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Final build of Sonic Xtreme found, leaking as we speak
- Thread starter Krejlooc
- Start date
Very cool.
Krasnoya Ronin
Neo Member
This is fantastic. Thank you for all your hard work and for sharing it with us! I remember seeing Sonic X-treme preview stuff and ads in EGM and Gamepro and being super excited for its release, then bummed when I learned it was canceled.
Hopefully this will eventually lead to interesting new games from the folks at Sonic Retro or the old SFGHQ crowd.
Hopefully this will eventually lead to interesting new games from the folks at Sonic Retro or the old SFGHQ crowd.
Vipershark
Member
I've been following the story/history/uncovering of Sonic Xtreme for years and seeing it finally, legitimately, running (albeit on an emulator, but actual original code nonetheless) is just so cool that I can barely contain it.
Seeing someone be able to take 20+ year old files and set up a computer to make them work exactly as they did decades ago is so ridiculously impressive to me.
I'm definitely going to be following this on Retro and Assembler as well to see everything from every angle.
Krejlooc, your Dreamcast build environment thread is really really cool and the concept of developing for consoles and always appealed to me. With Sonic Xtreme out there (and what seems to be a renewed interest in Saturn code), is it possible to make a similar thread for setting up a native Saturn environment?
Something that I'd really love to see is a "native" Sonic 4 homebrewed on Saturn some day, and as much documentation and interest for coding for it as possible could potentially make that happen.
So just a small vanity update as to what's been going on, at least on my end, the last few days. JR isn't going to have access to a Saturn controller bracket board for his NV1, so I've been figuring out the pinout from the daughter board using a multimeter. I was up till 3 am yesterday figuring it out. Bleeeeehhhh.... but this should help JR with his PC NV1 build.
For the Sega CD specifically? Not really
This would have been absolutely nothing like Sonic 3D Blast.
theSlacker
Member
So basically what he said. "Good".
This wouldn't have been good, either.
A Black Falcon
Member
Sonic X-Treme clearly took a lot of inspiration from Bug!, and Bug! is a really good game (I at least think so!), so I think it would have probably been good, yes.
Sonic 3D Blast is a fun game too, though. I like it.
That is from a screensaver that came with the PC version of Sonic 3&K.
You're probably thinking about this fan-made gif
Nah. It was similar but looked more "pixel art" and not as handdrawn, also no figure 8 legs when running. Oh well, I should have saved that son of a bitch.
More stable than Sonic Boom confirmed xD
Sonic Xtreme is one of these things I always was interested in. But I am more interested in things like Space Fantasy Zone, or the prototype of Alex Kidd remake for Ps2 (I have read something years ago about it, but it never appeared).
I have been in Sega offices, and my biggest desire was to know japanese, get alone inside, and discover all these secrets
I have been in Sega offices, and my biggest desire was to know japanese, get alone inside, and discover all these secrets
Sonic Xtreme is one of these things I always was interested in. But I am more interested in things like Space Fantasy Zone, or the prototype of Alex Kidd remake for Ps2 (I have read something years ago about it, but it never appeared).
I have been in Sega offices, and my biggest desire was to know japanese, get alone inside, and discover all these secrets
Space Fantasy Zone leaked like 15 years ago.
Laevateinn
Member
We should crowdfund you an oscilloscope.
I would just run display hacks on it.
Emperor Bohe
Member
Awesome. Would be cool if someone compeletes it in a few years in a way that can run on Saturn consoles
We anticipate we'll get this running on real saturns soon enough.
Labrynian Rebel
Member
Between Sonic Boom's "so bad it's good", Rodea the Sky Soldier turning out to still exist, the MOTHER 4 fan-game showing off professional-quality clay figures of the main cast, humanity playing tag with a comet for the first time, and now THIS?
Today has been a good day.
Today has been a good day.
RadioJoNES64
Banned
Hey guys
:V
Is this supposed to be a level editor?
Yep
It's also running on the NV1 card, we got the PC version build essentially. Very buggy, if you drag the window, the rendering explodes essentially.
RadioJoNES64
Banned
Well I guess there's not much you can do about the bugs. Still, it's pretty amazing what you've got there.
Dragoon En Regalia
Member
H to the E to the C to the K yes. This is one cool lookin' map editor.Hey guys
:V
Hey guys
:V
I'm now singing 'Dyna Cubes' to the 'Sonic Boom' lyrics
Azure Dream
Member
Wait. Is that level editor fanmade, or the original one they used?
Because the irony of it being released now, and being called "Sonic Boom"...
