They've taken action against things in the past, but they're not Nintendo. I'd be shocked if they did much about this particular effort.
One of the key factors in the history of Sonic that I didn't know until recently was that he was a total flop in Japan. In fact the Mega Drive struggled to gain traction there. That's why they kept trying to reinvent the formula into the 2000s and beyond; from Sega (of Japan)'s perspective, unlike Mario, they hadn't established a gameplay template that they knew would be a worldwide hit, only a character they knew was popular in the USA and Europe.
But the SRB developers got it. They knew what made classic Sonic work, and sought to replicate that with the strengths—and limitations—of the Doom engine and produced an absolute banger of a project.
If you care to compile from source, I have a patch that makes SDL input by scancode which lets you type in dvorak in the chat box etc, lmk if you'd like a link.
I don't think this is how it's supposed to work.
Version 2.4 which is almost out doubles down on it being a high skill racing game with even more mechanics... Gaining "amps" when dealing damage, going into overdrive, "ring bail" which is dropping all your coins for a boost and can cancel spinning out, "neutral drift" where you lose less speed when drifting without steering...
I don't know what's going on at this point. I just want to hold forward and drift.
The result isn't quite a kart racer and isn't quite a fighting game, it's...some mix in between, where the difference between coming in first and being in fourth requires knowing that (say) directional influence is reversed while you're teching banana peel spinouts, or how your boost frames are preserved if you cancel your sliptide wavedash around a tight corner, etc etc. The skill ceiling is ridiculously high. For online play, so is the skill floor.
In all honesty I don't think it quite "works" for mass consumption...but it's not meant to! This corner of design space is built by those who love the genre they've made, so to hell with mass consumability anyway. I personally find the experiment fascinating and rewarding to learn. Certainly do check it out.
See: Nightmare Kart, etc. [0]
- it is very nearly perfect, but has some minor issues especially in regards to the strength of frontrunning (early leads tend to become unbeatable) - the development team has mostly abandoned it in favor of the sequel, which completely abandons the brilliant simplicity of SRB2K - the development team kind of take a rude approach to the GPL. They don't really accept PRs from the community, and work in secrecy rather than out in the open. They still publish their work, so they comply with the license, but it's a bit lame - The modding community is super weird about reusing other people's code and will pitch a fit if you get caught reusing someone's lua script without their permission.
The four freedoms allow you to share your enhancements with the community, they don't say the original author has to accept them. They pursue their own vision for the software, they give you all the sources and license you need to pursue a different direction.
Stallman has also talked about how "works of art" (pictures, stories, music) are different from "functional" works (software, recipes, typefaces, etc.). He thinks that nonfree "functional" works are unethical, but is ok with a modest copyright time limit before being permitted to remix/modify art:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.ht...
> But eventually I realized that modifying a work of art can be a contribution to art, but it's not desperately urgent in most cases. If you had to wait ten years for the copyright to expire, you could wait that long
With that in mind, he'd want game code to be published under a free software license, but would be ok if the "art" of the game remained briefly copyrighted. Probably not what modders want to hear!
I wonder if it's just an age thing or something else?
Let's say you enjoy Skyrim. All the people are like "Yay Bethesda!". Bethesda gets the warm fuzzies (and lots of money)
Then PERSON X introduces the HORSE ARMOUR mod. All the people are like "Yay PERSON X!". PERSON X gets the warm fuzzies, and this keeps them going. To get the mod, you have to go to PERSON X's page on nexus, read their spiel, download their file, read their README, install it just right, and so on. That's a lot of time the masses are spending with PERSON X because... they changed a piece of Bethesda's game.
Now PERSON Y introduces the PERSON Y's MEGAPACK mod, which combines multiple mods and makes sure they work together. PERSON X's HORSE ARMOUR mod is just a single bulletpoint on the list, along with hundreds of others. They are mere datapoints, what's important is PERSON Y, because PERSON Y made sure all these other modders' stuff worked together, and used their taste and discernment to decide what was worth including or not. All praise now goes to PERSON Y. PERSON Y gets the warm fuzzies while PERSON X gets the cold pricklies. Boo!
Now do you see why PERSON X doesn't like PERSON Y's modlists.... for Bethesda's game?
A side piece about who's "stealing" from who in the 1990s demo and piracy scene, which cracks games and makes painstakingly pixellated copies of famous artworks: https://www.datagubbe.se/scenecop/
Being open to the community isn't unilateral upside. It comes with huge trade-offs especially the more toxic and opinionated and bikesheddy and entitled the community is. Sometimes you have a vision you want to execute without dealing with egos and emotions in PR comments and without people who have entitled themself some sort of weird ownership of the project because it's small.
Elm's creator has some talks on this. But it's also an experience I have in any project that has traction.
I'm an outsider and I've gotten a few patches accepted to Ring Racers, like this small screenshot bugfix[1], or this more complicated rework of camera momentum to make "look behind you" work better[2].
One dev gave an initial cursory review of [2] within 36h, and the project leader chose to merge my change within a couple of months. By OSS standards, this is shockingly fast. (I suspect I got lucky - the project usually moves much slower.)
[1]: https://git.do.srb2.org/KartKrew/RingRacers/-/merge_requests... [2]: https://git.do.srb2.org/KartKrew/RingRacers/-/merge_requests...
Kart Krew is more secretive when it comes to the non-public "in-development" branch, but I think this is because the core team is more tight-knit and wants to keep a smaller audience for their more invasive gameplay vision/experiments. (I don't have access to this branch, but most PRs don't need it)
My memory was that despite the enormous time-sink required to get it working, it actually wasn't very good. Like once you get over that initial thrill of being able to levitate in 3D space and blast a crude Kamehameha at people, the rest of the experience was pretty clunky.
Then, when I look at the walls, I don't know why, it just "feels" Doom to me.
Very cool!
Much ink has been spilled and fingers pointed over the failures of Sonic Xtreme and other attempts to make a fully-3D Sonic game on the Sega Saturn, but I think it fundamentally comes down to the fact that the creators didn't know how to translate the core gameplay loop into 3D.
But I broadly agree; it wasn’t a hardware thing, it was a “we don’t know how to do it” thing; SRB2 came like a full decade after the 32x’s relevance.
I owe my career to this community.
smrq•4mo ago