General Screenshot/Movie Thread

The reason, why Natsumi don't like this boss is good enough in terms of arguments. I actually really like this boss and it's definitely a big progression comparing to previous ones, that had more hard to dodge patterns or more hits. There's people who don't like this kind of boss, because these patterns can be very repetitive or even frustrating. Aiming people with content with hard difficulty is very hardcore to execute it properly - I know it from many failures from the past. It's totally fine, when people don't like something, even that is good, when they have solid arguments. Don't treat it as something rude, rather as a hint to sometimes change the style of the boss. Have a good day people and chill out!

 

I apologize for the unsuccessful joke. I led the whole text to the fact that need to objectively explain your point of view or not write at all, for writing something that hack is shit without explanations just looks like:
- Why is my hack shit?
- Because yes
I want only one thing... Please write objectively point of view, otherwise this messages turns into unneeded garbage, plus it can also offend the developers of the hack.

 

Fair enough, I can't argue with that d=

Well, seeing as we're about wrapping this up, I guess I'll go back on topic...

Here is a little tool I've been working on:




What it will do, is extract the sprites of Sonic games, and export them into bitmap frames/files. I'll later make another program that will convert them back into art, map and plc files. What this will mean, is that you can edit the art in paint or whatever bitmap/png editing tool you want, and just run a tool to convert it all. This should eliminate the tedious need to handle importing tiles and so forth, at least for the instances that aren't necessary, like, editing characters. The fact that the frames are in separate files should allow you to control the positioning of the art relative to the object's position.

With compression applied, we could also support stuff like... monitors, rings, badniks, etc.. In fact, how would you guys feel to having all art in the disassembly as bitmap/png files? I'm sure that'd make art editing easier for many. The tool should handle optimising the data best for art/sprites, and with certain options enabled, you should be able to control how it's optimised.

 

Fucking hell... You girls really need to stop getting your panties in a twist about someone not liking what you do. But you want an explanation? OK, just hold tight.

I always see people with actual skill, make very little effort towards their work, and end up with shit that is not functional, not fun, not engaging. It is always a shame to see skilled people resort to the lowest common denominator shit when they are clearly capable of doing some good shit. I see this year in and year out, thats why the SHC is full of crap, that is why I am cynical towards hacks and don't play them; You make them shit. you can't make hacks that are good, polished, short but sweet. So, when I see some stupid retarded bullshit from people who should know better, I respond. This is one of the cases. Blad is clearly skilled programmer, but he is fucking lazy twat about making bosses, experimenting, making the bosses unique, interesting, and most of all: FUN.

I criticize hacks because I actually give a shit, not because I am an angry asshole who is out to ruin everyone's hard work. If you live in an echo-chamber of constant praise, you end up cocky and do short of your potential. And that is how I see Blad right now. He thinks he can get away with making shitty bosses in as little time as possible, with no thought to actual gameplay content and fun factor, only to "show off". While I have nothing against showing off, I believe it must NEVER interfere with fun. The fun always comes first.

As far as a great example for boss, the final boss of The Next Level hands down. It looks cool as fuck, and its a lot of fun. Sure, not perfect, but its actually designed to be enjoyable first, and it really shines on that. Thats why people like TNL in general, because its fun first, and not just flashy for the sake of being flashy.

Then why the fuck are you people showing off your work, if you do not care for legitimate criticism? As they say, if you put it on the internet, someone is gonna complain sooner or later.

As you may know, I actually make my own hacks, and as we speak, I am working on a few projects behind the scenes. And I am not demanding anyone to make "perfect hacks", thats fucking ridiculous. What I issue with, is not that some hack isn't perfect (Heck, I couldn't consider any of my hacks perfect, sometimes far from it), but rather fucking putting in effort, not just slapping something together to further ones ego.

