Sonic 2 HD Tech Demo
Death of Rats
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So the Sonic 2 HD team has released the first playable tech demo.
If you have any problems running the demo (which is Windows ONLY), download these DLLs.
Please note that everything in this is temporary, even the Sonic sprite. The demo is mainly to show off the engine our programer LoST has been working on.
The grass will look a little more like this, as well as the block tiles.
Controls/About:
BASIC CONTROLS
Move the keyboard to move Sonic on the floor
S=Jump
A=Negate Gravity
Down+Jump=Spindash
The 3 versions are not the same
Please try all three of them - each has a diff. zoom (It's just a Zoom Effect, the game will be seen at the 4X Res). I suggest to try S2HD_TechDemo_4x.exe first. We included the smaller 1x and 2x resolutions because level scrolling is still being developed - so the idea was to give everyone space to move around by having a smaller Sonic in a bigger level. Also, full screen may not work for some in this work in progress demo. Please report your system specs if this is the case.
TRICKS
Wait the main title screen for more than 10 seconds will put in the secret Credits Scene.
=======================================
SONIC 2 HD TECH DEMO CONTENTS
=======================================
1. System Requirements
2. The Sonic 2 HD Project
3. The History of Sonic 2 HD
4. Joining us & Contact Information
5. Legal Disclaimer
=====================
1. System Requirements
=====================
We are testing these early engine builds with the highest
quality settings during development, so as to estabilish
the required specs to run at the "FULL HD" (1080p) resolution.
Low resolution compatible specs will be included in the next releases.
This tech demo could run at almost full speed on slower PCs,
so please note that these specs are not at all final. Please
report bugs or any other issues in our release thread on the Sonic
Retro forums.
The recommended system requirements are as follows:
Graphics card:
- 512 MB graphics RAM.
- The graphics card must be able to render multiple 3d primitives
with post pixel shader effects (Direct3D 9 and Pixel Shader 2.0 compatible)
in "FULL HD" (1080p) resolution at a rate of 60 frames per second.
CPU and RAM:
- 2.4 GHz
- 2 GB RAM
Operating System:
- Microsoft Windows XP SP2 32-bit
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2 32-bit
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultra Edition 32-bit
- (DirectX 9.0c or higher)
Joystick/Gamepad:
- Something DirectInput compatible with 8 buttons or so.
=====================
2. The Sonic 2 HD Project
=====================
The S2HD project is a Sonic Retro open community endeavour. Its purpose is
to remaster Sega's classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with high definition (HD)
graphics and music, whilst at the same time precisely preserving the original
gameplay (that continues to set quality standards to this day).
S2HD will not be limited only to presenting a beautiful graphical and musical
version of the original. New features that were not present in the original
will also be made available. Some examples are especially the online multiplayer
modes and extra levels.
=====================
3. The History of Sonic 2 HD
=====================
The idea of creating a high definition version of Sega's classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2
first appeared on a website called "Alchemist Defined". An artist calling himself
Billy had drawn an incredibly impressive piece of artwork, which showed Sonic about
to fight the last boss of the game in the "Death Egg Zone". The low-resolution sprites
were richly brought to life in this phenomenal piece of artwork: both the background
and the characters had been completely remastered. A number of video gaming websites
quickly discovered the image and were soon showing it off on their homepages.
The question had been posed; "What would Sonic 2 look like in high definition?"
The "Sonic Retro" community had always taken a keen interest in all things related to
Sonic's classical era. On December 6th 2007, a member of this community
called "Athelstone" found Billy's image and excitedly posted it in the General discussion
forums, while asking the very same question - what would it be like?. The thread was
soon moved to the "Creative Works" section of the forum.
Three months later, on March 8th 2008, a member of Sonic Retro called "Vangar"
created a discussion thread asking for a game engine he could use to start work
on such a project. The thread gained a surprising amount of interest! Many members
of the community quickly began to post concept images of what the game ought to
look like. To begin with, fans would merely apply graphical filters to the original
low-resolution graphics. A member called "Yarharhar" then posted an image of a
completely remastered Sonic, along with a method describing how he had drawn it!
It was not long until a member of the community called "Vincent" was so inspired
by Yarharhar's effort, that he took it upon himself to begin remastering a whole
set of Sonic's character frames. Sonic 2 HD had begun!
