Hey, I just had a quick thought about Sonic's 3D stages, in square kilometers.
Back at GDC, from a presentation video I was watching on YouTube, I happen to come across some interesting info about
Sonic Unleashed's process and how long their levels were, before the DLC levels were included.
The GDC '09(yes, that took place years ago, but that was rather interesting, to say the least) presentation video link's here, in case you may want to watch it -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHSDZQH3sgkTech specs speaking aside, it does give us insights on how the Hedgehog Engine, Sega's own engine created for later Sonic games, was made and how Unleashed's levels were built, along with the many challenges Sega and Sonic Team's devs faced there and then.
I understand not many of you in the VGMaps community understand much tech talk, but, I'll lay it to you simply as I can. I'll start from what I've been watching from Chapter 19 of its presentation. Find it at minute 43:46.
To be brief, at the time Unleashed was in the works, many PCs were underpowered to handle such a game that required Sonic to run at very fast speeds on long levels, made as the Day levels in that game, especially with the boost's introduction and other additional moves to get around them. The more prominent of such problems was having it run on the 360 to fit the limits in it.
To cut down on lots of computational time to work around it before launch, Sega and Sonic Team had to set up a distributed system with their arrays of PCs by the dozens linked up to the management PC and it followed up with a link to the artist's PC. Then...
Their underpowered PCs couldn't handle the workload for the game's development. So, they had to acquire new PCs with upgraded RAM to fit their texture data into their memory, install hi-performance hard disks, and compressed their light network data for optimization.
Then, just as they were about to get it on, another major problem hit them; power overload to their offices' old circuit breaker. Total darkness I'm talking about, here. Ceasing usage of their appliances wasn't just enough, too. They had but no choice but to completely upgrade their offices' power system to keep the overload from occurring again. And, of course, additional solutions to their other problems were met.
There's more info to hear in the rest of the video. Give it a good watch and listen, if you like.
Now, to the matter of 3D Sonic's stage lengths.
Sonic Unleashed stages, in that example, and talked about in that presentation video, were poised to be 5 to 20 kilometers long(NOTE: This does
NOT include open world games unrelated to Sonic, nor its hi-speed platforming formulas), especially Eggmanland's Crimson Carnival, which is quite long, and from what I kinda pieced together, other later 3D Sonic games kinda cut down on their length before we had more new hardware for game development.
Sonic's 3D games have come quite long since then, and we've had much more stronger hardware that guarantees more than just breathing room for running Unleashed on PCs without lag. And, I still felt like newer 3D Sonic games should have stages longer than Unleashed, Generations, or even Forces' stages.
Regardless of their length and size, they're still fun to play through, all the same.
So, I ask you this, did you sometimes think of how long other 3D Sonic games were, in kilometers? If not, maybe give it a try in calculating them. Sure would like to know sometime soon.