I have already explained this shit many times with previous bosses made by Blad. I am not a broken record, not going to repeat the same shit every single time just because someone doesn't bother to read and actually think about it. Heck, I've also explained this before many times with other bosses, made by other people, which suffer from the same mistakes Blad habitually makes.

So much wrong here. And yes, sometimes, if you do a shit job, you have to rework the entire boss. I did this twice with SonicMT, simply because it ended up not being fun. Or, with a new hack, I have rewritten one game mechanic 3 times now, and I am still going to rewrite again, simply because it is not fun. Thats the shit you do when you are more concerned with quality than quantity.

Also yeah, this 100%, Mr Cat posted exactly to just reiterate points made by others, simply because he has nothing original to say.

I don't make posts to discourage people, quite the opposite. If someone takes it at discouraging tone, then there is not much I can do. If someone takes me saying something they did wrong as "Stop hacking you noob get a life", then they need to re-evaluate their priorities and how much of a fuck they actually give. When you truly care about something, and if you believe in it, someone pointing out a major flaw wont discourage them from hacking more than temporarily.

Kinda hard to when you are literally doing that, and everyone knows you are doing that, and you have done that before.


But you know what, enough with messing with people, lets get to why the video is crap. First of all, there is a lot of downtime, where you cant hit the boss. While this certainly can work sometimes (ex. Big Arms from Sonic 3), Blad's bosses just feel like arbitrarily difficult because of it. And speaking of difficulty. Holy shit, this is like Varion's shitty Hyper Mecha fight all over again... Well ok, I lied, it doesn't seem as bad, but certainly just not difficult because its actually well designed and you have to learn the patterns, but more because you don't have enough time to dodge everything and there is poor projection from the boss itself. Big Arms for one was fun, because you could easily tell what its going to do, and it was very predictable. Or Markey's boss, because the boss very well projected its next move, way ahead in time, giving you fair chance to dodge its attacks.

Now, one more thing is... Too many attacks. Sure, variety is not bad in itself, but this boss is going to be just overwhelming with the amount of shit you have to learn, with seemingly random attacks each time. It's not fun, its fucking horseshit. The music I am not a fan of, but I guess you could disagree me on that. But the SFX itself are just shite. They do not fit and really make the fight just more annoying because it is so offputting. Also fucking 18 hits, with extended flashing time? Not cool man. Your fucking video is 4 and a half minutes long! While ok, it could be beat faster, it seems you are making the fight seem longer to show off everything, which is fair enough, but first timer will have problems beating the boss when it goes on for so long! Most Sonic bosses are 30-90 seconds long. That's about the time that someone can last of such stressful and difficult boss. Have a boss be much longer, and people will either get bored, or just die because they want to beat the boss faster without the proper skills.

Other than that, the boss doesn't seem innovative at all. Its basically a combination of a million projectiles/explosions/whatever and very predictable patterns, and even some stuff I've seen on other bosses by Blad. There is nothing new we haven't seen before, no unique quirks, nothing that makes it stand out from all the other bosses we've seen. It's just boring all along. This is a massive fail on every single level for all the wrong reasons. The greatest bosses are memorable, unique, provide fair level of challenge, have kickass music and make you feel great for beating it for the first time. This boss is none of that. This is why I hate this boss, this is why I criticize Blad, I know he can do better, I know he has the skills to create something awesome, but he wont use his skills for anything but the same old shit we've seen on all of his bosses.

 

We do not have sources that could accurately explain what's wrong with the boss. We are in fact sitting in a Russian trap where there is not any person who could advise how to bring the boss to a good state. Very sorry for this situation. As a matter of fact we write on ssrg, to learn opinion about work, and to receive though any help. Russian Romhacking is dead about 2 years ago, and we are the only ones who stayed in it. And now we are trying to establish contact with the SSRG community.

 

That's fair enough and understandable, but again, I've said pretty much similar things before, so I did not feel the need to repeat myself (in a more condescending tone). Furthermore, if you actually want to ask for clarity, attacking people and saying you outright reject what they had to say is no way to go about things.

