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Sonic 3 Complete

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by Tiddles, Dec 25, 2009.

  1. Tiddles

    Tiddles

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    I guess "unofficially" was the wrong word, but I was including bankswitching and any addon chips in that bracket; you can do it if you build your cart a certain way, or if you only target specific emulators or flashcarts, or if you don't mind being incompatible with the MCD or 32X, but I don't really want to get into those kind of compatibility adventures. I don't have plans at the moment for anything that I think would need that extra space.

    The level of smoothness exhibited by Pana would need a vast increase in the number of animation frames, which at the very least would require changing the way the animation system works as Sonic 3 already uses close to the single-byte limit due to different poses and such. ROM space is obviously an issue, and one that, if anything, would only be made worse with an SCD port - it's not like you can just access the whole CD at once, and the amount you could fit into a usable bank - which is already pretty low - would be further hampered by having to carry around an enormous player sprite as part of it. See the SCH topic for a similar discussion.

    I'm not saying it's totally impossible, but part of the reason S3C provides so many little things while still avoiding being too buggy, and actually ever getting updates, is because I try to focus on what can be achieved without tearing up too much of the original framework.

    Widescreen is not realistic either. You could draw everything narrower so it'd look right with an anamorphic stretch, but without being able to increase the actual horizontal resolution, it would look pretty terrible.

    These are things that are only likely to happen with a proper port of S3&K to newer hardware, so there might be better people to ask about that. :)

    S3C on S&K Collection is a pretty cool notion, but the idea of doing everything again in x86 fills me with dread. I'm happy to consider ports but I doubt I would program one myself.
     
  2. Blastfrog

    Blastfrog

    See ya starside. Member
    On the subject of widescreen, you could probably get something approximately close to accurate by stretching 320x224 to a 16:9 ratio with the 8-bit game's scale.
     
  3. MainMemory

    MainMemory

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    You might not have to touch any x86 asm, now that I've found a way to inject C++ code into games via DLL overrides (in this case, MIDIOUT.DLL is the likely vector). In fact, it would probably be easier to interface with S&KC's code than it is SADX/SA2 because you don't get so many optimized functions with weird calling conventions. They actually have an area of RAM that represents the 68000 registers, and the game uses them for everything the original did (it's very unoptimized, which may be because it's a debug build).

    But if you're not up to it that's fine. I'm not even sure what you'd get out of it, other than 12-bit color (they forgot to mask off the low bit of palette entries).
     

  4. I see. Thanks for the info.

    And this is THE romhack people should try out. Being able to use Sonic 1 sprites is great, as well as Sonic 1 level clear themes and all that.
     
  5. Chilly Willy

    Chilly Willy

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    The SVP limits the rom to no more than 3 MB (24 Mbits). The "standard" Sega mapper allows up to 32 MB (256 Mbits) as 64 banks of 512 KB, but only SSF2 ever used it, and they only used 5 MB (40 Mbits).
     
  6. Iceguy

    Iceguy

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    I love this hack. <3 The level of customizability is amazing.
    But, during my playthrough as Knuckles, I stumbled upon these two things you may or may not want to fix/change/modify/stuff:

    [​IMG]
    I drowned here, trying to get up. I haven't played Sonic 3 in forever until I saw the most recent release of this hack, so I don't remember if this happened in the original (I bet it did). Anyways, uh... yeah. Iunno what to suggest.

    [​IMG]
    And those rings are too high for Knuckles to reach.

    Please continue the good work. This hack really is magnificent. ouo
     
  7. Covarr

    Covarr

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    You can't climb the wall and then glide to them?
     
  8. Iceguy

    Iceguy

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    Nope. I tried, but the wall is pixel precisely high enough for Knuckles not to reach. xD
     
  9. Knucklez

    Knucklez

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    That's cause it's intentionally not for Knuckles.
     
  10. RetroKoH

    RetroKoH

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    IIRC you could always retain an Electric Shield to that point and get them all that way... besides why on earth should the layout change to make it accomodating for Knuckles? The whole point is that Knuckles has advantages and disadvantages that help and hinder, and all around change the experience.

    Compensating to remove these differences completely destroys the entire point of being able to play as Knuckles... as well it goes against the point of the hack.
     
  11. Iceguy

    Iceguy

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    My comrades! \owo/
    This is very important. Especially this part. /owo/
    I'm not forcing anyone, I'm just posting feedback just in case there are overlooked details.
     
  12. Sid Starkiller

    Sid Starkiller

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    Actually, you can. First, cling to the wall just under the spring. That gets you high enough to reach the wall on the other side, where the score is in your screenshot. Then from there glide over the spring.
     
