DragonXVI

Wow Epon, that brings back a lot of good memories Still think Pirate Gerald deserves his own game... I'll try my best to offer any advice on 3D engines, I'm not 100% master of them yet, but I've worked with Ogre and various others so anything I can learn is also handy

It ran ridiculously fast for me, about twice (Or maybe more) the speed of the usual Sonic Worlds beta. Made jumping a bugger... Saw the effect ok (Is a little hard to notice though, although there was limited places to achieve decent speed and as I said, it was running fast for me), looked fairly impressive and the logic behind it seems solid enough... One amusing question, would it be possible to scale up each Alpha Picture object depending on its transparency? Essentially a sort of mock Radial Blur effect. Not particularly useful, but might be a fancy effect. This is what I'm kinda explaining.

The Eyes! Well hopefully I'll stick around, there seems to be plenty of developments these days... The trick will be getting past the initial "Oh Bugger I've Got Work To Do" bit of starting a new project MAdventure... Hmm. I'd love to make a proper MAdventure with actual gameplay, but at heart it was supposed to be an RPG and, well, oof. There are 2 ideas floating in my head and I may just develop both of 'em as I go, both very non-traditional Sonic Fangame concepts, As for production cycles? Well, granted when 5 new games were release each week it was a bit much, but it's good to see people taking time on their projects now. My one worry is that as the time goes on you learn more, and you decide to scratch what you've done and restart.. And longer development times run the risk of resulting in Canned Spam due to lack of interest. I loved making the "Quick and Daft" games, and MAdventure 2 was just taking too long to get anywhere. I suppose making it "Episodic" would've fixed that

Bare in mind you'll be working in Radians with the math library, so if you're more confortable working with degrees you'll need the appropriate conversions Degrees to Radians = angle * PI/180.0 Radians to Degrees = angle * 180/PI (degrees are the 0 to 360 way of thinking, while Radians are the 0 to 2PI way. All Math functions in code usually work input and output in radians. I think Flash was different, but I can't remember) For above: x2 y2 will be the location of the thing you want to look at, and x1,y1 will be the location of the thing you want to rotate, so like the following: GunTurret.Angle = atan2( (Player.y - GunTurret.y), (Player.x - GunTurret.x) );

I'd originally pondered about having a go at a Sonic Engine in C#, but now Sonic Worlds has more or less rendered that effort futile (To an amazing degree I might add) After a night of messing around all I had to show for it was Tails runningly buggily up and down various ramps and loops, and I can't argue with how it's done these days (Admittedly there's apparantly a bit of a collision speed limit which could probably be solved with some clever ray-casting or while loops, not sure how MMF/GM handles that these days) So if anything It'd probably have to be something different to the traditional Sonic game for me to stand out, and that leads me back to 2 different locations. One of which I prefer over the other. Hmm.. *Ponders*

Pirating? Shocking! Although admittedly I can't remember exactly how MMF came into my possession all those years ago... But I'm sure it was entirely legal and not at all skullduggerous. EZboard? Christ that must've been fun Anytime I hear that name I get that "VOICE ENABLED BY MESSAGEBAY" nonsense they added once stuck in my head... Good to see S.A.G.E. is still going strong too. The names do ring a bell, but it has indeed been a while

Hmm, here's a thought (Re: the Camera), how about a first Person view? Now granted, killing enemies is then out of the question, but you've seen racing games do it, and things like Loops would be spectacular from that sort of fast paced view. To do a First Person View Sonic Game you'd probably have to make the levels a) Pretty linear, essentially long tracks ala Secret Rings and Enemy-less, but then turn it into what is essentially Sonic racing through various levels as fast as possible with the occasionally ridiculously long jump or sprint across water (And spikes) - Think of it as "Sonic's Training Session". Blaze is fairly close to the mark with the Rollcage/Trackmania suggestions. It brings back the discussion a few of us had about the Serious Sam 2 Engine, which featured running up walls and spring pads. Speed it up a little bit and you'd be fairly close.

