Sonic X-treme - Cancelled Sega Saturn "nights" concept video

If you look at the ground deformations etc. it is almost exactly the same effect you would see in NiGHTS. Unless they were aiming for a similar effect with a new engine it almost certainly must be the NiGHTS engine test that Chris Senn has mentioned during his chronicles of the Sonic Xtreme project.

An R&D department could easily knock up a basic level like the one shown in this video in 2 weeks, especially if they already had some of the graphical assets available to inject into it. It's a pretty simple process assuming the engine is well documented (which might be the natch here, with it being in Japanese and pretty much pinched from Sonic Team without their knowledge).

 

Mmm. Makes sense indeed. Just trying to get everything cleared up by asking someone directly about this. Coffin usually takes a long time to reply, Mike should know and will get back to me within 2 or 3 days maximum.

Senn said he couldn't confirm/deny either way, emailed him earlier today.

Mike says "The Jade Gully demo was not using the Nights tech--it was using
Coffin's boss engine tech modified for the main game."

 

It must be using something from the NiGHTS engine though. Why else would it feature the land warping/deformation weirdness of the NiGHTS engine otherwise?

 

Yeah, that puzzles me also..... will look into it. Do note that it is only for the the water in the river area shown, and not the entire terrain, could well have been programmed in to attempt to make the water look more real? I dunno, until Coffin replies to me I can only really go on other's words.

 

I can't remember actully, my memory is a bit hazy of NiD and I can't be bothered to setup all my saturn to check ;p

 

The ground does move a bit but since the majority of the game you fly around it's hard to say as to how much and where.

 

Well something that really interesting as pointed out by andrew75 on the Senntinet Fourms. Is that it seems that this level was built on top of the metal sonic level.

I'll let his post explain it better

http://www.senntient.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/000194.html

This picture in a subsequent post really shows the connection

 

Wow. There does seem to be a connection there.... :thumbsup: Thanks for sharing it here.


and unrelated news. This video has been Kotaku'd

http://kotaku.com/gaming/clips/sonic-x+treme-nights-version-265872.php

 

Hmm this will be interesting in the coming weeks.

 

The "breathing" floor only appears on one stage in NiGHTS which is Soft Museum. Even then it's not breathing but bends as NiGHTS passes over it because it's meant to be made of rubber. Why on earth the floor breaths on this Sonic demo I don't know.

Yakumo

 

Probably a left over bit of code. I've seen such things before in random betas that use other engines/games as their basis.

 

Is this by chance the video that was supposed to be put on www.sonicxtreme.com ? That site's been sitting there forever now and I've been waiting for something to happen, and just assume it had a link to this demo that's being shown here.

 

Very interesting footage Thanks

 

Hey hxc, how you doing? I would have thought that you had joined this forum a long time ago and was pretty surprised to see how recently you did join.

Nice resource of images you have on that site. May I ask which ones are Saturn ones if I can assume that all the others are from PC?

Cheers

 

Hi. I did join this forum a rather long time ago, but due to some problems that occured I was banned, it has all be sorted now, with my thanks to ASSEMbler.

If you are refering to xtreme.projectsonic.com... well its rather disorganized, I'm in the process of rearchiving everything, but anything Chris Senn uploaded (denoted by sxc_ at the beggining of file names) will be from the PC version he worked on.

The thing about the metal sonic floor was noticed a long while ago by my friend SANiK, and Coffin, the programmer of this gave an explanation, I will try and digg it up if people are interested.

Cheers.

PS. Found that post I was thinking of Coffin talking about this build

"Yes that image underneath the polygon terrain is the vdp2 plane for the metal sonic boss fight stage. Its 'just there' most likely because i just needed something to help align the vdp2 plane with the vdp1 polys and I wasn't concerned about having the right vdp2 tiles loaded.
Its appearance is tinted blue because the other vdp plane thats drawing that vista-pro style rendered mountains(programmer art lol) extends all the way down the screen with a blue gradient and transparency between both layers was enabled. That bottom 3d plane in later builds was aligned and transformed properly to link up with vdp1 polygons in the game with 3d sprites along the horizon to extend the apparent rendering distance of the world. Using some vdp1+2 tricks you could also cut out holes or make apparent dips+valleys in the vdp2 plane to make things more interesting visually.

If you look at a game like NiGHTS, what they did was draw their base heightfield terrain layer out alittle father, fogged it and made it hilly and downward sloping before they stopped drawing it so you wouldn't have such an unsightly horizon in your game. This is what xtreme did as well because it looks good, hence all the parallels and speculation that we had NiGHTS source.

That build is a very old one and its what I call a tester app which only has a fraction of the game's source in it because I would do a lot of tweaking/compile/rerun to refine the look of the game which didn't require everything in a level to be loaded. Surfing around in the sn debugger to mess with things could actually take longer than just a compile+rerun. cd emulators were slow too which is why alot of sega model formats spit out data in .c and .h files so you'd sacrifice ram during development by compiling in your biggest assets for the sake of less load time.
Think of that version as kind of like a little sandbox for sonic to play in, just contains the ability for sonic to move around, collect rings and a few other things. I used some code overlays which made that possible and it saved me alot of time."

The first part referes to the Metal Sonic arena underneath, and the rest to the rest of the demo

 

Sounds like a right bodge job, but such is the life of an R&D guy I suppose :lol:

 

So the question now is if there is an interactive prototype hidden somewhere.

HL718 usually posts with some clarification when it comes to stuff like this. I haven't seen him post in a while.