True, hence my question on the level of feasibility regarding that. They are not an entirely new thing but they might just as well be considered as such, since they've only been implemented 2 or 3 times in Mega Drive specific projects: Pana and S1 smooth Edition. There's no harm in asking. Now we all know that getting better audio could be done in the S&K collection. I didn't know that, and I''m sure many lurkers didn't either. Mainmemory suggested that. It's a net positive overall. Also the sprites do exist for Sonic 1 at least. Maybe someone knows of someone else with lots of sprites from an obscure project from years ago. A poll could be opened about who's willing to do sprites. I would do share of the work no problem. I firmly maintain my point that there's no harm in asking. Just go through the Doom 3 community. They have achieved literally crazy things throughout the years because of the open nature of both their projects and their community. Being this defensive because of my half-decently articulated question is out of proportion IMHO.
In the midst of this ongoing debate, my only modest proposal is a toggle for Knuckles's underwater physics. Going by the past official 2D Sonic releases (phone reworks & Mania) it appears that Gliding underwater as it was in the original was somewhat if not fully intentional as a design choice? It's about the only thing I can think of in S3 Complete that I really think should be an option. Not too keen on the idea of porting it to Mega CD, I'm not sure what the game needs or why it should be on a platform like that when it's already functional and content-filled as it stands on its current platform. The only port I'd consider is a widescreen remaster ala the Taxman/Stealth things, and that's not really in the scope of this project in particular to be honest.
For what it's worth, I don't like to have more than 8 rotation angles, and I can't see why someone would want to have that. If such a thing is done, please keep it optional.
I don't understand this meme. All other bosses which flip from side to side also do so without any inbetween frames. How is the MGZ1 boss worse than say, Big Arm?
Fliping side to side is a nonsense to mention since every single object does it withour inbetween frames...
Because I noticed that one. And it's a lot easier to draw. It's a much more productive use of one's time than adding more frames to Sonic's walk cycle, which was being discussed.
On the Saturn, yes it was possible to squeeze a bunch of ADPCM compressed audio on a disc but that has it's own issues as another member pointed out. Good luck on the SEGA CD, at most you probably just get low quality mono audio instead of decent stereo and probably don't want to use too complex of an ADPCM codec either. Using Redbook Audio tracks is completely out of the question with the number of tracks and length of them that Sonic 3 & Knuckles has (not possible). It's possible to USE the PCM chip to play some of sound effects and drum samples better than the YM2612 is able to, but good luck with that, too (you don't even have the original samples to begin with as those are already compressed 4-bit DPCM). Also good luck with the 32X as well. Final verdict: NOT WORTH THE TROUBLE AT ALL.
All this time I haven't posted on Retro for me to come out of the shadows to just say it. All of this pointless blabbering about porting and other nonsense for a project that has essentially been "complete" since 2013. Both Tiddles and Neo have stated they are done with it for all the various reasons. Passion, time and money are of the essence and people just can't have all of that to keep a great thing going. As it stands, this project is perfect and everything that was set out to be done was accomplished AND MORE. Have a fine day ladies and gentlemen. I will now have my breakfast.
LOl what pointless blabber? All that happened was having simple question regarding the possibility and feasibility of implementing CD quality audio, and smoother animation, to which some users expressed their perspective regarding the unfeasibility of doing such, for one reason or the other. And as I said, proposing ideas has the advantage of gathering people together who may have their own materials to contribute to the project, or may know of other more obscure projects that may have half of the work done. It's a forum, people discuss things. Deal with it. Across numerous forums which I'm a part of, big projects, or forking of existing projects have been born this way, with people sharing ideas, and then users coming forward, naming other users and what related things they have done, often times years ago. Contacts are made, assets are shared, and step by step, things get built. Look at the Tomb Raider modding community for example. Or the Doom community. Or so many others. Now if you think S3 can't be improved, good for you. Some people happen to think it can be improved just a tiny bit further - and if this was not true you would not have so many people clamoring for a newer port of S3K using the retro engine; heck people even insist on bringing the newer ports of S1 and S2 to consoles and the PC. At the end of the day, the very idea of tweaking and improving ends up being a very subjective thing. It all boils down to taste, which in itself is very subjective. Some people will say that implementing Sonic 1 & 2 sprites was good for the project; others will say it was needless and there would have been more interesting things to do. You can't make everyone agree with the priority of things 100% of the time. But a minimum degree of agreeableness can be achieved, so long as people don't get assblasted with a simple question.
Of course, one of the issues with implementing a CD audio soundtrack is that you need a CD audio soundtrack to implement. I've come to believe that it probably isn't possible to accurately enhance Mega Drive Sonic tunes much further than how they stand now. I think Taxman got it right by sourcing out higher quality samples of the Sonic 1/2 instruments (where possible) - doing the same for Sonic 3 would be lovely but going further (and actually justifying the reason for using the Mega-CD for this) is a different story. For example, what is the lead instrument on the Sonic 3 title screen meant to be? How do you make it "better" while still making it sound like Sonic 3? At least on the NES, square waves are a little bit more open to interpretation - with Sonic, they had the opportunity to actually use instruments that don't sound completely synthetic and they chose not to. And p.s. I've been waiting nearly 20 years for an answer to that question and I've still not seen one />/> I do like the idea of taking a page from the book of MarkeyJester http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_YPu8zrKBE Squeezing another sound channel in there.
The reason I'm 'unsatisfied' (for lack of a better word) with the current situation is that a huge amount of time and effort has gone into Sonic 3 Complete since the 2013 release, and none of that has seen the light of day. Neo has, among many other things (most of which I don't know about), implemented green spheres into Blue Sphere, implemented the Sonic CD timer, fixed countless bugs, implemented the drop dash (though not accurately, since Mania wasn't out at the time). I do wish Neo would take Tiddles up on his offer to fork the project and release something under a new name, because to not be able to play with all of this is heartbreaking.
Pointless because it's been made clear that Sonic 3 Complete is just that... it's complete. If the guys decide to update it with something new, they will. Things HAVE been worked on when time and resources have permitted. At least this isn't like Megamix and we actually have a completed product. Personally, I hope mods lock this thread unless Tiddles and crew decide to update.
Thank you for the kind words, but I wish people would bring this kind of stuff up with me in private, rather than make me further derail this thread.