Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed...!

[KrazyBean]

He picked the hardest difficulty available, which apparently increases your speed.

I guess it's like the CC Levels in the Mario Kart games. 150CC is faster than 100CC, but it's also harder for example.

Edited June 11, 2012 by KrazyBean

[PsychoJosh]

Is that true? I mean the speed thing.

I would prefer the speed to be selectable without being attached to AI difficulty (again, if its true that there are different speeds based on difficulty).

This is how it's always worked in the Mario Kart series so it's an idea you've been used to without even realizing it.

[HedgehogBR]

IGN is so strange....in Sonic Transformed preview they said that:

"

Any developer working on a mascot kart racing game knows that there's one title their game will always be compared to. That isn't to say that Mario Kart is untouchable; merely that it represents the genre benchmark, the standard that all others have to aspire to.....

"

But if you read others kart game preview, they NEVER write anything about Mario Kart, as you can see in LittleBigPlanet Karting article http://ps3.ign.com/a.../1224027p1.html .

Other thing that I really dont understand too is why we dont have any preview about Sonic Transfomation in this E3 !

=[

Edited June 11, 2012 by HedgehogBR

[Detective Shadzter]

New interview from Rocket Chainsaw

http://www.rocketchainsaw.com.au/e3-2012-interview-sonic-all-stars-racing-transformed-145/

Can't wait to see what that final unlockable Joe Neate mentions is.

[rewfewfawfwfae]

The Sonic Facebook page posted this for hitting 3 million "Likes":

EDIT: I see this was posted in the Racer Roster thread. Oops. Err...take this as a way of saying we may not get the concept art mentioned above?

I really like that concept art though. I would love if we could change vehicles though (like in Sonic Riders) instead of being forced to use the same car/bike (depending on what character gets which type of vehicle) for a certain character. I doubt that they will offer a huge selection of vehicles though. However I guess it is better than not getting a sequel for the original.

[ezodagrom]

Bought the first all stars racing with the Steam daily sale yesterday, I'm a bit disappointed on how badly it runs on AMD/ATI graphics cards (or at least it seems only AMD/ATI graphics card users like myself are having these issues, alot of Nvidia graphics card users saying the game runs smoothly), there's alot of framerate hiccups, especially when the "Low Detail Models" option is set to 2~4 players (which is the better graphics quality option for single player).

I hope Transformed will run better than the first game in AMD graphics cards... :<

EDIT: After posting this I saw that someone posted something about the hiccups in the neogaf forums, I wonder if this is why me and other players who bought the game during the sale are having the hiccups:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=38786202&postcount=485

Edited June 12, 2012 by ezodagrom

[Clisp]

Yuss! Dogfights confirmed!

[Kokonoe]

Who was the announcer/commentator in the first game?

I'll go ahead and quote this as it was missed, and SumoRex didn't know either.

[Ming Ming Hatsune]

We're not planning this at the moment. Way back when we did this kind of feature for OutRun2006, we didn't get a lot of people using it and it's a whole heap of effort. That's effort we can spend on making each version as good as possible, so we'll be doing that instead!

But S0L, Outrun 2006 was different. D= There should be crossplay compatibility between Vita and PS3...it would be great to play against my friends who have the PS3 version of the game.

That's one of the great features this game should take advantage of. There won't be many online Vita owners with this game.

Edited June 12, 2012 by Ming Ming Love

[Edward850]

EDIT: After posting this I saw that someone posted something about the hiccups in the neogaf forums, I wonder if this is why me and other players who bought the game during the sale are having the hiccups:

http://www.neogaf.co...2&postcount=485

That is indeed correct. The hiccups are caused by shader caching. The good news, however, is that (unless you delete your shader cache) it only needs to do once per object per track. This seems to occur less on tri core (or greater) CPUs (likely because it builds them in a separate thread) and NVIDIA graphics cards. ATI cards seem to stutter for some reason.

[ezodagrom]

That is indeed correct. The hiccups are caused by shader caching. The good news, however, is that (unless you delete your shader cache) it only needs to do once per object per track. This seems to occur less on tri core (or greater) CPUs (likely because it builds them in a separate thread) and NVIDIA graphics cards. ATI cards seem to stutter for some reason.

According to what S0L said, playing through every stages with every characters and using every weapons should stop this from happening, so I thought of trying something, I tried playing a certain stage with a certain character multiple times in the time trial mode, where it's just the chosen character its ghost, and the staff ghost.

While the hiccups would stop after a few laps, exiting to the menu and entering the stage again with the same character, there's hiccups in the first couple of laps again. Does that mean that S0L's solution might not work? :\

Edited June 12, 2012 by ezodagrom

[Edward850]

... exiting to the menu and entering the stage again with the same character, there's hiccups in the first couple of laps again. Does that mean that S0L's solution might not work? :\

That almost sounds like the cache isn't saving. I have never encountered such behaviour before.

