Sonic Hacking Contest 2014 Results

A big congratulations to the winners of this year's contest. I found this year incredibly tough to judge but I'm personally happy with the results. My commiserations to those of you who didn't win but remember, there's always next year and I have no doubt that in the next 12 months, some amazing things will be created within this community. I look forward to it.

 

Congratulations to the winrars!

For all of those who were watching my comedic videos about the hacking contest, I hope you had fun!

In any case, I tried to hint at a few points that are actual criticism, most of which I have been trying to communicate for at least 5 or 6 years now.

• Hacks that don't run on real hardware or at least the majority of emulators nowadays STILL are not penalized in the slightest.

+ - And no, "Gens" and "Fusion" don't count. Gens is so inaccurate, I don't even consider it a program that emulates a Mega Drive anymore. It emulates a hardware platform that vaguely resembles a Mega Drive, and is compatible to some degree. Fusion is meant for playing official, licensed games (this has been stated by Steve Snake multiple times). It lacks a lot of traps that lure in the hell of bad programming that is common in the Sonic community. For example: It doesn't trigger an exception on an address error. Never. Not once will it do that. Snake tries to justify this with some shitty excuse ("Official games never trigger it, so it's not needed"), but there is no excuse for an emulator that calls itself "accurate" to do that. So yeah, good for playing licensed games, not so good for homebrew and hacks. I have lost track of how many times people have asked what that assembler warning ("Instruction has been word-aligned") actually means... And many people just ignore it. Unfortunately, there have been a rather large amount of broken hacks like these recently, as far as I can remember the problem was not as severe a few years ago ... I mean, how hard is it to play through your own game ONCE in another emulator like Regen, Exodus or Genesis Plus GX?  

• The quality of this year's entries is appaling.

+ - Okay, while, among the vast amount of joke hacks, hacks with no purpose, hacks with a useless gimmick (like the contest winner... more on that later), pallette hacks or just plain terrible hacks that seem to be actual serious projects, there are SOME good ideas here and there. But my god, the contests 4-6 years ago had productions in it that were on an entirely different quality level. I mean, it says something when a hack with one level and a pretty much useless time travel gimmick wins the entire contest, albeit not having won a single other trophy. Barely changed graphics, pre-existing music and basically unchanged gameplay except for that feature..... Why did this win, exactly? On the other hand I can easily believe that there simply ISN'T anything better, and this time I've actually tried most of the hacks. And then people get really upset when someone criticizes their godawful untweaked XM3SMPS music ports.... I mean, seriously? Are there no full fledged projects anymore? With kick-ass music, grpahics and an all-around pleasant experience? All the megamixes, booms, remastereds, nekos, extendeds, what happened to them? I'm going to hazard a guess and say, risking a punch in the face, that it has partly to do with whomever took over the contest after 2009/10ish (is that correct? not sure) not nearly being as respectable as Ayla is / was. Ever since Ayla stopped hosting the contest, the interest of the really good guys seems to have faded. Hacking has shifted to the point where we get a large influx of really crappy stuff from our "friendly neighbor sites"... , created way back in 2008. It seems to ring true again. I mean, you know I'm not pulling this out of my ass, the binaries from back then are there, ready for you to download and enjoy. I know, and so should you, this community can produce much better things than what has been shown this year, and it was able to for at least the last 6 years. And that's just really sad.  

In that sense, get better

Cheers!
Oerg866

 

Time travel wasn't the only new feature, it looks like you completely missed the boss at the end of the zone.
In my opinion, although this hack may not have everything in it, it's generally well-made, looks good and eye-catchy (for a design person like me). I voted for Metal Sonic Hyperdrive by Darkon360 for the same reason though, because it feels finished and complete, hands down it could also be declared as a winner. More over, South Island Demo is completely playable and features original content. Only a few hacks were in that state this year.

EDIT: Removed useless iSpoilers.

 

Spoiler

Shouldn't these be in spoilers? They're unsightly because they're whole paragraphs and it looks like you're just making blank posts.

As for the contest results, I'm glad each one won what they did, they all look well deserving of what trophy they got. Looking forward to next year!