  13. Jason

    Jason

    *Results not lab tested. Member
    Found a bug at the end of Carnival Night Act 2. At the transition to Icecap as Sonic, bouncing into the cannon with the Bubble Shield causes the cannon to fire straight up immediately, with no player control. This happens two or three times until the cannon decides to turn to the proper angle and fire, transitioning to Icecap Act 1.

    EDIT: Also, when I used Hyper Sonic for the first opportunity in MHZ, the wrong sparks were coming off of him.
    [​IMG]

    One more suggestion: Could you make the Vs. Knuckles fight his S&K theme? Seeing as how you've kept the S&K specific tracks in a few S&K specific places (Flying Battery Act 2 Laser, Eggman's betrayal of Knuckles in Hidden Palace), seems fitting to use that track in the battle.
     
  14. MastaSys

    MastaSys

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    Set his theme to S&K on the options menu.
     
  15. Jason

    Jason

    *Results not lab tested. Member
    Well, I meant just for that fight. Like I said, Tiddles kept S&K music in some spots where the events made more sense. Currently it's the Sonic 3 Midboss, but I'd rather it be Knuckles' S&K theme instead. Doesn't really affect the fight if I change that setting.
     
  16. Tiddles

    Tiddles

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    Ah, but it does. The fight will use your normal Knuckles theme unless you're using S3 MD Knuckles, in which case it switches to the S3 midboss theme as you have observed. I'm not planning to make any changes there.

    The S&K midboss theme playing in a few places even when it's not selected is a bit of a special case - it already existed and had a sound test slot in S3, so I give it special powers to turn up immutably in a couple of places later on, in places where throwing out the S3 midboss theme just doesn't sound right to me. Compare to the S&K Knuckles theme, which does not exist in the S3 sound test, and takes over S3 Knuckles' spot in S[3]&K - it's clearly a replacement rather than a separate track of its own.

    I don't know what the deal is with those wrong Hyper stars; I've never seen that. If you can manage to reproduce it consistently, I'd love to know how. I'm guessing you'd had invincibility at some point before that?
     
  17. SuperSonicRider

    SuperSonicRider

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    Just noticed this after messing around w/some of the customizer options; if you set the credits music to "Sonic 3 Credits", then it will always play the original MD/Genesis credits music in the Complete/S&K staff roll, regardless of if you have it set to the PC version in the in-game Options menu or not.

    The only way to get the PC S3 Credits theme to play during the Complete/S&K staff roll is to set it to play during the "ending" and then make the ending music continuous. Was this intentional by any chance, or just an oversight?
     
  18. Tiddles

    Tiddles

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    That is an error. It's got a bit snarled up in the way half of it's in the customiser and half of it's in the menu. I'll have to rewrite what the customizer does there. Well spotted, thanks!
     
  19. SuperSonicRider

    SuperSonicRider

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    No problem! :)

    On another note, here's something I JUST noticed: The S&K layouts are always overridden when playing "Sonic 3 (Part One)" mode. (I remember seeing talk about layouts earlier in this thread but I don't recall seeing this specifically; forgive me if this has been mentioned already.) Granted, it's not really that big of an issue since you can just play the game in the Complete mode and get the S&K or recommended layouts anyway, BUT I'd figure I'd mention it anyway in case it was fixable. :)

    EDIT: Also, I don't know if it would help to know this, but I just tested and this doesn't happen in the inverse case; if you play an S3 level in S&K through the level select, the layout will be the S3 one if you set it to that. (Speaking of, I don't usually play in S&K mode that much, so I wanna say that making the level select background the Blue Sphere one for S&K was a really nice touch!)

    One last thing, and this is a super minor nitpick, but Sonic's starting position for Mushroom Valley when playing in S&K mode is a LITTLE too far to the left compared to vanilla S&K, haha. Not a huge deal, but yeah.
     
  20. Tiddles

    Tiddles

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    That much was deliberate. It's a difficult call as to how much the individual game's base settings should take precedence with things like this, but on balance it seemed to make sense that S3P1 should always get its original layouts, particularly given that few of its unique features (bugs) are respected. I certainly didn't want to make the options here as complicated as music selection, either. You can choose Normal difficulty to get S&K-ish layouts in S3P1, albeit with stuff like the super easy HCZ2 intro from Jam.

    It's never really come up, but I suppose that should be consistent and ignore the S3 preference if S3 ignores an S&K preference. I'll sort that out.

    This is by design, and it took me ages to remember why. And I'm not going to tell you why, because it's part of a few subtle changes that mask over a little visual issue that wouldn't really be noticable unless you were looking for it. I've said too much already. :)