A playable build of the cancelled Sega Saturn game: Sonic Xtreme has been found. - Games

A playable build of the cancelled Sega Saturn game: Sonic Xtreme has been found.

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Via NeoGAF: [QUOTE=Krejlooc]THIS DOES NOT RUN ON SEGA SATURN SYSTEMS. It's been a long, weird road, but it looks like we finally have every bit of Sonic Xtreme ever worked on. A member of Sonic Retro and Assembler has his hands on Ofer's source code for Sonic Xtreme and has successfully built the binary, and is sending it out to a few people to test to make sure the game actually runs. In his possession is the final source, including source codes for the level editor and some files needed to turn your PC into a Dev Kit. Some background on Sonic Xtreme, as many likely don't know the entire story. Sonic Xtreme was Sega of America's project while Sonic Team was working on NiGHTS, it was intended to be THE Sonic game for "next-gen" platforms. The roots of Sonic Xtreme trace back to the Genesis days, when Chris Senn originally pitched the game as an isometric scrolling game: [t]http://i.imgur.com/4glBomg.jpg[/t] The game wasn't approved as is, but rather proposed to be moved to the then-in-development Sega 32X, under the name Sonic Mars. A pitch video, made on an Amiga 1200, has survived of what they envisioned Sonic Mars running as: [t]http://i.imgur.com/WzvTFIL.jpg[/t] Mock-up of the pitch video, and the actual pitch-video: [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjuPHeNTcWs[/url] The game was eventually OKed for the upcoming Sega Saturn, where it was positioned to be THE Sonic game for the system. Originally, the SoA team managed to get their hands on Yuji Naka's NiGHTS engine and had intended to use said engine for boss battles on the game: Footage of the NiGHTS engine being used for bosses: [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajuzf79476Y[/url] Some executives saw this and demanded the entire game be made with this engine, scrapping an early-in-development normal-stage engine they were working on in the process. Eventually, a small test of this engine leaked as a binary that can run on stock saturns: [url]http://i.imgur.com/NZAkLt2.png[/url] Early version of the engine, that has leaked. It continued being worked upon, because leaks like this have popped up online: [t]http://i.imgur.com/JaKqAxl.jpg[/t] This version featured improved graphics, morphing ground (ala soft museum in NiGHTS), and a 3D sonic. Unfortunately, Yuji Naka got wind that they were using his prized engine, and threatened to leave sega unless they stopped using his work. Rather than lose Yuji Naka, SoA yanked the NiGHTS engine from the team, leaving them about a year into the project with absolutely nothing to show for it. At this point, a third complete rewrite of the game began, and this is essentially the Sonic Xtreme everybody remembers: [t]http://i.imgur.com/k8i1fih.jpg[/t] [t]http://i.imgur.com/eUUNdJM.jpg[/t] [t]http://i.imgur.com/vVYs7hw.jpg[/t] [t]http://i.imgur.com/A8wsKhH.jpg[/t] Several years ago, Chris Senn, one of the lead developers for the game, leaked everything he still had of the project from this build. he revealed in the process that this build of the game was never running on a Saturn, but rather was a PC build of the game by Ofer Alon, the main programmer. Senn had everything from this build except the actual game engine, but that meant not only all the tiles and arts and assets, but also the actual level files. In 2010, SaNIK, at Sonic Retro, built a model viewer for these levels after a few guys, including myself, cracked the level format from these files. His viewer worked with OpenGL and let you clip through the levels and explore them as non-playable representations of the levels themselves. Senn couldn't release the engine as he didn't have access to it, but for the most part, we had everything related to Sonic Xtreme except the game itself. Senn released the following videos proving the engine build still existed, though: [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzvS_beXtXk[/url] [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq_iPxQsbm0[/url] [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOd0mQ-uXE[/url] interestingly, the final video states "Saturn version," which is odd because the game is a PC executable. That didn't make sense... until now. Back in 1995, Sega launched the Sega PC initiative, which would have coincided with Sonic Xtreme's development. The heart of their initiative was a partnership with Nvidia to produce nvidia's first GPU, the NV1. The NV1 is a 3D accelerator video card that, unlike modern video cards, rendered in Quads rather than 3-pointed polygons, much like the saturn. The NV1 also includes Sega Saturn controller ports, and an audio processor making it an all-in-one card for playing Sega PC games. Only 5 games support the card - Virtua Fighter Remix, Battle Arena Toshinden, NASCAR, Panzer Dragoon, and a special version of Descent. The full source for the above versions of Sonic Xtreme have finally leaked and been built. They use the NV1 SDK, which wasn't available to normal consumers of the NV1, to build, which essentially turned your Windows 95 box into a Sega Saturn development kit. Inside the source for this leak are stubs for a Sega Saturn build option. The game looks a good 70% complete, and includes the source for a level editor. The engine will only run on a Windows 95 machine with a Diamond Edge NV1. Senn had long conceded that all the "levels" shown were thrown together in 10 minutes for the purpose of getting some screenshots out to magazines, and exploring SaNIK's model viewer made that obvious, as the levels are meandering without purpose. However, given how relatively complete the engine is, and that the game includes the source to the level editor itself, it wouldn't be out of the possibility for fans to actually complete this game. Next steps would have been finalizing the engine, building some levels, and programming some bosses. The person behind the leak doesn't have an NV1 card himself, but he's built the binaries and is sending them my way to test on my NV1 card. Hopefully I can post some videos of the game running locally at my place soon enough. This is pretty exciting and essentially the holy grail of the Sonic Community. FINALLY Sonic Xtreme has been unearthed. For me personally, this is the long culmination of years and years worth of research and leads and dead ends. I have personally been looking for this release since about 1999 when I first started speaking to people at Sega and past programmers about this. I had actually doubted we'd ever get our hands on Ofer's engine, this is an incredibly exciting time and I'm pretty honored to be the guinea pig to test this stuff out to confirm if the build is working. Very exciting day, just so happened to coincide with a day I had taken off from work.[/QUOTE] tl;dr A long time member of the Sonic community has gotten a hold of someone who has a playable build of Sonic Xtreme. Due to hardware restrictions it is currently awaiting release. It's possible this may be a hoax, but the guy has been active since ~1997 so him breaking his trust after all these years seems very unlikely. PS: Is there a Sonic general here? I went about four pages down and couldn't find it. EDIT: The thread if anyone wants to get the source directly: [url]http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=925240[/url]

