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Sonic 3 HD

Discussion in 'Fangaming Discussion' started by Relick, Dec 26, 2011.

  1. dsrb

    dsrb

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    I would hope so! Parallax scrolling is a basic feature of all the 2D games. I presume and very much hope that they're aware of this and that the current background is just a placeholder.
     
  2. Harmony Friends

    Harmony Friends

    it's the whole gang Oldbie
    My issues with the game basically amount to anyone else's, but that said, focus on the programming issues first. The current art is kind of lazily-done but you should have your gameplay engine completely and totally polished to high heaven and back before you even really think about assets. The art and music right now is extremely incredibly flawed but it the very least makes a decent placeholder. So keep it as a placeholder for now, and work your ass off on the code.

    First off: thoroughly read the entire Sonic Physics Guide. Then do it again. If you can't implement all this to the specifications you may as well not try.

    You should strongly consider open-sourcing the project. Get a repository at GitHub. The more experienced programmers that can see your code and submit changes to the project, the likely better you'll be able to make the engine.

    The project needs a SHITLOAD of work and polish but I also would like to believe you can make it into something awesome. I'd care more about a Sonic 3 HD any day of the week than a Sonic 2 HD -- and that's with no offense meant to the S2HD team as they've done incredible work, far more than this thing, and have set an incredibly high bar for any other similar fan remakes -- but S3K is my favorite of the classic Sonics and basically my favorite platformer of all time (and Sonic 2, while good, is my least favorite of the classic Sonics).

    I'm pretty sure many share my opinion, so there's a significant niche out there that would love to see this project become all it could be, and possibly even contribute to making that so. If you guys behind the project can get your ass in gear and work on these issues, then support will follow behind.
     
  3. saxman

    saxman

    Oldbie Tech Member
    I'm not interested in petty flamewars, but I'll just say this: you would never say the same to Tweaker. He was a dick to the guy who posted this topic. Yet you want to call me out for actually doing the right thing. I'm not a dick, I'm just don't like seeing innocent people get kicked around. That's the way I've always been, and I am not going to bow down to anyone who decides they get to play God and treat people with a complete lack of respect. Oh I know guys, lets lock this topic because I don't like the game. Any reasonable person knows that's crazy. Anything else I say from here on will be via PM because I don't like stirring up crap publically. But I felt it needed to be said. It's not like I'm the only person who thinks this. I'm just the only one who's not afraid to speak up about it. All hail Tweaker.


    As far as the game is concerned, it does have a ways to go. But I remember when S2HD was starting out. There were a lot of nay-sayers, and there were certain aspects of the quality that, looking back, were questionable. Some of the shading for example could be improved. You're at a disadvantage because you are a smaller group than Sega for example. However, I believe anyone can do anything they want if they have the imagination and talent for it. Please keep posting about this project.
     
  4. winterhell

    winterhell

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    Thanks guys for the comments, we'll do our best to improve and we'll keep you posted :)

    And estimating that I haven't read Mercury's Physics Guide is flattering me. Its true however that some of the values there doesn't work on this engine, so I calculated them myself. Especially the ones concerning slopes.
     
  5. Harmony Friends

    Harmony Friends

    it's the whole gang Oldbie
    I'm pretty sure flattering is the not the word you meant.
    That said, a lot more than just the slope values felt wrong to me when playing Sonic 3 HD earlier. I might write a more detailed writeup later but it is more than just the slopes.
    Honestly the engine does feel like a very rough approximation, like an early "static engine" like Tweaker mentioned, and fixing that should be your number one priority. But it can be done!
     
  6. Relick

    Relick

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    Yeah parallax is definitely going to be in. It was planned for this pre-demo but it didn't get put in for some reason :v:. We have all the layers and stuff (other than the very back 2, that still needs recreating).
     
  7. Cinossu

    Cinossu

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    Sonic the Hedgehog Extended Edition
    I'd work on at least getting the physics and every object of a zone (bar mayhaps the boss) properly programmed before showing off something new. While tech demos are nice, all they really do is show us that you've done something intermittent. By showing something complete you show us that you're committed to doing solid, good work.

    Actually I would, and have done many times. Stop playing the fucking martyr.
     
  8. I agree with saxman here. This isn't perfect, and it needs work done, but there's absolutely no reason that this needs to be trashed or bashed. If you're going to be saying people's releases are garbage, then why don't you look at your first release of Sonic Megamix. I don't understand why people criticize other members' first releases and call it garbage when their first release wasn't any better. Kind of hypocritical, no?


