List of issues so far

[TheWonderFromDownUnder]

Hey, I've really been enjoying this mod so far, and am looking forward to potential updates of it in the future.

With that in mind, I've noticed some lingering issues in the updates, so I've compiled a list of all the issues (that I've noticed) as well as a few potential improvements that could help improve the mod. I'm sure you're probably aware of at least some of these already, but I hope that this will help to keep track of them and allow the mod to be improved further.

Big's Stone Puzzle:

• Extremely minor thing but having a special sound effect play upon completing the puzzle, like the sound for when the ice stone spawns, would make the puzzle's presence seem more natural.

TGS Mode:

• The screens associated with this mode display as they should in all resolutions at 4:3 but screw up at 16:9. Don't know if this can be fixed, but worth noting anyway.

Angel Island Door Animation:

• The door can sometimes be seen open, then closing well before the player approaches it.
• Also disappears from long distances, though to change would likely require raising its draw distance by an unreasonable amount.

Landing Animations:

• Knuckles' landing animation works as it should from a full jump, but not from a jump cancel/fall. When it does trigger, it strangely seems to change the direction Knuckles faces on its own sometimes. The cause of this is unknown but seems to happen most when facing forward.
• When landing from an aerial hammer attack (or hammer propeller in the Cool Amy mod), Amy will use the broken landing animation (lands, then falls on nothing).
• Don't know what happened here, but Gamma uses the walking animation in place of the idle animation with this on.
• Also, could you change the height for triggering the landing animation for holding things to the character's full jump height? As is, it's quite difficult to trigger outside of an adventure field, and the change would make it consistent with the normal landing requirement.

Animation Fixes and Additions:

• Another suggestion for a new fix; after landing from an aerial flip and walking off a ledge, Amy will sometimes use the walking/running animation instead of falling. This could be an obscure homage to the classic games (like in Sonic's post-Sky Chase 1 cutscene), but I doubt it given its strange and finicky execution.

  More Knuckles Animations:

• The transitions after the idle and post stage clear animations look off, likely because they were intended to transition into the normal standing animation instead of the alternate one. They could look more natural if the alternate transition for landing from a fall is inserted afterwards.

Fishing Music and Voices:

• The getting up animation after snapping the line doesn't play, at least for me.
• The game over line seems to get cut off by the game over screen. This could be resolved by having it play in place of the second line. It also doesn't play on Trial Mode, probably because the game isn't told to go to the game over screen there.

Water Sounds:

• I think the sound for exiting water should be played sooner, it seems delayed when doing a full jump out of the water.

Light Speed Charge Sound:

• Seems unpolished as of current. Doesn't reliably reset when charging multiple times in a row, nor does it loop. Should also cut out when performing the LS Dash/Attack.

Barrier Sound:

• The sound works as intended for green barrier but is broken for the electric barrier.

Knuckles Damage Voice:

• I'm aware that this is debatable, but I can’t help but feel the previous voice worked better for this situation. The new one sounds more exaggerated than the other ones, like a damage voice for the Knuckles mini-boss.
• Raising the volume of the voice is appreciated but does make it sound inconsistent with the other damage voices.

Knuckles and Amy Damage Voices:

• Inconsistent playback. Sometimes plays too late, sometimes doesn’t play at all, sometimes plays when it shouldn’t (e.g. In Knuckles’ Sky Deck, the cannons hitting him will trigger the voice, even after beating the level.)

Item Box Voices:

• Is there a way to make the sounds for Sonic and Tails unaffected by distance? (e.g. in Sonic's Speed Highway 2, collecting the Speed Shoes gives a muffled sound).

Ideas for New Additions:

• The Idle Voice Clips for mini-bosses (e.g. Sonic Vs. Knuckles uses the normal Mystic Ruins clip instead of the intended one).
• The O MUD object in Dilapidated Way. Meant to make the player character look dirtier as they went through the level. Also had an unused level palette(PL_9MB) with different specular lighting to accompany it.
• In early previews of SA(e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQYd-0AKCg8&t=19m6s), the Egg Carrier is seen glowing yellow as the lightning strikes. Given the presence of several unused brighter palettes for the exterior(PL_T1B and PL_T4B) that resemble the colours in the preview, it’s possible this effect could be recreated by having the game cycle through the palettes when the lightning strikes. A similar effect is used for the Past emerald shrine when it’s on fire, so this could be feasible. I won't pretend to know the potential difficulty in achieving such an effect, though, so not expecting it anytime soon.
• An option to use the early alternate palettes for Mystic Ruins(PL_MRD, PL_MRE and PL_MRN) would also be appreciated.

