SkyLights

I am ready to show another stage in my game, for now in screenshot form. Tiara Cascades. Seeing as Tikal wants to get her father to stop being an idiot and Chaos wants to beat the crap out of Tikal's father for kidnapping his Chao buddies, their quest will lead them to this zone, the natural wall of the Echidna tribe. Its easy to lose your footing on the slippery rocks that guide your way up the cliffside, and you can easily plummit to your doom if you fall and collide with the pointed spires at the bottom. Lets take a look at some of the general points of interest of the zone! Near the bottom, your vision grows impaired by the thick mist that the waterfall gives off when it hits the landscape. Other tribal echidnas will try to take advantage of the situation and hit you for damage, so make sure you are as alert to your surroundings as possible! Since not all echidnas are able to scale the cliffside on their own, the engineers of the tribe invented a device enabling any echidna to travel sky-high. Just hop on and run, and it will take you as high as you need. What, you didn't think only the male echidnas would fight you, did you? The female variant can greatly assist the male with her bow by aiming at Tikal or Chaos and firing, regardless of if they're in the air or not. They don't really like close encounters though, and will attempt to stay away from the opposing character. Chaos is at a bit of a loss in this stage. He's too slow to use the flying machines, so they won't appear for him. Sure, he can utilize the platform pictured in the screenshot, but that will only lead him down. He can travel through water, but the water is currently going down and he needs to go up. Maybe he can change that though X) I've also gotten through a good ways of another stage, but I'm going to hold showing that until it's fully completed.

2 - This particular loop wouldn't happen to be the first one you come across with Tikal, would it? I am also aware of another problem where Tikal will go airborne at the pinnacle of a loop, and I'll be fixing both issues later on. 3 - Chaos's build allows him to pass through areas without going fast yanno. :[ Sure there's like 3 loops he HAS to go through, but it's quite possible to spindash through 'em... 4 - I agree. >_> You realize I put them there in the first place right :[ ...dare I ask what your FPS was

I have these old videos if that counts.

The two in the original post seem to have been weird, so I fixed them and they should work fine now...

I agree about the water distortion. It seems to be causing some problems for a couple people for some reason right now, so I'll definitely have some options in a future build to control graphical effects in general. For the people that are experiencing super-lag when underwater though, I have this temporary solution. Download this and replace the .exe in the game folder if you experience truly significant lag when entering water. I apologize for all these download links, I guess I'm off to a rough start when it comes to getting this thing around >_>; http://skylights1.googlepages.com/TnCdemo1-1-DOff-.zip

Okay, lets see if this works. The initial complaint in general was that there was too much slowdown, so I have readied a revised version which hopefully won't run slowly for people and won't cause error messages for people. GooglePages: http://skylights1.googlepages.com/TnCdemo1-1.zip Rapidshare : http://rapidshare.com/files/31104412/TnCdemo1-1.zip.html If you've already downloaded it and don't want to download the entire thing again, download this instead and paste the .exe into the folder, replacing the .exe that you unzipped the initial game to. http://skylights1.googlepages.com/TnCdemo1-1EXE.zip

Lots of slowdown? Well, crap. Never thought that would be much of a problem since it always ran at 50-60 FPS on my computer. I'll have to fix that >_>;

GooglePages: http://skylights1.googlepages.com/TnCdemo1-1.zip Rapidshare : http://rapidshare.com/files/31104412/TnCdemo1-1.zip.htmll For people that experience severe lag underwater with the current demo, replace the .exe in your game folder with this one: http://skylights1.googlepages.com/TnCdemo1-1-DOff-.zip Controls: Arrow keys, spacebar. I added one little tweak in terms of control: Up - Action. Try it out on both characters and see what happens Note: Before you play as Tikal, in order to do wall jumps, you must be in the air and have an arrow key pressed towards the wall you wish to jump off of, then press the action button (spacebar). I'll make a more fluent explanation tommorrow. Have fun X)

Tikal approves. Rep for you.

Happy birthday X)

I am to a point in my fangame where I could use a logo. The name is just "Tikal & Chaos" since I can't think of anything that fits better, so with that in mind I'd like the logo to be "Sonic & Knuckles"-ish in style. You DON'T have to do a character logo with Tikal and Chaos in place of Sonic and Knuckles to go along with it. Pre-thanks for whoever makes it.