... Or the cache isn't the problem. Hard to say what it could be, however.

[Pawn]

New interview from Rocket Chainsaw

http://www.rocketcha...ransformed-145/

Can't wait to see what that final unlockable Joe Neate mentions is.

There’s gonna be quite a lot of new characters and tracks announced over Comic-Con and that kind of stuff as well.

Ooh so there'll be quite a bit revealed next month... I'll have to decide whether I want to be spoiled or not by then. It's going to be hard to resist.

Edited June 12, 2012 by Lungo

[Ferr]

This is how it's always worked in the Mario Kart series so it's an idea you've been used to without even realizing it.

But I dont think it was the case in the first Sega Racing, the speed semmed the sam ein all dificulties.

[S0L]

I really like that concept art though. I would love if we could change vehicles though (like in Sonic Riders) instead of being forced to use the same car/bike (depending on what character gets which type of vehicle) for a certain character. I doubt that they will offer a huge selection of vehicles though. However I guess it is better than not getting a sequel for the original.

Hmmm, that's our original Sonic car concept, not the Classic Sonic Concept. You'd think they'd have cleaned up the tabs where the text went. I'll see if I can get approval to share the Classic one. Don't be holding your breath on that mind!

Bought the first all stars racing with the Steam daily sale yesterday, I'm a bit disappointed on how badly it runs on AMD/ATI graphics cards (or at least it seems only AMD/ATI graphics card users like myself are having these issues, alot of Nvidia graphics card users saying the game runs smoothly), there's alot of framerate hiccups, especially when the "Low Detail Models" option is set to 2~4 players (which is the better graphics quality option for single player).

I hope Transformed will run better than the first game in AMD graphics cards... :<

EDIT: After posting this I saw that someone posted something about the hiccups in the neogaf forums, I wonder if this is why me and other players who bought the game during the sale are having the hiccups:

http://www.neogaf.co...2&postcount=485

Due to the way the old engine worked, it would create and compile each new shader effect as it encountered this and then cache it for future use. This was better for the art team, as they could go wild with all manner of funky shaders, but it did mean that we couldn't pre-cache shaders for everything on every hardware configuration.

What *should* happen (providing the drivers are sensible) is it will cache the compiled shaders up. It might need to do this again for split-screen since the level assets were different there. Basically a run through each track should eventually build up a sensible cache and the problem should go away. It did work back with the drivers that were out back then - can't promise they've not changed things as PC hardware and drivers change all the time. It's a real headache...

Now... The new engine works differently. We have a stock set of shaders that artist can use, but they're all pre-compiled. So we get a huge performance gain - and hopefully much better cross hardware compatibility. The shaders are still configurable by the artists and are created on demand, so we're not sacrificing visuals. If anything, it works better for the art team this way around as they don't need to be quite so technical.

You live and learn is the short answer here...!

I'll go ahead and quote this as it was missed, and SumoRex didn't know either.

I'll dig this up, so long as you then don't all go and harass the chap...

But S0L, Outrun 2006 was different. D= There should be crossplay compatibility between Vita and PS3...it would be great to play against my friends who have the PS3 version of the game.

That's one of the great features this game should take advantage of. There won't be many online Vita owners with this game.

The problem is doing this isn't straight-forward, easy or quick. I'd need to dedicate people on both the PS3 and Vita teams to do this - and we're talking months of work. I could spend that same time instead on optimisation, art improvements and platform specific networking, meaning a better all-round experience on each of the machines.

That's really the hard part of this job. I know there is a desire out there for everything under the sun to be in there, but it's making sure you spend your development budget wisely.

There is also a huge risk and QA cost in making sure both platforms would network correctly. Any tiny difference in tracks, collision, timing or any other area will mean network desyncs and difficult to fix bugs. It's hard enough to network machines of the same type, without adding in cross platform asset differences, network types (3G for example) and any other horrors.

For this reason, we're not looking to support cross-play. Sorry but you won't change our minds on this, it was a decision that we didn't take lightly, but it's one that is set in stone.

---

S0L

---

Edited June 12, 2012 by S0L

[JezMM]

Just a random thing, I went to the National Media Museum in Bradford last week and while their video game section isn't huge, it does have a very nice selection of games to play (a LOT of classics, Goldeneye, Super Mario Kart, Sonic 2, and vaguer stuff like the original Prince of Persia and many arcade cabinets). One of the playable games is Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing on a 360 though too. =D

Did you/Sumo know your game is museum-worthy and/or have any part in the donation of it?

