#sonicgdk

The only 3D Sonic engines I'm aware of are Sonic World and SonicGDK.

Sonic World is made in Blitz3D, based off of an old, old, old codebase that's probably nearing ten years old at this point. It definitely has its fans, but, like... man, I dunno. To me, it's kind of bloated and weird. Like, at this point it has something like 31 playable characters? And the build at SAGE a few months ago was... enjoyable, I guess, but also really awkward and janky. Like, to watch Ozcrashsonic play it, he's accustomed to the controls and flies around levels like a ninja, but for a newbie like me it was kind of awkward to come to grips with.

It's worth mentioning that there are, or at least were, a lot of other offshoots of the Blitz3D Sonic engine, but I think Sonic World has taken its place as the defacto standard that everybody uses now.

The only other one I'm aware of is Sonic GDK, which is based off of the Unreal Engine 3 UDK. GDK has what you're looking for: all of the boost Sonic fixins (boost, quick step, stomp) on top of... well, a lot of stuff. Sonic Colors wisps, elemental shields, so on and so forth.

Here is a slightly outdated look at something that was made in Sonic GDK that tries to replicate the Sonic Generations look and feel as closely as possible. There's a newer version of that level that's out now that both looks a little better and plays a little better.

This is what base-level Sonic GDK looks like, though this video is also a bit outdated.

If only more people would use it! I’m actually sitting here feeling really guilty, because Stunt Race XF has made me wonder what Unity plugins LakeFepard used and how easy it would be to replicate physics like that, because there’s definitely a Sonicesque quality to his game.

I have the Sonic the Fighters models laying around here somewhere, doing something similar to what he did visually (simple shapes, simple colors) but making it a boost Sonic game is something that interests me. I’d call it “Virtua Sonic”.

3D level design isn’t easy. I tried to make some SRB2 maps once and none of them were very good. You have to think about space in a different way, and to some degree, game designers still don’t really understand it.

Because there’s that disconnect, right. When you’re making something versus playing something, you have a different perspective and expectations.

Plus, I assume you might’ve looked at a lot of BlitzSonic stuff… which developed this weird sort of fad where people didn’t actually make levels for it. They were mostly like… playgrounds, I guess. Because most builds of BlitzSonic didn’t have enemies or anything, so you’d just get these huge environments where you… ran around exploring, and didn’t really do anything game-like. Like a Sonic version of Dear Esther, or something.

That versus Sonic Generations is like… Generations also had an established structure, right. Something tangible that you can grasp on to and say, “this is how a Sonic Generations level plays.”

With BlitzSonic and to a lesser extent SonicGDK, you’re a little more free to define whatever you want. And you kind of have to, because that’s the point. So you end up with people experimenting a lot more, I guess.

Or, alternatively, artists who just want to make environments and don’t know how to flesh anything out on the coding end (like add enemies or level gimmicks).

SonicGDK (short for 3D Sonic Games Development Kit) is an impressive Unreal Development Kit powered Sonic The Hedgehog game creation tool which allows users to create some seriously impressive Sonic games (much better than the tat SEGA have been making lately anyway.)

SonicGDK gives you access to 3 versions of Sonic (Classic, Generic & Modern) with super forms, power-ups, badniks, special moves, controller support, checkpoints, bumpers, spikes and various other traps - basically everything you need to make a Sonic game.  You will need at least some basic coding skills to great anything good, but going by the variety of impressive games that have already been created with SonicGDK (See GIFs above), it's certainly a powerful and versatile game creation tool.  Maybe even SEGA could make a decent Sonic game with it!

It’s rather shocking that they’d let you simply cancel your subscription. I actually had to double check just to make sure you were right (you are). That’s almost like charging for patches, in a way, at some point. You buy it for $20 once, and then if you need something fixed, you pay $20 again for the latest version.

You could probably just ask Xaklse himself if SonicGDK would be ported to Unreal Engine 4, but personally? I doubt it. C++ might keep a lot of the same structure but it’ll probably require just enough work that porting it would mean almost starting over from scratch. Xaklse was supposed to quit working on SonicGDK a long time ago; it’s probably just kind of a “eh whatever I’ll kill some time” thing for him now. Porting to UE4 would be too close to the sort of work he should be getting paid for. :P

Of course, there’s no telling if somebody else wants to port it to UE4. I know some other people years ago told me of their very lofty aspirations of porting SonicGDK to Cryengine. (which obviously never happened, or at least, has not happened yet)

The more I think about it, the more I really like the Havok Harbor tech demo from SAGE, because it's a good example that your Sonic game can still be FAST without:

Being "Sonic Unleashed" fast