Thursday, October 12, 2006

ProSonic Questions

I am willing to take up questions on ProSonic. I have been seeing some interesting discussions going on at different places and figure perhaps there's some things people have on their minds about ProSonic. Certainly the outline has answered a lot of questions, but I also understand that new questions are likely to come along as development continues. I will make an entire blog post dedicated to answering as many as I can. If you want to ask if a certain feature exists, questions about my recent commercial marketing plan or anything else related to ProSonic, ask it and I will try to answer it. I love seeing questions, but I don't like seeing people confused and making assumptions that simply aren't true (I have been seeing a good bit of that lately). Don't be afraid to ask questions!

I will say that claims that ProSonic won't support network play is flat wrong. I have mentioned dozens of times before that ProSonic will be multiplayer and will be able to run over a network. I plan to support up to 8 players (I might even double that already insane figure).

I also insist that $200 is a fair deal for the commercial license. I am actually considering raising it to $300. There is absolutely a 2D gaming market out there. It's not as big as the 3D gaming market, but it's still there and still has some energy in it. I don't expect many Sonic fans to pay $200 or $300 though. What I am hoping for is to attract companies to use my engine. Of course they can't make Sonic games and sell them -- that would be illegal! They could use my engine to make non-Sonic games though, and I believe my engine is flexible enough to support any type of game. The fee would be a per/title basis, so each game that is created to be sold would require a license. I would be willing to make a deal for companies who want to use it for several titles. Keep in mind however that this commercial license won't be available for a while now because ProSonic is still being developed!

On another topic, I visited my grandmother in the rehab center, and she's actually getting better I think. There's some color in her face, and she can talk slightly better now. She can more her right arm a little bit. She is looking better each day. I just hope she returns to normal, or at least 90%. The biggest thing above all is being able to walk again. Having her not able to walk ever again would be terrible.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! I have a question that isn't related to making a fangame with ProSonic, but in addition to this, I am also interested in production of my own Sonic game too, if I can get enough free time to work on it, and I'm very interested in the whole project.

Right now though, I'm trying to make my own detailed maps of as many Sonic levels as possible, as part of a very large scale website project I've been working on for quite a while now. I've been using the program called "SonEd", by Stealth, to load up the maps within roms, then I use a feature within it that can export the maps of the foreground layer as a .PCX image. I've successfully done this with all the levels for Sonics 1, 2, 3, &K, and intend to bring the .pcx's into Photoshop where I'll add object sprites and arrows, etc.

The problem is that on all the computers I've tried (three or four), I cannot get Sonic CD (PC) maps to load up in SonEd, even though it's supposed to be able to do it. It always just crashes. My question is, do you intend for ProSonic to include a similar feature, and allow maps to be exported (at their true scale) in .pcx or any other image format? If so, will this feature support the Sonic CD levels aswell?

If this feature will be included, that would really help me out of a pickle. My website project involves detailed guides of all (or most) of the games, and Sonic CD, perhaps more than any other, really could do with maps in which I can point out where the hidden objects and best places to time travel are, for example.

I'll be happy to elaborate if you don't understand what I mean at any point.

Thanks alot! =)

Anonymous said...

For the fee's will that just apply to if I wan't to publish, promote and sell my prosonic game, could I just make a game for free and distribute it for free.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry to hear about your grandmother's stroke, Damian. I hope her condition improves.

evilmarshyx - I'm sure that Damian is only referring to fees applying to commercial use, i.e. selling the game that you make.

Anonymous said...

Only 8 Timezones? But 256 acts? I'd think about Upping the timezone limit.

Damian said...

No there's 4 timezones (that's enough to do a Sonic CD thing with the Present, Past, Good Future, Bad Future). It supports 8 acts, and 256 zones. I'm not sure where you read 8 timezones and 256 acts, but that's wrong.

And these are good questions so far. I'd like to see some more though. Again I'll be answering all of these in a blog post.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I was looking around in your folder, and couldn't help but noticing that you have a pic where the debug mode SCORE numbers show the slope and speed instead of the position. How did you do that?!?!?

Anonymous said...

The answer to that, of course, is because the screenshot is of his engine, not the original game.

Because he built it himself, he can make the debug numbers show whatever he wants with relatively little hassle.

Anonymous said...

Same guy who made the comment above.
Nevermind, I misunderstood. I, too, am curious how he got Sonic 2's debug mode to display slope and speed.

Anonymous said...

it's not hard for Damian to hack a Sonic 2 ROM to get all the info that he needs.
some of you maybe don't know that he has been on the Sonic hacking scene for a lot of time, he also wrote a lot of interesting tools like one (off the top of my mind) that allows you to replace the SEGA voice with a custom sound effect. so editing the debug HUD isn't that hard for him.

oh, and Damian, Nice Work once again ;)

Anonymous said...

Sorry bout' the tmezones, Just haven't played SCD for a while.

-Breakshot

Anonymous said...

I'm the anonymous double-poster back up aways, I just realized that "other" doesn't require a login. (I thought it used OpenID, and I don't have one).

Anyway, I am aware that Damian knows his hacking, and kind of figured that the screenshot showing the slope and speed was very likely of a hacked ROM. But I was hoping for some slightly more technical details, as I'm doing some stuff with S3K, and knowing how to get that info displayed would help enormously.

As it happens, though, I managed to find it in a RAM Search with a version of Gens I modified myself.

PS: I don't really have a public webpage, so the link is broken.

Anonymous said...

An engine initially designed to mimic Sonic...

I'm not sure that I'm 100% with my copyright law on this, but if you explicitly model an engine to mimic another game, I'm pretty sure you can't distribute it commercially. And I doubt you could even honestly state that you haven't reverse-engineered Sonic related content before... and I'm pretty sure you said you were going to use the knowledge you obtained from disecting the Sonic games to make this project.

So lets be perfectly straight here... If you sell this, there is a good chance you get sued. If you sell it to developers who sell something with it, that chance probably is a certainty. And... given the history of the project, you'd probably lose if you got sued.

I'm not going to say with certainty that it can't be done, I'm just saying... that there is a cold chance in hell that its legal.