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Final build of Sonic Xtreme found, leaking as we speak

S

SparkTR

Member
lostinblue said:
Why use a different engine?

I realize that project probably started of sooner, but using this codebase you get an usable Saturn version as well.
Click to expand...

I believe this leak is missing tons of stuff related to that kind of development, all that was salvaged for this project was some textures. Also endless compatibility and workflow issues (workflow is extremely important here). There's no chance a single person development team is making a Saturn game in 2015.
 
L

lostinblue

Banned
I was thinking once te engine is cleaned up and in a "mature", programming won't really be necessary, just the level editor and the assets/libraries.

Albeit yes, one would be bound by the Saturn polygon and ram limitations.
 
V

Vipershark

Member
Remark said:
Will we be able to do fisheye lens in this. Tbh w/o fisheye this looks kinda shit.
Click to expand...

Yes. Jollyroger is currently working on porting the fisheye over.
ArE21FE.png


Basically, the list of priorities is to get the modern windows port running as good as it possibly can, then from there working backwards to get all the functions running on the Windows 95/NV1 versions followed by the Saturn version.

Apparently working on the code in a modern, easy to use environment is much easier than trying to debug code somebody else wrote on a Saturn devkit.
This way he'll know what does what.

lostinblue said:
What is the current plan regarding level design for the game?

Level-design-wise "as is" it's clearly unfinished, and needs some structure to go along with it. They were clearly getting somewhere with the engine and afterwards the game would shape up and follow suit. As is, it's a good curiosity artifact but... We all know this won't be the Sonic X-treme that could be, unless someone does levels using the assets in place? perhaps encompassing what exists into something grander? dunno.
Click to expand...

There isn't one, to my knowledge.
There are "levels" in the leak but none of them were actually "designed" so much as quickly slapped together for testing purposes, which Chris Senn confirmed.
Essentially all of the level layouts are just placeholders to show off the game and to my knowledge there is no actual beginning or ending to any of them. They're just sort of playground areas.

That being said, as far as I know this project aims to simply port over the existing level data as it currently is, meaning what will be released are these unfinished prototype areas.

On the other hand, Andrew75's Project AXSX (which is NOT a port of this game but rather a faithful recreation in the Unity engine) aims to "complete" the levels and release the game in an actual playable state. Obviously this involves adding new content that Sega themselves didn't make.

lostinblue said:
Why use a different engine?

I realize that project probably started of sooner, but using this codebase you get an usable Saturn version as well.
Click to expand...

AXSX was started years ago, LONG before this leak surfaced and any hope of these "new" assets being released was gone. Progress on releasing anything about Xtreme halted completely because Ofer Alon didn't want to give anyone his code. The code Jollyroger has is (probably) that same build, acquired through other means.

But as far as adding new features to the Saturn/Windows version, the possibility of doing that is pretty improbable, especially right now.
Maybe in a few months/years the people over at Retro will be able to start considering that.
 
ResidentDante

ResidentDante

Member
Branduil said:
It's still mind-boggling to me how badly SEGA bungled with the Saturn by not having a real Sonic game for it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, same thoughts I have. I think even the 3D demo world of Sonic Jam is a fairly okay base for a game of it's time. Couldn't they at least just have made something to release out of it?
 
V

Vipershark

Member
Jollyroger is a freaking MACHINE.

This was posted on December 31st:
Andrew75 on Sonic Retro said:
After 12+ hours blood sweat and tears, JollyRoger has successfully ported the level editor over to a Modern Windows OS, However its still in need of a lot of work.
Features are missing, has bugs and crashing issues. It should all be downhill from here, as the hard parts are done.
Its extremely preliminary, But this shows that it can be done !


Edit: A thought had occurred to me. When this drops, this could possibly be the very first official level editor used for an official Sonic game ever released.
All the other level editors we have, have all been put together by community coders and hackers. Please guys, correct me if I'm wrong here.

vvk00yS.png
Click to expand...

Then just yesterday came this:
Andrew75 said:
Updates for well Some of the Rendering features. The cursor, blending, and line drawing now all work.

He is trying to reproduce as closely as possible the NV1 behavior for textures, palettes, blending, sprites, polygons, alphas.
Its a lot of work, and may take some time to get it to where he wants it to be.

w4K3dBG.png
Click to expand...

Followed by this:
Yx9dg0e.png


But best of all was today's update, which was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FviZbVb0qdo

It's getting closer, guys!
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
It's so, so awesome to see this moving forward... and if it has a level editor, people could make levels for it even if there aren't any actual complete ones in the game.

Only problem -- this is only the "levels" engine, right? It wouldn't be a proper full Sonic X-Treme game without those bossfights... unless those can be replicated in this as well?

Branduil said:
It's still mind-boggling to me how badly SEGA bungled with the Saturn by not having a real Sonic game for it.
Click to expand...

