Suggestions

[time gear]

While I do like the insta-shield, the split second nature of it's usage makes it mostly useless for new/casual players and gets the best mileage out of those who have practiced at it's high skill ceiling. It basically amounted to a game of perfect timing for avoiding damage from projectiles or extending the damage range of your jump to attack enemies. I question the usefulness of this for most players as a replacement for the much more obvious practicality of being able to stop your momentum on a dime.

I feel like adding on to what the shield does already would probably be a better alternative. Perhaps still stop your momentum on a dime if there's no target in range, but if there are enemies within a certain radius of you your momentum also gets transferred to them, pushing them away from you? Perhaps tossing badniks fast enough into walls could even do a hit point of damage? This could be useful for when you are moving at high speed and need a quick option to deal with a cluster of enemies, such as the occasional room in Egg Rock. If this could also be paired with the Thok, Sonic would get a lot of great use out of it.

 

[Jerry_Jalopy]

I'm new to the forums, so bare with me here. (Also understand that this is being written by a guy with minimal experience working with engines)

I suggest that the game migrate to a better engine to encourage longevity of the game's legacy. I realize that it's incredibly important for the game to hold that open source title, so I did some digging for doom-like engines that could be used, have an open source base, and is easy to access. I wanted to float around the idea of possibly migrating the game over to GoldSrc (Gold Source). I know what you're wondering, "That's owned by Valve and isn't open source! How could we work with that?". You're right, it won't work, however an engine designed around the GoldSrc engine named Xash3D, which as it stands, an open source GoldSrc engine. I have almost no practical skills in software engineering, however plan to develop my skills in doing so. At the earliest possibility for me to gain the skills and time required, I can start working on this, however that's a long term investment and I don't think I would be able to do that. I don't have any promises to make but it's something I think would be great for this game. Things like better rendering engines, some of the GoldSrc technology within the engine, and that sort of stuff can be utilized to it's fullest on Xash3D. And for those wondering in what relation to legacy Doom GoldSrc has, it is a derivative of the Quake engine, and for the most part uses similar formatting to that branch of engines. It even supports wads, amazing, right? I still need to do more research about Xash3D but from what I've seen about it, it's a logical enhancement as far as engines go.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the sprite billboarding, I'm sure that it can work on that engine, I don't recall any examples of it, however you can make that work in any game that can track something's facing position, which GoldSrc can do. Oh yeah, and multiplayer, the latest version actually does have it, and from the engine's page on ModDB it only seems to have problems with existing multiplayer maps for GoldSrc instead of ones made for Xash3D.

 

[Chezi]

I'm new to the forums, so bare with me here. (Also understand that this is being written by a guy with minimal experience working with engines)

I suggest that the game migrate to a better engine to encourage longevity of the game's legacy. I realize that it's incredibly important for the game to hold that open source title, so I did some digging for doom-like engines that could be used, have an open source base, and is easy to access. I wanted to float around the idea of possibly migrating the game over to GoldSrc (Gold Source). I know what you're wondering, "That's owned by Valve and isn't open source! How could we work with that?". You're right, it won't work, however an engine designed around the GoldSrc engine named Xash3D, which as it stands, an open source GoldSrc engine. I have almost no practical skills in software engineering, however plan to develop my skills in doing so. At the earliest possibility for me to gain the skills and time required, I can start working on this, however that's a long term investment and I don't think I would be able to do that. I don't have any promises to make but it's something I think would be great for this game. Things like better rendering engines, some of the GoldSrc technology within the engine, and that sort of stuff can be utilized to it's fullest on Xash3D. And for those wondering in what relation to legacy Doom GoldSrc has, it is a derivative of the Quake engine, and for the most part uses similar formatting to that branch of engines. It even supports wads, amazing, right? I still need to do more research about Xash3D but from what I've seen about it, it's a logical enhancement as far as engines go.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the sprite billboarding, I'm sure that it can work on that engine, I don't recall any examples of it, however you can make that work in any game that can track something's facing position, which GoldSrc can do. Oh yeah, and multiplayer, the latest version actually does have it, and from the engine's page on ModDB it only seems to have problems with existing multiplayer maps for GoldSrc instead of ones made for Xash3D.

I see the idea that you have and, in theory, that could work. The only issue is that SRB2 is an extremely old game. It has over 20 years of coding and porting that over would be an extremely tedious. Not to mention that the game may lose what makes it unique: a 3D Sonic game that's derived from the Doom engine. At this point, you'd might as well make an entirely new game from scratch, whether that be an original project or a sequel to SRB2. Sonic Robo Blast 2 has actually become somewhat of it's own engine as well, to the point where I am looking into making a full game using it's engine as a base sometime in the future.

