Knuckles' Emerald Hunt

Discussion in 'Showroom' started by MainMemory, Oct 19, 2015.

  1. JoenickROS

    JoenickROS ROS (bug fixing in progress) Member

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    Wait I thought "Can You Feel the Sunshine" was taken?
     
  2. Royameadow

    Royameadow Welcome to the modern existence. Member

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    Question about the menu track that you want from Sonic Mega Collection, which one in particular are you looking for: Main Menu, Games/Manuals (Manuals/Options in Plus), or Options/Extras (Games/Extras in Plus)?
    As about 0300 and a third people know by the time of this post, I had made a remix of King Meteor's MIDI version of the Options/Extras Menu back in April of '16, the remix itself uses instruments from the Yamaha DX07 and YM2151, as well as the PWM percussion from Chaotix; it probably would have to run solely on the DAC or Z80 as a PCM track or something similar, due to how this was made by me, but you and anybody else are free to use it, none of my publicly released tracks are ever (nor will they ever be) off limits at any point in time.

    ~ Sonic Mega Collection: Options and Extras Menu (YM2I5I with PWM):

     
  3. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    Whoops, I forgot to take it off the list.
    Um, either of the latter two, I guess. I can't do a PCM track though.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2016
  4. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    So now that the contest is over, I'm basically done with this hack, except for maybe some final bug fixes and a small extra. With that in mind, I've been planning for a long while now to release the source code for the hack when I finished it. Ideally, I would simply push the existing Git repository onto my GitHub account, allowing anyone to see the entire development history of the hack, but I realize that I'm not the only person who worked on this, and some of you might not want your work available for just anyone to use like that. So if anyone has any art, music, code, etc that they do not want to be made public, let me know, and I'll just make a version of KEH's source code without those things for the public to see.
     
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  5. nineko

    nineko I am the Holy Cat Member

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    Feel free to include my music, most of my songs are already public anyway.
     
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  6. JoenickROS

    JoenickROS ROS (bug fixing in progress) Member

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    Just like Nineko you can include all my ports in the source, kind of wanted some of my ports out there anyway, so this is fine by me.
     
  7. LuigiXHero

    LuigiXHero Well-Known Member Member

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    My port is fine being released.

    Also why is SSRG becoming SMWC all of a sudden? Not complaining but still.
     
  8. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    I've had this planned for several months, to go along with the trend of recent SADX mods being hosted on GitHub. Perhaps now people feel it's acceptable to release stuff freely without upsetting any of the more 'elite' members of the community, or they just don't care.

    Personally, I feel like enough people know about KEH that if someone tries to steal it and slap their name on it, they won't fool anyone; and if anyone implements anything from it in a badly made hack, that doesn't reflect on the quality of KEH, much like Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis doesn't reflect on the quality of Sonic 1.

    If there's one thing I admired about SMWC during my time there, it was how everyone was willing to share things. Sure, it can lead to 20 hacks with the same art and music, but we already have that anyway, so we might as well make more options available.
     
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  9. amphobius

    amphobius spreader of the pink text Member

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    I think it goes without saying that I'd prefer my stuff to be pulled from any public source release. Quality control, etc. I think public source releases shouldn't be taboo and there's a lot to learn from --- but I put a lot of effort into my work and it'd be annoying to see it in any old tosh.
     
  10. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    Well here we are, SHC2016 is over, and now I've made some final touches so that I can say Knuckles' Emerald Hunt is completed. For those that weren't paying attention, the changes from the version in last year's contest are:
    • Redesigned level select.
    • Redesigned score tally.
    • Tikal added as a playable character.
    • Competition mode enabled, get three out of five emeralds before your opponent. Each player gets one radar box that detects the emerald closest to them, and the difficulty setting does affect it.
    • More music choices.
    • Sandwich mode unlocked by playing sound FA in the sound test.

    The main ROM can be downloaded here, for single player and local multiplayer. Those looking to netplay should get the netplay ROM for a more stable experience, as the normal ROM can desync very easily.

    Because music is such a large part of this hack, Valley Bell has also prepared a VGM pack with tags for titles and authors pulled right from the source code.