The OP of that thread has stated that it may be possible to run the game under software mode, removing the NV1 requirement. Also note that the levels have no end and are mostly garbage as they were just used to demo the game engine.

judging from what ive read on the assemblr games forum is that its the later 3d model sonic version, unless i misread?

I hope they weren't seriously considering that fish eye effect for the camera. It looks like it would have been an amazing game though. I'm disappointed that they gave up on it instead of working on it some more.

[QUOTE=IceWarrior98;46417529]I hope they weren't seriously considering that fish eye effect for the camera. It looks like it would have been an amazing game though. I'm disappointed that they gave up on it instead of working on it some more.[/QUOTE] They were, and to my knowledge the build that's being leaked is the fish eye one. [editline]5th November 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=uaredead2020;46417558]pretty sure people on the team died while making it right?[/QUOTE] Two people almost died; Ofer contracted pneumonia but it's unknown as to what illness Chris Senn had.

This is awesome. I can't wait to download it once they release it. Maybe if they fix it up to run on a Saturn, people could make reproduction copies of it, like they did with Mother and the early SNES Shin Megami Tensei games.

[QUOTE=Blueridge;46417589]They were, and to my knowledge the build that's being leaked is the fish eye one. [editline]5th November 2014[/editline] Two people almost died; Ofer contracted pneumonia but it's unknown as to what illness Chris Senn had.[/QUOTE] Chris Senn IIRC went Sakurai on trying to complete the game. He would sleep in the office and pretty much be constantly working on it. [video=youtube;HLPk2rGgg7s]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLPk2rGgg7s[/video] Sonic Xtreme's story is pretty heart breaking. This guy's series of videos on it chronicles it pretty well. Or you can go to Chris Senn's website and read all about it.

