Sonic X-treme Textures and Defs

If you look at the other 2 "screen" maps, they ARE mockups. The second one is just a bunch of random high tech looking textures slapped together in a scene big enough for screenshot. It seems likely this was the whole purpose of those maps. Also, as for the second pic you linked looks an awful lot like one of the other screen files with a different water texture. Also, someone else posted a scene that is missing, I haven't quite found the exact map yet, but gee, these textures look familiar

 

Anybody know how to get ahold of SANiK? Or, barring that, anybody willing to help me figure out a way to implement a fisheye lens into an openGL project I'm working on? Right now I'm simply grabbing the screen into a texture and placing that over a distorted quad, but it doesn't look right. Anybody want to brain storm with me some other ways of implementing a fisheye lens?

EDIT: Nevermind, I found a project to add fisheye projection to Quake where the author explains how he did it. I'm just gonna use the method he describes here.

EDIT AGAIN: Dur, actually, thats a stupid way to do this. I'll just write a fisheye shader and save myself a lot of headache

 

Actually, the method for fisheye in X-treme is far simpler than you think. I was the one who whipped up a formula for SANiK which was used in that viewer. Basically, instead of changing the FOV of the 3D pipeline or anything fancy, you just modify the Z position of the vertices based on how far away from the screen center they are.

FisheyeZ = OriginalZ + ((((X-Cam.X)*(X-Cam.X))+((Y-Cam.Y)*(Y-Cam.Y)))*Stength_Factor);

see here
http://www.senntient.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=845

It'd be pretty easy to chuck that in a vertex shader if you wanted.

 

Much appreciated!

 

What I wouldn't give for the original Redsands layout. the art direction is simple yet beautiful
to bad the original layout isn't in there. I'd be on that like white on rice!
I've done as much as I could from a few screen shots a few years ago, but there is just so much missing.


heres a very early screen of the realtime lighting and water test I did in C4 game engine last year, never got around to finishing it though.

 

Are you sure that's supposed to be red sands? Red6.def doesn't look like that at all.

One of the things I take away from this is that whoever actually drew these textures is really an artist in the true sense of the word. They were able to give such depth to words that are literally made of nothing but cubes. This really dawned on me when I got to see the torches in Sand6 after seeing them in the magazine pics. No real time lighting effects here, just cleverly made textures. It's like those people who draw optical illusions on the sidewalk with chalk.

Hey by the way you guys, a couple unanswered questions about this release. What's with the screenshots in the root of the archive? And why is the map pack called "Sonic Boom"? Was that the working name for the PC version of Xtreme or what?

ONE MOOORE THING: I always scoffed at the idea that Sonic Adventure was based in any way on Sonic World in Jam, but I'm hearing some credible evidence. Plus, there ARE other Dreamcast games that were designed for Saturn at first. I guess a lot of people, including myself, forget how close the DC is to the Saturn despite the huge leap in graphical power.

 

While on the topic of Xtreme, I know we have connections with a few developers of Xtreme, but have contacts with POV ever been considered or established.

 

Psychobob tried it and didn't get anywhere/fucked things up. Should've been left to someone who knew what they were doing.

 

The only thing that bugs me is the gravity changing mechanic. I don't think the PC version had it at all... And I remember reading on the Senntient site that the Saturn version had it and not the PC. That would mean that this video was indeed the Saturn version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftNgzZ3Ovig

The videos that show gravity-changing do look like they have a certain style/look compared to the pc videos... Jade Gully has a completely different form compared to the pc incarnation, sporting a green-hill floor look.

 

The gravity changes are really sloppy, it looks like it was aped for the demo, ie not really part of the engine.

Also, looking back, pretty much every video Chris Senn released is of a map included in this release.

This is that one that TheShad said looks like the snake from SA, I think it's Fun.def, too lazy to go check

Pretty sure I saw an early def of this

This is obviously Galaxy.def or one of the DE.defs

You can see Jade Gully and a couple other worlds here, again, clearly included in the DEF files we now have

It really makes me wonder if Senn has a copy of this engine still or not.

 

Or maybe the gravity-changing was really incomplete and buggy. I still say the version of jade Gully in the video has different level design compared to the pc version. I'd like that level to be found in the leaked files, because the version of Jade Gully in the video is my favorite. I'm still unsure how you could fake gravity-changing like that. It looked like it worked, albeit in a buggy way.

 

Now that we have not only nearly every level in map form, but many revisions of each map, we can see that the Xtreme team had to make a LOT of mockups for the press. It's totally possible that version of JG was just a small mockup like the SCREEN*.def files.

 

How is it a mockup if it is shown in MOTION? I understand the checkerboard Red Sands, which looks like an animation of a static image, but that version of Jade Gully- I have a hard time believing that it was completely fake.

 

You misunderstand by what I mean by "mockup". The SCREEN*.def files are all very small maps that seem to have been created exclusively to show off to the press. Even if you get Sonic to run around on those maps with 3d view it doesn't make it a real game.

Have you guys ever seen this? Apparently the textures from the Metal Sonic boss arena are still in that leaked saturn build. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGLhvXb_iVE...feature=related Seems that this build was a really quick hack to be used as a pitch.

 

All of Senn's released videos came of VHS and were captured via TV card, so that's in no way proof
I have one or two of the raw MPEGs ripped from VHS, they are not taken via screen capture or the like, it's definitely a vhs.

 

Even if it is just to show off to the press, that still is level design and an actual representation of gameplay that had effort put into it. If Sonic X-treme actually was finished, maybe the level design of that version of Jade Gully would be used? Anyway, regardless of its reality, I find that version of Jade Gully and the gravity rotation CONCEPT to be really great. If someone is indeed remaking the game (as much as possible), I would include that version of Jade Gully in some form, and definitely make levels with the gravity rotation concept.

 

Yeah, I could tell by the video quality. I'm not really sure why I said that.

At any rate, I'd love to see someone implement those cool ramps that ofer made into a fan engine, it reminds me a lot of those rings in Sonic 3 death egg

 

What ramps exactly are you talking about? The one in the new worlds Saturn video that look like rafts on water? Or the half-pipe ramp in the Death Egg Video?

 

This shit Ofer was working on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOd0mQ-uXE

 

My first real post!

Anyway, the reason it says "Sonic Boom" is that was the name of Ofer Alon's level editor for the game I believe. Those screenshots are probably the only ones I've ever seen of it in action. It really was an amazing tool, and supposedly you could develop on it quite quickly, but thats speculation.

I also had a theory. Has anyone else noticed that there are 14 different iterations of Death Egg? At first I thought they might not be satisfied with a map, but then I saw how many there were and It got me thinking. There might have been an idea at one point to make Death Egg an enormous stage, one where they all somehow connect kind of like how levels in modern sonics are segmented, example from around this time period would be Sonic Adventure's Sky Deck Level. There may have been 14 segments to it that you needed to have battled your way through but its just a theory, this might also explain the sonic heads which may have marked the way from one map to the next.

I've been going through all the levels since they came out and analyzing them to create a list of changes and revisions between levels. Of whats there it would seem there are 2 acts to jade gully, possibly 2 to Red Sands and Crystal Frost, and one to Galaxy Fortress and Blue Ocean. Not complaining, but are there boss maps in the package, cause I don't think I saw anything that resembled some of the demos? One last thing was the color chart thats placed in one of the files, it specifies true names to each act within a zone, and its supposed to have their color palate as well, but that doesn't seem to be there. Just thought it may be of interest cause it wasn't mentioned.

Thats it for me tonight, gotta get up in the morning.