heyjoeway
commented
9 months ago Sorry it took so long to reply to this, but I guess I'll take this opportunity to explain what's been up and why the project went abandoned!
(Okay since I started writing this might actually turn into a sort of retrospective)
First off, I've got to return the thanks on fan upgrades with SCD Restored! I've had an absolute blast revisiting the game and I can't really go back after experiencing the QoL tweaks. While I'm at it I might as well take this opportunity to extend the same thanks to all the other community projects like REX, Absolute, Forever, and AIR. IMO you guys have taken these games the last mile they really needed to reach their true potential. I want people to see what I saw in these games as a kid and I believe this kind of work is crucial to expressing that.
I have a LOT of reasons for dropping S2CX, despite the mountain of work I put into it. The game was basically my "COVID project" after tinkering with GPGX a bit and finding out that getting basic widescreen going was stupidly simple. No, seriously, go look at the first commit for it, it was like 10 lines. The majority of the work in the emulator was spent packaging things and tracking down small bugs.
I chose the name "Community's Cut" partially as play on "Director's Cut", but more importantly because I wanted to see the kind of community that the decompilations have now garnered. By distributing the workload of developing mods and features among the community, progress is more likely to be consistent and doesn't get toppled by one person leaving. (Haha, ha. ha.) RetroScript, Lemon, and the way both engines handle assets is undeniably more accessible and modular for modding than romhacking and emulator hacks. This is the reason why other projects were able to much such progress so much faster.
Under the hood of S2CX's development is an absolute mountain of parsing cryptic crash screens, manually managing memory (RAM and VRAM), importing art, creating mappings, replacing systems including sound drivers and object management, doing major refactors to support simple features, on and on. Things that you really shouldn't have to deal with in the eyes of most to add a few features, sprites, or whatever else. I was prepared to go into this only because I have been modding classic Sonic games since I was 9.
My approach made it much easier to get an accurate product out the door, but not one that was prepared to be adopted by a community at large. When I started, the idea of a decompilation was a twinkle in the eyes of many. Despite that, I've always felt that if a decomp happened that it would be the way forwards, and I've stuck to it. On top of that, there's no reason that the decomps couldn't be MADE to be accurate! I'd really love to see someone directly port the character controller from 68K to RetroScript; I believe that would fix a good majority of the inaccuracies while keeping everything good about the new engine. I feel like this is only a matter of time.
So, that's why I stopped, right? No, I still had some plans on things to finish up, although a bit limited compared to what the community can accomplish. The more important reason is that my hierarchy of needs started getting a bit fucked. In the year since I've abandoned the project I've gotten married, got my Master's (after a pretty catastrophic fallout with my advisors), got a WIP house (just got electric run to it!), got a job that actually uses my skillset (which took like 4 months of getting ghosted), and experienced a lot, a LOT of grief, stress, and self-reflection. It's absolutely been the most insane time of my life, and something had to give. Which actually wasn't even just S2CX, but my Switch ports as well. I've also tried to focus some of my remaining free time to indie development, but even that just got fucked by the recent Unity bullshit. (John Riccitiello, xvyy lbhefrys rot13.)
If (when? idk i feel like it's inevitable at this point) I come back to the modding scene, my priority will be set to bringing all the features that haven't yet come from S2CX over. Seriously guys, no act transitions yet? Cmon.
Idk if this has been coherent at all but I think it's most of what's been on my mind. Also, after 9 years I finally got my wife to play through Sonic 2 for the first time yesterday. :)
PimpUigi
Hey Joeway, developer of Sonic CD Restored here. Nice to meet ya. ;p As someone who actually cares about preserving the original routes/speed tricks of Sonic games, I've been dismayed by projects that came after mine simply did not care at all about the original tricks. Sonic 1 Forever doesn't let you bounce combo over GHZ3 into the boss, S3Air removed bosses from Time Attack, and S2CX was the polar opposite end of this spectrum.
You preserved the accuracy and the faster glitchless routes due to the "built on the ROM" nature of the project. You have everything expected from the "Definitive" ports the community has recently become obsessed with and more.
I'm just going to leave this here as a token of thanks for your work.