Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Dario FF - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

GDC Vault Link

This might be really old but I don't remember this talk being free recently, and certainly not when we were researching Hedgehog engine games more in detail. I think the only resource in the Wiki was this page, so it can be filled with a lot more stuff now. He also uses the Debug mode a lot during the presentation to showcase the graphical features.

There's a lot of technical details on the process from rendering, introducing assets, packing, streaming, shading methods, etc. It doesn't reveal a whole lot more that could enable anything new given that we mostly figured this out already, but it does clear up on a lot of technical details we had a few doubts on.

Black Knight's Stage Geometry in Hedgehog Engine running on PC to showcase how much Global Illumination can help despite just being Wii geometry. (Don't remember seeing these) He clarifies these didn't mean the game was going to be ported, it was just an experiment to see the benefits of GI on low-detail geometry.

Update 1/14/2015:
The files are already in the public, but you'll have to find them on your own. Adding a tools section. Maybe setting up an SCHG page will be more useful?

Tools
pacpack: Extracts the contents of the PAC files that hold mostly everything that Lost World has.

HKX Converter 2012 with Metadata: A modified version of the HKX Converter used for Unleashed 360 to Generations PC conversion. Since Lost World's HKX files don't have any metadata packed into them unlike Unleashed, the alternative is to make the converter read the metadata from another file that shares most of the classes it uses. Some HKX files may not convert if there's no matching metadata for them. Note that the resulting files are for Havok 2012, a newer version than the one in Generations.

modelfbx: A command-line tool that allows you to convert .model files, Havok skeletons and Havok animations into an FBX file. The Havok animation support is kinda dodgy at the moment due to not being able to figure out how to properly translate the Havok scaling yet, but the skeletons should work correctly. Supports both the updated .model format and .material format from Lost World, and expects Havok 2012 2.0 files (Lost World version).

Development and File Structure

The speculation behind Sonic Team still being organized into two teams for the mainline games and the Storybook/Colors team developing Lost World becomes even more apparent with a brief examination of the files. The folder/file structure and file formats use share a LOT of similarities with Colors. The project's name internally is "Sonic2013" (Colors was "Sonic2010"), and almost all the directories they exported their stuff from was paths in the style of "Sonic2010/Sonic2013", heavily hinting at which team developed this.

The files themselves are the most reliable proof as they share a lot of formats with Colors, but the biggest change is that instead of relying on Nintendo's Wii model formats, they now used a modified version of the Hedgehog Engine's formats.

Criware Pack (.cpk): Compatible with current tools, there's only one CPK used for the entirety of the game's assets (not movies). About 1.8 GB. (Generations totals to around 5.2 GB)

Layout Object Files (.orc): Just like in Colors, there's a dedicated "set" folder with .orc files that are used for the object level layouts. While I haven't looked much into the format, besides a small file header upgrade it seems both Colors .orc and Lost World .orc are very similar. Nowhere near as easy to deal with as Generations XML formats sadly, but not impossible to crack either.

Lots and lots of lua files: Again like in Colors, lua files are used for defining a lot of the stage's properties (in Generations XMLs are used instead), and are also very similarly coded. The new things are a lot of graphical parameters that have the same names as in the Hedgehog Engine games (stuff like SceneEffect.prm.xml's properties).

Animation Scripts (.anm): Not sure what their purpose is but it seems like they were used in Colors as well.

Pac Pack Files (.pac): Seems like a new package format in place of .arc or .ar. This format is more complicated than it looks at first glance compared to any package format I've ever seen. The main problem that comes from it is that some certain file formats that are packed inside (.effect files, etc.), end up sharing their strings and offset table with the entire pac file. This makes it a huge pain to make a reliable extractor and repacker as the files have to be basically rebuilt. Luckily they don't need to be cracked, as the offset table in the pac file is all the information needed to fix this. I now have a working PAC extractor/repacker (that I hope to be able to test in the future in the console) that automatically appends some metadata to the affected file formats inside and allows them to be properly repacked.

Updated Hedgehog Engine Formats (.terrain-model, .terrain-instanceinfo, .material, .model): These should be familiar to anyone who's modded Generations, and to my surprise they were mostly compatible with the existing tools already. The main difference seems to be that the header got slightly updated, and the root node offset got changed to 16 from 24 (0x10 from 0x18). I don't really understand the purpose behind the new header yet (probably some context information as they need it), but it shouldn't be a big problem. It seems the game also uses regular files without the header that are pretty much the same thing from Generations, and I'll theorize they can run on real hardware as well.

