I've been following LakeFeperd since the announcement of the original BTS game, and now having played this latest game, I can say that I've been blown away again! Whilst I'm not a huge fan of your enemy designs (I think some look quite cheap and massively out of place, though I thought the Moon Mansion ones were fantastic) and I do sometimes find myself jumping randomly to determine what's in the foreground and not the background, I have found pretty much everything else in this sequel to be brilliant. You've done so many things that SEGA haven't dared do since Sonic 3 & Knuckles that what you've created feels like an evolution of those titles; varying abilities and set pieces, and even mixing up run-of-the-mill stuff like spinning around a pole (DIAGONALLY!?? WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC!?) make this game stand out from the rest. I especially like the fact that every zone and even many stages are vastly different from the rest and you've given real depth to the stages too. Whilst it could be far more polished in terms of graphics in many areas, I did find the later stages very beautifully crafted, and I'm impressed considering this fan game hasn't been in the making as long as others. Perhaps adding pushing animations and abilities would help the game, as I found a lack of that a little disappointing, as there could have been some awesome extra puzzles thrown in to the mix, but rest assured, I'm only pointing out some areas I think could be improved because the rest of the game is hard to describe as anything other than brilliant. Well done, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you have in store for us in future!
Well... just beat the game. Sort of. Only got 5 emeralds. That 4rth special stage was just awfully designed.... along with a few other things. Still, I'm glad I got to play it. I may even do a let's play of it.
How odd... for some reason, I can't record any footage of this with fraps. I can still record other games, like Dust, just fine. Does it still work for other people? Is it just me?
Joke responses aside, Fraps is designed to record games that use DirectX to run. It may seem unorthodox, but you might try streaming software like OBS that is capable of saving to a video file.
I decided to copy Tiller and record a full zone. Though, my video quality isn't as good as his... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYBQmAeUtw I tossed in the special acts, too.
It's great checking out all these playthrough vids being posted on here, seeing as I can't be bothered to boot into Windows for anything right now to play this game. Once I do, I know I won't be disappointed, AtS looks really imaginative, and the entire soundtrack is totally rocking my ears right now as I type this. All of you musicians on board with the project know how to infect us all with amazing earworms! Also, I'd suggest VLC Media Player too for recording. It's UI is strange, and maybe a little difficult to work with sometimes, but it's amazing at what it does. It's my favorite all-in-one solution for everything on both Windows and Linux, as well as replacing Windows Media Player as my video/music player. I've used it for recording art videos, livestreams, converting audio files, and I'd like to try recording 2D games with it too; I'm pretty you can get better results with VLC than CamStudio, or HyperCam. (The former, I couldn't keep sound synced properly, and the latter royally sucked even worse, in my experience, for games.) Free or open-source recording programs are not only rare, but it's difficult to find one that actually works, and VLC is definitely a gem in that regard. I use it heavily and love it to pieces. ^ This, a thousand times this. I only keep WinRAR around for those occasional rar archives 7-zip is too picky to extract. I use 7-zip for compressing/extracting anything and everything.
Whoa, wait. VLC Media Player works as a screen recorder too?! Holy crap, I've only been using it all this time for watching anime! I've been looking for a decent recording program for a crappy computer. The best one I've been able to find records Majora's Mask at about two frames per second. Honestly, I have no idea how I never realized that it could do this.
Well lookie here: http://www.gamesreviews.com/pc/pc-reviews/06/sonic-after-the-sequel-review/ Pretty cool stuff. ^_^ I think they hit the nail on the head; It's not perfect, but it brings back so many things about Sonic that Sega has been afraid to do since the Genesis era, including the style of music. With all of the exposure this game has been getting, I have to wonder if Sega has at least become aware of its presence. Perhaps they're taking notes. :v:
Without being smart, I think fraps only records direct X or OpenGL windows which Sonic Worlds to my knowledge doesn't use. I think Strife made the Freedom Planet engine work with it since I can record that by targeting the window. What I do is just record an area on the screen via bandicam.
This is pretty much the perfect package for what a fan game should be - great music, wonderful graphics, masses of creativity. Loved this and BTS. Really nice work.
Lemme just stop you right there about that. While the idea is perfectly sound - use the more portable runtime to make native versions for OSX and Lunix - the problem is that Anaconda can't handle Worlds yet. It was taken out of the oven a bit prematurely, imho. What it does, it does in a rather buggy fashion. And then there's the important fact of extensions, which none have really been made for Anaconda. And this is critical; ATS uses extensions in order to play back the Flash-based cutscene movie files. Extensions which do not exist with Anaconda. There's also the detail of there being no ink effects available, so things like water and shields would have to be redone to use alphatransparency, which can get rather messy and not look right. And then there's the music. You'd uh, lose the beautiful soundtrack. I don't think Anaconda has OGG support. I know it can do WAV, maybe MIDI, but I don't think OGG is there. This is because of the code they were able to publically and legally obtain from Clickteam for creating a runtime, and the code came from their oldass web runtime that nobody really uses anymore. Now, there are other multiplatform runtimes for MMF2, but none of them are as robust as the standard Windows runtime. You can kinda get Worlds running, but it will be slow and not entirely behave properly. I had a 360 degree engine that Lark and I made that was extremely lightweight and ran without needing extensions, and it actually ran well in the Java runtime on Mac and Linux! Except then I showed it to Mercury for assistance in making it more accurate to the Genesis games (there was a LOT that was out of whack), and his response was basically "throw it out" In conclusion, just keep using WINE. As for the game itself, this is great so far! When I get some free time I'll have to play it more.
I do think there's a Mac runtime coming out sometime, along with things like HTML5 and the already release Flash runtime that might run on Mac or Linux, I'm not sure how well or if they support the extensions used(I'm pretty sure cutscenes might be out of the question for most of them, there really needs to be a good multiplatform video extension) but it's a glimmer of hope at least? I'm just waiting for a good time to sit down and play the whole thing, I assume twice to get the Classic mode only things, then load up both of the soundtracks and set them on loop.
The Sonic fangame scene sure needs better engine implementations rather than everyone reinventing their own wheels. Could be at least cross-platform and then with a consistent programming API, etc. Taxman's is a famous example indeed.
I proposed some time ago to start a Kickstarter to buy Taxman. That's right, to actually buy Christian Whitehead, not just the retro engine. No one ever jumped on my idea.
Don't think anybody jumped because its not quite acutally legal... Sorry to cursh your dreams Falk buuut Just saiyan. :p
Better to assume "Clickteam = Windows only", as it has been for... fifteen years or more. Yes you can probably brute force it to run in other operating systems with WINE or whatever but you can't really plan with portability in mind when using MMF2. It was never really built to acknowledge the existence of OS X or Linux or whatever - as a system it was never really forward-thinking and extensions always cause problems. The optimal solution is to of course not use MMF2... which would drastically increase production time (as in... to the point where you probably wouldn't see anything at all because it's too much hard graft). It's not fair to jump onto silly bandwagons where we expect everyone to be Taxman - Clickteam development works in a very different way, and you should expect to take significant cuts in exchange for reduced development time. Arguably it leads to a lesser product in the end... but the vast majority of fangames are never released at all, so yeah.