I apologize if I somehow come off as aggressive and I look forward to your involvement with the community in the future.

 

[Jerry_Jalopy]

I see the idea that you have and, in theory, that could work. The only issue is that SRB2 is an extremely old game. It has over 20 years of coding and porting that over would be an extremely tedious. Not to mention that the game may lose what makes it unique: a 3D Sonic game that's derived from the Doom engine. At this point, you'd might as well make an entirely new game from scratch, whether that be an original project or a sequel to SRB2. Sonic Robo Blast 2 has actually become somewhat of it's own engine as well, to the point where I am looking into making a full game using it's engine as a base sometime in the future.

I apologize if I somehow come off as aggressive and I look forward to your involvement with the community in the future.

While true, it would lose some uniqueness, I think the title of being a GoldSrc engine game would be pretty noteworthy in of itself, considering that engine is pretty old too, almost as old as SRB2. One main thing to consider is the problems and the brick wall that is provided by the engine's limitations, it's quite old and migrating the engine would be better in the long term, even if in the short term it may pose some issues. The post I made here was more food for thought than an actual request

Edit: Just looked it up and yeah, same year. GoldSrc was made in 1998

 

[Twins'R'Okay]

words

While Quake's and Doom's engine share some similarities, Quake's engine is still within a completely different ball-park compared to Doom, mostly due to the fact that its one of the first engines to be actually fully 3D with polygons n shit.

I would also love to build Sonic levels out of brushes instead of sectors, but the truth of the matter is that, changing engines, no matter how similar they are (even if its a newer version of legacy), would undo the past 20+ years of progress due to the fact that SRB2's engine is so different from standard Legacy; The devs would probably need to rewrite everything in order to make it work.

It would work better in the longrun if we stick to the current engine we have now. Hell, there are some advances made in SRB2's engine that not even GZDoom has. (raising/lowering sloped fofs in realtime, floating polyobjects, translucent sloped fofs, etc.)

 

[Jerry_Jalopy]

While Quake's and Doom's engine share some similarities, Quake's engine is still within a completely different ball-park compared to Doom, mostly due to the fact that its one of the first engines to be actually fully 3D with polygons n shit.

I would also love to build Sonic levels out of brushes instead of sectors, but the truth of the matter is that, changing engines, no matter how similar they are (even if its a newer version of legacy), would undo the past 20+ years of progress due to the fact that SRB2's engine is so different from standard Legacy; The devs would probably need to rewrite everything in order to make it work.

It would work better in the longrun if we stick to the current engine we have now. Hell, there are some advances made in SRB2's engine that not even GZDoom has. (raising/lowering sloped fofs in realtime, floating polyobjects, translucent sloped fofs, etc.)

It's not like the existence of a Xash3D version would delete the other one. They can just fix up the Legacy Doom version of the game up to a definitive state, begin the porting process, then make the Xash3D version the main development branch. There is no mutual exclusivety between an enhanced version and it's original. It also reaching a definitive state would allow fans of that said original to move in and patch up that version. At that, why can't it be the inverse? A bunch of people with the know-how going and making said enhanced version with both existing

 

[Twins'R'Okay]

It's not like the existence of a Xash3D version would delete the other one. They can just fix up the Legacy Doom version of the game up to a definitive state, begin the porting process, then make the Xash3D version the main development branch. There is no mutual exclusivety between an enhanced version and it's original. It also reaching a definitive state would allow fans of that said original to move in and patch up that version. At that, why can't it be the inverse? A bunch of people with the know-how going and making said enhanced version with both existing

I guess that could work but moving from a pseudo 3D engine to a full 3D engine would still require rewriting the entire game into an engine the devs and community aren't familiar with.

 

[time gear]

I don't really see a reason for there being two official branches of SRB2 just so that one of them can be on a more advanced engine, and I don't see a need for SRB2 to change engines to begin with. Aside from the fact that everything would probably need to be rewritten from scratch, even if that weren't the case the fact of the matter is that in regards to longevity SRB2 is already popular as one of the better Sonic fangames, so the longevity of the game on the current engine isn't really even a blip on the radar. It's heavy capability to be modded makes it very easy for the community to keep the game alive for extended periods of time, and every time a major new release comes out the modding community spikes in activity again, keeping the cycle going.

