Hello!. Project RingStar, is a romhack of Sonic The Hedgehog 1; spiritual sequel of Sonic 3 (& Knuckles). It's foreseen to have a post-1993 style/presentation, all in a sci-fi, edgy and dialogless plot!, while never forgetting attention to detail. I'm the co-author and co-director, team leader and special effects programmer of this project, and regardless my poor engrish, together our team we'll try give our best effort in providing a professional game, with the quality anyone would expect from an original sold game, and a special emphasis in balanced gameplay, technical work, and at least an attempt of general creativity, originality and audiovisual quality. The biggest goal however is completing this project ALL THE WAY UNTIL THE END. Therefore, demos may or not be released, but we're never giving you any release dates. The idea is to keep faithful to the game plan, never cutting content for technical or time constraints. Game and Gameplay Specs This romhack is based in the Sonic The Hedgehog 1 ROM (JAP), and should play like a Sonic 3 sequel, or a new Spin-off title. And just like the other original Sonic games did, it shall not feel like something you've played before. Therefore new zones won't be inspired in GHZ, MZ, etc in ANY way, besides applying the obvious tropes. Each zone is 2 acts long, with 1 or more minibosses. Badniks are NOT powered by animals!! Sonic is, again, the only playable character. (Fast Facts) Moves (all implemented already): - SpinDash - Roll in mid-air - Wall-jump - Insta-shield, shield-based movements Monitors: - Eggman monitor - 10 Rings - ("?"-marked) 5 Rings - ("?"-marked) 20 Rings - Blue Ring - Speed Shoes - Fire Shield - Electric Shield - Bubble Shield - ???? Shield - Invincibility - S Technical Specs (Fast facts only) This hack is based in the Sonic The Hedgehog 1 ROM (JAP), using Mercury's ReadySonic branch. Any other functions from later games besides the sound driver (so I mean shields, moves, act transitions, etc.) have been rewritten from the ground up, and the engine supports up to $8000x$8000 sized levels. I'm trying a visually different (hope "better") extended camera. A new Special Stages engine is planned to be made as well. The programming should play like inspired from Contra Hard Corps. With hardware-based effects, with the least possible (if none even better) framebuffer emulation, and generally soft FPS. Current Progress WORK IN PROGRESS WIP - WIP - WIP - WIP - WIP - WIP - WIP - WIP Spoiler All feedback towards the project is welcome. If you are a romhacker (or even if you aren't!), and you want to collaborate on this project, you are also welcome!, try finding me at SSRG's discord server; I'll try to answer, so we can talk about it. More updates and information coming soon!!
Nice start. If I can throw in one piece or critique, specifically for the grassland level, it's that the grass is very well detailed, but the rest feels a little flat. Maybe a bit of extra shading to the rock and the sky would help bring the level to life. Anyway, keep up the good work.
I'm sorry, but after 3 playable characters in S3&K, reverting back to 1 character feels like a step-down, to be honest. It would have been nice to at least bring back the other 2 playable characters from S3&K (Tails & Knuckles).
That's interesting. I've never heard of doing something like that before! Out of curiosity, I've gotta ask... How would that even work?
Nice. Just a shame you're a ban dodger called HCKTROX. I should ban you for evasion you know.....did you really think you could hide yourself completely? I always find out in the end.
If you want an easily bored artist who has hit a plateau in her own hack and sprites her depression and mental trauma away, I'm here!! Be warned, my stylings teeter HEAVILY on Chaotix and Sonic CD's stylings, and I like using graphical and palette tricks to my advantage. Also, I am a heavy fan of analogue shading as well, used heavily in Chaotix, Sonic CD (for Wacky Workbench Good Future), and Ristar. I just hope I don't fill up TOO MUCH VRAM for you, since heavy detail and pushing limits is my forte.
Okay, after he had a little talk with the staff, FireRat has been unbanned. Let's not talk about that any more...this thread is about the hack.
Sega's Sonic 4 even did this. So while not a reason for not doing it. Even Sega themselves ditched multiple playable characters at first.
