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Sonic 3 Complete

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

  1. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Nothing to worry about, but it's still an inconsistency.
     
  2. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Space and time, probably.

    The effect you described is more likely due to slightly wonky maths than the idea itself. There's likely a way to clean it up.
     
  3. Knucklez

    Knucklez

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    Didn't say it wasn't. Just stated Tiddles' reasoning behind it when he initially made the change.
     
  4. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    Thanks for clearing that up. Still don't get how just "The Doomsday" makes any less grammatical sense than "The Doomsday Zone", but whatever floats Tiddles' boat :v:

    No, I'm pretty sure the "sliding" of the blocks in S3C was deliberately put there to simulate rotation in the extra frames, in lieu of existent graphics for the new angles. If they made the code properly align the blocks in all frames, they would end up with repeated frames and it would just look the vanilla S3&K's rotation effect. So the only way of solving the problem without reducing the rotation frames would be producing block graphics for the new angles.

    Anyway, my point was the Sonic Team likely didn't use more frames for the rotation because they realized how awkward it looks unless you draw each frame, not because they couldn't implement a "smoother" rotation ala S3C's.
     
  5. Tiddles

    Tiddles

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    The rotation change was a one byte change that affects how often the screen rotation updates. S3C didn't do anything special. That's how the game does it, just more often. By the barometer of "this is the first complaint since it was changed in 2013", I'm guessing it's not an issue for most people.

    "Doomsday" is used as both a noun and an adjective. As a noun, it is never used with the definite article; "we'll be here until doomsday", not "we'll be here until the doomsday". It would be like saying "The Christmas Day". The adjectival form is often used with the definite article, e.g. "the doomsday book", "the doomsday clock", because the article belongs to the noun it's describing. So "The Doomsday Zone" is fine because "the zone" is a noun and "doomsday" describes it; without the "zone" modifier, "the" doesn't make sense any more, and looks daft.

    Imagine if you had a game where you run around oranges, and all the levels are named, like, "navel orange", "blood orange", and the last one is "the curious orange". And there's a level select that omits "orange" from the end of them all, to save space. Should the last one say "the curious"? I don't think so. You may disagree.

    Essentially, "zone" is an integral part of the name in a way it isn't elsewhere, so it's treated uniquely when that modifier is lost.

    If you've been keeping up, none of these things are ever likely to change again, so there's even less sense griping about it than usual. I can only recall two people having complained about Doomsday, and one of them is Neo, so if he ever makes a successor project, you can probably have a party about it returning to being technically consistent nonsense.

    Oh, and competition result data is already shared.
     
  6. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    Well, if it's only a matter of a single byte change, then why not make it a setting, or at least an optional patch? It shouldn't be that hard in that case. And the fact that a single byte decides how often the rotation updates should tell you that Sonic Team purposely picked the rotation rate used by vanilla S3&K because they felt it looked the best. They could have picked a higher refresh rate themselves, yet they choose one that matched the existing graphics, keeping the blocks aligned all the time. Isn't that reason enough to offer the option, seeing how you guys tried to include an option for nearly every other design change?

    As for the Doomsday thing, fair enough. Guess I always assumed "the Doomsday" was grammatically correct because of S3&K, as that was where I first heard that word from as a kid (English isn't my first language, so I didn't know many English words back then). Thanks for explaining it to me.

    Huh. I could swear I was able to record different times in S3C and S3 modes. I just tried it again and they were shared this time. I must have tried an older version by mistake, my bad.
     
  7. Brainulator

    Brainulator

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    I'd actually like it if the use of "the" in Doomsday's name gets removed because it feels awkward to have it there. I guess another point of reference would be TV channel naming conventions; The Weather Channel, The Movie Channel, The Disney Channel, versus Travel Channel, Food Network, Disney Channel... there's no true sense of consistency when it comes to a specific medium. Why not rename the first level in Sonic 3 "The Angel Island Zone"? The Flying Battery Zone? The Death Egg Zone? I mean, we say "Dr. Eggman built the Death Egg" and not "Dr. Eggman built Death Egg," so why not make it THE Death Egg Zone?

    tl;dr Definite articles in zone names are awkward
     
  8. The Doomsday is a great name though because of the fact no other zone begins with 'The' in the game, or even franchise to that point. It helps really sell the 'oh shit' factor, coupled with being the first time you unlock a zone with the chaos/super emeralds.
     
