After Several Delays, a Ray of Hope
Tuesday PM Update: This morning Damian Grove made official ProSonic’s transition to an open source engine. The more formal release is now available to download.
Grove released this statement to accompany the download:
Here it is, the entire source code to the ProSonic engine. This by no means is
an indication that I have stopped work on this engine forever. However, I also
have other interests that need my attention, so I decided to go public with my
source code to this project.You will need the Allegro, Zlib, and HawkNL libraries to compile this code.
The DOS version is the exception, where all HawkNL references are ignored.My goal with this project was always to make the perfect game engine for Sonic
games that everyone would want to use to make their very own Sonic game. I am
hoping with the release of this code, someone will come along and make this
the engine I always envisioned it becoming. I have laid what I feel is a good
foundation for beginning something big in terms of a quality Sonic fan game.There are things that could be improved. The object manager could be tweaked
to be more flexible with moving objects. The PROCODE scripting support could
be improved to allow more complex routines and arithmetic. The 68000 code
support is only good enough to allow a certain number of objects to run in
ProSonic, and no VRAM emulation is implemented.I am granting permission to everyone to use this code in any way they see fit.
It would be great to get credit for anything that is used, but I won’t try to
sue you if you don’t, because at the end of the day it’s only a video game!If you plan to use my source code for anything at all, even if it’s just a
portion of it, I’d love to hear about it. Send me an e-mail about it. My
address is ymtx81z ata yahoo dotod com.Enjoy!
Our original story follows below.
—–
You may remember last year when we covered a very promising Sonic fan game engine dubbed ProSonic. It was the product of Damian Grove, who had promised a September release. That never happened. Neither did a push to October and eventually to the end of the year.
Overlooked this weekend on Sonic Retro was an update by Grove on the project: His eventual decision to make the engine open source, and release it to the public where it will hopefully see completion.
“I still have a desire to continue the project, but sometimes life gets very crowded,” Grove said. “I can’t work on too many things at once without feeling like I’m carrying several tons of weight on my shoulders. ProSonic is still my baby, and I feel it has a lot of potential, but that won’t mean a darn thing if I don’t make the time to really bring out that potential.”
With that in mind, and with some support from those following the project, Grove eventually made the call to turn ProSonic over to the masses. A once private build is now available for download, and Grove says he’ll clean that up for a further, more formal release.
“The Sonic community has the capability of making this engine what I always wanted to make it,” Grove said.
We’ll let you know once the formal release is made available. What exists now is pretty powerful and is sure to help SFGers in their projects.
Loading ...