Sonic Team: "We want to make NiGHTS and then Burning Rangers, not Sonic!"

Sega: "Meh, Sonic's not popular here in Japan, so he's not actually important... so sure, go ahead."

Sega of Japan's whole strategy with the Saturn basically ignored what Western markets wanted, so it should be no surprise that they did the same thing with what they should have known was their most important property.
 
E

Elija2

Member
Edit: A thought had occurred to me. When this drops, this could possibly be the very first official level editor used for an official Sonic game ever released.
All the other level editors we have, have all been put together by community coders and hackers. Please guys, correct me if I'm wrong here.
Click to expand...

I think there was a flash version of Sonic 1 on the old Play Sega site that had a level editor. No idea how fully-featured it was.

But yeah, this is still big news.
 
V

Vipershark

Member
I'd like to share some other information, just in case anyone was wondering.

Andrew75 made a post on Retro regarding what all Jollyroger was working on and releasing, and it confused me a bit:
Andrew75 said:
What we have is basically a snap shot in time of around E3. JR does not have the engine or later levels that chris Senn has shown for Jade gully , Red sands, New paths and Crystal frost. That engine is much more recent and a lot more playable than what we have here.

The 3 available versions of engine that JR is sharing are also pretty ,,,,,,(Bad shape) um how should I put it,It's the original team's Work in progress. According to Jolly, the engine is in mid re-wright so some of the code that did work ( and that .def files have parameters for) was stripped out and or commented out of the source code. a lot of it will need to restored after he finishes all 3 ports to Modern windows. He'll be able to mix and match attributes between 2 versions: 37 and 4 to get a more complete version that has restored functions that the .def files depend on.
Click to expand...

To which I responded with this:
Vipershark said:
Just to clarify: unless I was reading previous pages wrong, there are five builds total in this leak, right?
If I recall correctly there were four that we know of and one that hasn't been seen by anyone yet?

You say that JR is sharing three builds but you only listed versions 37 and 40. Is one of them a duplicate (or incremented) build? What about the other two builds?
Click to expand...

Then Jollyroger himself came in the thread with a response:
Jollyroger said:
The five builds we have are:
- v37 engine and level editor for Windows 95 + NV1 (we have the source code)
- v40 engine and level editor for Windows 95 + NV1 (we have the source code)
- v40 engine for Saturn (we have the source code)
- v53 level editor only for Windows 95 + NV1 (we have a very small amount of the source code, I reconstructed it from mostly binary object files)
- POV engine for Saturn (we have the source code)

Jolly
Click to expand...

The v53 engine hadn't been mentioned so far (to my knowledge) so I asked for more information:
Vipershark said:
Great, thanks.
I'm assuming there's no possible way to reconstruct the version 53 engine with only the level editor available?

Are there any v53 assets (levels, etc) that can be retrofitted into the older engine(s) at least?
Click to expand...

to which JR responded:
Jollyroger said:
Unfortunately there is no way.

We may be able to reuse some v53 assets and retrofit them to work on v40, but v40 needs A LOT of work...

Jolly
Click to expand...

Well, that's unfortunate.
Here's hoping that JR will be able to figure something out.
...though considering how well he works it'll probably happen soon ahahaha
 
B

BishopLamont

Banned
Krejlooc said:
Whoo boy, I have gotten some flat-out stupid emails and messages (and death threats, seriously) over this stuff (mainly from other boards) so I'd like to take a moment to dispel some notions:

we are not hording the source code. First of all, the source code is neigh useless to the vast, vast, vast majority of people. Why is it not useless in our hands? Because JR has professional experience developing for the Sega Saturn, and as a result has sega saturn development hardware. We understand the need to preserve old games - we, all 3 of us, are active in various video game preservation societies, from arcade board preservation to stuff like this. We have taken steps to ensure the source code isn't going to die on some person's hardware, we have preserved the source. But we will not distribute it. Why? Because the author of the source specifically asked us not to. Now, I get some people are thinking, "if you're already going behind backs to release this stuff in the first place, what's the harm of going against Ofer's wishes?" That is a bad sign of trust to do that. This stuff doesn't operate in a vacuum. Aside from burning bridges with Ofer Alon, who isn't really a bad person to know in general, we would be demonstrating to other people that we are not operating in good faith among developers. This could impact our potential to gain access to future prototypes. So the situation we're faced with - either release a largely useless source code to satiate a bunch of people online who really don't know the situation to begin with at the expense of our future ability to uncover prototypes... or not. The choice is obvious.

We are not interested in "owning" a rare version of Sonic Xtreme. We don't really get any joy out of holding onto something like this. I think especially Andrew75 and I are mostly excited to be the people who are bringing this stuff out to the community, not part of some super secret club or whatever. Which is to say, what we care about most is releasing Sonic Xtreme, not gaining exclusive access to it.

