Time Travel

[luksamuk]

Any chance Sonic Worlds may have a functional time travel there?

...and this includes porting some events to General Events in MMF2.

[LarkSS]

I never liked the time travel gimmick personally. If you want to implement it though, you could probably duplicate a stage and change the backgrounds in the duplicates for each time period. When you active time travel, store Sonic's position and speed in global variables, then shift to the frame containing the new time period loading the position and speed variables back into Sonic. Checkpoint stuff should be global already, so I don't think you even have to worry about that bit. Remembering which badniks were busted and which rings were collected is a different story though.

[luksamuk]

I already know that Lark, but I was thinking in making it more practical. Hedgehog Reborn's engine is half copied to the General Events, so the game would be much more light. That's what I am talking about. Some events can't be put here because of the qualifiers. But it still makes the game lotta easier to deal with. Changing one engine changes the rest.

[LarkSS]

Personally I don't recommend global events whatsoever since iirc there is a bit of a timing issue between global events and frame events that can cause problems later on. And yeah, the lack of qualifier support just kills its functionality in my opinion. But I digress.

If you wanted to make code that was truly global and allowed something like this to be done by simply swapping level graphics, you'd need to make a level editor and have all levels loaded inside of a single frame. Managing the levels yourself like this, it should also be possible to achieve effects like having act 2 linked to act 1. ;>

[luksamuk]

Hmmm, fine... but how could it be possible? I mean, Retro Sonic loaded graphics from image files. But can it load infinite tiles?

[LarkSS]

As long as you program it to do so. :] If you use an object like Animated Picture, you can load external files dynamically into the object and treat it like an active object. I believe you can import image data directly into active objects though, including setting up new animations at runtime.