[QUOTE=Krejlooc] So alright, just a bit of background on this project, it's being worked on by a veteran of the industry, so when he gives estimates as to how long this will take to finally reach people, understand that it's an expert giving you those time frames. The problem with the release in possession is that it's a series of zip file backups from 1996 along with a clone image of a person's entire development PC. What's going on now is that we're piecing together the environment exactly as the people working on Sonic Xtreme had theirs so that we can build their code. If you're unfamiliar with what a development environment is or how one works, you might want to take a look at my Dreamcast game thread. I have neglected it (sorry, but I haven't forgotten!) so all that is there right now is a tutorial for building a development environment from scratch to build dreamcast games with. This guy is trying to piece together a Nvidia NV1 development environment the same way, only with infinitely less resources available to him. Even worse, he's jumping into someone's source code that is non-commented and undocumented and only half complete. Parts of the source, for example, expect files to be in exact locations on the computer - which is fine, but it takes time to set up his computer to build like that. He already has a skeleton build working, by commenting out basically everything he can build an executable that calls the NV1 library and does absolutely nothing. It's going to take a few weeks before we can build a fully functional executable, but the exciting thing is that we have everything possible to do so. The guy has an NV1 in the mail going to him, along with some saturn development equipment. This is a hobby for us, not a job, so keep in mind that getting this stuff to a state where anybody can play it will take time, but the most important thing is we have this in our possession. It will never be lost again. Now, onto the specifics of what I got to see - namely the source code. I can confirm with my own two eyes that this is indeed the real deal source and it's crazy. We have 5 builds of this from various states of Ofer's work. Early on, we have a partially completed build where Ofer was in the middle of transferring his work over from a software renderer he built to the actual NV1 hardware, which is where we think we can get the software renderer working again. Everything actually builds from the same source - saturn, PC, and mac - but it's the absolute thinnest abstraction layer you could possibly imagine. Functions like "draw polygon" overloaded with the brunt of the work being done in these sorts of calls, lol. So, midway through these builds, you can see the source transform into something more dependent on the NV1, and the build options whittle to PC and Saturn, ditching mac, and eventually to PC only. You can evidently get this running on a saturn no problem using a cartdev kit (the dsk images don't contain the actual binary, only the peripheral files to be loaded through the serial port on the saturn) but it runs at like 3 fps. Eventually, the build options whittled down further to just PC. Now, the craziest part - 4 months after the final build we have from Ofer, we have another build from POV of a never before seen Sonic title for the saturn. We don't think this title has ever been shown off or mentioned before. We don't even know what it looks like yet because we can't build it until the environment is complete. But there is likely at least one more major surprise in this find. I saw the code for the level editor, it's built right into the engine. The assets folder even includes icons for the level editor we never noticed before, but now suddenly make sense. They do things like map surfaces onto the cubes. This guy basically wants a buffer between the starving crowd of people and himself, mainly because he does this out of pure love for coding and preserving games. Jollyroger himself is a great guy, sounds passionate in the same ways I am passionate about games and development. He is weary of people getting upset that this release is taking too long and, you know, doing dick 4-chan stuff like finding out his email address and messing with him. So, going forward, Andrew75 and I will be the between guys for him and the community. All releases will go through us and if you have comments or questions, direct them our way. We will be the ones who eventually package and release these files, but not today. This will take a few weeks to get in people's hands, but we definitely want to share. I have some pictures but I can't share them at the moment because they're mainly of the source code itself. However, if my credibility has ever meant anything, trust me when I say that this is absolutely, 100% real. We finally have Sonic Xtreme, now we just have to prep it for release.[/QUOTE] Another canceled sonic game? This is getting pretty interesting.

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