 

What a terrible topic. The whole point of making stuff easier for people to have access to is to expand the people interested in the hacking/modding community and make them not reinvent the wheel in the first place.

The more people that aren't programmers/highly skilled in reverse engineering I get interested in modding, the more my job is justified.

EDIT: On-topic, the results are fine and the hacks were pretty entertaining this year. We had a pretty fun streaming session with some friends the weekend of the results checking them all out.

 

I started modding Sonic Generations having basically no programming/reverse-engineering skills whatsoever and not having much of a good understanding of how games work on the most technical end. Now I'm actually developing my own modding tools for completely different games and seeing decent results from it. If the community's attitude had been "if you can't program then we don't want you here", I'm not sure I would've ever gotten to this point.

 

Oerg, your expectations on programming are far too high, because you are a programmer. Here's the thing: when you have one person attempting to fill all the roles of an entire development team, they're going to have to be generalists. This means that eventually something is going to give. Whether it's the level design, the artwork, the programming, or the sound/music, eventually something isn't going to be up to snuff. Furthermore, there *no* contest-qualified Sonic games that are:

A) Open source
B) Written in a beginner-friendly language. Say what you want, but assembly languages are not pleasant to program in.

These two things work with eachother to virtually ensure that only the most tenacious of people will even be able to write code for these games. This disadvantage is going to stick with them and bring down the quality of code across the entire spectrum. This is also why you see so many more fangames than hacks and mods. The toolkits are more user-friendly because they're not reverse-engineering anything.

When you bemoan the lack of ambitious projects, it shows a lack of perspective. Most large and ambitious projects never get finished. Even when they have the most dedicated staff in the world. Why is this? Because we vastly overestimate our productive capacities. I am actually kind of glad we're seeing more small projects. It shows that people are starting to value a finished project over one that languishes in development hell. I know it isn't as exciting to play a bite-sized game.

And for the few of us that *are* building large, expansive projects we have our own entirely separate set of problems to handle. Coordinating a team, getting contributors and ensuring that their styles all mesh in a cohesive way, as well as playtesting these epic monstrosities are all non-trivial challenges. The other important thing to remember is that large projects are built slowly. I've shown off at every single Hacking Contest since SA:Gens started, and I even entered RDX in the ones before that. Each new build was only as different as it was because I spent an absurd amount of crunch time in the 2 weeks before the contest deadline. Most people can't take the time off of work to do that. I'm considering only showing at every other hacking contest just to make sure there's enough new content to make it worthwhile.

 

Surely the full-fledged projects are still around, they just weren't presentable enough to be shown at this year's contest? Compare that to some entries being, let's say, 'crapped out in time for the contest'. Of those two situations, I can understand the former, not that I'm trying to speak for you. Off the top of my head, the only full-fledged hack was Hyperdrive, but I'm disappointed that I don't know where the differences lie. I need some drive to play the hack again :v:.

I do agree about the lack of hardware compatibility. I don't care if you can work around it with funny emulators, being incompatible is a show of poor skill and possible laziness (if they've actually noticed it and won't do anything about it). It's like leaving an obvious bug in-game: the player could ignore it, the whole 'if you don't like it don't play it' logic, but it's still there, still there to be fixed. And they didn't.

What the hell, man? Why put words in his mouth? Or am I just missing something?

Where does his post say that? Anyway, I've already had my say on this, but I'll try again to make it more direct: Lack of compatibility is as bad as excessive lag, either produced by the lack of optimisation of pre-existing components, or new additions to the hack being terribly programmed. That's my view on it. You could overclock, but the hack's still less because of it.

EDIT: Doesn't AS scream bloody murder when odd addresses are used wrongly? Maybe we should encourage the use of the assembler that actually does something about this.

 

I'm annoyed now - I was excited at the thought of "Sonic vs. Gamera" until I realised I'd read it wrong.

I want Gamera!

 

Gulty on both counts :v:

On direct cases, yes. But like all assemblers, it fails to this:
[68k] lea (1).w,a0
move.w (a0),d0[/68k]
and other similar scenarios. Also, you need to consider the "wahhh asm68k" syndrome.