    Keep working on this, and it could get somewhere. Kind of reminds me of S2HD except without the nitpicking on the minute details. This, at best, is proof of concept, and should be named as such! Physics and collision need some work, but I like where this is going. I can offer to do some music if you wish, soundfonts pasted over MIDIs are usually a bad idea.


    You could bundle XNA Framework with your release, or have an extractor do all of the work. Complaining about having to install that is like bitching at having to install VB6 for xm3smps, which Tweaker didn't do by the way.

    So, if you can't get rid of the XNA dependency then just bundle it in some way.
     
  9. Cinossu

    Cinossu

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    Times change, standards rise, and the fact that said ROM hack was done by one person rather than a group, means this point is nullified.
     
  10. Tweaker

    Tweaker

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    I think it's hilarious that people are finding every insult and demeaning analogy they can pull out of their ass to try and slam me with just because they're so offended by my opinion differing so drastically from their own. Keep it classy, guys.
     
  11. LordOfSquad

    LordOfSquad

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    I really don't think they're offended by your differing opinion, so much as they're offended by you being so harsh with your criticism. It doesn't seem like there was really any need for you to be so passionately angry about it. And, you know, calling the team "lame" isn't really classy either.

    Just my two cents.
     
  12. A few thoughts:
    - Not really a fan of the art style. It looks clean for what it is but the world kind of loses a lot of its charm somehow. This is probably a result of the game being vectored, not sure how you would fix this though and I recommend you stay steady with the style. Although if you can find tweaks to make it feel more organic the game would be better for it
    - You weren't kidding, the engine's pretty buggy. Specifically collisions. Its weird how I'm programmed to expect things to react in this stage. When I fly through enemies and spikes like I shouldn't in the Genesis games it threw me off guard. This'll be fixed though, and I'm really impressed with what you've got on the engine so far. What's done feels almost exactly like the Sonic I know and love

    I don't really know what else to say besides the game looks awesome, can't wait to see it progress. Keep up the good work y'all!
     
  13. Tweaker

    Tweaker

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    I was as harsh as I felt was necessary given my past knowledge with this project and the people involved in it. These guys have been trying to make this project for at least a year or so now and did little more than go from forum to forum begging for people to join their staff team, despite having literally nothing to show that the project even had any substance to it. Several people made validation topics with their sole argument being that they should be validated so they can give the project publicity despite having nothing to show for it. A few months back a topic was even made on here showing nothing substantial, once again, to prove that the project was worth even paying attention to. Now that they finally have content—and god knows how they managed to scrounge it up, because all of the big talent in this community wouldn't dare invest unpaid time and effort before being shown it was worth it—it's been shown to be extremely sub-par and underwhelming whilst being given this huge, overblown promotion campaign and introduction post.

    So yes, I think this project still has little no compelling substance to it and I feel that the actions taken by the team's staff members on the whole have been pretty goddamn lame. I think that the only reason they tried so hard to post so much of it here is because they want to do exactly what Sonic 2 HD did and see how much talent they can suck out of the forum before fading into obscurity or otherwise contributing little on their own. I've seen their original website, I've seen their original mockups and I've seen their approach to the whole thing—it's an insult to the talented community members they wanted to badly to help them make this project. It feels like an awful plea for attention and that rubs me the wrong way.

    But I guess a few downscaled screenshots, a "work in progress" engine test and the empty promise of better content is more than enough to sway people here, so whatever. I never forced anyone to share my opinion and frankly I don't care if you do or not. I just want it to be known that I think the dude who started this project (I can't even remember his name anymore; I don't think I ever knew it) was just another little pretentious guy with a "cool idea" and it's shocking that it's actually come as far as it has given the circumstances, despite that not actually saying much about the project's quality as a whole.
     
  14. I don't know any of these guys working on this thing but I feel like if they have enough drive they can get their shit together and make this work nicely. There's really no reason to be so critical over a simple tech demo (Unfinished but at least they're showing some progress) Like, it'd be one thing if they were legitimately boasting around the internet about how great Sonic 3 HD is and how people should leave Retro and various other communities to come work exclusively on Sonic 3 HD, but from my view its basically some dudes who decided to do a fan game and put a fair amount of effort into it. Its not perfect by any means, and if they were calling it a finished product I'd be just as critical, but with time they could make something ok.