  9. Brainulator

    Brainulator

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    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pux2TNnKuw4
     
  10. WhoWhatWhenWhale

    WhoWhatWhenWhale

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    I can't believe that cybershell is still around and active. I remember watching his Sonic 3 & Knuckles videos in like 2009-ish. Glad that he made an entire video about this hack, because this deserves it.
     
  11. Covarr

    Covarr

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    He's not still active so much as active again. He stopped making Sonic videos consistently eight years ago, came back for a tails run of Sonic CD two years ago, and only in the past few months has been regularly releasing original Sonic-related content again.
     
  12. Modern

    Modern

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    The only way this hack could be any better is if you could customize teams, a'la Sonic Classic Heroes. Even if it's via the rom customizer on the website, just give me the ability to play as Tails with Knuckles following me around and I'm set for life.
     
  13. MainMemory

    MainMemory

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    That would require significant modifications to all the character objects. The game is hardcoded to send player 1's input to player 2's data when playing as Tails alone, and Tails is hardcoded to always use controller 2, so you'd need to come up with some way to make any character able to use either controller. The AI routines are also coded directly into Tails, so you'd need to make versions of that for Sonic and Knuckles.
     
  14. Chris Highwind

    Chris Highwind

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    So during my run of the 3 Genesis Sonic games leading up to Mania, I decided to play Sonic 3 Complete on my Vita through a homebrew RetroArch port. However, for some reason, the Tails Assist function doesn't seem to adhere to the rules it's given. Whether I turn the assist on or off, or change between Sonic 3 and Sonic 1 2013, Tails will go into assist mode if I double jump, jumping automatically detaches Sonic from Tails, and the only way I can ascend is if I jump off Tails and then jump again so he grabs me again and goes up a bit.

    EDIT: Disregard, it appears to be RetroArch Vita fucking up the input again like in Wonder Boy 3. "Unplugging" the "controller" (changing the Device Type to "JoypadEmpty") and then "plugging" it back in (changing the type back to JoypadAuto) fixes it for the session.
     
  15. Gammatron

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    This is tangentially related, but I figured I'd mention it here since I don't know if it's warranted to make a thread for it.

    Now, Sonic 3 Complete is basically the definitive version of Sonic 3. Now, for the other Sonic games, the definitive versions are the Taxman ports... for iPhone. There's no PC versions or anything.

    Has anyone thought of making a Sonic 1 Complete and Sonic 2 Complete?

    For instance, for Sonic 1 Complete, there has been romhacks that fix the spike bug, add a Spindash, allow Tails and Knuckles as playable characters, but they're all separate romhacks and don't put them all into one nice package. So if you're playing on an everdrive, you need to load up a separate rom if you want to play as a different character, which is an little inconvenient. And if you were to make a repro cart, each one would require a whole separate cartridge.

    I can't imagine this would be that hard to do, because I've seen romhacks of Sonic 1 that feature multiple characters and ones of Sonic 2 that include Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. It's just that these typically change level layouts and the like as well.
     
  16. DigitalDuck

    DigitalDuck

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    Sonic Classic Heroes essentially does that and more. You can play as a single character of the classic trio, or a pair of characters, or all three, and ditto for Chaotix characters, in either Sonic 1, Sonic 2, or both, with fairly minimal changes otherwise.
     
  17. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    If you're looking for a more pure version of those though, the old Sonic 1 + 2 hack is essentially Sonic Classic Heroes without the Heroes aspect or the Sonic 3 & Knuckles sprites. So it's just Sonic and Tails.

    However if you're looking for official versions of a Sonic 1 and 2 Complete well that's basically the Taxman iOS/Android remakes
     
  18. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    That's subjective. There are a few things about S3C that bug me TBH.
     
  19. Modern

    Modern

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    care to elaborate?
     
  20. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    Well, I've already posted about them here, so here are the links to my posts:
    http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=18808&view=findpost&p=897449
    http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=18808&view=findpost&p=897534
    http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=18808&view=findpost&p=892918