Chaos exclusive. I made it so the tile is detectable by sensors when NOT playing as Chaos Zero and when NOT submerged, so unless Tikal finds a way to turn into Chaos Zero and crawl around, I don't think she's going to be fitting in those holes anytime soon

Thanks. X) I will work on welding the level together some more. Any odd spots in particular that I should take care of? I'm guessing spots like 0:17 and 0:30 on Youtube's timer on the second video, where it's a bit cluttered or scrunched in.

Yeah, I put some time into thinking of how Chaos Zero could fit in the Sonic formula, and I think I've done a successful job of it. One thing not in the video that he can do is sink through platform surfaces when he submerges, such as a sewer lid or bridge. I will look into length of the level. I thought that this one can be completed in about the same time as a regular first level, but I'll see about it anyway. And I guess I spin-dashed too much, because Tikal does have running sprites. My fault for time-attacking Sonic games too much. >_< Chaos Zero doesn't have another running animation on purpose though because he doesn't have the ability to run like Sonic would. He uses his momentum as a ball to speed forwards, as opposed to moving his legs as fast as he can. But about the running sprites for Tikal's case. Is the average Genesis walk/run animations not enough and I should add a third, faster version like CD's peel-out, or should I do something else?

3 vids

The second tile dump for the 256x256 chunks for ripping Sonic CD things seems to result in a half-width sheet of 128x256 tiles... :[ The first tile dump is okay though. Same problem for ripping chunks for Sonic 1. Please fix this sometime.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think my fourth screenshot is just a big, confusing mess. I think I'll change that around in the long run so it's easier to tell what is solid. I don't think the problem with the graphics is that the level has too little contrast (the style has a high amount of contrast in the foreground) or is built from too small of a set of tiles though, but rather, there's nothing drawing the eye someplace else in the midst of the leaves other than what's on the top of the platform. I think I can easily remedy this problem Thanks for the positive response though, everyone. I'll be sure to keep an update.

Hi. (yes I know there's a few oddities in the graphics where tiles don't line up)

Sweet. That's the answer I was hoping for. Thanks for confirming.

I'm wondering if there's a way to deactivate the tiles that are not in the current view, or should I just not worry about that/not use tiles?

Hm. Well I did get the pausing part to work in general, but I'm unsure of how to deal with two things. 1. Assuming I went the first route and used surfaces, I am able to get the current gameplay to be stuck to the screen, but that's about it. I can't figure out how to draw to it at all. 2. If I went the other route and just turned off the background color drawing, then the screen just turns black on me. I'm guessing that's not supposed to happen?

I apologise for making a cliched analogy to make the same point everyone else is making... oh well. I'll just rephrase it; That wasn't a dumb question.

There are never stupid questions; there are only stupid answers.

So yeah, I need a little help with this. I'm just trying to make a simple pause object that pauses the entire game and has the potential to have a menu incorporated into it. The way I came up with was that I take a screenshot of the current game, deactivate all of the instances except for the pause object, and then wait for the user to unpause while drawing the screen taken. Sounds simple enough, except that every time I hit the pause button, the game lags to death. Here's all my code: /*Create Event for objPause*/ x=view_xview; y=view_yview; screen = sprite_create_from_screen(x,y,240,160,0,0,0,0,0,0); instance_deactivate_all(true); /*Step Event for objPause*/ PAUSE = keyboard_check(vk_pause); if(PAUSE) instance_destroy(); //This unpauses the game. /*Draw Event for objPause*/ draw_sprite(screen, 0,x,y); /*Destroy event for objPause*/ instance_activate_region(view_xview-64,view_yview-64,240+64*2,160+64*2,true); instance_activate_object(objActivate); //This is just to activate all of the instances that need to stay active for the game to run, like the object to draw the stats, water, ect. Help please.

Well, I downloaded the program the other day and started messing with it... then I read in the ReadMe file that it's possible to load the Sonic CD PC version into it, which I just so happen to have myself. However, the program unexpectedly quits whenever I try to load the soniccd.exe file into the program... I tried loading it as a fresh installation, and then I used the XP patch on Sonic CD PC and it still wouldn't load into SonEd. Would anyone happen to know how to solve this problem?