 

This is looking very promising and is definitely something I'll be keeping an eye on. That said, I do have a couple of questions, one regarding this and one regarding your planned importer.

1. Does this tool use any external scripts to define formats, a bit like how SonED2 and SonLVL use project files? The reason I ask is that the Quackshot format for mappings is very similar to S1 and it would be even more useful to me if I could customise it to work with it as well.

2. Whenever you get to making the importer you have planned, will it be able to determine if a tile has been used within a previous sprite and therefore not duplicate the tile within the art set?

That aside, keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

 

After having a bunch of issues with my PC, I rushed to make this:



I can't wait to finish it.
(Spring Yard Zone)

 

Ah, now, this was something I did consider actually. I created a script system for sprite plotter some time ago, but no-one ended up using it as far as I'm aware... I wasn't intending on doing that for this one though, as you can see there's a "Game Format" list there with "Reserved" sections in there, I was gonna take requests and hard code it in instead. Would you rather have some script system instead though? I might be persuaded to add it in if it's at high demand.

Yes, it most definitely will, it'll try and find repeated matches anywhere it can, to try and find the best result for sprite count/tile count. There will be circumstances where you can't have both sprites and tiles, and one has to give, which is why there'll be an option to optimise "best for", it'll optimise best for both, but will swing to the winning one based on the user's decision.

That's looking pretty good~ Do the mountains scroll behind the buildings? If not, then it's no biggie, but it'd certainly be an added touch.

 

Considering that the hacking of other games isn't really much of a thing at the moment, I guess hardcoding wouldn't be much of an issue. I was thinking more along the lines of putting the workload onto the users rather than yourself, but if you're happy to hardcode them then I would be perfectly happy with that approach.

 

I'm for scripting, actually, if only because of what we're talking about around the corner. Hardcoding is just a short-term hack for a long-term issue for a tool like this.

 

I would love a scripting feature, since as of late I've been digging through other MegaDrive games, and it would just make sprite extracting/editing much easier to do.

 

First time since Stardust Speedway (Past) that somebody uses a background for a zone that is heavily resemblant to that of Rysher Entertainment's second Splash Screen from 1993, albeit without the Shooting Star and the Crescent Moon at the far Eastern part of the background, this is some of the best City/Mountain trope level art that I have seen of any Pixel Art work in years.
It definitely also has the feel of many Nighttime shots of California that were shown in Renegade, one of the major TV series from 1992 to have footage of buildings in this fashion without giving away too much detail of them at night; my only question though is this: Do the buildings and streets have their colours actively change after a certain amount of frames, wishfully fast enough for added fluidity?

 

One of my old bosses.
It's pretty primitive , but "pinch" mode and some interesting ball moves are here:

 

BG obviously taken from Robocop vs The Terminator , but still looks quite nice.
What's about FG?

 

Looks very nice! However, I think you should make the checked ball look attached to chained links or something for the final phase of the boss, because it doesn't seem to make much sense for a checked ball to randomly float in mid-air.

Also, I have some content I've been itching to showoff for a while...



I've added power-up abilities from Sonic Chaos such as the pogo spring and rocket shoes to S3K.
Along with the pogo spring, I've added an ability to give the player to bounce higher on the pogo spring by holding down on the D-pad!

 

Sonic Hacking Contest 2017, I am ready.

I hope you'll enjoy this.

 

A little teaser for our friend @redhotsonic ...

 

You made my Peridot Palms look amateur in comparison. It looks a lot like Angel Island from Sonic 3 tho (a good thing by far). Once Project Aspect gets in the much later stages, I was thinking of starting on an SMS port of Sonic 3, and asking for you to do some of Angel Island and Mushroom Hill sometime.

 

When you're making art for SMS, then it's oblivious that it will be less detailed, because bigger limitations. I think your art along with Mr. Cat work are the best in SMS Sonic hacking scene.