 

Three suggestions for next year's contest:

• The trophy descriptions need to be on the voting pages so we don't get people voting incorrectly again.
• I had a comment on one of my promotional Reddit posts: "I wish they didn't try to make the website so fancy. I try to middle click to view entries so I can open them in new tabs but instead of just being static links they're rubbish that dynamically changes the content of the page which is entirely unnecessary. It's flash over function."
• Media promotion REALLY needs some work. I know there were a TON of people officially doing media, way more than ever before, so it's kind of understandable. But I think I can make the claim without being big-headed that nobody on media worked as hard as I did or produced as much content. Quality is more subjective of course, but regardless, I was barely promoted in an official capacity until I asked to be. And if I'd known that was the case, I'd have asked a lot sooner. I worked hard to get my first exposé up at the same time the contest went live, but not having anything featured until so late in the contest, by which time most of the traffic had come and gone, really hurt.
  
  I'm not saying I was treated unjustly, because I should have raised the point on day 1. I know you guys were dealing with a LOT just keeping the site up. And I'm certainly not saying I wish I hadn't done all the work I did. I still really appreciate the opportunity to be on the panel, and I'll gladly do it again next year.

As for the drama going on here... I'm not a programmer by any means. The only hack I ever made removed Carnival Night's barrel and did nothing else. So I judge this stuff from a sort of outside perspective when it comes to that stuff.

I agree that the overall quality of the hacks is probably down from last year, but part of that is because there were so many more entries. I do agree that as impressive as South Island Warped is, there's no way I'd have voted a one-zone demo as the best in the contest over Hyperdrive. But again, it's all subjective.

 

I wanted to have this stay as a statement, but I'll just reply to a few things Spanner has said:

I didn't say this. Read my post again. (that, and it's just wrong. The hacks (or rather their creators) *didn't* specify that (and never have?).)

I didn't say this. Read my post again. I said this year, not the two years before that which had some good entries apparently (yes S Factor is good stuff, but it's been around for a long time now, so I should have put it in the list)

Irrelevant. The vast majority is still Mega Drive based.

Not only is this irrelevant, but it is also a blatant bold-faced lie. I was on the judging panel once in 2008 (six years ago, and I fucked it up by being an idiot. I never made an effort to come back again.

Read this and try again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

You should settle down a bit after people in your own IRC channel start telling you that you're wrong. Just saying.

[quotes]Your videos, from what I looked at them, were pretty much a troll attempt to try and attention seek as you have done many times, which in the past has made many people, including site staff, turn on you. It doesn't matter what you're capable of, if you're a Tech Member or not, if you're still arrogant and a twat towards people, it doesn't mean you can use your status to deflect your behaviour concerning the attitude you have towards this contest.
[/quote]

First of all, this is an unwarranted personal attack. The series was started upon request, and the last video was even made because the hack author himself asked for it (MainMemory). In addition to that, they were well received and people had a good laugh.

Okay, at this point I still fail how this is a response to anything I just said...

Thanks for being so open to criticism. I'll have someone else submit any further posts I make directed to you in the future.

 

I guess I can throw my opinions on the current "issue" here, specially about seeing this post here:

Well. I guess I am not the most entittled person to comment on this because my field is Art, not programming. However. There are these things called categories, you know. Hacks with layout modifications. Hacks with Music Modifications. Graphical Hacks, Hacks with Engine changes....

People who become one-man-shows and fail at making their own hacks often fail, because as you said, they try to do everything at once. What happened with starting with a few simple layout edits, then adding chunks, then importing those chunks into the tileset, then redrawing all the chunks and re-importing them back? That simple methodology for a relatively simple layout hack implies that the author not only has created new content, but figured a way to implement those inside the engine. It's not the most advanced coding work on existence, but it's something. Most hacks have failed to even accomplish this, presenting quite broken layouts and retina-melting color palletes.

It all boils down to don't chew anything larger than what you can swallow. I have sadly provided art to many lame, incomplete and butchered hacks like to know how things go when the authors look at things like Megamix or Retro Remix or even E-122 Psi's hacks and promptly say. I CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS! then fail miserably. One of the reasons why this happens is because we are giving the false sensation that everyone can make a good hack when it's everything but true. It's not the tools you use to make a hack, but the talent within the person doing it.

