New Information: Genesis of the Azure Wind

Dev Blog Established, New Video

In development now for several years, there is new progress on the 3D Halo mod Sonic: Genesis of the Azure Wind.

Headed by Moody, there was one major setback for the project during and after the 2008 Sonic Amateur Games Expo with a patch Bungie released for Halo.  But, according to the Genesis Mod DB blog, those problems have been resolved:

I cannot really excuse the slowness of the progress , nor can I promise the world, as that would not be fair, but what we are doing at the start of this year, is getting everything polished off while we can, to be fair, when everyone comments saying “it’s not gonna be released” or “it’s not gonna be finished like they said” that’s fair, we can take it, mainly because it’s untrue.

To us, modding is not a hobby, it’s a way forward as most of us want to try are hardest to get somewhere from this experience, in the video games industry, even though that sounds stupid to some people, it’s like a dream to others.

We have worked a lot, and taken a break since SAGE 08 in July up until Dec 17th, mainly due to Uni and high schools pressuring us with work, those who look at the team’s YouTube page will know I have been working my ass off none stop with hardly any sleep since September, in one case I was getting 3 hours of sleep a day for 6 weeks straight to get a project done, which then got rejected anyway and I ended up burnt out and almost failing the project because of my tutor’s lack of judgment, but anyways, that’s enough personal details that you don’t need to know about.

We have been set back by a patch that was forced apon us by Bungie, Halo CE 1.8 which effectively took away all the cool stuff from our mod, the 3rd person application will not work with it, so we were trying to find ways around that for ages, trying to get people to code us a new 3p camera, but in the end we got progress when “Open Source” was released, a C++ application that allows us to do a bit more in the way of modding when it comes to CE’s engine, unfortunately that has only just been released near the beginning of Dec 08 so people are still experimenting with it, but we managed to pull 3p back.

Aswell as this, we started developing a dynamic camera system for CE also to give a Unleashed style feel, but it did not work out too well, so instead we are going for static cameras placed around the levels as well as the normal 3p cam, to give a nice experience.

And finally, I started a dev blog to keep people up to date easier, which is working out well, the teams using it, and also there’s a lot of progress being made, we have prioritized everything so eventually we hope to get the remaining stuff done before summer, then it’s just the levels that need to be done.

That other development blog now includes some pretty tight deadlines for the team to follow.  Since this post, Moody has announced that all characters have been rigged, including a common set of enemies and bosses.  The team’s YouTube page has also seen a plethora of development material uploaded, including 3D models and how the boost system will work in the game.  We have that video below.

Keep checking back to TSSZ News as we bring you more information on Sonic: Genesis of the Azure Wind.  Thanks go out to Sonikku Master for pointing us to this information.  If you have a news tip, let us know by clicking “News Tips” at the top of every page.