise the crap out of specific sections which they have knowledge on. LOst is one man. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong that one man did everything (bar sound?), it's stupid to expect amazing graphics programming AND amazing physics AND handle the game engine AND presumably do a bit of hacking to get data from the original game.

I mean people like to make comparisons to Rayman Origins but I count over 30 members of the programming team in that game. Are we really suggesting one man should have the technical skills of thirty industry professionals working day in, day out? Really? I'm surprised the Mobius Engine isn't already out the door then!

The real question I suppose is why only one person was touching the code. It doesn't make that person demon spawn for it because that's kind-of the project manager's responsibility. The DRM stuff is the only questionable bit in LOst's code. It's an "alpha" not a "demo". I bet the Crysis alpha only ran on supercomputers back in the day.



also if you were to profile this you'd probably find the majority of the RAM usage comes from rendering the scene - getting Sonic to move and react with the environments uses a negligible amount of CPU (though more than the original game because you're not working as closely with the hardware and you're doing actual calculations in places where Sonic 2 just does estimates). Graphics are very processor intensive regardless of dimension - this is why graphics cards were invented to ease some of the strain. RAM has gone from KB to GB in the space of twenty years - that's a significant exponential rise. 320x240 has evolved into 1920x1080 in the same time period - not quite as impressive (especially when you consider colour depths).