Images:



Lightfield (.lft): Compatible with Generations, no changes whatsoever. Determines how Sonic and objects are shaded depending on the section of the level he's in, basically simulating the light bounces from the terrain.

Havok 2012 Formats (anm.hkx, skl.hkx, phy.hkx): Also familiar to anyone who worked with Generations, the Hedgehog Engine seems to rely on Havok's implementation of animation, and ends up appearing on Wii U, a format that does not actually exist as a target platform in the tools. The version of the files is hk_2012.2.0-r1, and lack any metadata of any kind that describes the formats. They're also in big-endian format. HkxConverter (developed for the Unleashed 360 to PC conversion) needed an update to read the metadata out of other files (that I exported myself with the Havok 2012 Content Tools and used similar metadata to Lost World) to be able to properly convert the Wii U HKX to PC HKX. The result is usable, and with some luck, can actually be converted back to 2010 if the formats aren't very different. Here's a lot of TwilightZoney's work regarding the animations, along with the converted Sonic Lost World .model to Generations:



Comparison of Sonic Lost World Model (yellow) to Sonic Generations Model (blue):


Gameplay Videos of Sonic Lost World Model with Lost World Animations back-ported to Generations:




Hedgehog Engine Changes and Terrain

Ever since its reveal it was very apparent that Lost World was a Hedgehog Engine game that was heavily nerfed graphically, and its files tell the same story as well. The two reasons are pretty obvious, a reduced budget (exclusive deal) and a 60 FPS target frame-rate instead of the usual 30 on similar hardware. The nerf affects pretty much every aspect of the engine: the quality of the shaders, the overall size and detail of the geometry, the GI quality, the elaborate streaming engine, etc.

Shader Quality: Most of the shaders from Generations made the transition to Wii U as well as several new ones, so that means that almost all Generations materials are compatible with Lost World. However, the overall quality of the shading seems to have gotten a significant downgrade and it's very apparent with the SonicGLvl screenshots that will come later (that use Generations shaders). Certain shader parameters aren't used the same way as in Generations and several new ones were introduced. This causes huge consistency problems when trying to preview these models with the Generations shaders.

Geometry Size & Detail: The numbers tell the entire story here, as I was really surprised when I was told the size of the Sonic Lost World dump. It was to be expected but the difference in size when compared to Generations is still stunning.

All Lost World terrain size (uncompressed): 1.953.601.752 bytes (1.9 GB)
All Generations terrain size (ACTUALLY COMPRESSED): 4.604.474.273 bytes (4.6 GB)

The terrain in Lost World is not compressed and is simply dumped inside Pac files. Generations compresses all terrain inside PFDs and heavily benefits from it, with an almost 70% smaller compression ratio for each Stage.pfd. The terrain from 4 stages of Unleashed UNCOMPRESSED is as big as the entirety of the terrain in Lost World. We already know the reasons but it's still insane to think how much Sonic Team reduced the workload for the stages.

Global Illumination Quality: The GI Streaming and the GI Atlas texture system are gone, in comes individual GI textures for each instance file in the stage. There's no longer any level of variable quality to the GI, and only the lowest quality ones as possible were rendered and used in the game. The shading algorithm however luckily remains the same, and there's no need to come up with new rendering techniques to preview it or create our own.

Streaming Engine: The Hedgehog Engine in both Generations and Unleashed uses a lot of files to determine Terrain Groups and Terrain Blocks. These control when to load and unload chunks of terrain, when to cull it from view with a Visibility Tree, etc. That entire system is gone and instead the game will auto-load anything that is in the terrain folder (I assume since I haven't seen anything that describes what terrain to load). While this makes terrain repacking extremely easy in comparison to Generations, it also limits a lot what can be done with the game. The game simply streams terrain by just using the bounding spheres of each terrain node and loading it if it's close to the camera.


Terrain Previewing

As expected, since a lot of the formats are similar, it's pretty easy to add some compatibility into my current branch of SonicGLvl and preview it with the Generations shaders. However as mentioned before, the changes means a lot of materials are incompatible and not supposed to be previewed like this, leading to a lot of red materials (used when the shader does not exist in my database), broken uvs, broken lighting, etc.

Bring on the picture dump!







Conclusions for now

• The dual-Sonic Team theory gains new ground as the workflow is extremely similar to the Colors' one. Whoever's in charge of this team seems content with what they have and would rather not adapt to the other team's workflow despite adapting the Hedgehog Engine to Wii U. The middle-ware inconsistency between the two teams is even more apparent now.
  