However, the most difficult tasks still lay ahead of the project. How would we
organize ourselves to achieve this goal? What game engine would be used to make
it a reality? One possibility was to use a modified Genesis emulator, which would
display the graphics from the original game ROM in high definition. However, it was
decided that this would be far too limiting for the project. This is because the
bugs and slow downs from the original game would be replicated, rather than fixed
and improved upon. It would also be impossible to expand upon the project if its
foundation was just an emulator.
Another possibility was to use a custom made engine that had already been created.
A member of the community called "Taxman" had already created a popular Sonic
engine called "Retro Sonic". Unluckily, the physics in his engine were not yet
close enough to the original genesis series for it to be used (despite the fact
that Taxman's engine boasted an incredibly impressive level development kit for
designing original Sonic levels). It was likely that Taxman would eventually perfect
the physics in his engine - but rather than wait for him to accomplish this, the
community thirsted for the Sonic 2 HD project to move forward.
After a time, a staff team had been formed. Since Vincent had already remastered
many of Sonic's frames, he became the project leader and the lead artist.
A member called "SANiK" had even created an online database, which allowed
contributors to upload all of their artwork, while members "Athelstone" and
"Blue Streak" coordinated some of the community's contributions while giving
suggestions and guidance to other project staff. Eventually, the administrators
of Sonic Retro granted us our own community forum for the Sonic 2 HD project -
but we still didn't have an engine!
Members of the community were starting to cast doubt upon the project - was it
really going to become a reality or not? Then, out of the blue, a long-running
member of the community called "LOst" privately informed the project staff that
he had already been developing his own engine for a number of years and would
like to be a part of the project. The staff were astounded at the accuracy of
his physics, since they were based upon Sonic 3 (which fixed many of the bugs
present in Sonic 2's physics). We finally had an engine! On September 15th 2008
the first technical demo of Sonic 2 HD was released - Sonic has returned!
=======================================
4. Joining us & Contact Information
=======================================
Want to help us? Are you an artist or skilled musician? You're welcome to join us!
Please register at the Sonic Retro forums at http://forums.sonicretro.org and
click on the "Community Projects" section. Please read our contribution rules
and guidelines first before posting an example of your work in the relevant topic.
If your work is of a high standard, it is likely that you will be invited to join
our staff. We need:
- Character / Enemies artists: To remaster sprites of characters and enemies
(the use of vector programs like Illustrator or Flash is preferred).
- Background artists: Drawing either backgrounds to be used as Level Tiles for
levels or menu screens.
- Concept artists: To throw together mockups of what the project should be aiming
to artistically achieve.
- Music composers: Either Real instruments or Synthetized music, our engine finally
accepts .OGG audio files. All remasterings must follow the original Sonic 2 tunes.
- Artists to draw an opening and ending sequence.
If you want to contact S2HD Staff, just send us a private message on the Sonic Retro forums.
=====================
5. Legal Disclaimer
=====================
"Sonic 2 HD" is in no way affiliated with Sega® or Sonic Team®.
The copyrights of "Sonic The Hedgehog" and all associated characters,
names, terms, art, and music thereof belong to Sega®. All registered trademarks
and copyrights belong to Sega® and Sonic Team®. "Sonic 2 HD" is a non-profit
endeavour created by fans. No financial gain whatsoever is made from project efforts.
No intent to infringe said copyrights or registered trademarks is made by contributors of
"Sonic 2 HD".
Move the keyboard to move Sonic on the floor
S=Jump
A=Negate Gravity
Down+Jump=Spindash
The 3 versions are not the same
Please try all three of them - each has a diff. zoom (It's just a Zoom Effect, the game will be seen at the 4X Res). I suggest to try S2HD_TechDemo_4x.exe first. We included the smaller 1x and 2x resolutions because level scrolling is still being developed - so the idea was to give everyone space to move around by having a smaller Sonic in a bigger level. Also, full screen may not work for some in this work in progress demo. Please report your system specs if this is the case.
TRICKS
Wait the main title screen for more than 10 seconds will put in the secret Credits Scene.
=======================================
SONIC 2 HD TECH DEMO CONTENTS
=======================================
1. System Requirements
2. The Sonic 2 HD Project
3. The History of Sonic 2 HD
4. Joining us & Contact Information
5. Legal Disclaimer
=====================
1. System Requirements
=====================
We are testing these early engine builds with the highest
quality settings during development, so as to estabilish
the required specs to run at the "FULL HD" (1080p) resolution.
Low resolution compatible specs will be included in the next releases.
This tech demo could run at almost full speed on slower PCs,
so please note that these specs are not at all final. Please
report bugs or any other issues in our release thread on the Sonic
Retro forums.