[PiKeyAr]

Sorry for jumping in, just wanted to leave a quick note re: the Egg Carrier lightning effect as I've been interested in implementing that too. At the moment manual palette blending between different PL files isn't implemented in Lantern Engine. The Past fire effect is a bit different because there the palettes are all in one PL file. A closer analogy would be Sky Deck, which at the moment is a hardcoded exception in Lantern Engine. So, to be able to implement this effect you'd need to wait for @michael-fadely to have support for blending between PL files in Lantern API. Same issue with the Casino mud object.

An alternative way of doing these effects is making custom PL files with the palettes required for these effects, and blending using those palettes. That's a much less "elegant" solution, though perfectly feasible even right now.

[TheWonderFromDownUnder]

Hi, I’ve noted the issues with the lighting effects, and understand the difficulties in such a task. While I would indeed like to see the effect in, I would prefer to see it put in in a more suitable way.

To continue from the original post, here are some additional things I’ve noticed since then.

SPR Task Display:

• Using DC Conversion's fade in/out cutscene skip button also activates SPR. This probably happens because the C button is also used in this instance for cutscene skipping.

Animation Fixes and Additions:

• Gamma's "jumping while holding something" animation looks strange compared to the other ones, the motion looks delayed, whereas the motions for other characters occur instantly. Could be another potential fix.

Item Box Voices:

• The discrepancy mentioned before could be fixed by allowing the option to use the Voice bank or Sound bank version of Sonic and Tails’ voices.
• Also appreciated would be switching the Invincibility and Speed Shoes voice clips to be consistent with each other (e.g. both make Sonic say, “Here we go!”, Tails says “Alright!” etc.) which would make them more consistent with how it’s handled in SA2. The same could also be said for getting the shields, but I like those voice clips being used for 1-ups as well(Sonic’s in particular makes for a neat CD call back).

Final Egg Act 1 Alarm:

• Has a similar discrepancy to the Item Box Voices one. Don’t know if a fix for it is as simple as the one for that, but at least, it would be preferable to have the sound stop permanently when you exit its area of effect.

Ideas for New Additions:

• In the E3 ‘99 preview of SA’s overseas release, there’s some strange unused voice clips in English and Japanese for Sonic, Tails, Amy, Big and Gamma(Knuckles, to my knowledge, doesn’t have English equivalents) that presumably could have been intended for playing with Chao. (Source: https://twitter.com/SPEEPSHighway/status/1135394333845348352 ) Of course, the final game doesn’t have much in the way of that, but it’d be cool to have these play when you pet the Chao. The one issue, of course, would be porting the voice clips. They’re from the E3 ’99 build, as I said, though Gamma’s, at least, are in the final(1779.adx to 1784.adx).
• An option to set Dilapidated Way’s start coordinates to the start of the tube to the right of the start point (for Sonic and Tails).
• A fix for Knuckles, Amy and Gamma’s grabbing actions (e.g. grabbing a Chao or an egg) so they don’t get interrupted by moving the analog stick away from the object, as with Sonic, Tails and Big.

Edit: A couple other things I wanted to note.

Animation Fixes and Additions:

• Gamma's "jumping while holding something" animation looks strange compared to the other ones, the motion looks delayed, whereas the motions for other characters occur instantly. Could be another potential fix.
• It's no secret of the game by now that Sonic has a unique action pose that he goes into when he jumps from a standstill. Despite being the only character with such a feature, all the other characters have animation slots for the same situation that's occupied by their standard idle animations (Except for Tails, who has a version of the idle that strangely plays at double speed, and Knuckles, which plays at double speed once then reverts to normal speed.) It'd be cool to see the other characters have unique animations for this instance (e.g. Tails could use his action stance from cutscenes like the pre-Egg Hornet scene, Knuckles and Gamma could use their character select stances etc.). To this end, an option to swap Sonic's action pose with his Autodemo pose, which is still used in some cutscenes, would be neat.
• I don't think anyone will argue, though, that the pre-Perfect Chaos fight cutscene, when Super Sonic flies upwards, would look a fair bit better if it used the Spring animation instead of the falling animation.