Topic: Sonic the Hedgehog (GEN) *Redux*

[TerraEsperZ]

(This thread is a continuation from this messy and outdated one)

Thanks to feos' effort, I've recently switched Genesis emulator and have been using Gens-ReRecording instead of plain old Gens for the last week or so. Thanks to its much more flexible nature, it's made it a lot easier to map Genesis games properly. As such, I've decided to re-do and complete my maps for the first Sonic the Hedgehog game. The re-do is mainly because Gens-RR uses a slightly different palette than Gens and also because I can now (with some work) freeze moving platforms in their initial positions.

I've decided to try and make better backgrounds than before; hope you like the improvements. Just like my earlier attempt, I'm still not going to force the whole map to conform to the game's 256 x 256 patterns on account of having sprites floating in mid-air would look stupid. These maps show all that can be accessed in-game with Debug-Mode; if you want complete but less aesthetic maps, you can go to The Sonic Center instead.

*Note that these maps aren't final and haven't been labeled or fully optimized*

Green Hill Zone Act 1:


Green Hill Zone Act 2:


*Added 17/06/12*
Green Hill Zone Act 3:


*Added 26/06/12*
Marble Zone Act 1:

[TerraEsperZ]

Updated first post with Green Hill Zone Act 3.

I normally would be farther along on this project but my computer has been slowly dying over the last few weeks and increasingly frequent crashes from overheating are really driving my productivity into the ground. Hopefully I'll have a new machine by the end of the week so I can actually get more work done.

[avalanch]

Just be sure to zip em up & burn them first   That or try to salvage the HDD into the new machine.

Also, there's about 15KB shaved from those imageshack images.

Click on the optimize images tab to grab em.

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.vgmaps.com/b7CRp6E5

Updated first post with Green Hill Zone Act 3.

I normally would be farther along on this project but my computer has been slowly dying over the last few weeks and increasingly frequent crashes from overheating are really driving my productivity into the ground. Hopefully I'll have a new machine by the end of the week so I can actually get more work done.

[TerraEsperZ]

You should know that I rarely post finished maps unless a project is close to completion. I'd waste too much time re-optimizing everything any time I changed my mind about some little detail. I usually post PNG files that had their color palette reduced if possible since that only takes a few seconds to do and cuts the file size by about 60% on average. A final optimization is only done once everything is finished and I'm reasonably sure there are no longer any mistakes to fix.

I added a note to the opening post to clarify this.

[TerraEsperZ]

Updated first post with Marble Zone Act 1.

Not much has changed from the original version I did except all the moving platforms are now in their starting position and I used dithering to point out the hidden passage near the end of the level, though I'm not sure if I'll keep it like that. I also tried filling the sky with clouds but it actually looked worse like that instead of with a small cloud layers like what I actually ended up doing.

Freezing the platforms wasn't easy because there didn't seem to be a single counter for them like for the Sonic Advance games on the GBA. I instead found 16 different counters for simple moving objects like platforms and blocks, all increasing and decreasing at different rates, but they don't seem to work for some of the more complex objects like the disappearing platforms in Scrap Brain Zone or the platforms moving around on belts in Labyrinth Zone. I might run into some trouble yet .

[Troy Lundin]

Are the black areas really black in the game or just areas you cannot get to?

[TerraEsperZ]

In Green Hill Zone, anything black absolutely *cannot* be reached in any way. Extracting the maps from the game shows there is some data there, but showing it would result in spikes floating in mid-air for example so I don't show it and stick to a 'visible in-game only" template. In Marble Zone, you can go everywhere in Debug Mode but the black sections are all empty and unreachable by normal means anyway while playing so I don't consider them as part of the map. I *could* fill this void with either lava or bricks but since there's nothing there and I don't like to add stuff that's not there, I prefer to keep it black.

[DarkWolf]

I can't wait to see Scrap Brain Zone 3.  I've always taken the shortcut to beat the stage, so I've never really explored the zone.