Why the SRB2 hate?

This is the first time I've actually played it. My old computer wouldn't run the game.

Anyways, my thoughts. Its too fast for its own good really. Plus its too slippery. Most of the time you end up going all out and too fast, so you end vaulting an entire area of platforming or simply falling randomly into it somewhere, most of the time a pit. So most of the time your edging forward, simply tapping forward, trying not to fall of the edge cause you can't stop. Plus the areas are too sparse and empty. A lot of it simply feels like aimlessy running around.

Its a nice idea. Its a bit like Paper mario actually. Just without being an RPG. But its just to awkward and twitchy for my liking.

I haven't got around to playing the side scrolling bits, but they look a lot more promising.

 

I don't hate SRB2 at all, but I wouldn't say it's a fangame I really enjoy eather

I admire it for technical innovation, back in the day when SRB2 had a lot of work being done on it, other fangames were mainly Game Creator type affairs. SRB2 was one of the first to break out of that and when you look at it considering the infancy of the scene at the time its pretty amazing

that said the game has it's good points but I've played it only really once proper. It's a tad on the fiddly side but considering the scope of the project it's forgivable. Though the factorly level turned me right off by being too confusing to navigate :\

 

I like SRB2.

In terms of fangames, it's right up at the top—it had an immense amount of effort put into its creation, it's uniquely constructed, has some pretty cool music, is fun to play through, and aesthetically represents classic Sonic pretty well from a graphical perspective. The environments are rich and colorful, original, and extremely vast—you'll be hard-pressed to find yourself without a multitude of ways to get from Point A to Point B. Add on the fact that custom games are entirely possible with the engine and you've got a pretty wide range of appeal to work with.

At the same time, though, the engine—mainly the physics engine—is extremely difficult to work with, and the camera leaves much to be desired. The level design feels very forced in some places, and you can constantly be overwhelmed by the feeling that you don't know where you're going. The multiplayer concept, while intriguing, is something I never personally bothered with. A lot of the level packs I've seen are pretty boring and uninteresting, and the character packs I've seen mostly consist of recolor fancharacters and different "styles" of player. I also feel that the graphics—whilst tolerable—could use some serious improvement. If you're going to do 3D, you can at least do better than the Doom Engine's default output (if that makes any sense).

Overall, SRB2 can be pretty enjoyable if you decide to give it a playthrough once in a while, but I'd hardly consider it the "perfect 3D Sonic game" by any means whatsoever; as far as I'm concerned, that title is still tied between the Sonic Adventure series and Sonic Unleashed. It is pretty fun, though. :specialed:

 

The development is ridiculously slow though. No matter how busy you are, it can't take that long to do level design. Everyone has at least some degree of free time, and if they can't rationalise giving up some of theirs to it, they should give the Megamix SRB2 source to someone else since it's so ridiculously unfinished.

 

Eh, the SRB2 levels are a bit more open, yes, but I find the game harder to control in pretty much every way, and Heroes is really taking all its cues from the same places in terms of art style. They are quite similar in appearance.

 

I should dig out the unfinished version of SASRB2 if I still have it. I had redone the HUD and everything.

Also, porting SRB2 to a new engine probably wouldn't be that difficult. There are programs out there that rip 3D model geometry, so it's simple enough to load up SRB2's OpenGL mode, rip the level, and then import it in to something else. I've seen images of Green Flower Zone for... TF2, I think?

Of course, SRB2 is abolishing OpenGL mode entirely, so that probably won't be possible.

 

Fixed. Until recently, development has been literally stopped, sticking exclusively to adding features requested by players almost no level development at all. That's why it's taking so long really.

It's GPL. That, and most people want to make their own EXE mods than contributing to the base game really. Or making character recolors really =/

EDIT:

No, as far as I know OpenGL will remain in SRB2 (at least SRB2ME), but none of the new stuff (e.g. polyobjects) will get programmed into that mode, so playing any WAD using them in GL mode becomes unreliable.

