Sonic Mania (and Plus) bugs, oddities and other stuff

We're all about documenting Sonic stuff to the smallest detail. I say that includes bugs in an official game release. Just because the members of the team have been on here for over a decade (though they've been silent for about a year now), doesn't mean we can't run the game through a fine-toothed comb. If they can't fix these issues at this point, someone will eventually. It's good to have a list.

 

We like to find bugs and document them. Why not make a thread for it? This is the most devoted Sonic community out there, so it's like an OCD. I, for example, bought the Japanese version of the game just to scan everything in HD and document it.
Let us be the retarded fans we like to be. It's not a harmful behaviour at all.

 

As I said last time,

this board was founded on nitpicking. That's what we do. We're very good at it.


And even if it's not fixed in an official capacity, someone else might through mods or whatever.



I personally find this stuff fascinating, and I think all bugs and oddities should be documented on our wikis.

 

It's not an error handler. The way the game handles characters' victory animations involves moving their position as an object that still complies with level/object collision, so that when the next act/cutscene starts, the character can be player controlled or cutscene controlled seamlessly from the exact spot they ended in their victory animation. The reason this affects Mighty noticeably in this context is because he stays grounded the entire time in his animation, where all of the movement that Sonic and Knuckles have in theirs happens in the air.

What's happening (to my understanding) is that, on certain animation frames, Mighty's character object is made to move a specific pixel-per-frame speed in the same way his movement or air speed would be calculated during gameplay. In the last frames of his animation, his horizontal speed is set to zero. This is delayed whenever his animation movement is interrupted by a lack of ground beneath him, which happens consistently if the animation starts most anywhere on top of an egg capsule. I think this is the case because I've had instances where the speed at which Mighty moves to the side falling off the capsule is significantly less than most other times it happens.

Reference videos mine:
https://xcancel.com/healercrepe/status/1019147887509303296
https://xcancel.com/healercrepe/status/1019148215352901633
https://xcancel.com/healercrepe/status/1021482604028219401

 

Given that there are game-breaking bugs that shouldn't have even gotten past QA yet have survived for eleven whole months, I'd be inclined to disagree with this statement.

 

Isn't that a catch-22 situation? How can they be full aware of the issues without them being reported about in the first place (ie. the bugs mentioned on that thread which got moved to here), and/but if they were already aware of them, why weren't they patched before it was released?

 

Hydrocity Zone's boosters use the slower Running Animation instead of the max speed animation. Pretty sure that's a bug and it bothers me every time I see it.

 

I'm willing to place heavy bets on them being well aware of at least some bugs and oddities, but having deadline pressure from SEGA's end meant they were working down to the wire, and as a result, had to focus almost solely on higher priority problems (And getting level designs and bosses finished and tested.) while leaving most lower level issues on the backburner. Even then though, the original Sonic Mania still released with too many issues out of the gate, such as very jarring missing level level transitions, unnecessarily laggy Special Stages on Switch version, music tracks failing to play, and more severely game crashes.

The additions, refinements and bug fixes in Sonic Mania Plus only further amplify just how much rougher around the edges Sonic Mania was upon release. While not officially acknowledged (For obvious reasons: bad press etcetera.), it's blatantly obvious that Sonic Mania's original game needed a much more significant delay on all platforms, not only for general polish, but for basic gameplay stability. Should've been delayed to mid-December at a minimum if you ask me, although obviously I'm not on their development team, so take that with a grain of salt. I don't doubt the developers' competence, however I think Sonic Mania's original release shows clear signs of them being stretched thin within strict timeframes.

Also, I think that a dedicated topic for bugs and whatnot is a good idea. It helps to keep those specific discussions organised, which could be useful for things like adding bug information to wiki pages, for example. Furthermore, outside bug reports from those not on the development team could lead to potential discoveries/flagging-up of errors genuinely missed by the developers, and having them all in one topic may help the developers to find 'n' fix stuff more efficiently.

 

Just wanted to say, since two of my posts were included in the OP:

Love the "Mania" dev team and obviously think they did an incredible job. Would love if they get to do a sequel someday, but if not "Mania" and the additions in "Plus" are the greatest contributions to the series in over two decades. If it ends up being the only (official) 2D Sonic game they make, I'll be more than happy returning to it over the course of the coming decades of my life. Huge thanks to them all for that.