    No reason to be so cynical about it all. Even if it does turn to shit and they abandon it completely, so what? We wasted a little bit of bandwith and got to see somebody's attempt at a fairly cool idea. I mean you said it yourself, you're surprised they got as far as they did. Give 'em time and see what they can do
     
  15. Elratauru

    Elratauru

    Little Shiny Emurralds Member
    Well, let me add my grain of sand:

    I believe that the art should be looking more "HD" and less resize and retrace... something like this:

    Original:
    [​IMG]

    My version:
    [​IMG]

    As you can see, I did not just retraced it, I added my own details based on the artwork. It is just a quick example of where the art direction of this project should base of I guess...The original artwork pieces were great and had tons of personality that the original artists had to recreate using low res sprites. If I really overthink it, I'd scrap that off too and just use pre-rendered stuff... I mean, Sonic 3 played with contrast A LOT...maybe my example would fit a lot more in Sonic 2 than 3 actually :P...

    Aside that, the engine is not bad... At least its language is decent and easy to run. I have seen some nasty bugs but then I saw that it was an unfinished-rushed pre-demo so yeah...Makes sense. But I look forward to see more progress about it.

    Ps. don't forget parallax scrolling :)
     
  16. Eduardo Knuckles

    Eduardo Knuckles

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    I could enter this "it's good or not?" discussion by give another personal opinion about the graphical content itself or even the music stuff or the engine used. But I think that if we pay attention, no one of us are going to the wrong way here. Everyone of us are giving our own opinions about how the art is going as the knowledge we have about these stuff. In my opinion, all that is lacking in this project is a bit more of a sharing, by open up the project for other people to contribute on this on the way as they can help, without taking the stuff as "finished" without a revision or other people's eyes. I mean, eyes from people wich aren't from the team and wants to contribute to it with something. If they needs fix, why don't to contribute to it instead of only be talking about without giving to this project a true and deep contribution?

    I'm sorry dudes if I'm sounding like offending people with this, just be sure that this isn't my intention.
     
  17. Conan Kudo

    Conan Kudo

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    Okay, first: XNA is a bad choice. XNA immediately limits you to Windows Vista and Windows 7 and makes it difficult to port later to other non-Windows based platforms when you want to do it later. And you will want to do it later. It is also bloat. You don't need all of XNA. Heck, for a Sonic game, you don't need ANY of XNA. SDL works well enough because it's just a 2D game with some 3D layering if needed.

    Second, requiring the .NET 4.0 Framework is just awful. If you required .NET Framework 2.0, that's fine, but .NET Framework 3.0 and higher is unacceptable.

    Third, despite common belief, .NET works just like the JVM. It's only faster because it doesn't render everything by itself, and lets Windows render stuff for it.

    Fourth, open source if possible. More people can freely contribute to an open source engine, and it benefits more people in the long term, too. Writing a game engine is freaking hard as hell. Nobody should have to reinvent the wheel if what they need is potentially available for use. Of course, I don't think that's something that Retro people really understand, since that's something that is more appreciated in the programmer's realm rather than the artist's realm.

    Honestly, I'd recommend writing the engine in C or C++, using cross platform libraries like SDL and OpenAL. Or if you need the full repertoire of APIs, then I'd recommend using Qt4. Though using a full toolkit like Qt4 for a game isn't usually done...
     
  18. dsrb

    dsrb

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    Great! I've been saying this all a-

    Oh. More gratuitous shininess that makes me want to do a Horatio Caine in case the sun hits the wrong angle and blinds me forever.

    Sure, for absurdly shiny art, it's pretty damn nice, but it's still absurdly shiny, and I think that's what a number of us have been trying to steer all these purportedly HD projects away from! (Also, that flame makes no sense. Physics)

    They haven't; go back about ten posts.
     
  19. Eduardo Knuckles

    Eduardo Knuckles

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    This is the main point. Public contribution is everything for a project of this big size to grow in the correct way. And this one isn't that bad at all.
     
  20. Falk

    Falk

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    There's also a saying - "Too many cooks spoil the broth".

    In terms of code and/or development, that's what SVNs are for; in terms of art and audio assets, it's a lot harder to have a cohesive feel the more people contribute, unless many/most of those people really know what they're doing and are versatile enough at their craft.

    Successful projects typically require a person with good organizational and communication (or sheep herding, call it whatever you like) skills.

    edit: To put in an additional two cents: How many fangames can you list have split or just plain died because people couldn't agree on a direction? I mean even in this thread you have people who want a straight out remake, others who want a Generations-style re-imagination, and so on and so forth. Asking said people to contribute is a risky proposition unless some things are already set in stone as a baseline.