Yeah, but you know what else Sonic 4 did? Being unoriginal by having levels like Totally Not Green Hill Zone or Totally Not Casino Night Zone or Totally Not Metropolis Zone or Totally Not Aquatic Ruin Zone or Totally Not Wing Fortress Zone. However, according to FireRat, this is an important aspect for a real sequel: That just reminds me off the jump between Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 or Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles. You know what else they did? Including one new character for each new installment, which also plays part in the sequels being different to the game they are the sequel to. So yeah, in that sense, reverting back to just Sonic indeed feels like a downgrade, especially if Project Ringstar tries to be a sequel to something as...ahem, "phenomenal" as Sonic 3 & Knuckles (with that I mean the amount of new features and overall presentation in S3&K in comparison to Sonic 2).
Then think of the jump between Adventure 1 and Adventure 2 (6 gameplay styles to 3) and from Unleashed to Colors (2 gameplay styles to 1) instead. I get your argument, and where you're coming from, but it's one built on faulty logic. In this day, many sequels do not include more characters for you to play with, or actively take characters away from you. It's up to the developer, and the story they want to tell, to determine the amount of characters a game needs in their sequels. And that number often fluctuates. Mario does it, Halo does it, the Arkham games do it, and Donkey Kong has done it. Honestly, it feels like you're complaining over something that doesn't meet a personal standard. Again, I get your argument, but it seems like something so miniscule to mention. More characters are not necessary for a sequel. And there's not enough info here to tell us whether or not it NEEDS more characters. Perhaps the plot requires Sonic to tackle this solo, who knows? All we have are quick little glimpses into the game's assets. I'd say wait for an actual level trailer to drop, or for more info before we start judging the game's content.
Ladies and Gentlemen, now more so after the events from yesterday, I repeat just in case. If you have any questions or commentaries that doesn't belong to the hack/project itself, I invite you to express them at Discord, or through PM. Thanks. Things have drastically changed since yesterday. First off, it's true that this project went way too ambitious to begin with, possibly dooming us into development hell. To prevent this to happen, the working scheme from now onwards will be different, hopefully keeping things more active. Therefore VERY special thanks to @Natsumi for exposing the situation to us and not letting the fumes to go over my head today. Admittely, this is -just- a hack, right? And more so, thanks to SSRG staff for giving me a chance to share this project regardless. ANYWAYS!, on to answering questions! The idea is to make it a game you could just pick up and play. Although Sonic will be the only playable character, that doesn't mean the others won't make an appearence in one way or another. Comparatively speaking, you can get an idea of what I'm talking about by checking Sonic 2 8-bit. Now, being realistic, adding any new character(s) is by any means a VERY dangerous move. Considering the good and bad I have seen related to fan-characters, it's a very fragile and delicate matter to deal with, and I believe it will take a giant influence in the final reception. I don't have a definitive answer just yet though, besides the plot is under severe re-revisions I'll try to explain myself with an example. The console itself can't do full-fledged scaling and rotation the way we're used to be, through hardware alone. The to-go way to achieve this the known way, is a very heavy and intensive rendering process based on software. With the scale/rotate process being heavy in itself, the output has to be rendered to RAM, then convert it into tiles (or being fancy just render the output AS tiles), and finally DMA it all to VRAM. Depending the case, it may even require double-buffering!, and generally (more of a personal opinion), I find it to be cheaty: Through many careful tricks, it is possible to achieve extra layers, vertical plane resizing, some rotation degrees, and much more, all through hardware, in exchange giving a much softer experience. Later SEGA games tried hard to experiment new graphical combinations, which the public generally relates to "pushing the hardware to the limits". Relying exclusively on software rendering for the complex just defeats the whole purpose and fun of all this. The idea is to show what can the console do. If I had to write a plane scaler, I'd rather write only the horizontal resizing part software-based, then rely on the horizontal interrupt to resize vertically. For instance, Contra Hard Corps achieved a 3D-animated boss through sprites ONLY. This is, by the way, something I'd like to give a try. Including but not limited to things like chains and general particle-based sprite animation. I believe there's still a lot to experiment and be creative with. In general, I believe there's still a whole world to experiment and be creative with. And while the casual player is not completely aware of all effort involved, this is the kind of things that I, as a romhacker, always wanted to see.