Personally I feel like the only major bugs found so far in all versions of Encore/"Plus" are the music cutting out, and the hammer drop after beating the Titanic Monarch Act 1 boss leading to a crash. Which I'm sure they are aware of, and will likely be fixed. Most of the issues reported in the thread so far seem like known shippable bugs to me--issues that they would deem not important enough to warrant taking the time to fix. (Though I suppose other major issues could be found eventually.)

The PC/Steam version has much more major issues currently, and I do think it's in a pretty rough state. But it seems clear that is not the fault of anyone on the "Mania" team whatsoever. Sega Europe seem to be the ones handling PC-specific bugs/that version of the game, and the weird new PC-specific issues introduced by the latest patch on PC seem to have been caused by them (Sega Europe). It's a shame that's the case, and I hope Sega allocates more people/resources to that version of the game to fix all the PC-specific issues it has, but yeah it ain't the fault of the "Mania" devs.

Anyway I've definitely said all I've needed to regarding the music cutting out in Encore issue, and the PC-specific issues with the Steam version. Won't post anything else regarding bugs, and apologies to any mods/site staff/etc. if they felt I did so too much. Anyway, I'm off to do another Ray run. (Ray is bae.)


(If the thread stays open, I will continue to read it for any funny descriptions/videos of non-major bugs, since those are often enjoyable to watch. This has been the funniest one I've seen so far.)

 

Here Sonic behaves full sized, but has his sprite shrunk and aligned to the top left of where the full sized one should be.

I'm not sure what I did to make it happen, unfortunately. Sonic probably got left behind in one of the sections where you go into the distance while I was playing as Knuckles, and didn't get his size restored when teleported back into the boss fight.



It persists through the level complete animation.

 

The search bar isn't turning up anything, so I guess no one's brought this one up.

In CPZ, the blue chemical ball thingies play their SFX twice as often as they're meant to. In the original S2, only every other ball in the chain plays the sound effect, but in Mania, all of them do. It's kind of obvious how they messed that up: in S2, every ball calls the PlaySound function, but the SMPS engine itself ignores every other call for that specific SFX.

Still, wouldn't have hurt to actually check the original game while recreating its objects, geez.

 

I personally don't think it's appropriate to document bugs with this sort of tone. There's all sorts of reasons why things might not match up with the originals, especially because from what we gather, the Mania team only had limited resources and so had to prioritize their efforts.

I appreciate that in some cultures comments like that are meant to be playful, but to me it just seems unnecessary rude and entitled.

 

Now, you see, I'd accept the whole 'you're entitled' argument if this was a free product that someone was working on in their spare time, but it isn't: my money's going in their pockets, so, yeah, I expect them to test the things they port. As someone who's working on a free product in my spare time that involves porting objects from Sonic 2, I find it a little strange that I'm the one doing it instead.

You could argue that they have limited time, but this has been an issue since the Sonic 2 Remaster (edit: ninja'd). That's four years they've had to at least double-check.

 

Maybe it's not a bug but a design choice that they felt like implementing?

Since Sonic 2 remastered they must have run into this at least 100 times. They'd have to have noticed by now.

 

I get where you are coming from. And I actually agree that a paid product has less leeway when it comes to these things. But the way you worded it made it sound like the Mania Team couldn't be bothered, when it could simply just have been that their limited budget meant they had to prioritize other things.

If you had made the same comments about say Sonic Forces, I'd say it was totally appropriate, because, from what we can tell, they weren't working to a tight budget (at least not as tight as Mania) and given how weak the final product was, it did seem that the Forces team really couldn't be that bothered with a lot of things.

 

The development of EVERY game goes through budget/time issues, seeing as resources are NEVER unlimited, you always have to choose how to allocate them, no matter how abundant they may seem by comparison.

That being said, I can understand wanting the product that you paid for to be perfect, but absolutely nothing is perfect, much less a program as complex as an action game, where there are literally millions of opportunities for things to go wrong, and at least dozens of them will, so I'd say that a sound effect playing at the wrong rate is a very minor issue, which doesn't come anywhere near ruining the experience in any way. But if as a paying customer you think that's outrageous and unacceptable, you can always return the game.

Nothing wrong with reporting the issue (which may or may not be a bug), but implying that the developers were "lazy" because they didn't go through every line of ASM in the original games is unnecessarily disrespectful and just shows a lack of understanding of how professional software development works.