Sonic X-treme - Point of View - Info + help required

awesome, but didn't JollyRoger said something about no need for the level editor and that he's not going to do this? perhaps i'm remembering things wrong

 

I didn't say that there is no need, I said that it would be hard and perhaps not worth the effort, but in the end I decided to give it a go, just to see what could be salvaged and what had to be modified/rewritten.

Jolly

 

Updates for well Some of the Rendering features. The cursor, blending, and line drawing now all work.
He is trying to reproduce as closely as possible the NV1 behavior for textures, palettes, blending, sprites, polygons, alphas.
Its a lot of work, and may take some time to get it to where he wants it to be.


Man the editor really looks well planned out!

 

I've said this before, but without the fisheye lens that stage really does remind me of the first level from BUG!

 

I love the idea that when this all releases, not only will we be able to experience x-treme on the saturn, and PC we'll also be able to create levels for it using the official tools.
It's a crazy update. Considering the most we've ever had chance to try is the boss engine demo.

 

You mean that Green hilly level?

 

JollyRoger? andrew75?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0-7zdAa2co

You're the best around, nothin's ever gonna keep you down! XD


All silliness aside, you guys are quite literally working on making one of my life-long dreams a reality. Ever since I learned about sonic xtreme when I was 14, I started looking all around the internet for *any* lead to anything related to Sonic Xtreme, but was horridly saddened when I heard it was never going to be released.

Then came you guys, and I kid you not, I'm only growing more and more excited with each screenshot you give.

Keep up the amazing work, you're making quite a few fans happier than they've ever been before!

 

Yeah probably not the best description for it! The metal sonic engine, minus metal sonic, and a different environment!

 

First footage of the Sonic X-treme level editor ported to modern Windows. ( Still WIP)
I don't have the words to express my feelings on the matter.
Anyways, Please Enjoy the video folks, I'm sure it took JR a lot of time and effort to get this far.
http://youtu.be/FviZbVb0qdo

 

*drools a little*


This is SO AWESOME!!

 

Timeline of my browser history on the path I took to get to this topic:

PSU Facebook Group
Phantasy Star 0
Dreamgear My arcade station and Several other chinese knockoff portable game systems (and much lulzing ensued)
Old video games! http://www.thegameconsole.com/1990-videogames.html
Me: Huh, Sonic X-treme for the Saturn. Never heard of it. *googles*
Youtube: Gaming Mystery: What happened to Sonic X-treme?
PK the Hedgehog: HEY GUYS SOMEONE GOT AHOLD OF THE FILES *LINK TO ASSEMBLER GAMES*
*Click* Browser comes to a screeching halt.
Time to register just for 1 comment.




My hubby is going to be ecstatic when he wakes up and finds you guys have been working on this! Thank you so much for the time, money, dedication, and effort you guys have put into this project!

The whole topic is a great read, very informative and suspense inducing! It kind of reminds me of the days when they found the Earthbound 0 Prototype... and the various scams from people who supposedly had the Earthbound 64 prototype.

Keep up the good work guys! We're rootin for ya! :3 <3

 

So excited about this. Amazing work.

 

I'll just chime in and say this is amazing.

And I've always noticed the Bug connection too. The whole level layout scheme they had going for the game always made me think their concept possibly inspired the people behind Bug without their knowing it. Could be?

 

I realise that the development of Sonic Xtreme predates that of BUG! by at least two earlier platforms, but that particular stage was created quite a while after Realtime Associates' game had come out, so if there was any inspiration then it would have been the other way around, with STI's project being the once borrowing its design cues...

 

This is looking pretty interesting. Are you guys still working on the Saturn version too?

 

I like the story ! And welcome to the forums! You should also stop by http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=33545&st=420 for the sister thread, as well as www.Senntient.com, home to Chris Senn one of the main Xtreme team members who originally worked on the game.

yes I think that is still in JollyRigers Playbook, After he ports the code to Modern windows, he'll port it back all shiny and cleaned up for NV1 and the Saturn since the old OS is hell to debug and test in.
At least that is my understanding.

 

Wasn't it recently confirmed that even with the fish eye camera effect in place, the Saturn version could still reach about 20fps? Considering that any optimisations won't be limited by the short development window STI had plus more recent programming advances, I'm confident the end result could easily achieve 25-30. At the very least, I'd love to see the four PC levels, the two "new world" stages, boss arenas and the various locations from the E3 '96 promo video feature in the final playable version, though I suspect with the editor tools it would be easy enough to recreate any missing elements in whatever source material jollyroger has managed to acquire... Really, with the exception of perhaps the ongoing Team I.G.A.S. restoration of the prototype era Resident Evil 2 scenario, Sonic Xtreme is the single biggest project I've ever seen anybody take on, and without a doubt it's by far the most historically relevant to someone like me who grew up looking at screenshots, never really letting go of what might have been. You guys take all the time you need and keep up the great work - I'm sure many others out there will come to appreciate it!

 

I have yet to get a stable performance reading of the engine running on Saturn, as it is very crash prone.

One of the future experiments will be to tweak the code to compiler under a modern SH toolchain, to use all advances in code optimization available in modern compilers, which were not available back then.

STI's engine is entirely written in C and uses portions of Sega's SBL library, so it should benefit from the more modern compiler.

POV's engine has several portions written in hand-tuned assembly and uses portions of both Sega's SGL and SBL libraries.

Unfortunately STI's v40 engine is in a very poor state, and will take a long time to get to a level even close to v37.
For performance reasons, many features of v37 have been removed or simplified in v40 to run on Saturn.

The later versions we have a binary of (v53) seems to focus on PC, as it uses much more memory than the Saturn has, and seems to implement a full Z-sorting routine for the cubes, necessary to use the fish eye camera effect.
v40 has the code to implement the fish eye effect, but it doesn't Z-sort the cubes, or at least I have not found any code that does it yet.

Jolly

 

I suspect it was the z-sorting routines that caused problems for STI/POV with the frame rate on Saturn, as I seem to recall a few developers quoted around the time of the Dreamcast's announcement saying this feature was a new addition to that hardware natively when compared to its predecessor, giving programmers more room in memory to handle other effects (such as bump mapping, although just a handful of titles ever took advantage of this - Soul Calibur being one of the few examples I can think of, and even then it's only used sparingly).

 

What differences are there between v37 and v40 aside from the fisheye? Would it make more sense to continue plugging away at getting v40 usable, or can you retrofit v40's assets into v37 and just use the older version as a more stable base?