Andrew75

And now for a screen with Sonic running! "please enjoy"

AXSX Water 1440P ( With Youtube's Crap 30 FPS) Youtube's Missing frames of animation really makes the water scrolling effect nearly vanish, so I had to slow it down when recording this video, the shimmering pixel effect still looks very broken here) The AXSX Video Scene has been dry for awhile now , so I thought you guys may like to check out some of our water development progress! I feel its a good start but still needs some work. In the future we can all look back and compare this to the final version of water.

That R2 really does look like it could have been in Sonic CD! the art direction is fantastic,( always thought R2 would have used the textures from the Waky workbench's hidden room, way to go !) I have some official R2 badniks from the original stage if your interested in using them. One is similar to grounder, and another is a bug that is hidden in a tube that can pop out at Sonic.

Water blocks ?! oh my! do you mean the greenish blocks ? They were supposed to be a sort of blue sea rock of some kind that's going to be canned in the final game, Since i didn't care for how it turned out. I tossed it in UDK to test my new shader that works with fisheye so we can now stretch a large texture across multiple blocks. Lets say.... If a block is moved, the texture updates in realtime so that it stays aligned with the rest of the blocks, (a sort of automatic Texture UV mapping effect.) This way if we want a tiled texture than we wont have to cut up a larger 128 x 128 texture and apply the resulting 32 x 32 tiles to each block 1 by 1, and or every time a block is moved or cloned than the textures are always aligned. This literately saves days when producing level layouts. if you look below you can see that each block tiles nicely with its 128 x 128 texture across multiple blocks. I marked where the textures would need to be divided if we used the smaller 32 x 32 textures to make up the larger one. EDIT: there are under water sections going on under the mirror like water, complete with water physics.

Thanks to a little of bit of Xaklse's programming knowledge we now have fan physics that function much better than what we had before !

Opening the picture shows in true resolution if anyone wants to study it up close . For this specific water surface I was taking a cue from Collision Chaos Zone.( The water even scrolls similar left and right) May add transparency depending on water viewing angle vs camera position.

Water surface WIP. Fully animated down to the little pixels that scroll in a classic 2D like parallax fashion. ( make sure you guys click the pics to open them !)

I'll reply to your post with a quote from the water post. so yeah What i mean is that the water tinting is not finished, These screens are to show the new sprite animations for AXSX. Keep in mind Sonic 1 has green and purple water tinting, I dont see a problem with using blue water. ( also what if the water was cloudy because it's turbulent and has sediment drifting threw it from the bottom, u know like if u go to the beach, water is never 100% clear like pool water.)

How about some screens of the water current gameplay features. ( test level uses temp GFX) Josh has a few bugs to work out yet for this Sonic sprite animation here, but at least the base animation is in place ! Sonic spins as the water's current takes him away! Custom Untextured version of the crystal spear model. ( this one was not used in game , but since you guys like beta stuff, have at it !) Sneak peak at the new level props can be seen to the right! ( the crystal spears are actually green with a black metal rod, but the water tints everything too much to be able to see the nice texture details that were added.) (Tinting needs some tweaks!)

It may not be pretty (yet), but We have .... Hang-bar! Sonic is on the ride of his life ! Rotates left and right horizontally. Anti gravity Handstands or die ! ( Sonic can jump back and forth between bars as the platform rotates 360 degrees vertically)

Right now there is no way to turn it off.

There may not be any new visual updates for you guys, Just letting you know we are still working on the project. Slowly but surely! Xak's working on New enemy functions such as shooting and enemy AI. (will benefit Sonic GDK as well) Josh is finishing up with new Sonic Sprite animation programing and fixes for Sonic. I've been working heavily on level art and new layouts as well as bug testing, and keeping the guys busy. Have most of the gameplay related to special stages planned out. Have been speaking with Shadix in relation to putting together a custom music track for the special stage. Lastly....Chris Senn is interested in doing a few level layouts for the project as well.

I'm working on AXSX myself, Anyone else ?

How many of you guys use Sonic GDK here? just wondering.

First test level built 100% from blocks! (inside the level editor) over 3600 block types to select from !

Image of the now new diagonal shadows! ( colors could be a bit lighter in regard to shadows) (A brief description just to communicate the just of it) The diagonal shadows are a just a simple gradient black and white texture that is use as a mask to blend between the engine lighting and the hand painted per block face texture darkening effect. I used just 1 diagonal mask texture that can be rotated using the value of vertex paint Alpha. (Values for the rotations are 0.125 0.375 0.625 0.875) Anything between these values cause the mask to vanish and we can see the painted colors without the diagonal mask. R G and B channel control 3 separate darken blending styles within the material So we can get different types of blends to create the darkened effect. (keep in mind the painting on the mesh in RGBA as colors are not directly effecting the outcome of the color, the vertex colors are passed to the shader material which uses the values as 0 - 1 to do the blends there. Depending on the value 0 - 1 the shadows can be very light or completely black. Left wall and ceiling using engine shading, floor and right wall using faked shadows manually painted in on the fly) Edit: Anyhow this beats making 1000s of shadow textures, We can also change the block's material and the shadows will stay since the vertex colors stay put. very very handy !

Actually if you look at the PC version of the game, you can see that it uses engine lighting and also darkens the ground blocks to simulate shadows, I believe the darkening was done similar to a voxel lighting system where the engine calculated where to darken floor tiles to match the engine light source direction using invisible blocks (or ghost blocks that existed in code only) that tell the visible blocks next to them in a specific direction: Hey you become dark god damn it!) What I'm doing is kind of a hacky manual method, Its a bit slower but it works!

For the first time in AXSX history ! We have Engine lighting ! We can now use engine lighting, However shadows do not work with Fisheye.... so I produced a Material shader with which can be used to hand paint lighting over multiple blocks and textures on the fly. When combined with the engine lighting we can hand paint shadows on the ground matching the engine lighting for walls and ceilings. (Anotherwords producing a faked shadow that looks like a wall is projecting it onto the ground.) This image shows only engine lighting, notice the lack of shadows on the floor. (Walls appear as if they have shadows but that's just polygon shading from a directional light source.) The next 2 images shows 100% hand painted lighting and no game engine lighting. They were just tests produced during shader development. (bloom can be disabled for the actual gameplay if we want)

Got 2 bits of news regarding the project! I wont say what they are quite yet. Nothing as huge as Sega pickling up the game or anything like that. but rest assured its not bad news. Well there is one bit of bad news, This exciting (Project Secret) will cause the project to miss the Sage event. Sorry guys. It would have been nice to make a release at Sage. But i feel that i should wait to make a release, because i'd really like to make a nice first impression on players . releasing the original levels is not really that impressive as they are very outdated, and not very fun, and do not showcase the work that has been put into the gameplay engine. I'll make an announcement when i'm sure if this big news thing is going to happen or not.

I had to use Kismet to set up my enemies in AXSX and GHZ 2.5D Also here is a small update for you guys ! First the old temporary Bumpers (You probably seen em in videos) And New bumpers complete with chrome effects and 360 Degree spinning animations. (The old ones have the same spinning animation)

Yeah I typed it and triple checked it, no idea why its not working,, I can't even copy past into these forums its quite aggravating, not sure I will be posting anymore updates here. ( I've tried it on a fresh installed Windows system too)

Update: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVSj2-B5nPQ

I can't seem to paste any text in this post window ! Someone help!

Here we go! Hope this holds you guys over for awhile....

Which of the 3 do you like? Also do the sound FX match or feel out of place? http://youtu.be/pVrQAvoQeJA