The recommended system requirements are as follows:
Graphics card:
- 512 MB graphics RAM.
- The graphics card must be able to render multiple 3d primitives
with post pixel shader effects (Direct3D 9 and Pixel Shader 2.0 compatible)
in "FULL HD" (1080p) resolution at a rate of 60 frames per second.
CPU and RAM:
- 2.4 GHz
- 2 GB RAM
Operating System:
- Microsoft Windows XP SP2 32-bit
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2 32-bit
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultra Edition 32-bit
- (DirectX 9.0c or higher)
Joystick/Gamepad:
- Something DirectInput compatible with 8 buttons or so.
=====================
2. The Sonic 2 HD Project
=====================
The S2HD project is a Sonic Retro open community endeavour. Its purpose is
to remaster Sega's classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with high definition (HD)
graphics and music, whilst at the same time precisely preserving the original
gameplay (that continues to set quality standards to this day).
S2HD will not be limited only to presenting a beautiful graphical and musical
version of the original. New features that were not present in the original
will also be made available. Some examples are especially the online multiplayer
modes and extra levels.
=====================
3. The History of Sonic 2 HD
=====================
The idea of creating a high definition version of Sega's classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2
first appeared on a website called "Alchemist Defined". An artist calling himself
Billy had drawn an incredibly impressive piece of artwork, which showed Sonic about
to fight the last boss of the game in the "Death Egg Zone". The low-resolution sprites
were richly brought to life in this phenomenal piece of artwork: both the background
and the characters had been completely remastered. A number of video gaming websites
quickly discovered the image and were soon showing it off on their homepages.
The question had been posed; "What would Sonic 2 look like in high definition?"
The "Sonic Retro" community had always taken a keen interest in all things related to
Sonic's classical era. On December 6th 2007, a member of this community
called "Athelstone" found Billy's image and excitedly posted it in the General discussion
forums, while asking the very same question - what would it be like?. The thread was
soon moved to the "Creative Works" section of the forum.
Three months later, on March 8th 2008, a member of Sonic Retro called "Vangar"
created a discussion thread asking for a game engine he could use to start work
on such a project. The thread gained a surprising amount of interest! Many members
of the community quickly began to post concept images of what the game ought to
look like. To begin with, fans would merely apply graphical filters to the original
low-resolution graphics. A member called "Yarharhar" then posted an image of a
completely remastered Sonic, along with a method describing how he had drawn it!
It was not long until a member of the community called "Vincent" was so inspired
by Yarharhar's effort, that he took it upon himself to begin remastering a whole
set of Sonic's character frames. Sonic 2 HD had begun!
However, the most difficult tasks still lay ahead of the project. How would we
organize ourselves to achieve this goal? What game engine would be used to make
it a reality? One possibility was to use a modified Genesis emulator, which would
display the graphics from the original game ROM in high definition. However, it was
decided that this would be far too limiting for the project. This is because the
bugs and slow downs from the original game would be replicated, rather than fixed
and improved upon. It would also be impossible to expand upon the project if its
foundation was just an emulator.
Another possibility was to use a custom made engine that had already been created.
A member of the community called "Taxman" had already created a popular Sonic
engine called "Retro Sonic". Unluckily, the physics in his engine were not yet
close enough to the original genesis series for it to be used (despite the fact
that Taxman's engine boasted an incredibly impressive level development kit for
designing original Sonic levels). It was likely that Taxman would eventually perfect
the physics in his engine - but rather than wait for him to accomplish this, the
community thirsted for the Sonic 2 HD project to move forward.
After a time, a staff team had been formed. Since Vincent had already remastered
many of Sonic's frames, he became the project leader and the lead artist.
A member called "SANiK" had even created an online database, which allowed
contributors to upload all of their artwork, while members "Athelstone" and
"Blue Streak" coordinated some of the community's contributions while giving
suggestions and guidance to other project staff. Eventually, the administrators
of Sonic Retro granted us our own community forum for the Sonic 2 HD project -
but we still didn't have an engine!
Members of the community were starting to cast doubt upon the project - was it
really going to become a reality or not? Then, out of the blue, a long-running
member of the community called "LOst" privately informed the project staff that
he had already been developing his own engine for a number of years and would
like to be a part of the project. The staff were astounded at the accuracy of
his physics, since they were based upon Sonic 3 (which fixed many of the bugs
present in Sonic 2's physics). We finally had an engine! On September 15th 2008
the first technical demo of Sonic 2 HD was released - Sonic has returned!
