#kappaengineer

[speeps-highway]

One time I remember pirating SADX and to my horror, EVERY SONG IN THE GAME was replaced with Windy Valley 1. To this very day, that song still triggers a fear response in my brain. I'm pretty sure FMVs were cut for space too.

There’s a vid of that up on YouTube:

It’s absolutely hilarious. If you’re interested in pirate copies there’s also a version with Russian dub from hell:

[mariakono]

Kappas

Kappa: 7/10

WHY THE RATE: Usually i’d give them a 5 or even a 4, but the times when i read kappa stories always ended up with SHEER LAUGHTER. the sole existence of these manturtles is so fucking asstonishing. I can’t take them seriously.

i fucking love kappas. they’re so dumb.

also i love the touhou kappas. they’re so great

[speeps-highway]

Any opinions on NiGHTS, since it kinda shares DNA with Adventure? I always thought it looked super cool based on the weird stuff going on in Casinopolis, and now it's one of my favorite games.

I love NiGHTS, I think I still have my Saturn copy lying around somewhere. I was never that good at it but I still managed to beat it.

I was never too big on SA1′s Card Pinball until recently. The problem it has is that it’s never really explained that you need to pick up the blue chip cards before attacking the cages to get Ideya.

Plus, it has a small issue where one of the cards never appears (Jackle), which means you can only get the Straight bonus (having all 5 individual cards from one suit) for Green cards.

[speeps-highway]

Is it weird to have a soft spot for SADX? When you're like 8 you don't know better, and that's how the game always looked. I say we start SADX Anonymous, for people who never got to play the Dreamcast version.

I don’t know, I always assumed a lot of the people who never got the chance to see the Dreamcast version were the ones most vocal about hating the game as a whole.

I mean, I’m pretty sure I’d say the game looked awful if all I knew about it was a let’s play of the Steam port.

[speeps-highway]

I was messing around with Sonic in SA2B and I noticed that if you tap the B button to somersault 3 times with a very precise timing, you can actually do a punch attack instead of a slide! Has anyone else noticed this?

Yeah, I’ve noticed him do the punch before!

I think you have to be travelling at a certain speed for him to do the punch attack instead of the slide.

[blazehedgehog]

So a friend and I have been discussing something when it comes to 3D Sonic. How do you make a satisfying amount of content in the Unleashed style while also maintaining a reasonable budget and schedule? It seems like it's been causing Sonic Team a lot of trouble to develop detailed worlds that feel gigantic with gorgeous lighting, but take only a minute or two to traverse. Performance seems like it could be an issue too.

You’re right, that can be a major hurdle, but I also feel like it’s a hurdle for a lot of game developers right now, and some of them are solving it with tools specifically designed to let you generate large amounts of detailed content very quickly.

Sonic Unleashed was eight years ago, and now we have automated tools that can use complex algorithms that borderline on being artificial intelligence to generate lots of detail quickly from a pool of existing assets.

FAST Racing Neo on the Wii U uses all kinds of tricks to generate its track details, from photogrammetry to procedural generation.

Lighting is less of an issue now, too. Sonic Unleashed’s pre-rendered Global Illumination was cutting edge eight years ago, but now games use Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) to achieve similar results in real-time. Crunching numbers for 24 hours in a render farm in order to bake lighting data for an entire Sonic Unleashed level has now been reduced to almost zero because it all renders on the fly. This could even reduce overhead in the case of a Sonic game, because now you don’t have to stream in huge lightmap textures on top of everything else – you just read a shader file and simulate the lighting naturally as it comes in to view.

That’s not to say it isn’t still a problem, but I think it’s becoming less of a problem as developers are forced to rely more on procedural generation to populate their maps with detail that would otherwise take days, weeks, or even months to do by hand.

I also have a feeling that Sonic Lost World was designed with the idea of cutting down on the amount of time it takes to detail a map, and honestly, I wouldn’t mind it if they kept that aesthetic going forward – not the Super Mario Galaxy tube and planetoid maps, but I mean the sharp, simple, colorful art direction.

If that was the price for having the Unleashed-style of gameplay, I’d be okay with that sacrifice, as long as it played good and worked well within its limitations.

[liverx]

We Love You @kappaengineer

[hydroxianchaos]

Your art style would taste like pasta! Not sure why c:

Whoops, missed this one!and thanks! It might be the loose, stringy lines. I think that’s a really good analogy, actually!