SSNSonicHD - Expanded & Enhanced
Alright, this is going to be an in-depth dive into the changes this mod brings, so if you just want the TL;DR of it:
New angles for sprites that needed them were added, the grey color was applied to the shoe bottoms wherever applicable, a tail was added in almost all the sprites that missed it, a lot of small touch-ups on various sprites were done, eyes/pupils were redrawn on a lot of the early sprites, some of the incorrect angles were fixed, new sprites were added for states that were missing them such as new skidding sprites and proper teetering sprites for normal Sonic, Super Sonic now has his own springing/falling/skidding sprites and a whole bunch of other stuff that won't fit here.
All of the images are inside the spoilers and there's proper explanations of all the changes inside, so if you feel that you need to know more, continue reading further.
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SSNTails' legacy lives on...?
What if SSNTails continued making more sprites for Sonic? What if he put even more time and effort into making them look just a bit tad more consistent? What if the waiting sprites didn't look so wrong from different angles when Sonic's foot tapped in seemingly wrong directions at both the front and back? And what if Sonic's tail didn't just pop out of existence all of a sudden on certain angles? Well, one could certainly dream...
But I wanted more than just a dream. I'm not an artist or even a coder, however, I wanted the old legacy Sonic sprites I've gotten so used to over the decades that I've played this game for to get at least somewhat better, to look more like something that'd fit with SRB2 v2.2's inclusion of new, easily modifiable player states and the ability to cram more sprites than ever before.
So ultimately, the goal of this project was to add more sprites that were missing in the grand scheme of things and change already existing sprites just a small amount to fix some small flaws and add specific details that felt missing in them. This scope extended not just to Sonic's normal sprites, but also to his super sprites.
And thanks to the existence of these original HD sprites from SSNTails himself (as well as the original mod that I based this massive edit on), it became a reality.
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So, what are the changes?
It's honestly really hard to track just how many things I've changed because there is a lot...
...a WHOLE lot of them.
But either way, I'll try my best to write them down here as well as show comparisons when needed.
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Here's the in-depth showcase of the new changes for Sonic's normal sprites and his super sprites.
Sonic's normal form had by far the most work put into it. A lot of the early sprites such as standing, walking and other similar states lacked specific details that could be seen in certain angles but not in every single one. One of such casualties was Sonic's tail, which mysteriously vanished every other angle. Another issue was the inconsistent application of the grey and red colors on the bottoms of his shoes. However, there was also a massive problem with certain sprites missing additional angles that were much needed to keep some of them consistent in rotations.
So on top of having to add some details that were missing in one angle but present in the other, I had to keep my eyes out on the fact that there were sprite angles that used the mirroring technique to their detriment. That was especially true with the waiting sprites, which had angles that were downright broken in how they had next to no consistency whatsoever.
(Top - OLD; Bottom - NEW)
Sonic now actually has his tail here and the shoes are drawn with more detail in the last angle to show that they aren't exactly that narrow-facing. The eyes were completely redrawn with white pupils being placed in the center, the nose received a very similar upgrade. Second to last angle now has the eye visible on it and symmetry was applied to both the front and the back angles to give as much consistency as possible. Additionally, Sonic's back quills are now visible from the front and they have been made consistent in the fourth angle with other sprites such as walking and running.
If you pay extra attention, fourth angle is now better aligned with others as the quills on Sonic's head were moved slightly to the top.
(Top - OLD, Bottom - NEW)
The front facing sprites now have all eight frames instead of four to account for Sonic's mouth on the left side of his face (it's something that's in the top sprites as well, but that's more of an example since they technically cut off at the fifth angle).
The eyes have been edited for sideways facing walking sprites to not touch the nose on the bottom since it looked quite awkward. The redrawn eyes were applied to every frame and every sprite in the set and the back quills move slightly with each frame.
All sprites that have the shoe bottoms exposed have them colored grey/light-grey (original has most of them colored red while sometimes using grey for certain frames for whatever reason). This is also true for every sprite other than the ones for walking.
(I couldn't showcase these here because there's something really weird going on with the transparency on those frames that makes it really, really hard to put them side by side.)
Running sprites partially utilize the grey colored shoe bottoms on certain frames and angles since changing the color on all of them would likely require redrawing them from scratch. Like the front-facing walking sprites, the front-facing running sprites now match four frames instead of two to keep Sonic's mouth consistently on the left side of his face. The eyes are updated here as well.
(Top Left - OLD; Bottom - OLD; Top Right - NEW)
One of the biggest problems with these waiting frames was the fact that the original front-facing sprites did not match up with the backward-facing ones due to the shoe lifting on completely wrong sides. Some of the other frames didn't match up, but they were far easier to deal with.
In the top-right corner is the fixed variant that matches up the other four sprites in the five-sprites-total the original waiting frames had.
Luckily, it meant that making the other four sprites to fill out the rest of the angles wasn't much of a problem.
(Left - OLD; Right - NEW)
The grey color was applied to the shoe bottoms in all the sprites, but besides that, I also made sure the face in these particular sprites looked less strange to look at by using Sonic's face from his riding sprites. The rest of the rolling sprites looked decent enough overall that I decided to not go any deeper into them.
The shoe bottoms use more consistent greys and the is color being applied in all the sprites that it could be, so this isn't surprising. But you'll notice that the pain sprites were actually upgraded quite a bit as Sonic's arm, head and torso no longer look detached from each other and he now uses the mouth from SSNTailsHD instead of the one he used to have before.
