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

It have.
I moved recently and all my stuff are boxed. Need to find the card.

 

This is about as accurate as it gets per my knowledge having spoken to a large portion of those who worked at STI. Although, as per Mike Wallis, it is definite that PoV were attempting to port Ofer's engine to the Saturn, or at least that was the intention from when they were brought on board by Robert Morgan.

Don Goddard worked on a version of Sonic Mars on the 32x, and then also a version of Xtreme (of sorts) on the NV1. Ofer was also involved in this to some degree, hence why there is a possibility this PC code is the original Ofer engine.

In reference to that screenshot earlier; that is I shot I received and distributed to the community from Christina Coffin, who has multiple builds of her engine running on an emulator. I never progressed with asking about purchasing them/them being distributed.

 

Has anyone tried to contact Clint from Lazy Game Reviews with regards to getting the card with accessories? He did a video on the card back in September and had the complete package. Daughter board, controllers, software and all.

 

Thanks for that - as complicated as many people seem to think the development timeline of Sonic Xtreme was, I had a feeling my (anything but brief) summary felt accurate based on what I've read over the years.

From what I can tell, Chris Senn also has access to the PC version's engine, level editor and possible even its source code, though he agreed only to share his own creations such as music files, texture data and sprite sheets due to Ofer Alon requesting that anything he produced remaining firmly locked away for personal reasons, which is why fan game makers have been forced to build such elements from scratch. However, there's no reason why this material couldn't surface through another STI member not bound to such agreements.

As for Christina Coffin, I remember that she used to post at the Sonic Retro forum, providing quite a few key details about the curved polygon exploit that I mentioned earlier along with information relating to the programming of this Saturn project in general. However, she then disappeared without giving an explanation, though I've heard it was because she was either bombarded with private messages from community members demanding whatever is in her private archive or due to comments that I certainly wouldn't dare repeat here.

I'm fairly sure that before turning her back on speaking openly to enthusiasts of this unreleased game, Christina did indeed confirm she still owns all of her Saturn era work from Sonic Xtreme, although just like Ofer Alon, we're unlikely to get anything from her now unless she has a major change of heart. Actually, that probably isn't the case, since we at least managed to get something via Coffin, meaning we've more chance of bridges being rebuilt rather than us establishing communication with someone who has previously been known for having a stance that isn't in our favour.

I realise this is a predictable and rather forward question, but does anyone have contact with Christina? Considering her direct involvement with Project Condor, I suspect she might be open to offers if she knew that POV's entire archive from Sonic Xtreme was on the verge of being preserved online. Then again, if everything is already in the hands of a reliable third party just waiting to be shared, what could she bring to the proverbial table apart from inside knowledge? Since she was part of STI rather than just POV, I'd like to think she might also have assets relating to earlier versions of this game... maybe even concept art or design plans?

 

I've been in contact with Christina Coffin on a few instances threwout the years working on AXSX, we mostly discussed the boss engine and how it was meant to function. She didn't look very interested in making any releases of what she had.

 

Senn does not, to my knowledge, have access to the engine. He has access to the level files, textures, and anything he designed. The level files made their way out into the world unofficially through me in a somewhat contraversial moment where I basically gave up on the sonic 'scene' and just dumped everything and probably burnt that bridge. The issue regarding Ofer's material surfacing is weird; you would think other members may have it but Ofer was very much against distributing his code to anyone, and did not adhere to backup systems in place at STI. There's a story of him somewhat holding code hostage that I have written somewhere, but digging it up may take a while.

Christina is in no way in the same boat as Ofer. She was simply busy and lost interest, and I, being her primary point of contact, also lost interest and thus didn't push it. I think if anyone were to have a chance of contacting her again it would likely be me, because I don't think anyone has really taken up the task of talking to people about the game since I stopped. I do not feel that is a burnt bridge. I sort of had a third party line through to Ofer at one point but that is likely a burnt bridge and nothing much would have come of it, regardless.

Assets wise she has a couple of saturn builds on cd, some source code, some models, but some is on damaged media.

I will, post my exams next week, potentially try and rebuild a rapport with a few folk and see what comes out of it. Christina was initially fairly keen to distribute some stuff, and wanted to check NDAs before doing so.

Interesting @ the above, clearly things are not as they were when I talked to her.


Edit

The amount of my life I dedicated to this one bloody game was ridiculous. I have so, so many emails, yahoo chat logs... all sorts. It's ridiculous. About half of it is published and about half of THAT is in a presentable form. Perhaps one day when I've got time and I'm not selling my soul to the corperate machine at such a rate, I might try and tie it all together. not sure I could ever make it as coherent as Anthaemia managed already though!

 

Yeah this must have been after the fact. Its a real shame that the Sonic community can be so pushy sometimes. I last spoke with her in 2010. but than since vanished.
I think it would be really nice if she came back to the community with some inside info and not have to worry about being bombarded with asset requests.

her last words were:

I can't make promises regarding when I can
reply to further emails, but don't be shy to ask more questions.

-Christina

Edit:
I've sent a few more emails since than , but yeah I guess she's pretty busy, I don't think it would be a good idea if anyone other than grodecki try and contact her since she may not appreciate being flooded with emails from us rabid Sonic fans.

