A few requests from the team at Sonic Cage Dome

[spindashmaster]

Hi there! My name's William, and I'm from a Sonic online racing community, known as Sonic Cage Dome. We use Kailera in combination with the Gens emulator.

We've recently heard the news about a brand-new version of kaillera coming soon, and we're overjoyed by that. (Our competitions have literally depended on the Kaillera project for the last three years.)

I just wanted to chime in and tell you a couple things that have made our gameplay experience great, and we'd like to ask you if you already are implementing or plan to implement some of the features that us SCD-ers are dreaming about.

One great feature of kaillera which I love is the ability to search for waiting games. When we have to run tournaments, it is sometimes more useful to allow competitors to join a server at a different location as our main one in New York. Having competitors host a game and making it appear on the master's main waiting list makes searching for the matches very very easy.

Another awesome aspect is its somewhat-forwards compatibility. Thanks to Moosehead at Anti3D, we have a server which can be moderated whenever one of our staffers is available. It also has built-in Autofire detection, which helps find fake spindashers (although I have to say that issue has never risen under my watch). Being able to attatch special messages and links to the server join message helps promote the site, too. That's just a small list of the numerous, amazing gifts that the server upgrade has done.

Since I told my colleagues about this big release news, they are very excited about your progress; and have asked me to inform you of some of their special requests.

One very neat feature we'd like to see is an input recording feature, similar to what I've seen in the Gens Plus emulator. If a log could be made of the buttons pressed in a manner that they can be "replayed" in an emulator (or on kaillera) somehow, that would make video sharing very easy, since the filesize of an input log can be in terms of kilobytes. It would also help us report match results without dispute. (OpenKaillera's record game feature doesn't work with gens for some reason.)

Another thing we would like to see is the ability for spectators to join a game and simply observe the competitors. I'm not sure if I should be telling you or the Gens guys about this, but when at least three players are in a game that typically only has 2 players (Like Sonic the Hedgehog 2), the controls are disabled for all people in that game. This doesn't happen in a game made for 3 or more players (Like Mega Bomberman), though.

I'm guessing that it has to do with the megadrive's "teamplayer" support, and if I could somehow edit the Sonic 2 r0m so that it includes the code telling it to understand teamplayer support, the whole problem would be uprooted.

One other thing that would interest us at SCD is to be able to assign special insignias by members' names. The purpose of this refers to a project at SCD that is still behind closed doors, but being able to create a small 10x10px image by someone's name would be awesome. Perhaps an avatar ability would suffice.

0.9 clearly has its pitfalls, and I know you are working very hard to get a new release by early April, so I'm not really expecting instant gratification on these requests. We at SCD just want you to know that in future versions of kaillera, longer down the road, these kinds of features would be a godsend to us.

Thank you!

-The SCD Team

[Kurgan]

You may also wish to send this message in an email to Etai Hugi, and send a copy to the Gens folks as well.

These sound like great ideas... I hope they can do for you what you want!

[spindashmaster]

OK, I've gotten around to doing that just a minute ago.

[Kurgan]

Any response? Here it is 2009, and Etai doesn't seem to have done anything Kaillera related in a long time. I wish I knew what he was up to...