Because the irony of it being released now, and being called "Sonic Boom"...
This is the real editor
So, bombshell: Sonic Xtreme had changed names to Sonic Boom during development. This is after the name of the project had changed. I guess they never announced that to the public.
Azure Dream
Member
That's... pretty damn coincidental.
Other than the fact that Sega loved using the name "Sonic Boom" and continues to do so.
Dragoon En Regalia
Member
boom.gif
Imagine that, we could have had Sonic Boom then rather than now. Without the sports tape.
Imagine that, we could have had Sonic Boom then rather than now. Without the sports tape.
Still would have been terrible, though.
More than just a coincidence.. I saw this video for project AXSX where the guy said that Chris Senn, the original director for this game happens to be the director for Sonic Boom too.
So just some things I've noticed from these builds and looking at old xtreme footage:
some of the most grainy footage might have been from POV's saturn port all along. There are number of videos that are extremely poor quality, like they were recorded off screen, than exhibits the behavior from the saturn build, namely the way the Sonic Sprite is pasted over objects in front of him, where, in the PC version, those objects merely become transparent.
Ofer's engine would automatically make obfuscating pieces of geometry transparent if they got in between sonic and the camera, see here:
the saturn build we have exhibits different behavior:
We see that same behavior in some of the stranger footage for Xtreme, example:
In footage from this area, we also see Sonic jump repeatedly, multiple times in the air (as in, more than twice). Also, in this footage, when sonic jumps, he becomes a blue sphere, where in the PC footage, when he jumps, he displays individual frames of jumping animation. I'm not sure if this is just a case of frames being missed in the video capture or not, however. Also, in the above footage, Sonic can't collect rings, just like the Saturn build, but unlike the PC build.
Obviously any actual art or test levels they got would have been created by STI. I'm merely talking about footage of the saturn engine... potentially. I think the above that I pointed out is from POV.
Of course, it could also just as easily be from an earlier version of Ofer's engine and the quirks I'm pointing out in the saturn build were lifted directly from Ofer's work...
we won't know till later, I guess. Just interesting to go back and watch the old footage.
some of the most grainy footage might have been from POV's saturn port all along. There are number of videos that are extremely poor quality, like they were recorded off screen, than exhibits the behavior from the saturn build, namely the way the Sonic Sprite is pasted over objects in front of him, where, in the PC version, those objects merely become transparent.
Ofer's engine would automatically make obfuscating pieces of geometry transparent if they got in between sonic and the camera, see here:
the saturn build we have exhibits different behavior:
We see that same behavior in some of the stranger footage for Xtreme, example:
In footage from this area, we also see Sonic jump repeatedly, multiple times in the air (as in, more than twice). Also, in this footage, when sonic jumps, he becomes a blue sphere, where in the PC footage, when he jumps, he displays individual frames of jumping animation. I'm not sure if this is just a case of frames being missed in the video capture or not, however. Also, in the above footage, Sonic can't collect rings, just like the Saturn build, but unlike the PC build.
Obviously any actual art or test levels they got would have been created by STI. I'm merely talking about footage of the saturn engine... potentially. I think the above that I pointed out is from POV.
Of course, it could also just as easily be from an earlier version of Ofer's engine and the quirks I'm pointing out in the saturn build were lifted directly from Ofer's work...
we won't know till later, I guess. Just interesting to go back and watch the old footage.
Vipershark
Member
Jollyroger works so fast!
Can't wait to see more.
Can't wait to see more.
We all pretty much go home from work and immediately begin doing Sonic Xtreme stuff just about every night. We're giddy to work on this stuff, haha.
BillGaitas
Member
Man, I've been intrigued by unreleased Sonic stuff since 2006 or so, when I was 12 years old. Reading about those Sonic 2 pre-release roms (Simon Wai and Nick Arcade), unused content in the games, those prototypes and betas released by drx in 2008...
Sonic X-Treme has always been a interesting one. I never thought we would see more of the game, but here we are.
Looking forward for more updates from you guys!
Sonic X-Treme has always been a interesting one. I never thought we would see more of the game, but here we are.
Looking forward for more updates from you guys!
lostinblue
Banned
For some reason that reminds me of...Hey guys
:V
It's the boxy look and the path going alongside the wall, I think:
But it actually looks like a good blocky level for that engine... perhaps a good, tongue in cheek level to implement providing that level creator works.
Vipershark
Member
Not to be pushy, but you seemed to miss the question I asked above. If there's a particular reason you can't/won't answer though, that's cool!
Just keep doing your thing.