=======================================
4. Joining us & Contact Information
=======================================
Want to help us? Are you an artist or skilled musician? You're welcome to join us!
Please register at the Sonic Retro forums at http://forums.sonicretro.org and
click on the "Community Projects" section. Please read our contribution rules
and guidelines first before posting an example of your work in the relevant topic.
If your work is of a high standard, it is likely that you will be invited to join
our staff. We need:
- Character / Enemies artists: To remaster sprites of characters and enemies
(the use of vector programs like Illustrator or Flash is preferred).
- Background artists: Drawing either backgrounds to be used as Level Tiles for
levels or menu screens.
- Concept artists: To throw together mockups of what the project should be aiming
to artistically achieve.
- Music composers: Either Real instruments or Synthetized music, our engine finally
accepts .OGG audio files. All remasterings must follow the original Sonic 2 tunes.
- Artists to draw an opening and ending sequence.
If you want to contact S2HD Staff, just send us a private message on the Sonic Retro forums.
=====================
5. Legal Disclaimer
=====================
"Sonic 2 HD" is in no way affiliated with Sega® or Sonic Team®.
The copyrights of "Sonic The Hedgehog" and all associated characters,
names, terms, art, and music thereof belong to Sega®. All registered trademarks
and copyrights belong to Sega® and Sonic Team®. "Sonic 2 HD" is a non-profit
endeavour created by fans. No financial gain whatsoever is made from project efforts.
No intent to infringe said copyrights or registered trademarks is made by contributors of
"Sonic 2 HD".
Anyhow, we need tons of people checking out this demo, mainly to spread the word and get more people interested in contributing to the project, but also to weed out bugs that people may encounter. Hope you guys enjoy it.
No I don't.
Death of Rats on
0
Posts
I'm not at home, so no sound.
What's up with Knuckles? All pixely.
I kinda wish I hadn't played it, because I want the full game now.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Knuckles seem to be using the original sprite, whereas Sonic is one these guys made.
I haven't heard of any other Sonic 2 HD projects. I think TSR said that they were gonna use his engine, which woul mean that TSR is this LOst guy.
What's up with fullscreen being 1280x960? It makes fullscreen impossible for people like me with screens running at 1280x800 (or lower). Aren't the HD consoles usually running at 1280x720?
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
So, how long until SEGA shuts this down? I mean, it always happens to people who seem to make better fan remakes than what the actual copyright holders release (ie. Chrono Resurrection and Payne & Redemption, for example).
As far as resolutions and the art goes, this isn't really to show off the "HDness" of the project, but more to show off the engine. Knuckles is only included to show that the character traits associated with Knuckles can be replicated in engine (gliding, climbing). Seeing how Knuckles isn't even in Sonic 2 we haven't been working on sprites for him.
As I understand it, we do plan on having the game in widescreen, at full 1080p resolution. At the moment that stuff isn't implimented because, well, this is just a tech demo. By the time we have anything really playable, we'll have all that good stuff in the game.
The rest of the tiles were thrown together by Lost as a last minute place holder. The next release of the tech demo should have the more official tiles.
Also, this whole thing got my blog 46,918 hits, and counting.
Edit: I mean look at this -
?
Chrono Resurrection wasn't a game but a tech demo that was used to advertise the creators. It wasn't shutdown until after they tried to bring it to E3 or something of the sort. It didn't look that great anyways.
It's too bad to hear that TSR kind of hasn't been heard from. He's a really smart and talented programmer, at least in my opinion; even though he's not shooting for game programming/design as a career choice and is no longer studying compsci in school. Last I heard anyway.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Oh, we'll get to that, but making Sonic 2 HD is the first priority. I'm hoping if all goes well with this we'll also do Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Knuckles in Sonic 2.
Let me tell you about Demon's Souls....
I don't think they've ever shut down a fan game for as long as I can remember. The difference with this one, though, is that it's not an original fan game, but a prettier Sonic 2. So I don't know how it's going to turn out.
I wonder what's going on with him? He seems to have dropped out of sight lately.
I sent him a copy of DBZ: Burst Limit for him to review, never heard anything from him since. This was back when it first came out (June).
Yeah, I haven't seen him around that much.
Granted, I've been away from GnT.
Still, this looks awesome, I'll have to download it.
But anyway, the engine is rather nice, and sonic's sprite is perfect. He's smirking
Not permanently.