Edited June 12, 2012 by JezMM

[ezodagrom]

Due to the way the old engine worked, it would create and compile each new shader effect as it encountered this and then cache it for future use. This was better for the art team, as they could go wild with all manner of funky shaders, but it did mean that we couldn't pre-cache shaders for everything on every hardware configuration.

What *should* happen (providing the drivers are sensible) is it will cache the compiled shaders up. It might need to do this again for split-screen since the level assets were different there. Basically a run through each track should eventually build up a sensible cache and the problem should go away. It did work back with the drivers that were out back then - can't promise they've not changed things as PC hardware and drivers change all the time. It's a real headache...

Now... The new engine works differently. We have a stock set of shaders that artist can use, but they're all pre-compiled. So we get a huge performance gain - and hopefully much better cross hardware compatibility. The shaders are still configurable by the artists and are created on demand, so we're not sacrificing visuals. If anything, it works better for the art team this way around as they don't need to be quite so technical.

You live and learn is the short answer here...!

I've been making some testing, these are the results I've gotten:

- Phenom II X4 955, Radeon HD6850, June 2012 Beta drivers (Catalyst 12.6 Beta):

Stage "Icicle Valley" in time trial, there's sudden framerate drops in certain locations, like the cave shortcut near the beginning, when entering the second cave close to the end, and a few other places. The framerate drops happen mostly in the first lap and get alot less frequent in the following laps, but exiting to the menu and entering the stage again (with the same character), the framerate drops are back to how they were at first.

- Pentium Dual-Core E5200, Radeon HD4850, January 2012 drivers (Catalyst 12.1):

Same situation as the Phenom II X4/Radeon HD6850 PC.

- Pentium Dual-Core E5200, Radeon HD4850, March 2010 drivers (drivers released in the month after the game was released, Catalyst 10.3):

With these the framerate drops happen in the same locations, when exiting to the menu and entering the stage again, the framerate drops are back to how they were at first as well, but the framerate drops are alot less sudden with these older drivers.

After this I started trying a bunch of different drivers, until I found the first driver where the framerate drops became more sudden, which is the March 2011 Catalyst 11.3 driver.

I tried a few drivers before this one, like February 2011 (11.2), January 2011 (11.1), December 2010 (10.12), they all worked like the March 2010 (10.3) drivers, there were framerate drops, but they were not as sudden as the newer drivers.

I also tried a few drivers after the March 2011 (11.3) driver, like June 2011 (11.6) and December 2011 (11.12), these all have the sudden framerate drops like the March 2011 (11.3) and the January/June 2012 drivers (12.1 and 12.6).

I guess I'll try sending feedback about this to AMD's driver feedback page, but I doubt they'll do anything about this...

Oh well, can't wait for All Stars Racing Transformed.

[PsychoJosh]

New interview from Rocket Chainsaw

http://www.rocketcha...ransformed-145/

"There’s gonna be quite a lot of new characters and tracks announced over Comic-Con and that kind of stuff as well. And there’s going to some really interesting ones. We’ve managed to get a lot of niche ones in there, which I think a the fans will really love.”

Now I'll believe THAT when we get Arle Nadja and Sketch Turner.

[Kokonoe]

I'll dig this up, so long as you then don't all go and harass the chap...

I know this is a joke, but not everyone who plays Sonic games is like this. I'm interested in who the voice actor is to see if he's done other work in other video games and possibly cartoons/anime. He did pretty well in the last game and there are those who liked his inclusion.

Thank you for looking by the way.

[S0L]

Ok doke,

I re-iterate my 'Please don't harass this guy' comment, I know a lot of you are level headed sensible people, but we do get the odd one who isn't

The actor last time was Mac McDonald, he's a pretty well known actor in the UK for playing Captain Hollister in Red Dwarf, but I'm sure if you go look on IMDB, you'll see he's been in a lot of well known films and TV series.

Which is weird, we seem to have this knack of finding people who have been in classic BBC Sci-fi. The original Gilius voice actor for SST was the guy who played Space Commander Travis in the first series of Blakes Seven. About 4 people in here will be old or nerdy enough to be able to name him without looking that one up!

I still want to somehow get Brian Blessed in a game we're doing - once that happens I can retire with pretty much all my dreams complete

---

S0L

---

[The Tenth Doctor]

No way, it was Hollister? Ha! I love Red Dwarf! I officially love the commentator more now!

[Pawn]

OMG Hollister! That's amazing. It's a shame we won't be hearing more of him this time.

Edited June 13, 2012 by Lungo

[Jango]

That Sonic's vehicles concept is sweet, really liked it. Still looking forward to the classic one!

[TheOcelot]

The SASRT E3 Trailer is available to download on Eu PSN for free. The game looks amazing.

[frokenok3]

I watched the Trailer so many times but watching it on HD on an awesome Tv is the best thing!