There's also now a tail on all of them except the spring sprites, since they obscure Sonic's back enough that I don't think there's any point in adding one there.
Remember the falling sprites? The last one now has a tail.
As for the teetering sprites (standing on the edge of a cliff), these two frames were the only ones found in the original mod. It turns out that they were finished some time later and they were simply not saved alongside the other ones in the HD format. That was rather upsetting...
(Top - Teetering; Bottom - Gasping)
...Until I created some new ones using a combination of falling and gasping sprites. I had to first finish the gasping set with every angle because it originally only had five angles made for it instead of the whole eight, but once that was done with, they were a lot easier to envision.
Unfortunately, they don't have the waving hands and they use the same animation of Sonic's spines moving in the wind. I'm simply not capable of drawing good looking hands, especially when trying to put them into motion... Even though the animation is literally only two frames long.
Did you know SRB2 v2.2.14's overhaul of the character sprites gives each character their own dedicated skidding sprites? No? Well, now you know. You can consider this as an early Christmas gift. I cobbled these together using the falling and riding sprites.
The first continue sprite is pulled from one of the scenes in the older SRB2 intro prior to v2.2 where Sonic falls onto his knees in defeat after seeing Greenflower City's destruction at the hands of Eggman... Too bad it was all retconned into being a defacement of some mountain. Lame!
The second continue sprite is one of the drawings available on SSNTails' remnant website, Spaddlewit. I put that one in just as an extra.
But the most fun ones are the dying and drowning sprites. The dying sprite was edited to have different positioning for the shoes, specifically so that they looked less awkward. Sonic's mouth was also placed in the middle instead of to the side.
The drowning sprite was directly based on the combination of the dying sprite and the front-facing gasping sprite. I made sure the head shape fit well and the facial expression was more exaggerated (shrinking the eyes helped with that a lot).
The signpost sprite is also one of SSNTails' drawings and it has been in this mod before. The only thing I did with it was change the position of one of the eyes to make it look more like Sonic is looking at the camera.
The continue stock sprite was made by heavily downscaling one of the waiting sprites and then spending quite a bit of time on making it look presentable by fixing up all the pixels.
The sprites had been rearranged and two new frames were added to make the super transformation look more smooth and less jarring. It looks almost exactly like how the vanilla 2.2 characters go super.
...And yes, the first two frames are literally the exact same. Your eyes are not deceiving you. I just felt a bit lazy and thought reusing it wasn't going to be anything bad.
Super Sonic did not receive that many changes, the most I had to do regarding consistency was add the tail into the sprites that were missing it again and adding new frames to walking/running/floating to make Sonic's mouth consistently on one side. That's also where I had to swap his mouth from his right side to his left side in pretty much almost all the front-facing sprites because it's position in them was not consistent with his normal sprites.
Yes, Super Sonic is now actually standing when he is still. The fact that he just floated in place always irritated me. Either way, Sonic's normal standing sprites and his super standing/walking/floating sprites proved fairly simple to combine. I doubt I could ever do the same with the walking sprites, though.
I also made sure to duplicate one of his arms in certain sprites as he only had one visible arm in some of them, making his rotation look extra strange.
These were the most painful ones to make. It took me well over a day to get them finished, and even then, they ended up looking very inconsistent. The only reason they don't completely bad was because a fellow by the name of Wumbo (he also worked on the SSNSonicHD mod in the past) helped me out by redrawing one of the frames I was attempting to make (SPNGA2A8, specifically the second sprite from the left) and it turned out so much better than I could ever hope to make myself. Big thanks to him for that sprite in particular.
Unfortunately, making them proved to be so difficult that I decided to give up on making the super hurt and riding sprites. Those will be the only ones not covered for Super Sonic, I'm afraid. Maybe I'll come back to try making them again at some point.
Falling, now in Super Sonic style. It's obvious that I used normal Sonic's falling sprites as a base, but it might take a while to guess that I used Sonic's super teetering sprites to get the head right. It took some time to tinker with the layers properly, but I think it was ultimately worth it.
And the last ones are essentially the previous super falling sprites, but now with the adapted legs and shoes from normal Sonic's riding sprites to get some skidding going around here.
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Unfortunately, I don't really have any videos to show and the GIF compression in SRB2 kills a lot of the quality the HD sprites have, making it really hard to judge what's actually on the screen. So I sincerely hope the in-depth showcase did it well enough.
As for the character stats, they are essentially the same as they were in the previous versions of the mod and the Final Demo versions of SRB2 (actionspd is 72, maxdash is 80). The spin-dash visually resembles the legacy spin-dash, but since this mod has no Lua, it functions exactly like the vanilla spin-dash except with a slower charge due to the higher maxdash value.
Furthermore, I had to make some fixes from the original SSNSonicHD addon as there were problems with it not being very compatible with other character mods due to them using the same thok graphic name.
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Credits
Original drawings of Sonic: SSNTails (super sprites initially edited by Wumbo)
SSN Sonic HD v3: Wumbo
SSN Sonic HD v4 (the original mod this was based on): Zippy_Zolton
SSN Sonic HD Expanded & Enhanced v5 - v7: SpeedManiac (the super SPNGA2A8 sprite was made by Wumbo)
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A little bonus extra sprite of the head from one of the riding sprites being pushed onto one of the standing sprites, creating what is essentially FSonic in HD. Maybe one day it'll be more than just one sprite, eh?... I'm not promising anything, though.