Sonic X-treme Textures and Defs

FU Sonic Cult hotlinking, you know what image I am talking about

vs.



Yeah, the second one is sooooooooo much better.

 

The second one looks more accurate.

 

Out of curiosity, is there any code left in Sonic Adventure from Sonic World?

 

I doubt it considering how different it is, it's on a totally different system too. I'm pretty sure most of the hackers probably uncovered any secrets pretty early on if there were any.

 

That hotlinking image never ceases to amuse me.

At least Sonic Jam World was finished.

 

The function that swaps sonic's model between the jump ball and the morphed character model appears to be the same. Alot of the basic code is probably very similar to what was in sonic world, alot of the foundation things (like sonic's actions/animation handling) and object disctinction look like less refined versions of how things were done in SA. I'll bet you most of the programming work went into the camera since then.

 

I'd believe it. It fucking needed it.

 

Wasn't there a prototype video of the Sonic Jam model being used in Sonic Adventure's Sky Chase zone?

 

Also, didn't somebody mention recently that the system used for animating the character models in NiGHTS was actually more advanced than in Sonic Adventure, which didn't use skeletal animation?

This could be already a hint towards SA starting development before NiGHTS.

 

I checked out the videos of Xtreme again. Noticing the game was a lot more than just cubicle stages and consisted of way more objects and a lot of loops and slopes and enemies, I changed my view on the game. Even though it still isn't necessarily like classic Sonic to the T, I would still play the crap out of the game if it ever was released.

Still, I would kill for a somewhat faster, complete game of Sonic World.

 

Personally, I want to know what became of the levels seen in this and this screenshot. Mock-ups, or were these ever actually used for anything...?

I mean, honestly, one of the most fascinating things about X-Treme wasn't just the fisheye (although that was certainly damn interesting too), but the whole "walking on walls" spiel. It was basically Super Mario Galaxy before Super Mario Galaxy. As such, I kind of want to figure out how the hell they did it (or didn't, ultimately, whatever).

 

One of them is there "screen1.def" It seems it was only a mockup to make the magazine article.

 

Sonic Xtreme is closer to classic Sonic gameplay than Sonic Adventure to me. Sonic Adventure felt like a complete bastardization of Sonic -- but, I know I'm in the minority on that. The way Xtreme/Bug! played is how I imagined Sonic in 3D.

 

SANiK wrote the level viewer, so you downloaded it from the cult ftp after someone uploaded it there.


The shots here: http://forums.x-cult.org/topic/2082-presenting/ came from a bulid Christina Coffin has. She was, last time of speaking, unwilling to share it. I did not press her for it. That was running on the saturn.

her words about those screens. There was more than were in that cult post? Not sure where they have gone.

Xtreme did not use the bug engine, once more.

Please feel free to direct any questions to me, I would love to clear up myths once and for all. Oh, and no, I am not going to push Coffin for it, nor am I going to let you push coffin for it, if you want to get in contact with her, work out how to do it yourself.

 

Well, news.

I was afraid in the future Chris Senn could do something with the content in SXC because of the leak (I don't know, whatever) so I downloaded the entire site. While examining the textures I opened a file called JG_TEXTURES.zip inside JG_ALL.zip. That file has a LOT more textures (and has all textures seen in that JG screens from lostlevels.org). I would say we only have a very small part of the game. Well with all the content we have It's possible to recreate that pics perfectly in a map at least =P.

 

So it's more than possible for us to find the missing textures in our texture list and fill in the gaps...?

 

Gaps? I'm talking about a MAP gap =P. The texture gap is the smallest problem =P.

 

These were made with version 042 of SONICBOOM, whereas the latest version iirc was something like 045 or so? These maps were late 96 creations.... so not the last of the maps created in any case.

 

Sonic World's draw distance appears to be much longer than that of NiGHTS, although NiGHTS's environments are so bizarre that might have been intentional.

I haven't actually disassembled the NiGHTS at all, but it appears to be using a skeletal system, because if it isn't, that would mean that they decided to recreate a bunch of Elliot's animations for Sonic rather than make proper Sonic ones. He uses Elliot's animations for walking, for his second and third jumps, and his knocked over and getting up animations. During the boss, he uses NiGHTS's "hurt" animation, and grab and throw animation. The only animations unique to him are a full speed run that there's barely anywhere to use, and his first jump. I'm not too familiar with SA's animation system, but I'm pretty sure that they would have had to make animations from scratch if it used the same kind of thing.

 

SA is a later revision of the Sonicworld engine, which infact is a revision of the Nights engine, and so is Burning Rangers. (which is why you have the exact same issues in all of them: shit controls and camera. For Nights, try running around as the kids, or as sonic in xmas nights, and you'll see.)

Beyond the common roots, the only thing they share for sure was the PVR compression in the game textures, and possibly some model formats (I remember someone mentioning the latter). And even the PVR thing was more likely to have been a devkit thing.

I think that was more attributable to the fact that they wasted so much time working on canned engines that it would've been more feasible to just move to a preexisting one.
You know, instead of creating yet another engine, they could focus on getting some gameplay there and getting the game out after the development hell. Sort of what 3d Realms was trying to do last year - they knew the game looked shit compared to the ultrarealistic crap like Crysis, but they just wanted to finish the damn thing already, instead of retooling it again.


>SANiK wrote the level viewer, so you downloaded it from the cult ftp after someone uploaded it there.

It was probably Sanik who uploaded it, I remember he had at least some access to the cult. I'm not entirely sure. If I dug back on my emails and irc logs, I could probably find out, but I can't be bothered and it doesn't even matter now.


>Xtreme did not use the bug engine, once more.

I'm sure this is evident, people are just drawing similarities between the gameplay. Not counting the fisheye bullshit and the 360 motions, Xtreme totally looked like Bug!.


>There was more than were in that cult post? Not sure where they have gone.

They were linked on the short news in the newsscript, I think. So they were displayed in the mainpage, but not under the full story link. 00000019.png and 00000024.png are there, they are logo graphics, if there's anything else you'll have to ask someone with ftp access to check the folder the pictures are in. They are in their own dir and not in the imagebin root, so it should be fairly painless to check. But I don't think there's anything more uploaded, even though the filenames indicate that more shots were made.


>Oh, and no, I am not going to push Coffin for it, nor am I going to let you push coffin for it

I'm not talking about pushing the thing, but you could just politely ask her ONCE about this thing - if the answer is no, at least we have an answer to stand by, instead of the usual uncertainty. I mean, the last time she said she wont rip it was what, 3 years ago? She may have changed her mind since. And it IS christmas time anyway.
Heck, I'd even like to hear more of whatever effects they pulled off on the Saturn, sonic related or not.