Sonic 3 A.I.R. Release Thread

Is there any plans for an option to play the zones in their original intended order, with Flying Battery taking place between Carnival Night and Ice Cap? I ask because it's an option I have turned on in Sonic 3 Complete. It's not a big deal, I'm just asking.

 

There is a mod on GameBanana for playing the game with the original zone order.. the only thing is it doesn’t have Flying Battery zooming by when you’re in the cannon ready to fire upwards like in S3C.. it just randomly shoots you diagonally towards it (that’s something I wish they can implement btw in the mod)

I think Euka stated that he won’t make it a special option in the main game though

 

Has a music mod been made to randomly choose the selection of a zone's music?

Like say I have 3 pieces of Flying Battery Zone music I like for Act 2, has there been a mod where it will randomly choose one of the three pieces of music to play in the game when the zone starts up?

 

It's fine by me because I think the final placement works better, and 3 Complete's transition from Mushroom Hill to Sandopolis is a bit silly I find. I really wonder what the actual one would have been if they kept the zone order though.

Also, I don't think recoloring a sunny sky for night time looks very good because being above the clouds you should see stars. I get why it is the way it is, and for a fan made hack I'm not complaining, I'd just prefer the slightly more polished feel of the final, though it is a nice glimpse into how things could have been.

 

Silly little me and this damn bad memory.
I totally forgot Mania had Blue Sphere xD
And not forgetting @Eukaryot's version...

So, in a sense, all major classic special stages got the Taxman treatment.

 

Is there a mod to make the Egg Robo post-credits scene play after Hyper Sonic's ending?

Or a guide on how I could make such a mod? (I have absolutely zero modding experience.)

 

Whipped this up after some trial-and-error.

 

Sweet! Thanks so much for doing that!

 

Well, because everyone and their capybara has been saying it, I will chime in with the fact I'd love the Zone correct order, too, with nighttime Flying Battery, etc (maybe add stars per Metalwario64's comment...I would dig that!). and I'd love the Complete cutscene between Launch Base and Mushroom VALLEY, too.

It is the way I've been playing the game for years, so I consider it the standard now.

I LOVE how in A.I.R. you can change it so that you have to dodge the bombing run in Angel Island now. That is something I'd always wanted to see and glad it's been made a reality.

I got a new laptop recently and I'll be setting this up in the near future to do a full run-through along with the PC ports of Whitehead's 1 and 2. Planning on making a weekend out of it but have to get it all set up first and HDMI it to the big screen.

 

Hey everyone,

We just released a new mobile Beta of Sonic 3 A.I.R. - for Android, iOS and Web!

Compared to the last beta a few weeks ago, the main new feature now is support for zip files as mods. That means you dont' have to unpack the mod zip files any more, but just place them in the "mods" folder of the game's save data folder. Find more info on that in the game's manual.

Also, you can now select the game controller to use in the "Controls" section of the options. This should help solve some issues that people had, like the connected controller being used for Player 2 / Tails.

You can find all downloads and more information on the project website, and again, in the manual - this includes instructions for installation and updating from a previous build.

Have fun!

 

The Nvidia Shield controller works perfectly now with this latest update! Thank you very much for your hard work on this game, it's much appreciated.

 

PC version could use a renderer framerate cap for use with VRR displays, right now if I run it in fullscreen mode in a 144Hz freesync display the renderer outputs 144 frames but the game only shows 60, creating judder.

 

Not trying to be a dick or rush anything, but opening the source would allow people to experiment with so many things, and in some cases actually take the workload off of the core team with selectively adopting submitted fixes/improvements. I don't see it as some added burden, simply refusing to support nonofficial versions is enough. It's certainly better than refusing to allow third party experimentation at all. Even with the caveat of an ever-changing structure of the core project as things shift around, it would only serve to benefit everyone in the long-term.

 

I've just added a new option for that, whcih I guess will help (unfortunately I can't really test it myself). It's part of the next preview build.

Well, the old open source question. I guess I will not make friends with answering.
I'd first refer to this thread from last year because many of the reasons brought up by people to not make their projects open source also hold for S3AIR.

This is a project that I built up from the ground and as such, it more than anything else I've ever done felt like my project. The one where (of course with the exception of specific contributions like DJ Spindash's sound track, and the ports by Sappharad and Heyjoeway) every little piece was put in by me, and that now after over four years of work on it really feels like a very personal life task.
That's not something I want to make public for everyone to judge and argue about. Or to make changes to in a more or less uncontrolled fashion, where in worst case I end up being the manager of other people's contributions, or constantly have to make sure not to introduce code conflicts or incompatibilities with the work of others. Even if that's exaggerated, sharing a living project makes many things more complicated in any case.

On the other hand, I'm aware that there is quite some interest in the sources. That actually was one of the reasons I made the game scripts open source. These include everything that makes up the core game itself, being a port of the entirety of original S3&K code, plus most of S3AIR's own additions to the game. As such, the scripts are already a major part - I'd say even the major part - of S3AIR. And they allow for all kinds of tinkering with Sonic 3 & Knuckles, as proven by many of the modding community's efforts.

So all that's really left is the core engine sources - and this is still something I'm very hesitant to make public. For the reasons above, but in part also because (unlike S3AIR itself) the engine is far from being finished, and has a much larger scope for me personally. This is because I actually do have plans for using the engine in other Mega Drive / Genesis game ports as well (maybe even as a commercial project, if an opportunity arises).

All in all, things would look differently if all of this was a finished project and I could just zip it all up, upload somewhere and forget about it. But that's not the case here, at least not the near future.

 

Looking forward to testing it!

 

I actually wasn't aware of this part, but I wasn't really keeping up too closely TBH. That pretty much solves most concerns I had. I still think it'd be neat if someone could tinker with different screen resolutions and framerates, but being able to modify most things (even if not at the core engine level) is quite satisfactory enough.

EDIT: Attempted to clear this of text color. I still don't know how the hell that happened, I sure didn't mean to.

 

Maybe the folks here use a skin other than blue?
I, for one, use black. No problems reading posts.
(I prefer black for ease on my eyesight... ^^")

 

Here's what the post looks like on Blue 5, for people who don't use it.