  
• Sadly there's barely any cut content or interesting areas from what I found, but I've not had a very thorough check yet. Hopefully when the files are public other people will give it a better look. I'm still awaiting the DLC files to inspect those as well.
  
  
• The small differences between the formats means a back-port of the terrain to Generations is easily possible with some coding. However, I'm not interested in the idea nor think it would work well due to the massive gameplay differences between the two games. There's a lot to be discussed as well if it's actually beneficial for us to do that to a new game that is still being sold as the latest title. We don't know what reaction Sega could have to seeing a botched copy of their newest game in an older one, and the situation gets even more dodgy considering the low amount of Wii U owners and the implications of that. I will not prevent anyone from trying when the files are public, but I would rather not take the risk. That and I don't really like the level design anyways. />
  
  
• As a side-note to the previous point, it could be interesting to discuss the reuse of assets instead rather than ports.
  
  
• What I'm more interested about as soon as an exploit appears is to test how easy it would be to import brand new levels into Lost World. It should be much simpler than Generations levels in theory (except for the .orc file cracking), and the gameplay could easily lend itself to more regular 3D platformer stages than the kind of racing stages Generations usually does. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested to see the Parkour being used in more interesting levels as well rather than Straight Extruded Tube Zone Act 1.
  
  
• I've not seen much in the way of physics configurations files yet, which is pretty disappointing considering how many tweaks this game would benefit from. Seems like a lot of it is hard-coded like Colors.
  
  
• All of Sky Road's levels are named in a way that they imply are the final acts of each world instead (w1a01 is Windy Hill Act 1, w1a06 is Sky Road Act 1). The sharp spike in difficulty would suggest otherwise, so it's probably just an organization thing rather than an old level order.
  The actual level order is laid out in lua files. Notice how a lot of the "x" levels were stuck into the worlds, explaining the big inconsistency in themes for each world:
  
  Spoiler

  ---------------------------------------------------------------
  -- ゾーン、ミッション、ステージの対応表
  
  zone_table = {
      -- world1
      {
          index = 0,
          missions = { "w1a01", "w1a03", "xind01","w1a06"  },
      },
      -- world2
      {
          index = 1,
          missions = { "w2a01", "xbee01","xswe01","w2a06"  },
      },
      -- world3
      {
          index = 2,
          missions = { "w3a01", "w3a03", "xsea01","w3a06", "w6a03" },
      },
      -- world4
      {
          index = 3,
          missions = { "w4a01", "w4a04", "xcas01","w4a06"  },
      },
      -- world5
      {
          index = 4,
          missions = { "w5a01", "w5a02", "xind02","xmoa01" },
      },
      -- world6
      {
          index = 5,
          missions = { "w1a04", "w5a03", "w6a05", "w2c01", "xnim02" },
      },
      -- world7
      {
          index = 6,
          missions = { "w7a01", "xsea02","w7a02", "w7a06"  },
      },
      -- world8
      {
          index = 7,
          missions = { "xcub01","xsky01","xnim01","xbak01"  },
      },
      -- minigame (WorldMap, SaveData)
      --world1
      {
          index = 8,
          missions = { "w1m0a","w1m0b","w1m0c","w1m0d"  },
      },
      --world2
      {
          index = 9,
          missions = { "w2m0a","w2m0b","w2m0c","w2m0d"  },
      },
      --world3
      {
          index = 10,
          missions = { "w3m0a","w3m0b","w3m0c","w3m0d"  },
      },
      --world4
      {
          index = 11,
          missions = { "w4m0a","w4m0b","w4m0c","w4m0d"  },
      },
      --world5
      {
          index = 12,
          missions = { "w5m0a","w5m0b","w5m0c","w5m0d"  },
      },
      --world6
      {
          index = 13,
          missions = { "w6m0a","w6m0b","w6m0c","w6m0d"  },
      },
      --world7
      {
          index = 14,
          missions = { "w7m0a","w7m0b","w7m0c","w7m0d"  },
      },
  
      -- battle
      -- speed race
      {
          index = 15,
          missions = { "batl01","batl02","batl03","batl04","batl05"  },
      },
      -- expart race
      {
          index = 16,
          missions = { "batl06","batl07","batl08","batl09","batl10"  },
      },
      -- ring race
      {
          index = 17,
          missions = { "batl11","batl12","batl13","batl14","batl15"  },
      },
  
  

  
  
  
• I hope none of the horrible nerfing to the engine that took place in this game happens for Generations' Sonic Team's next game. />

My focus remains on working on SonicGLvl and a Generations mod as well (that is not related to this), but hopefully we get to talk more about this once the files are public and the Wii U exploits are possible. So far it's looking very promising and possible to make level mods for anyone interested without much research. 2015 looking pretty interesting so far. />

I delayed creating the thread here since originally, my post in ModDB was gonna be much larger and detailed... until they told me at the last minute that there was a 10k character limit. Most of the questions asked in the other thread at the moment had already been answered in the Readme, but I don't blame you since that is really long. So I had to separate it into a news post, which didn't get approved until this morning.