    Speaking of source code, a few months back I was thinking about how so many SADX mods are hosted on GitHub, so I figured why not release the source code to a MD hack? So I present to you, the source code to Knuckles' Emerald Hunt (modified slightly to remove music the authors weren't comfortable with sharing).
    In this archive, you will find:
    • Barely commented code
    • An implementation of an SA1-style emerald radar in Sonic 2
    • A modified object manager to support the emerald radar
    • S3K rings manager (MarkeyJester put way too many rings in HPZ for S2 to handle)
    • A port of Knuckles from KiS2 (basically what you get after following my guide)
    • Ports of various S1 levels/objects by Flamewing
    • Fancy scrolling level select
    • Fancy scrolling credits, with a tool to generate the data for said credits
    • A lot of custom music
    • A custom "radar ping" sound effect
    • Flamewing's Ultra DMA Queue
    • A modified Sonic 2 sound driver by Clownacy and Valley Bell:
      • Support for S3K PSG instruments by best-fit mapping, and extra frequencies required for e.g. sliding sound
      • S3K-style speedup (no more hardcoded speed shoes tempo table)
      • Support for multiple "SEGA" samples, with automatic bankswitching (no size restriction)
      • Support for multiple music and DAC sample banks
      • A tool that allows easy management of music and DAC samples by editing INI files, with support for SMPS2ASM and automatic Saxman compression
    • A partially implemented extra zone that I never got to finish based on the DOS game Hocus Pocus

    Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who helped me figure out why my code didn't work, contributed art or music, submitted records to the leaderboard so I could figure out how to set the ranks, livestreamed, reviewed, did a playthrough, or just enjoyed playing this hack.

    And now, I leave you with a video:


    Edit: Oh by the way, since someone may find it useful, here's a map of HPZ:
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2016
  11. Trinitronity

    Trinitronity Well-Known Member Member

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    You know, I'm actually sad that you never tried to implement the SA2 radar into KEH. Would have been a perfect radar for Hard Mode, while no radar would have been perfect for Extreme Mode.
     
  12. Clownacy

    Clownacy Retired Staff lolololo Member

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    Well, with the source, now you can! :-D
     
  13. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    It'd certainly be easier to change the emerald manager to do SA2 style radar than trying to add in support for SA2 in addition to the stuff that's already there, which is the main reason I never got around to it.
     
  14. ArcaniaCQ

    ArcaniaCQ Well-Known Member Member

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    Well this may be subjective to my own opinion but...

    WHY?

    Sonic Adventure 2's Knuckles stages was shit. And I litterally feel that the radar in that game can fuck right off. That was mainly the reason why I ended up getting a 100% Completion file just so I can skip the Knuckles/Rouge Stages. It gives me a distaste for that particular game alone.
     
  15. Misinko

    Misinko Oh SHIT it's the Biolizard! Member

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    Because Hard mode is incredibly difficult, and it would be nice to have a monitor of any kind whilst playing through the levels.
     
  16. Jareth247

    Jareth247 Well-Known Member Member

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    Will there be a Knuckles' Emerald Hunt 2, preferably based on S3K (and possibly SCD) levels?
     
  17. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    Sonic CD isn't happening mainly because there's no disassembly. Even if there was, I wouldn't want to spend all the time needed to port all the objects over to S2. And then, there's the issue of stage selection: with all the different time periods, Sonic CD has an enormous amount of levels, and I'm not going to put ALL of them in, so how do you choose?

    As for S3K, I'd love to, but I don't even want to think about porting S3K's objects to S2, which is why I've considered making an S3K or even S&KC hack.

    BUT, if there's one thing I heard repeatedly over the course of the contest, it's that I should do something different next time. So, IF I were to make KEH 2, it'd have to be at least a year from now, after SHC2017. I could potentially start working on it in private before then, but I wouldn't release anything publicly.
     
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  18. MarkeyJester

    MarkeyJester ♡ ! Member

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    I would love to see a S&KC hack personally. Given that you'll likely have less limitations at hand, you could do all the things you've wanted to do, but couldn't, or even struggled to do.
     
  19. MainMemory

    MainMemory Well-Known Member Member

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    Well, yes, and no. Much like SADX, it is possible to do practically anything, but doing even small things is made much more difficult by the near-complete lack of documentation, or even properly disassembled code. You also have to keep in mind that the VDP emulation it uses, and even the basic data types used by the game, enforce many of the same restrictions the MD game has, until someone can understand it well enough to make workarounds.

    This is getting slightly off-topic, but I am planning to do a hack of S&KC not KEH-related, as a demonstration of the possibilities of the game and its mod loader (btw there's a mod loader for S&KC).
     
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  20. nineko

    nineko I am the Holy Cat Member

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    Consider me interested into anything related to S&KC. I agree that this is off-topic here, but feel free to contact me via private messages if you think I could contribute in any way.