 

Annnnnd it's live (for now).

NVidia NV1 SDK 1.50 has been uploaded:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=706

This is the conclusion of a twelve-year quest for me:
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=14&p=37

Many thanks to my source (no, he doesn't have anything else NV1-related, and nothing Sega-related for that matter)

 

Fantastic, thank you!

This is exactly what I needed, now the card!

 

After a **VERY** preliminary inspection, part of the archive seems to contain Alon's PC based engine and editor, but with enough rendering backend abstraction to run alternatively on NV1 and Saturn.

In addition to that there seems to be a Sonic experiment based at least in part on the technology POV had created on the Sega Saturn for Interplay's cancelled Armed/Aftermath game.

As I read through code and try to compile/run parts of it I will give updates, there is a lot of material...

 

Just glad its in good hands. My Sonic mood blew over after the last bit of drama years ago, so Im happy to see someone taking charge here.

 

That's very interesting indeed.

It would make sense if that was the case as PoV were comissioned to port his engine... I do not believe his engine ever really got running in any significant form on the Saturn but anything is very welcome. I'd be interested to know what the assets look like and whether they are similar to the 'map' and texture files from Ofer's PC engine that I made public quite some time ago.

 

I sent Mike Wallis an email with a link to the topic here asking if he wanted to chime in on the conversations we have going here.
In case some of you guys may not know who Mike is, he was the Producer of the original Sonic Xtreme. He's been very helpful in the way of historical information related to Sonic X-treme.

Hi Andrew,

I just read through that link you sent me (on my mobile while in a meeting, so I can't remember all of it exactly--ha!). Here's the gist of it:


The POV (Point of View) engine was the attempt to get Ofer Alon's PC-based engine up and running on the Saturn with some actual FPS (remember, Ofer before tried to get his code ported to Saturn and could only get about 4fps with no textures).


Project Condor was the team that remained after Senn/Alon split off to work on the PC version using his editor. Project Condor was based off of Coffin's boss engine technology.


POV had nothing to do with Project Condor's work. After Irimajiri saw Coffin's boss engine and made the decision to go with that version, as opposed to POV's port of Alon's PC work, their contract was terminated and they stopped working on the project.


Do you need any other information? I hope that clears things up about all these projects that were going on. And ask anytime--I love hearing from you.


Feel free to post/rephrase on my behalf.




Thanks,
-Mike

 

I realise this is a little off-topic, but assuming that I'm remembering this correctly, POV was established by former staff of STI and Interplay, which is why it had such close ties with those two companies. If at all possible, would you be able to check and see whether any other projects were mentioned - even by name - in their archive? I suspect that POV was might have been responsible for the abandoned Saturn conversion of Indy 500 that was in development around the same time Sonic Xtreme was in production, which I seem to recall being cancelled (in favour of Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition) as the console's major first party driving game for the winter 1996 release period. Interplay was definitely listed as the publisher for this, so I can imagine there being at least something in POV's files... providing they were actually involved at all, that is! Being the go-to conversion team around then, I would be very surprised if POV didn't at least have some kind of documentation on this title, and I'd love to know more as this was a point when Sega really started pursuing the idea of outsourcing projects once handled internally, such as letting Tantalus port Manx TT or having Appaloosa bring Sky Target to domestic platforms instead of its own AM divisions.

P.S. So it seems as if POV was simply porting Ofer Alon's engine (despite him previously trying and failing to get this running on the Saturn at a playable frame rate) as opposed to assisting the "Project Condor" team, its contract terminated when management chose to go with Chris Coffin's boss level technology for the main game?

 

A bit off-topic: grodecki, if you were to get back in touch with Don Goddard, I guarantee the NV1 owners over at VOGONS would be interested in anything NV1-related he had to share, such as alternate revisions of the SDK (if he had it) or any non-Sonic demos and so on. I also clued in blueshogun96 to the existence of this thread.

We did a followup interview with him here in 2012 (thanks to vetz):
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=283873#p283873

 

I have downloaded the archive Chris Senn made available on his site, and on first inspection, it seems the data files are essentially identical, in form at least; this is for the main project/system, which in the sources goes by the name "Sonicboom".

The assets from POV's own Saturn experiment seem to be a mix of data from Ofer's engine (mostly sprites and textures), and other files, which seem to be 3D assets converted to POV's engine format.

Eventually I will run a binary comparison tool to identify any assets that are present in the POV archive that are not present in Senn's archive.

 

This is one of my posts from earlier this year. I am trying to beat Anthaemia in post length it seems! Anyway, I tried to squeeze a lot of important info on Sonic X-Treme in this wall of text. Some of it may be wrong, in light of recent findings!

 

I'm actually excited for news on this, this has got to be one of the holy grails of cancelled games.

Exciting times.......

 

I remember a lot of drama regarding two of the last gameplay videos of the PC version of SX... I also remember me being involved in them getting released.
Can't wait to see something new! =P

Also, I do still want to know - are any of the source codes ever going to be publicly available?

 

At the moment I do not intend to release any of the source codes, they belong to many people, some of whom have been so far opposed to their release.