Sonic's White Glove Diaries -

Updated and maintained by Johnny 'Sonikku' Wallbank and A.J Freda

29th January 2000

Dev Diary - Part VII.

About a month and a half ago, SRB2:XMAS v 0.9 was unofficially released to SRB2:XMAS. I had woken up on the Saturday and found out that I was not allowed on by BT Weekend due to 'Unknown problems'... meaning that the phone bill was going to racked up this weekend. Great. I hopped on to the normal account and began my Sonic surfing. I began with Sonic HQ, The Super Sonic Zone, SSRG, STJr, Sonic Fan Games HQ, The Soni--- wait a sec! I looked at the Sonic Fan Games HQ... 'SRB2XMAS IS OUT!' was plastered all over the top.

"Aw s**t!" I thought, "A.J released something without telling me AGAIN!"

Still, I didn't worry, so long as he'd made the game up to scratch... how disspointed I'd be. While downloading it, I checked the Sonic Fan Games HQ message board, only to find somehow who had problems getting it to run... hoping that it would just be me, I unzipped it, and ran SRB2:XMAS - I had not a good day so far... BT Weekend didn't want to let me (and a good 35% of their customers on), A.J had ignored me again, and I'd already found a complaint for SRB2:XMAS. I needed a good way to calm down.

...Which I wasn't going to get. I doubled clicked on 'srb2xmas.exe' and waited for the DOS box to pop and load... I got the DOS box, and this message...

"Oh no! Back to reality!

SIGSEV ERROR IN 4322:3829 8329:9229..."

Cue lots of profanity... A.J had made a game that no-one could play! How the HELL could anyway miss that? It takes just two clicks to see if something boots up! I eventually found out, that (thankfully) this only affected Win '98 Release 1 users. A.J then told me that he'd released it quickly to 'punish' people for asking for it to be released.

So, by this theorum, whenever I ask for some fries and a Bacon Double Cheeseburger at Burger King, I should recieve a steaming pile of hot cow dung.

I couldn't let this go on. A.J's power trip was over. It was time to get a proper programmer. Stealth said he'd played it, and offered to help us program. Without hesitation, he was in the team, and A.J was back to sprites...

"But I thought he'd angrily left after SRB2 turned 3D and hated the whole idea?" - A good 10 months later, Stealth had played SRB2:Haloween Test, and realized that it was possible to re-create something from the DooM engine... before this, Stealth had found a 2% complete in-development alpha, which basically had Greenflower 1 and half of Greenflower 2, no rings, no jumping, one badnik, Sonic had a pistol and the old DooM textures, which he was, quite understandably not impressed with.

Though he was very surprised at how far SRB2 had come from being a cheap clone of Sonic DooM 2, he and I both knew that it had a hell of a long way to go before it was anywhere near the top-notch standards all the Sonic fans were expecting.

So here we are now... with a much stronger programming team and the Sonic sprites coming along a lot quicker!

Next time: Ku's Last Stand.