 

Bingo. If you hate it, hate it for being a doom wad. But it's not like it's terrible. But at the same time... I don't really enjoy anything related to the doom engine.

 

Hehehe... reading this whole discussion is quite amusing to me. All at once, though, it's hard to restrain myself from making any leaks about how 1.1 is going, so as to combat some of the claims here... although, obviously, complaints about loose controls, Doom-based mapping (ie: no ramps) and paper-thin objects won't be going anywhere any time soon (I feel I can say that much, at least, since there's not much I know of that we can do about the first, and the latter two are an inherent part of the engine, which obviously isn't going to change). Sorry! I don't think it's terribly loose, personally, but I'm used to it by now, having played it since, like, Demo 2.

Yeah, that was me.

I'll point out that it's not exactly the greatest map ever. I kind of focused a bit TOO much on keeping it 1:1 with the original map, meaning I had to do low-gravity for anyone but Scouts to take the first point - and there's very little cover, so it's Sniper heaven. It was still a good bit of fun to play, though.

However, the conversion was nowhere near as cut-and-dry as you make it sound. It's not really possible to use some kind of GL ripper and port it to Source - I had to convert every sector in the Doom-format map to a corresponding brush in the Source-format map by hand. I even did it such that I could make the ground entirely displacements if I needed to, although I doubt I will (that might actually have been a BAD idea, since that'd drive up the number of brushes... but, well, I did it anyway). And it took me nearly a bloody month just to do Round 1, which only spans as far as the first starpost. I haven't even started Round 2, where we get to the lake - I wonder how well that'd work in TF2, anyway?

Download it here, if you want. It's a little more updated than the version in that screen, with authentic SRB2 water (I wanted the pretty Source water, but the little waterfall winds up causing too many rendering glitches to be practical), the proper SRB2 sky, and (although this may have been a bad idea) the Greenflower Zone music to boot.

 

Oh god. Is that a 2F2F Terrible Maps tuesday map or something. Maybe I'll forward to a guy who's just set up a new server.

 

The last time I played SRB2 it was tricky to handle, way too fast accel and speed to do any serious platforming and the slope physics were far from sonic standards, kind of like sonic adventure :P

I never been a big fan of it because of how different it feels, like wetflame said it's more of a fast mario platformer with springs.

 

Oogaland programmed a small converter in the Doom Build editor so I could generate a Wavefront OBJ file from that, wich I used to port one of the levels to BlitzSonic once. Sadly, I've lost the source code for the converter, so I guess it's unavailable for now (until someone else creates one).

 

If they were going to switch engines to allow for better I HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF THE SONIC ENGINE, they'd have to remake the levels pretty much from scratch in order to take advantage of the new physics.

I find SRB2 to be kind of annoying to play. It's way too easy to get lost.

 

To be honest, I really didn't like it much. Controls were very much a pain and some jumps felt very sketchy, as if you needed luck to make them. I think the only thing they got down was music, but even then, only Techno Hill Act 2. The rest of it sounded pretty bad. It was amusing for a little bit, but for the most part I'll probably never play it again unless the team makes some significant changes.

 

If anything, SA1 is better as a platformer and a Sonic game. Jump cancel makes precision jumps far easier than in SRB2.

 

Um. No.

The other levels HAVE been worked on and completed. They don't put them in the demos for a reason. You have to have SOMETHING for the final release here in a few months....

 

I think that's more the nature of the Source engine. You see piles of model ports for stuff like Garry's Mod, but map ports are almost non-existent. There is no reliable way (or at least, no publicly-known way) to import a map from another game in to Hammer - they always have to be remade from scratch.

But getting SRB2 level data in to something else probably wouldn't be that difficult. Even ignoring 3D data ripping tools, as Damizean said, making a converter probably wouldn't be too difficult.

Vendettagainst needs to watch this, I guess.