Sonic Adventure 2 Hacking

This is really interesting; quite surprising actually. Forgive my ignorance (I'm not part of the hacking scene) but how much of SA2's engine is based off of SA1's? By porting the values like you said I'm assuming that SA2 has physics variables that are like-for-like with SA1 to a degree.

I've always thought the two games looked and felt completely different to one-another, especially in terms of physics and handling animated characters.

 

Yes, SA2 has an array of physics data structures that are formatted identically to SA1's. Sonic and Shadow in SA2 even use the same values Sonic did in SA1.

Sonic Adventure 2 is a heavily modified Sonic Adventure 1, much like Sonic 2 is a heavily modified Sonic 1.

 

SA2's engine is just a pimped SA1 engine, simply put. A lot of things are the same, but a lot of things are different too. I guess you could compare it to the changes between the classic games (1 -> 2, 2 -> 3), or maybe even Unleashed and Generations (although much less so).

Edit: Ninja'd :v:

 

And the music is way too loud in cutscenes. On the plus side the timings on speech is better.

 

Wow, This is wonderful! Honestly as much as I love Sa2b, Sa1 has more of a charm due to the variety of characters! Amy was personally my favorite.

In other words port them all into Sa2 please, haha.

 

There are a multitude of reasons why that won't happen any time soon, if ever.

 

Would it be easier to port SA2 stages to SA1 than to port SA1 characters to SA2?

 

Well... that depends on how authentic you want to be. SADX has nothing like the crates and all the new enemy types. But you can get the level geometry ported.

 

At the very least, SA1 doesn't have grinding, so unless that's been implemented in some way, I don't know how well some of the levels would port over without modding them a bit.

 

Just add rings so you can light dash through those parts.

 

Actually, I recall somebody having shown off some sort of cobbled-together grinding mechanic running in SA1.

 

Is there a way to make the walker health bar invisible? I wanted to take some screens of the Egg Walker for the wiki, and they'd look better without the bar in the way.

 

Has anyone successfully ported SA2 stage geometry to SADX before?

 

Yes. The LevelConverter tool in SA Tools is designed to do exactly that, in fact. It's just that nobody's really done anything beyond getting the geometry ported.

 

This is a question that comes up every now and then on another forum I frequent, but how hard would it be to port the Chao Gardens from SA2 Dreamcast to SA2B Steam? Are the data formats between the original and the PC port similiar enough to just make it a matter of copying over the right files from the Dreamcast version, or would some actual hacking be required? A bit off topic, but for the sake of completeness, I'll also ask about porting the Chao Gardens from SA1 Dreamcast to either SADXPC04 or SADX Steam.

 

I will answer both your questions at the same time. One could, theoretically, make the game use the Dreamcast geometry. Simply copying files wouldn't do it, since geometry is compiled into the game's EXE and DLL files. However, there are hardcoded things that might be more difficult to alter. I know SADXPC hardcodes the object layout, don't know about SA2, but there's also stuff like areas where Chao and items can spawn.

 

IIRC the tool tries to convert, but the game doesn't accept it for whatever reason.

 

If I'm not mistaken, They are material files that usually contain written coordinates for a wavefront file (.obj).

 

They're sound files for the characters actually. That's actually how this whole topic began.

Something to note: Just because extensions are the same doesn't mean the the file is related in any way, shape, or form to another file of the same extension. Also, the obj material files are mtl, not mlt.