Okey,i'ts a good start and, when you think start working the project?It will take time about the arts and more...I was making a some smps,if you want a smps i'm good doing that hehe,only tell me what songs you want and could start working,it will take time make the songs wished but,the criticism and effort it's worth a lot
Hold on, you cannot call art replacement "cheaty", and scroll position replacement as being "all through hardware". That's a misguided conception. In both cases, data in VDP's memory is being replaced during blanking intervals, caused by the main CPU, and the software you have written to enforce that. If one is cheaty, the other is also considered as such. The horizontal interrupt does not resize the plane vertically at all, the VDP simply reads, processes and outputs a scanline of pixels, the "resizing" you're refering to is a photographical illusion known officially as "slit scanning", it is the process of repositioning the image before the expected scanline is to be scanned. This is not a hardware function, it is software. That's like me putting an image onto my digital scanner, then while it's scanning, moving the image with my hand slowing in a direction, and then claiming that the scanner itself can scale the image vertically. You're on the right tracks, but I think you've been heavily misguided. Regardless though, I think it would be wonderful for you to incorporate slit scanning and other raster effects into the hack, just to give it that extra oomph! Just make sure you come up with something original to incorperate these effects with. If there's one thing wrong the demo scene does, it's using the same exact content with the same technique, and it gets really old, fast, like, how many times have we seen a twisting vertical box, or a scaling checkarded background, just to name a few? Just check out some demos on youtube, after about 10 of the best ones, you start seeing very familiar effects, even graphically. As long as it's original, you'll have my positive attention for sure, also, welcome back to member! Between you and me, I thought it was stupid that you were put into exile for questioning before being given your member status back. But, whatever, I'm glad to see it's all sorted now~
You ever felt like believing to know something but not how to explain properly, because expression barriers and the topic in question being such a delicate matter where almost every single little word counts? Because this is what I feel right now, plus the bad engrish and self-paranoia do add extra pressure to the mix. I think the issue lies in HOW have I been experimenting the effects themselves. Since around 2012, I have drastically changed my way for playing games. For many years I did not almost play any new games, now I do play a very few ROMs, just over and over, because I like to analyze their movement patterns. Pretty much the same goes for general anime/cartoon animation by the way. I have seen a lot. ROMs of yours, demoscene showoffs, and games like Red Zone, Adventures of Batman & Robin, In The Hunt, and now at last Contra Hard Corps, all over and over again without stop. Because rather than playing or enjoying the game or presentation itself, I like to analyze everything's movement patterns and combinations. Most of the time I'd take necessary annotations, debug the scene if necessary, then attempt to rewrite it manually however I understand it does work. On very counted ocassions however I have went to check effects "outside" when absolutely necessary, to get the ideology behind. Therefore I'm afraid my final ideology regarding certain things or procedure names may not be always correct from heart. However, I'm always behind what works best and smoother on the screen. And cool and worthful of course =P, I find it's bit annoying when done "just because". I like however to experiment with the huge arsenal of possibilities. Would having an incorrect ideology for a correctly applied work help bringing "different" kind of variations?. I really want to believe so! For example, I always imagined Ninja Gaiden having at least one scene with a true human-like camera movement. So years ago (I think) I done a crazy experiment: I pasted a mosaic of dots to a wall at home, then recorded them with a camera in hand. With Adobe After Effects I took all generated data from the Motion Tracking, then converted all that keyframe data as a LUT I could use within ROM for applying to H/VScroll, and apply the perspective variations to use for the "slit scanning" illusion, all to give my background's wall and ground a dynamic 3D-ish look. I hope to not have left you disappointed if I'm not really following usual program norms. More of a personal opinion (so it could possibly be wrong, but meh), but just like general art, I find there's no "marked", "single", or "to-go" way to do things, understand? (well, besides hardware limits but that's a different story). EDIT: As a final question: What is the point of all this if there are literally no limits while drawing to a bitmap/framebuffer? I THINK there's just no challenge (well, not meant for something totally different such as your latest game (which I love!), but is still not the same). Hope you understand what I'm trying to mean =U
I never claimed there to be such a "marked", "single", or "to-go" way to do things, you explained something a little incorrectly, and I simply corrected you, I'm sorry if my post came off as some sort of order. It honestly didn't intend to. Having done plenty of raster effects myself, which you claim to be "more challenging" (see the The Next Level's boss intro screen, as just one example), I happen to know that that's bullshit. I understand what you're saying, and I really do congratulate you on your progress of understanding, and your pure determination which is quite strong. But please do not bullshit me, the one thing I cannot stand, and that's people blatently trying to bullshit me when I know the facts black and white.