So, it is not about high expectations. It is about being honest with yourself. If you can't do palletes, just do a green hill layout change, after all. it's not like the chunks are too hard to edit anyway. If you are just good with music. Just import it away and focus it on your music, try to change some things but keep your hack on your field of speciality. Same if you just know how to code new things. Maybe you can code fancy menus and add some features to the game, but suck at character moves or things that need to interact with eachother. Well. as I said. Keep it under what you know specially if it's your first hack. Chances are that if people notice you are good in something but the other areas look untouched, you may get a few messages from people who may be skilled on other areas and eventually work together in something that is not a literal turd.

I do agree on this part. However. while one thing is to expect everything to be the next big thing. And another one completely different is to have an excessive number of entries that... well, are not even amusing and are repetitive at best. We had innumerable joke hacks and two of them ran with the same joke( three? [given than Gotta Go Fast seems to be a tie-in with Egg on Toast given the extra level. oh, it also ties in with The Useful Engine. Sharing art even.] )

Ambitious projects usually tend to die, but not because of that we should expect mediocrity. That is just wrong. Though, I guess it was to be expected given where the entries came from, who made them, and entries that I don't even think they should be considered valid ( a Java application that patches stuff on the fly and expects to have content ready by the contest date for showing itself off? Seriously? )

I don't have much to add to this paragraph as I agree enterely, but I want to point out that the issue is that while it is understandable that all the big hacks are either on halt or being developed slowly. Noone else is trying to go the same route and deliver a good quality hack anymore. And it feels, like you mentioned, that most of these entries are quick hacks with rushed effort in about two weeks. With only one or two exceptions. And this is the thing. You usually prepare the thing and plan it carefully and make things SLOWLY, one by one. Not try to rush a metric ton of unfinished gimmicks and general bad stuff into a binary in less than 14 days and call it a day after presenting it to the contest. Which is what most of the notable examples of bad hacking this contest has provided feel like.



Beyond that. I do need to agree with Josh's suggestions though regarding the trophies and the site. It was kind of hard to navigate through the things on a desktop, and on embeebd devices it was a pain.

The community's attitude is not "if you can't program then we don't want you here", it is "Do not make a fool out of yourself and make something that is worth it under the spectrum of your own talents without fucking up too much overall" There is a difference between small, modest, simple, and limited hacks released ocassionally, and rushing a buggy impresentable turd to a contest.

And going back to some of those nested quotes. It is definetly great to have access to easy to use tools that allow one to modify the aspects of the game with ease. That's definetly awesome. I am myself working on a small little thing which so far involves redrawing the chunks for Green Hill and improving Sonic's Sprites, but my programming skills suck so I am just doing the art and I will see if I can learn enough about programming logic to force my way around the dissasembled binary and shove my art in. Which is something that I would never, ever dare to submit into a context.

Again, the point here is not to ban amateur entries from the context, or about how we should prohibit non skilled people from even trying to tackle their passions, but to expose the real problem that having a lot of disorganized individuals presenting stuff at the SHC is, and since these things are usually one of the things that draw the attention of most people, even those who are not in the communities per se, a bad management and a bad list of entries says a lot about who and on whose behalf are they presented. That's about it.

My apologies for the post length. but there really seems like we are facing things in the completely wrong direction here. ( or I am taking things erroneusly, that can happen too. but those are my two cents anyway )

 

Honestly, I wish stuff as lazy as Sonic Hard Mode wasn't allowed in. There's no fun in having a "worst hack" community trophy if some guy that wasn't even trying gets all of the votes.

 

Why limit yourself to something in particular? It's nice to be able to ace in a certain category, but I personally tried to modify all aspects while making a hack, that way you at least learn something new. I guess it's not just me.

 

I'm just gonna take a step back from all this and say:

THANK YOU to each and every one of you who submitted a hack. We had an absolute blast playing and critiquing them all. And THANK YOU to all the people involved who brought the whole hacking contest together, provided the website, helped to schedule everything, and kept things running smoothly. This contest has become an absolute highlight of every year for me, and after 18 years of being in the online Sonic community, I'm honored and humbled to be part of what we've accomplished here.