Laevateinn
Member
I asked a similar question earlier. There's a thing called Saturn Orbit which provides a dev environment for the Saturn. I'm interested in doing some homebrew but I think I'm leaning towards the Dreamcast since it has a native Linux environment over a Windows one which Orbit seems to be built around. The homebrew Dreamcast kit/community also seems to be a lot more active which would help for when you run into snags or need documentation.
lostinblue
Banned
Sir Abacus
Member
It's not so much the market spoke, triangles are just faster to process than quads. Every triangle is on the same plane and you don't get any MC Escher silliness that can happen when four points of a quad aren't on the same plane. Plus you can always split models rendered with quads into triangles anyway.
What is the real benefit to quads though? I've seen CPU stuff so I guess it had to keep track of less polygons and/or issue less draw commands?
Blender 3D for whatever reason uses quads. Triangles are also possible.
lostinblue
Banned
Benefit was vertice count for flat surfaces and better perspective accuracy sans-filtering.
PSone and Saturn didn't have perspective correction and used Affine mapping, but you probably only heard of warping on the PSone. There's several reasons for that, but the biggest is:
Affine is not good with triangles, with rectangles though, it behaves acceptably albeit not perspective correct.
Linear interpolation is the issue (it's a 2D texture manipulation, as you can see the squares don't get any smaller with distance, just warped, and the solution for both consoles was the same, subdivide it to make that "perspective" happen one way or the other, otherwise they could just do the surface of a fight ring in... say, Virtua Fighter II, to be a huge single quad and spare their polygon budget, or on the PSone they could make do with 2 polygons, and on both accounts it would look hideous. But more hideous on the PSone.
Then again, imagine you have to do the aforementioned flat surface with triangles, technically a quad is that very same polygon with one extra vertice going on whereas whilst working with triangles to do a rectangle you'll need to spend two of them. Depending on what you're doing the tradeoff might be good enough providing you have a limited amount of polygons to work with.
Anyway and in hindsight results on that front were way better by using quads and the cost was roughly 3 quads= 4 triangle polygons, tradeoff didn't feel wrong in the 90's, I guess.
One such recent example would be the Nintendo DS who used triangles and quads, unlike most systems where if you want to you can run the system into the ground with geometry, it just won't be realtime anymore (...) the DS was actually geometry capped to 2048 polygons or 6144 vertices, per frame.
The thing could reach these numbers at 60 fps with free 2xAA, it was just capped (probably due to RAM budget).
Thing is, it supported quads. So these 2048 polygons could amount to as much as double 4096 polygons if they were all quads and you were to use triads instead. It sure came in handy, obviously, counting a rectangle as 4 vertices and not 6 could really mean something in the long run. (I believe geometry had to be optimized for that though, and most devs wouldn't.
PSone and Saturn didn't have perspective correction and used Affine mapping, but you probably only heard of warping on the PSone. There's several reasons for that, but the biggest is:
Affine is not good with triangles, with rectangles though, it behaves acceptably albeit not perspective correct.
Linear interpolation is the issue (it's a 2D texture manipulation, as you can see the squares don't get any smaller with distance, just warped, and the solution for both consoles was the same, subdivide it to make that "perspective" happen one way or the other, otherwise they could just do the surface of a fight ring in... say, Virtua Fighter II, to be a huge single quad and spare their polygon budget, or on the PSone they could make do with 2 polygons, and on both accounts it would look hideous. But more hideous on the PSone.
Then again, imagine you have to do the aforementioned flat surface with triangles, technically a quad is that very same polygon with one extra vertice going on whereas whilst working with triangles to do a rectangle you'll need to spend two of them. Depending on what you're doing the tradeoff might be good enough providing you have a limited amount of polygons to work with.
Anyway and in hindsight results on that front were way better by using quads and the cost was roughly 3 quads= 4 triangle polygons, tradeoff didn't feel wrong in the 90's, I guess.
One such recent example would be the Nintendo DS who used triangles and quads, unlike most systems where if you want to you can run the system into the ground with geometry, it just won't be realtime anymore (...) the DS was actually geometry capped to 2048 polygons or 6144 vertices, per frame.
The thing could reach these numbers at 60 fps with free 2xAA, it was just capped (probably due to RAM budget).
Thing is, it supported quads. So these 2048 polygons could amount to as much as double 4096 polygons if they were all quads and you were to use triads instead. It sure came in handy, obviously, counting a rectangle as 4 vertices and not 6 could really mean something in the long run. (I believe geometry had to be optimized for that though, and most devs wouldn't.
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