The NV1 SDK, which is being used in this project, would be of no help towards a theoretical sega saturn emulator development. This in particular is weird, I keep getting hit up from people demanding we release the NV1 SDK so that "a real sega saturn emulator can be developed." This is just a gross misunderstanding of the way this tech works. Firstly, the NV1 and Sega Saturn are entirely different beasts. JR joked with me that the most these machines share in common is that they run on electricity. Obviously, they both use quadratic primatives, but that wasn't uncommon in 1996. My Creative 3DO blaster, for example, does the same thing.Quads weren't a unique quirk of the saturn's hardware. Beyond the use of quads as a primitive, the NV1 is radically different from the Saturn. Case in point - the NV1 is a single GPU by itself. When you code for the NV1, you create an NV1 object (nvschedule or whatever) and that handles all communication to the card. It works as a single entity. The Saturn uses dual VDPs to render its graphics, with a pipeline running between them. you are, for all intent and purposes, coding for 2 graphics chips when working with the saturn. The hardware between the NV1 and Saturn is so radically different.

Further, the NV1 SDK we have wasn't part of this leak. This SDK is freely floating around on the internet. Anybody can grab it, it's not something we're holding on to. It's been out there, in the wild, since 1996. And it's useless to Sega Saturn emulation development. And, most importantly, Sega saturn emulators already exist.

Long short of this is, we're 3 people with day jobs, who have spent quite a bit of personal money on this without accepting donations (nor do we wish to), who hold day jobs and have personal lives. Girlfriends, wives, kids, pets, that sort of thing. Additionally, being passionate professionals, we all also have other projects and hobbies that take up our time. Without getting into JR's personal life, Andrew75 alone is working on Project AXSX (of which he's spent several grand of his own money) and I am doing stuff for Half Life 2 VR. So the work we do for this release is being done out of passion and a desire to distribute this to the greater whole because we realize this is worth doing. We're gonna lose money on this endeavor, but it's worth it to us. While accusations of greed honestly doesn't surprise me, given the nature of the internet, please realize that you likely don't have a good grasp of the situation and how much we're personally contributing to get something into everybody's hands for free.
Click to expand...
keep doing ur thing, appreciate all the effort u guys put into this, forget the haters.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
A Black Falcon said:
It's so, so awesome to see this moving forward... and if it has a level editor, people could make levels for it even if there aren't any actual complete ones in the game.

Only problem -- this is only the "levels" engine, right? It wouldn't be a proper full Sonic X-Treme game without those bossfights... unless those can be replicated in this as well?



Sonic Team: "We want to make NiGHTS and then Burning Rangers, not Sonic!"

Sega: "Meh, Sonic's not popular here in Japan, so it's not actually important... so sure, go ahead."

Sega of Japan's whole strategy with the Saturn basically ignored what Western markets wanted, so it should be no surprise that they did the same thing with what they should have known was their most important property.
Click to expand...

Worked ace for them as it helped kill their console business.
 
A

AniHawk

Member
MrCunningham said:
Worked ace for them as it helped kill their console business.
Click to expand...

the saturn was fairly successful in japan. sold better than the n64 at least, and probably would have lasted a couple years longer if the us and europe didn't reject it outright.

you know how bad the vita is selling? the saturn did about a million less. or to put it in another way, it achieved about 1/3 of the wii u's sales.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
AniHawk said:
the saturn was fairly successful in japan. sold better than the n64 at least, and probably would have lasted a couple years longer if the us and europe didn't reject it outright.

you know how bad the vita is selling? the saturn did about a million less. or to put it in another way, it achieved about 1/3 of the wii u's sales.
Click to expand...

That's true.

And yeah, snuffing the UK and US was what killed the system. It also didn't help that they had a console that just didn't suit the needs of third party developers and had all sorts of quirks that made it hard to develop games for.

Sega also pissed off a lot of retailers in the US by releasing the console early.

The Saturn was botched hardware from the start.
 
A

AniHawk

Member
MrCunningham said:
That's true.

And yeah, snuffing the UK and US was what killed the system. It also didn't help that they had a console that just didn't suit the needs of third party developers and had all sorts of quirks that made it hard to develop games for.

Sega also pissed off a lot of retailers in the US by releasing the console early.

