What interested me the most about that video was that mini Sonic went into his win pose when he hit the capsule. Funny since he never does that in 2 player mode to my knowledge.
I am pretty sure that the "smashed the capsule pose" is the same as the "you got a continue" Sonic you normally see once earning a continue.
LOst: did you edit his sprites to show something coherent for the actions that don't happen in 2P mode? =P Also now I demand a hack where all characters are replaced with their 2P counterparts. Add Knuckles' gliding, though (the sprites are there, but unused).
That switch with the platform...I feel weird because I was watching the video over and over thinking "what are these guys talking about? Everything looks normal to me!". Yea, that platform fucked me up a few times when I was a kid. I definitely knew about it.
I honestly can't remember. I doubt it was a direct consequence of exploration, because I did it in a linear manner when I was young. It could be either to get more rings after I lost them since I used to leave some behind for this purpose (there's a 10 ring box after the barrier), or because I was clearing the enemies before backtracking to collect all rings and minimise the change of being hurt to attempt the special stage. The slow ways I used to play Sonic when I was a kid... clearly missing the point.
Speaking about S3 Competition Mode, did anyone notice the alphabetically organized level names? Azure Lake Balloon Park Chrome Gadget Desert Palace Endless Mine I'm pretty sure most people have noticed, I just don't think its ever been mentioned.
It has been mentioned dozens of times on this forum actually. It is true that the wiki doesn't say much about this, though: Sonic_the_Hedgehog_3#Competition_Mode: "Three options are available immediately upon entering the Competition choice on the title screen: "Grand Prix," "Match Race," and "Time Attack." The first of these modes is a straight run through of the five multiplayer levels available, done in alphabetical order." Many of the things that are mentioned in this thread aren't on the wiki, to be honest, even if they're old and well-known by most of us (such as the moving LZ platform)...
No I didn't! That's the best part. The pose shares the same animation index. It doesn't mean they were playable in the normal zones. I had to play without taking one single hit, as the damage animation sprite table is messed up, showing garbage over the whole screen as a result. Spindashing as well as spinning has Y offset problems. The game crashed into the Sega screen when Sonic was popping up from the snow in Launch Base Act 1, so many frames and offsets to hard code to fix issues. Not worth it. My main concern about the mini players were ehy the physics felt so off, when Sonic Advance that uses almost the same dimensions feels right. I first thought the mini players were programmed by one of the other programmers, but I was wrong. The code is pretty much a macro of the real player. My guess is the scale was so odd that the physics became different, or it was not finished before the release of Sonic 3, so they skipped adjusting the physics?
Oh, it wouldn't be the first time Sega decides to use the same Animation indexes, so I'm not surprised: http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=8815&view=findpost&p=229119
That is interesting. I have been thinking of doing something like that in a Mario-style Sonic hack with all of the usual Mario trappings -- you start small and must get a mushroom to get back to "normal" size -- and it is interesting to see it looks OK. (that or a return of Sonic CD's mini-Sonic). The mini-players have different values for acceleration, deceleration and top speed -- and those values are different not only from the normal-size players, but they differ from each other. Could it be this that is causing the differences you are spotting?
Ah, well, good thing I did not waste any work on it. I was thinking of something more comprehensive than that, with coins (instead of rings), fire flowers and fox suits (instead of raccoon suits; they would transform Sonic into Tails and allow flight).
You would be wasting no time at all sir. That never got much beyond the initial concept, yours seems like a much more complete Mario-esq Sonic hack, that combines both Mario and the idea hez had going on in Sonic Classic 2.
LOst and MainMemory, I love the characters-in-the-wrong-level-size stuff - nicely played, chaps. I've been toying with getting Mini Knuckles to glide for some time - I almost got into it when I was working with sorting out cutscene Knuckles' palette but stopped short and never got back to it. One worry is that, even though he has the basic glide/fall/climb sprites, he doesn't have floor slide or clamber-over-ledge sprites - I guess all the mini characters are lacking in frames in general, but it seems like things could look very wonky indeed without those. Regarding the competition A-B-C-D-E level order - it took me way too many years to spot that little feature, even with GP results listing those initials! It seems like this was a deliberate bit of visual sugar decided after the original levels were conceived, since this is one of very few places where the apparent gameplay level order differs from the internal one (which would make them A-B-D-C-E). Here's a little known Competition Mode oddity... in S3K, take any character into Desert Palace and run into the loop. Carry enough momentum to get through the loop, but slow right down as you're reaching the top, so that you curve back down to the left pretty slowly (but fast enough to stay attached to the loop). There's a reasonable chance you'll be flung backwards around the loop at breakneck speed, taking you back almost an entire lap if you don't press anything. Then, try going back even further: it seems to be impossible to traverse the loop backwards, as you'll be blocked from going up the buggy side of the loop. Neither of these bugs appear to exist in Sonic 3 alone (which is a bit weird, since competition mode seems to otherwise hardly have been touched between the two...)
Why the hell do they even have an animation index if they weren't meant to be used at all? Unless at some point the players did do that animation when they won a race, that is. Yet... I find this one odd because you can take damage in 2P mode (there's that item that can hurt your opponent). Probably it'd have just used the glide animation directly for sliding, while when going up Knuckles would just be on his standing position directly. Remember, Sonic's instashield doesn't have any sprites when mini, just a sound effect!
I have a theory. Perhaps it loads because on the results screen there may still be some code that loads up the continue sprite into VRAM, but since you can't get a continue in levels it just never appears. Seeing as how the victory sprite and the continue sprite are the same thing, maybe it just appears that Sonic is making a victory pose.
