Since things have been relatively slow around here, I figured that I should show off a little bit of what I'm working on: I'm honestly surprised that I got any of it working at all. Of course, there's still a lot of work to do, but the monitors alone are pretty great :3
I know it's a work in progress and everything, but I'm not much a fan of the bad future palette nor the voice samples you have in the game. How exactly did you get them sounding that distorted? If it isn't something you can fix I recommend just replacing it with a sound effect as it's very painful on the ears.
Probably being in DPCM format and being processed via Sonic 2's Z80 sound driver (where PCM playback is constantly interrupted by other music playback functions) (correct me if you are actually not using this driver) is why it sounds so distorted.
Bad future is definitely getting an overhaul before release, I'm not the biggest of the palette myself. I've been more focused on getting the Time Travel mechanic fleshed out. As for the dac samples, I actually used MegaPCM and 8-bit unsigned wav files. I'm pretty much a nooblet when it comes to Sound on the Genesis in general, but my best guess as to the low quality is that I had to boost the volume of the samples manually because they're inaudible otherwise...
What sample rate did you set the samples at? Did you also make it so that they were so loud that they ended up clipping far too much? It shouldn't be necessary to do that.
They're at 16000 Hz. And yes, that seems to be what happened. I'm not sure why they play so quietly by default.
I think I've fallen in love with this Emerald Hill Zone Good Future pallete: And a clearer shot of the background: Any thoughts?
Methinks the purple needs to be a shade darker to better contrast the grass. A lot of what I'm seeing here kind of meshes together because everything is too bright to contrast against each other. Throwing in a dark tone can make everything pop.
To me that purple looks perfect; Its not too bright your eyes, but not dark enough to clash with the bg. The palette looks very nice actually, except for the very bottom part of the BG, thats just terrible.
@Pacguy: I like the concept of what your going for there. Looking at this actually gave me an idea of how this could be done if it's possible (Of course it's your own hack but just throwing some ideas out there). Final Boss Phase 1: Fighting metal sonic like Silver sonic. Final Boss Phase 2: Race against him to the finish like in SCD. Final Boss Phase 3: Face off against the death egg robot. Just my own thought's. overall I'll be keeping an eye out on this.
I think I might just be finished with the Metal Sonic boss. I didn't really stray too far from his appearance in Sonic CD (I tried to make his behavior match his appearance in that game as well as possible), and I think I did a pretty decent job :3 My only regret is that I don't have a good way of playing Stardust Speedways' music during the fight (I tried to use a large PCM sample, but it sounded like crap, and I'm no good at SMPS ), so the Knuckles Chaotix music plays through the whole race...
This is indeed good and all, really, nice work! Too bad for that hideous jump sfx, it never ceases to disgust me, but it's a matter of preference, I guess. Also: just like I said for your Sonic Odyssey, I can look into SMPSing the song for you, if you want. The hard part is that the original SSZ uses a metric shitload of samples, but if you have a custom driver, I guess we can work something out. I thought that other people converted SSZ, though, unless I'm mixing it up with some other song from SCD. (and FYI, as of now I'm not looking into converting "Jump Up, Super Star", because you didn't seem to want it at that time)
I'm planning on adding multiple "Character Style" options, which changes the players graphics, moves and sfx, so when it does get released, you won't have to worry about the Sonic CD sfx I have the Clone Driver V2 installed, and I know how to add custom DAC samples, so that might be helpful in making an SMPS. I'll be honest though, I didn't really look to hard for one that had already been made (I skimmed through one or two SMPS packs; it was a lot easier to find these things back when the SMPS archive was up). And yeah, Sonic Odyssey is currently on the backburner. Its' not a dead project, but I'm not doing anything with it right now...
It looks really neat seeing three characters moving around on screen :Y Fun fact: I only recently noticed that this actually softlocks the game. Better fix that
I made a custom credits screen! It even reads text dynamically from a bincluded .txt file (because hard coding it seemed stupid and boring ). That way, the credits can be effortlessly changed to include more people, fix typos, etc. I'm even considering wrapping it up and releasing it to the community. Protecting my crappy code is one thing, but giving people credit for their time is more important to me.
I see you're a trail member on Retro again, perhaps you should post this in their screenshot thread too~
I realized that Knuckles palettes made Metal Sonic look like garbage, so I thought this would be a cool idea. I'm actually considering scrapping this, and just making Knuckles skip the Metal Sonic boss fight entirely. I'm not sure who to credit for the sprites (the Spriters Resource page I got the sprite sheet from says to credit "Master G", but I can't find anything on them, not even in the list of people who worked on The S Factor), and there are several sprites that are missing, that I couldn't hope to recreate myself (like the winning/taunting pose). Any thoughts? EDIT: Well, it seems that both issues have been worked out. This is no longer in danger of being scrapped :3