You may remember "RedXVI" You may also perhaps remember a few of the following games. Sonic Khaos, (Or was it Kaos? I can't even remember myself now...), Sonic Thirdscape, Sonic Thirdscape 2, Sonic MAdventure and the "Probably-Only-TFH-Was-In-Development-Longer" Ill-Fated Sonic MAdventure 2. You may even remember "Sonic vs Waffle X" Minigame I did for one S.A.G.E. because I had nothing to submit that year (It was a Powerstone parody), and some of you might even remember the whopping 3 levels of Sonic Vs Eggman or my fancy Sonic: Geonicide City hoax I'm sure I did a 10th Ann thing as well... If not, remember Sonic: Time Attacked? I did some of the music for that one... Even got my name in the credits for SRB2 and Mystic's Addon too, and . I even did a fair bit of Sonic Epoch's original score and once programmed half (if not most) of the 2nd S.A.G.E. interactive experience under the watchful helm of Luckett... And if you're really lucky, you'll remember "Sonic Adventure 2 Minutes" and "Highest Heaven", my crazy Tails Puzzle-Platformer, or perhaps even "The Caffeine Enhanced Ninja"'s many incarnations, or "OMFG! NINJAS!" or perhaps even my forays into multiplayer games with "Sonic Deathmatch" and "Metroid Online?" Wow... When I list it like that I really was quite busy back in them days huh? If absolutely none of these things ring any bells whatsoever, I've obviously been away longer than I thought But no matter! Some of you will, and some of you may be wondering where the hell I've been for... a few years now. I surfaced a few times on various boards but never really stayed around for no longer than 5 minutes to voice an opinion on latest game releases and then disappear again. So where have I been? Well I'm not about to admit I've been away for 5 years working secretly on a Super-Ultra Sonic Game that will revolutionise Fangames for years to come (Much as I'd like), because that's a lie Truth is, I was busy with other things. I went to University for 4 years to study Games Programming, learned the whistful arts of C, C++ and C#, Physics, AI, Procedural Generation, 3D Vector Maths and all that nonesense, and emerged 4 years later with some knowledge in Rigid Body Dynamics I'd probably forget in 3 seconds and an honours degree in software engineering and the knowledge that I now know what A*, Scenegraphs, Finite State Machines and the like actually are. Then I entered a competition to, with the help of 4 friends, create an original game prototype in the space of 10 weeks. We made essentially Guitar Hero meets Zelda - A Rhythm RPG called "Ragnarawk" controlled entirely by the Guitar Hero controller (This included walking around talking to NPCs) - And we won. We won a lot. Google the name and you'll see what I mean. I'm now working for ("The Man" as many hippies would have say) a major Games Company as a Games Programmer so I'm pretty much where I wanted to be, and truth be told I owe a lot of it to SFGHQ. This place was one of the main reasons I seriously got into making games Back when I joined, games were made with CnC & The Games Factory (There was no MMF at this point) and were... 'Charming' in their simplicity. Through endless hacking, tweaking and fiddling we'd eventually try our hand at our own methods, using various extensions, to try and recreate a Sonic Engine as close as possible. Hell, I remember the time that Slopes were a hot new feature for Fangames (As were, at the time, "Static Engines"), and Loops were just out of the question entirely With all these limitations, some of the best games tried to find a way to make their games "Unique" instead of just a direct Sonic Engine clone, and this gave rise to many games I still remember to this day. To this day it was one of the best online communities I've been in, but at the time more and more people were leaving - Either fed up with the community or fed up with Fangames in general, and a lot of friends vanished to do their own thing. Now we're on what, MMF2? C++? Things have certainly improved since then. I've seen that little 3D Project lying around here, and I've caught up on how Retro Sonic (After all these years) is doing, plus the many other viciously close attempts at recreating the old girl (Nexus, XG and the like). It's good to see that we've come a good way since Tails' Bible Adventures So now I'm back. What's next... 'Something' may return. At heart I've always loved the original Sonic games and I won't get into what I think of the newest ones on this forum. I enjoyed trying to map my own little Story around the Sonic Universe while trying to come up with fun ways to play them. In my spare time I've been coding a little 2D/3D Engine (I've done C++ and C# and I'm settling on C# for now) for me to spit out little Indie Game ideas and you never know, I may return to the realm of Sonic Fangames yet, complete with my trademark use of: a) Explosions Ridiculous Storylines c) Photoshop Lens Flares d) Impossible Boss Fights But I'll obviously have to wait and see. I don't want to promise anything this early... I can see the competition's gotten a lot tougher since I was last here (And I see Clickteam finally got around to including proper rotation and maths ). But now I'm back, older, wiser and with 5 years of Code-fondling under my belt I'm curious to see what would happen if I went back to Sonic... Of course one reason I came back was to see if TFH was finished yet *Slaps Blaze* So. What did I miss?