The Saturn was botched hardware from the start.
Click to expand...

unfortunately for sega, the rpg revolution was about two years after the launch of the platform. they might have even been able to get a jump on it had they been localizing all the stuff that came to japan in the mid 90s. maybe it wouldn't have brought the system more than double its final sales, but it would have landed them in a better spot in 1998 than the dreamcast launch.
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
AniHawk said:
the saturn was fairly successful in japan. sold better than the n64 at least, and probably would have lasted a couple years longer if the us and europe didn't reject it outright.

you know how bad the vita is selling? the saturn did about a million less. or to put it in another way, it achieved about 1/3 of the wii u's sales.
Click to expand...
Fairly successful in Japan... well, it was from 1994-1997, but it didn't last. Overall, a 90% or more drop in US sales wasn't worth doubling your Japanese sales, not when that means about 15-20 million lost sales in the US (versus Genesis sales, depending on how much it actually sold -- 17-22 million Genesies in the US depending on who you believe, versus 14. to 2 million Saturns), versus only ~3-3.5 million more sales in Japan (3.5 million MDs to a bit under 5.5-6 million Saturns). :p

Sega of Japan sacrificed so much for temporary success that didn't last. Sega's not Microsoft, they didn't have the money to survive that kind of situation...

Now, releasing a Sonic game in 1997, when Sonic X-Treme would have been finished had it not been cancelled, would not have saved the Saturn, but it would have helped; a lot of people, me included, liked Sonic, and certainly would have paid more attention to the Saturn if it'd had a real Sonic game on it, like how Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast got attention. And if Sega had done the right thing, and made Sonic Team make a Sonic game in 1995 or 1996, instead of (or in addition to) NiGHTS? Well, the Saturn would still probably have finished in third, but I do think it could have made a real difference, Sonic was important. Saving the Saturn would also require not giving up on it in mid 1997, of course, and hopefully launching the thing better, or just canning it entirely in favor of something better, but those are other issues.

AniHawk said:
unfortunately for sega, the rpg revolution was about two years after the launch of the platform. they might have even been able to get a jump on it had they been localizing all the stuff that came to japan in the mid 90s. maybe it wouldn't have brought the system more than double its final sales, but it would have landed them in a better spot in 1998 than the dreamcast launch.
Click to expand...
Yeah, when people complain about all the Saturn games we missed out on in the US... well, there are some major ones, but a lot are stuff that just wouldn't have sold well here, as similar PS1 games mostly didn't. Maybe had the Saturn not been effectively killed back in mid '97 Shining Force III and Panzer Dragoon Saga (and Burning Rangers) could have gotten a lot more attention, though. And sure, Grandia's a big missed opportunity. But even though the Japanese Saturn library we didn't get is large, and contains lots of great games, I'm just not convinced that releasing more of those would have "saved the Saturn" here. The Genesis didn't become a hit because of games like those, after all; it was Sonic, EA Sports, and the like that really made it successful in the US. And there aren't that many platformers we didn't see, particularly 3d ones. There are a couple, but not a lot, and certainly nothing to make up for no Sonic.

I know that downsizing Sega of America made sense considering how terribly the Saturn was selling, but doing that also hurt Sega's chances of competing here because they needed those Western-developed games that the Genesis had had in order to attract a larger Western audience! You see this loss when you look at the Dreamcast library -- very few Western-developed titles published by Sega there, in a big contrast to the Genesis. Sega was fortunate that Western audiences liked their Japanese-developed Dreamcast games better than they had Saturn ones. Of course, on the other hand the Dreamcast failed to catch on in Japan, so Sega could never win... never managed to release a system that was actually popular in all of the major regions.
 
F

Falk

that puzzling face
Borman said:
There is more than just this level in the archives. This is just step one.
Click to expand...

Uh huh. There still wasn't much of a game to begin with.

edit: Cool video.

Thinking this should be a new thread considering it -is- a release.
 
B

Borman

Member
Falk said:
Uh huh. There still wasn't much of a game to begin with.

edit: Cool video.

Thinking this should be a new thread considering it -is- a release.
Click to expand...

Still a lot more than this. Especially when the recovered archive doesn't cover everything STI did.
 
F

Falk

that puzzling face
Well, I suppose we could go for the low hanging fruit and make a jab about how half the games released nowadays are in a less finished state than what STI presumably had when the plug was pulled. :V
 
J

J@hranimo

Banned
Great, impressive stuff! These guys seem to have been underground behind the scenes working on this for a while. Crazy.

Hope there's more to this in the future.
 
A

Azure Dream

Member
"Oh, by the way, here's a super-polished prototype we had no idea existed."

That's really cool. It looks like POV was on to something, actually. Camera's still too tight in, though.
 
A Black Falcon

A Black Falcon

Member
Pretty awesome! It really makes me think though, that looks SO much like Bug!. Sega probably should have just had Realtime make a Sonic game instead of Bug Too! for '96. :p (I think the Bug games are pretty good, so I mean this as a good thing.)
 
C

Coffee Dog

Banned
Haha, wow, the guys at POV easily had the best interpretation of the concept, resulting in a platformer with distinct layers. Camera is terribly close for a sonic game, but there's a decent idea in there.
 
A

AzureSkies

Member
Woah, if POV were actually involved in Xtreme's development a year earlier or so, I imagine that the game may have had the potential to be released.

This looks really nice, hell I even prefer this look over the Fisheye style camera.
 
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