First @ TSSZ: ProSonic Engine Beta to Be Released During SAGE

August 22nd Release Pegged

TSSZ News uncovered some new details over the weekend regarding the upcoming release of ProSonic, Damian Grove’s Sonic engine that will be at SAGE next week.  Mr. Grove has pegged August 22nd for the public to play with the engine for the first time, in a public beta.

There will be some limitations, as explained in the Sonic Retro ProSonic thread:

love the excitement that’s coming from you people, but I don’t want to let things get too far out of hand and have people be disappointed when I release the engine.

You’ll be able to import levels, and you’ll be able to make new levels.

S3K-style transitions won’t be readily available in this release.

I don’t have Tails playable — it was a pain just getting Sonic playable. Give me time to work on that, but I don’t think it’s going to show up in this release.

I plan to launch a YouTube video at the same time that this engine is made available for download.

It won’t support Sonic 1, 2, and 3K in this release. The outline I wrote over a year ago is no longer relevant to what I’m doing currently. I maintain my stand on backwards compatibility, but it requires some time. Certain things will definitely be portable though.

Level scaling is broken. It’ll be broken until I rewrite my level rendering code. Level scaling would be a great feature to have, but I don’t view it as one of the most important features, so fixing it is put on hold.

There will be music and sound support, but I have no concrete details as to what specifically will be supported at this time. You’ll definitely know by release, or close to it.

Those things aside, there’s plenty of good things about the engine, and there are one or two surprises (at least I think they’re surprises… I guess I’ll have to wait until I see how the public reacts). The engine will be ready to get people started with making games. However, it will NOT be perfect, nor a finished product. That’s where software updates will come into play.

With this first ever public release, I will target the hacking scene specifically. Later, I will be targetting this scene and the general fan gaming scene.

It’s unclear right now as to whether the engine will be made available directly at SAGE or through other means.  Keep checking back for the latest on this and other SAGE developments, first at TSSZ.