General Project Screenshot/Video Thread

Cinossu, you God.

It's amazing to see that working so smoothly in the actual rom! I did notice some disappearing shapes at one point but it hardly matters.

 

Ah, so that is in the rom! Awesome job! :D

Any chance a similar effect could be achieved in the slot machine minigame in Sonic 3&K? Alternately, can it be implemented in your "Ordinary Sonic Hack" albeit with the same kind of channel-flipping that goes on in the main stages?

 

ALL HAIL CINOSSU MAKER OF DREAMS

 

What, it's just a perfectly normal special sta-OH MY GOODNESS!

SQUIDWARD!

Awesome work though, it looks so much better than the original!

 

Hahaha. Cinossu for Troll of the Year. Or maybe that's a joint award shared with Taxman and Stealth. :v:

Seriously, though, it's really interesting to learn that this was already perfectly possible with the existing engine. I'd never thought it through, but if I had, I think I'd have assumed that the slow speed was intrinsic, due to the MD taking that much time to calculate the rotation or whatever. The fact that commenting out one line enables much smoother rotation with no apparent ill-effects is something I wouldn't have predicted.

In any case, those rings look splendid, anyway!

 

It was Sega's first game on the system when they were still trying to figure out how to use their hardware, so they were probably too lazy to fix it - including with S&K's slot machine. xD

 

Yeah I'm kinda leaning towards it was done deliberately.

 

Perhaps they added this instruction, mid-programming for some odd reason... Maybe they wanted to prevent any possible problems they felt could occur with trying to implement the rotation feature (even though none seemingly exist with the instruction removed)
OR they first attempted smooth rotation, failed at first... and added this line (and possibly other coding changes) that they felt was needed... and it just turns out this instruction wasn't needed. I've done that kind of thing with my programming at times, especially with Triad. If something like that was the case, then maybe this could be classified as a bug? Hard to say.

As for Sonic 3K... maybe it was a simple copy/paste of the rotation routine for the particular Bonus Stage? They WERE hard pressed for time with Sonic 3K as it was... hence the games being split. They probably just wanted a Bonus Stage to throw in... took the Sonic 1 Stage verbatim... added a Sonic 2 gimmick to it from Casino Night Zone... and just basically put as little effort into throwing something extra in as possible. Let us remember that this Bonus Stage also handles Continues rather funnily... They probably just never bothered to try giving the stage full rotation.

 

Yes, much as I once thought otherwise, I'm increasingly convinced that the fact the S3 slot machine gives you continues at all is a mistake, just leftover copypaste silliness from Sonic 1. It just doesn't work logically at all and no effort has been made to make it do so. The slot machine stage also uses $38(a0) on the player 1 object as a timer for fading out (IIRC, something like that anyway) which in Sonic 3 is the character ID! This is why Knuckles turns into a red Sonic when he's spinning out. It's just thoroughly messed up in the head.

I can't remember the original well enough to say, but is there any behaviour difference other than the animation speed? Does it actually make the stage rotate any faster, or is it purely a graphical/rendering fix?

 

Like Tiddles, I'd also be interested to know how, if at all, it affects control and so on. Does this mean that Sonic's physics are reevaluated more frequently on all the new frames, or does everything end up being the same? Purely based on the line of code quoted by Cinossu, I would guess the latter, as it seems to be referring only to the display (e.g. it's called ShowLayout, not CalculateLayout).

Anyway, yeah, this is really interesting. It almost makes me want to download a disassembly and toolchain just to try it for myself... almost. :P This might start cropping up in a lot of new hacks.

Heh. I appreciate that you explained it! I'm sure other people would have refrained from ever explaining and just basked in the 2 pages of adulation and 'are you a wizard'. :v:

 

Let's not forget the fact that Yuji Naka did say in an interview that the general gameplay gave him minute motion sickness, hence, they slowed the speed of the character down. The same reason could be explained for this, I mean, just looking at that special stage being all smooth does make me feel a little dizzy, thereas the original did not... Likewise, SEGA did have a few "requirements" when it came to games, stuff like prevention of flashing colours (to remove the chances of epilepsy), not that I'm trying compare dizziness with epilepsy mind.

 

Very good idea, Markey! That's a very believable possible reason for them to quantise the rotation.

 

God... if that's the case, I wonder how to explain the existence of Hyper Sonic... that thing is motion sickness, epilepsy, AND game-breaking! all rolled into one package.
They must've slipped that one in behind his back.

 

But, seriously, it's a good argument. And I think that there's a difference between epilepsy and motion sickness; He may not have been bothered by Hyper Sonic's palette swapping, but experienced nausea when fully rotating the special stage.

 

MarkeyJester provides my counterpoint. this is what I was getting at with Hyper Sonic...

It's not just Bonus Stage rotation, but you can't honestly tell me that Hyper Sonic speed plus brokenflash jump doesn't equal motion sickness for the poor man.
And yea, I know the difference between the different cases. Just pointing out that Hyper Sonic is just so wrong on so many levels... It's no wonder we haven't seen the form in any games since. It's pure overkill...

That said, I love BrainScratchComm's little thing they did with Hyper Sonic vs. Knuckles in their S3K playthrough.
EDIT: I think we are starting to enter territory where mods/admins will want to split this into a new thread or trash it. I'm treading lightly on this one now...