We're Not Dead Yet

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LoganA

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Sonic Team Junior
Posted by Mystic on 03-05-2013 04:03 AM.

Rumors of the project's death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the lack of news, we have been making slow but steady progress on SRB2 over the last year. As with the previous updates, click on the screenshots for a higher resolution version.

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Techno Hill 1's revamp continues on schedule, providing a stage that no longer feels anything like Greenflower 4. New slime, enemies appropriated from a prominent mod (No more Crawlas outside of GFZ!), and just a nice good old-fashioned set of polish all around.

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The Techno Hill slime has been completely revamped, as seen here in the underground tunnel's first room. The slime doesn't hurt anymore, but is exceptionally buoyant. Jumping in it will cause you to float up, bouncing in and out until you eventually lose enough momentum to start walking on it.

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Here's a simple example of what can be done with the new slime. Just jumping into the slime won't provide enough depth to reach the goodies at the bottom, but if you climb up to the upper ledge and jump down, you'll have enough speed to touch the bottom and grab the reward.

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The NiGHTS Special Stages are now 100% complete and ready for release with 2.1. You can even run through the stage multiple times in a single run to attempt to get a high score. For more details on the NiGHTS Special Stages, check out our previous update.

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2.1 also includes some outright new content, such as Azure Temple, a brutally hard extra stage which is entirely underwater. In the previous tradition of Aerial Garden, expect lots of pits, fire-breathing gargoyles, and other hazards to beat this stage. Unlike the rest of this update, you can actually try out a beta of this stage, as a 2.0.6 version was included in the May/June 2012 OLDC on the forum.

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Finally, our coders haven't been sitting entirely doing nothing with the netcode not working. One of the new features of 2.1 is skyboxes, which allows for more interesting, animated skies like this one in Castle Eggman 1. Those clouds are very much layered and moving.

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Castle Eggman has nothing on this impressive demonstration skybox, however.
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Finally, the depth I've been waiting for in SRB2 backgrounds for literally 6 years has finally come.
 
Wow, all of this looks great.

But, how did you get the curves done so perfectly in that Hydrocity themed level? And is that Tails following Sonic...?
 
Act 1 still has that massive ugly tree, huh? That's a shame.

On another note, the Sonic & Tails combo are finally a thing, so that's nice.
 
I spotted one of Blade's spring turtles in the first screenshot. Awesome. Also, the new slime looks cool, but I'm going to miss the old, hazardous slime.
 
Hazardous slime is ridiculously stupid. It's tedious to escape out of and wastes time over all; you may as well have a spikepit with springs of get out four miles away instead. I like this change, it'll encourage custom maps to level design better too, hopefully.
 
Act 1 still has that massive ugly tree, huh? That's a shame.
I guess some things just have to stay as shitty as ever, for tradition's sake. ;)

In other news, CEZS looks unexpectedly great, especially compared to that last screenshot.
 
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Like they said in the first post, the netcode is not working, that's why that those changes are happening.
 
Here's a better question regarding the netcode: How much broken is there left, and can we expect a release sometime this year?
 
I have a guess at how skyboxes work. They're probably regular sectors that are in reality, right in your face and extremely close to you (as well as being intangible), rendered before everything else likely; but are overlapped by everything else visually. Giving the effect of them being huge from far away. This explains the noticeable low resolution textures on the ones shown, a sacrifice for the illusion of looking big when they really aren't; it also explains the lack of slowdown when using them.

I think the same trick is done for the grow and shrink effect on characters, this explains why you can't make characters more than 255 pixels tall without horrible visual issues, but can upscale a small one ingame to be larger than an entire map and look fine.




If I got this right what do I win? :D
 
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This is fantastic improvement, especially the fact that they have adopted the use of skyboxes (from srb2cb) for better in-game playing. Furthermore the shields and other graphics (including the slime texture) looks outstanding from my perspective. Such a shame for anyone who are planning on releasing a level pack just before 2.1 comes out.
In that first picture, is that a tailsbot following sonic?
 
Guys, the skybox isn't from CB. Those skyboxes only work in OGL.

Weather these skyboxes work in OGL, I don't know, but they certainly arn't CB skyboxes.
 
What D00D said there is correct - 2.1's skyboxes are not actually taken from SRB2CB, and they're currently software-only as of now.
 
I have a guess at how skyboxes work. They're probably regular sectors that are in reality, right in your face and extremely close to you (as well as being intangible), rendered before everything else likely; but are overlapped by everything else visually. Giving the effect of them being huge from far away. This explains the noticeable low resolution textures on the ones shown, a sacrifice for the illusion of looking big when they really aren't; it also explains the lack of slowdown when using them.


If I got this right what do I win? :D

Nope.

It's actually much simpler than that.

It's a secondary camera object that renders what it sees in F_SKY1. The skybox is actually contained within a whole sectioned-off part of the map.
 
There goes my sounding smart :V

I wonder what happens though if the part of the map the player is rendered on and the skybox camera collide, weird visual stuff? Or is it even possible for the level to ever 'reach' the skybox at all?
 
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