Sonic Generations technical oddities & flaws (Unpaid betatesting)

One bug I did notice that I was able to reproduce after a few tries:

If you change directions and immediately press square to do a spindash charge sometimes you will be facing towards the screen about ready to spindash and will either go nowhere or just slightly to the left or right.

 

I rescind what I said about not being able to accelerate in mid-air, but something about jumping still feels weirdly off. Those moments where it's like "BOUNCE OFF THIS ENEMY TO GET TO A HIGHER PATH" are really hard because of this fact.

Something weird I also noticed: Going down the double s-tube at the start of the level is scripted so you can't make Sonic jump or anything, but going back up it isn't, even though it's functionally identical. Why does it HAVE to be scripted then, if it's only scripted going one way?

 

Wait, this game is using the Havok engine?

 

I'm pretty sure all the games since '06 have been, at least the ones on PS3 and 360, certainly (well, not Sonic 4 though, obviously).

 

It says so right there in the opening logos. But again, it's probably for stuff like the badnik fragments that fall around when you bop an enemy, or the various sundry umbrellas and tables you can knock around on your way through a city stage. Also, the broken pieces of level geometry as the truck rampages through City Escape are some pretty obvious pieces of Havok at work. Havok is for object physics and shit; Sonic's own movement is probably handled by something else entirely, or at the least, programmed in a different way.

 

What I meant was that Havok is probably slowing down Sonic when going up the loop - reducing the friction Sonic has when rolling would fix this. Also I recall people saying that Sonic's speed gets automatically capped when entering anything that's scripted (such as the loops), so that doesn't help either.

 

Are the loops scripted? They don't feel scripted to me...

 

Most of them don't seem to be. This one definitely is, though. As soon as you start running through it, the game will take you all the way through no matter what you press.

 

Couldn't have put it better myself. If this is in the final game, is the only word I can use to describe.

You can actually walk up a good section of that by backtracking, but due to the way sonic moves, you have to keep switching form left to right. It is also as buggy as hell.

On the subject of automation, I with they'd made the S tunnels the same as before, where you can slow down inside them. You also cannot control yourself in between the two S tunnels at the start.

EDIT: More detail:

Just played some more, and I can tell you these things:

No 1: Bad alignment
Some sections of the grass in GHZ are aligned in such a way that.. well you can see through the seams. It even happens in the brown parts a lot.
The easiest example of this to find, is straight after the first platform in GHZ, I mean the one accompanied with a ring box, a motobug and a buzz bomber, look to the right of it on the ground, just before the first incline (to see it you must be to the left of it) is the gap, you can see the background through it.

No 2: Random turning
This is an odd one, there is absolutely no reason why this should happen. Basically, get onto the first swinging platform on the lower path of GHZ, preferably on it's first swing away from you. You should randomly turn to your left (try to face right to begin with). I can reproduce this when I don't want to, sadly.

No 3: Walk jump
Just like the famous rock jump bug in Sonic 1, I have made a similar bug in a different way. Now, this is different from the 'trick jump' as no trick animation was seen. Basically, the sequence of events was as follows. I hit the Badnik (I'm pretty sure it was a motobug), bounced off of it normally, then straight onto a shoe box. After this I found myself bounced off of this box, at normal speed but in the walking animation.


+ - (I typed like a clever person on purpose btw :P)  

 

Sonic Colors totally has the PhysX logo during the credits, though. Competing physics middlewares!

 

I don't care about Scripted *Special* Loops, I do care about scripted Springs and Slopes.

 

Scripted loops that are scripted for a reason aren't an issue worth thinking about, but I wish that one would be a little less obvious about it (by, say, letting Sonic stay in ball form instead of snapping him out of it?). I just wish the physics let you use the ol' loop trick with the non-scripted loops.

 

From what I can see there's no reason why anything in that Green Hill Zone demo should be scripted. Scripted loops only really make sense if you're dealing in 3D or are running the game on a system that would struggle to cope with the idea. Neither of those are issues in Generations. Plus there was a video posted showing that it's possible to walk up that loop/spiral mountain bit if things glitch up, so it doesn't even seem to be an engine concern.

If someone wants to fall off the corkscrew it'll be their own fault if they die, but the option should be there. Dicking with things is a staple of the series, hence why debug mode is popular.

 

It's true; as soon as the demo came out, people started dicking around in it. :specialed:

 

It's quite obvious that the console version of the demo is not true 1280x720 but something lower, I play over vga and it's quite obvious that the resolution is lower compared to many other games I play.

It's no deal breaker for me but it does make the game look a little more fugly in places.

 

Probably an optimization issue to be corrected as development moves forward. Unleashed was true HD; there's no reason to think Generations wouldn't be.

 

Of course you can. When you're in between them, just jump and you'll get control back. Although there's not much reason to do that since there's nothing there...

I agree with you on the automated tunnels thing though. It doesn't feel right to be able to tiptoe into one and suddenly go shooting through at 134295712 kilometers per hour.

 

Walking up the spiral mountain path screws up your directional control, actually; Sonic's left-right movement keeps reversing itself as you move up the ramp. They could probably program it to always accept the direction up the spiral as "left" and vice-versa, but from a designer's standpoint—why bother? It exists solely to have a cinematic downward run. A classic example of designers not assuming their players will play the game like dingbats and shooting themselves in the foot because of it. Players will always do what they aren't supposed to do. Designers need to wise up and make concessions to compensate.

Well, at least it's not as cringeworthy as '06's loops, which were a much more extreme example of the same mentality.

 

Agreed, how hard is it for them to code (speed= speed+1) isntead of (speed= OMG). I do enjoy what they are doing with the title but sometimes it just doesn't feel natural, like how can you break a rock just by jumping beside it, Sonic should only be able to break them jumping down or rolling into. Just these little things could polish the gameplay up in my opinion.

 

Eh, I prefer it this way, personally. All the old ones did was propell you forward less promptly. Which made them annoying when you happened to step into one at low speed, since it seemed like it was going "You wanna go fast? Huh? Do ya?! DO YA? Then bark like a dog, bitch! Yeah, bark like a little bitch and maybe I'll let you go fast! YES! There, that's a good doggy. Have a treat." *zoom*

...And that example got a little out of hand, but you get the general idea. It's an auto-speed segment whether you like it or not. Might as well go full retard about it.