The point is that while there probably would be some positives to come from moving to a new engine, there isn't really much of a need or demand for it, and there runs a risk of such a transition being an overall net negative when you take more factors into consideration, such as the impact such a thing could have on the community, the support for old mods and the heavy work that would be required to port them to the new engine (Probably even more than the usual work porting to newer versions), the rewriting of all the features present in the game up to present day as well as currently indev planned features, etc. There also runs the risk that due to unfamiliarity with the engine being ported to, certain features might not be able to be ported 1 to 1 within the rewrite, which could also result in some design elements such as level design, enemy AI behaviors, etc. needing to be changed to accommodate. There also runs the risk of a plethora of new bugs and glitches being introduced to the game during the porting process, which would then need to be fixed thus adding to the workload, etc.

Overall, such a thing would probably be better off handled by a separate team entirely making their own unique version of SRB2, but at that point it begs the question of why it should even be SRB2 anymore, and not a new fangame entirely. Perhaps if STJR gave this hypothetical new team their blessing, they could make the project into the often fabled/joked about SRB3, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

 

[Ace Dragon]

Regarding the idea of moving SRB2 to a Quake-based engine (as opposed to a Doom-based one), at this point it would be faster to deprecate the old software engine and binary format in favor of the OpenGL engine and the UDMF format (because at least everything will remain largely intact barring some porting work). With UDMF, building levels in Zone Builder can even be made to feel a little more like 3D modeling.

I know that software is not that bad these days, but OpenGL has true-color color maps for starters and a shader could be written to keep some form of color crunching while allowing a lot more than 256 colors (as a compromise if people don't want full true-color in textures and in sprites)

 

[NeonSRB2]

As my own suggestion, I would appreciate if there was smooth rotation, I'd usually save this for opengl, since software would be a pain to implement this for, but I think it would make a nice addition.

Though somebody could probably make that sorta thing as a merge request, I have no idea about C, so no way in hell could I make that myself.

 

[Giberish4]

For me, it would be to add motion blur as an option in later releases, similar to SRB2CB.
i would say something about super in match but i've already said that here twice

 

[Retroben]

I think it would be nice to add an option to change the window size so that on multiple scenarios,players could use either low resolution in a window and resize the window to fit their high resolution normally or also on low-performing hardware that can barely keep sufficient performance on anything other than small resolutions in software mode or average or larger resolutions on OpenGL mode.

That way if someone can get 1440p or 4K resolution on their desktop itself fine but can't run the game at 1920x1200 or even a less high resolution without hiccups or worse,they could still have it fit better regardless of the upscale setting so its easier to see and can keep access to their desktop if needed instead of going full screen and risking the instability of it.

On my end,I would like the option to make my window larger than 1920x1200 on my 4K screen even though it looks decent enough as-is.

Others out there who can barely keep good performance would benefit greatly from having access to change the window size when running at a much smaller scale internally so they don't have to squint their eyes at a tiny window size in windowed mode while avoiding the risky full screen mode (using resolutions other than native screen resolution on full screen could change it and mess up their desktop size) ,and the benefit of having access to proper multitasking with the game running.

 

[CST1229]

while avoiding the risky full screen mode (using resolutions other than native screen resolution on full screen could change it and mess up their desktop size)

That's never happened to me. I think that's an effect of exclusive fullscreen mode, which, when changing the desktop size, shows a black screen for a while on my monitor. In SRB2, switching between fullscreen and windowed is pretty much instant.
Or maybe you're using a really old version of the game that does use exclusive fullscreen?

 

[Ezer'Arch]

Improve AGZ* and SND* texture/flat set

Please improve these legacy textures from 1.09-2.0 era. Not only the beige, but also the yellow brick set.



The white-yellowish lines between blocks ruin the textures and cause walls to look really ugly from distance.

 

[Cosmic]

It would be cool if we could get a port for PS4 and Xbox. We've got switch and Android ports so why not PS4 and Xbox?

 

[Saladin786]

Would it be possible to do a level mod that resembles Sonic 3D Blast or Sonic Labryinth?

 

[lnferno]

Would it be possible to do a level mod that resembles Sonic 3D Blast or Sonic Labryinth?

This isn't for mod suggestions, in fact, mod suggestions are forbidden on the MB.

 

[Saladin786]

This isn't for mod suggestions, in fact, mod suggestions are forbidden on the MB.

Oh shoot, my bad

 

[time gear]

It might be helpful if common topics that keep popping up get pinned threads dedicated to them so the same topics don't get started over occasionally from scratch. What's your favorite video game, what's your favorite Sonic game, etc.

 

[Ezer'Arch]

Small suggestion: rename command listwad to listfiles, as it describes better the command.