Since I would probably just copy paste my original post here, better go read the original news post on ModDB:
ModDB News Post with FAQ, Troubleshooting, and Credits included



Torrent of the mod.
Atomic Gamer




Feel free to use this thread for all your needs, I hope the extended post will help clear any other doubts people had.

As for post release stuff, I will quote myself:

Quote

Since obviously archiving this stuff is in the best spirit of what Retro is about, I will post those on this thread later on.

For bugfixes, we'll probably push a patch in the online updater later when we got some more issues reported after some days.

As for post-release content, there's no plans for me yet due to how busy I will be for the rest of the year with college. We have some cleaning/organization/archival to do of the whole thing first. There's some stuff coming for SonicGLvl first though!

Hope you guys had fun with our work after all this time! I'm really thankful to all the people in the credits sections for helping this become a reali-

Yes, even him.

EDIT: I just remembered Retro has a section for hacks in the Wiki, but I suck at wikis. So if anyone wants to do a page, go ahead.
EDIT2: Also realized I forgot to credit MM for his work on the Archive editor. Sorry!

Dragon Road Demo
(Entry for the Sonic Hacking Contest 2012)

Before going any further, please notice we're in ModDB now with our own page! So you can follow us there as well for any updates(some exclusive content too!).

Half an year has passed since the research started, from absolutely NOTHING other than some basic uncompressers. Today, it's time to let you play the fruits of our labour and hard work, and there's plenty more to come in the future! For now, enjoy it...



Download
UPDATE: If you've downloaded the mod before, you can download these files and replace on the relevant folders you copied the files to. Otherwise, just get the full pack.

Patch: Download the latest Patched Files

Full(updated): Download from our ModDB Page.
Full(not updated yet) mirror: Google Drive Mirror(Way faster)

The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000142)
This is caused because your version of the game isn't updated. Common problem with people who haven't booted it in Steam, or pirate copies.
Update: Or you can update CPKREDIR v0.4.1 on your Sonic Generations folder.

This mod uses SonicGMI. This pack already has the program included. If you follow the simple instructions inside, you should be able to play with no problems at all in less than a minute.

You can buy Sonic Generations right now for $17.99 USD on Steam! (Daily deal is over, last chance to get the game cheap)



Installing:

• Install either SonicGMI or CPKREDIR with the instructions included. (Simply copy the included EXE and DLL to your Sonic Generations folder).
  
  
• If you never used Mods, remember to enable mod redirection using SonicGMI's "Install/Uninstall" button. All this does is replace the string "imagehlp.dll" to "cpkredir.dll" in the exe, and it's easy to restore. Steam won't give you any trouble for this simple patch, nor will you get a ban or anything like that.
  
  
• Drop the "UnleashedDR" folder into a mods folder(like the one you just copied to the regular Sonic Generations folder) of your own so SonicGMI detects it. If you're using CPKREDIR alone, you'll have to add the entry to your INI.
  
  
• Now just boot up SonicGMI, make sure the checkbox on the Dragon Road demo is enabled, then Save & Play!
  
  
• If you don't see the custom HUB when entering in-game, then you just did something wrong. Try again or ask here, with accurate descriptions of what you did.

Please notice this mod uses its own custom save file, so none of your progress will get overwritten or reset. DO NOT START A NEW GAME(you can restore the original save file with SonicGMI). If you want to force this off, simply toggle it in SonicGMI.



Features

• Sonic Unleashed level from the Xbox 360 version, playable for the first time(for the public) on a PC.
  
• Framerate Cap increased to 60 FPS
  
• Unlimited resolutions, whatever your PC can render.
  
• Global Illumination from the Sonic Unleashed DLC, improving the lighting quality by a great margin
  
• Fully reworked layout. Stuff that couldn't be ported in got replaced, anything annoying or bad is improved, and some other additions of our own!
  
• Custom mini-HUB, and some great new HUB tunes thanks to Falk.
  
• Lots and lots of glitches fixed, and more shall be fixed as they're discovered if needed.

Video:

Full playthrough of the level(spoilers obviously)



Screenshots:



Click the spoiler for more shots.




FAQ:

• Q: The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000142)
  A: This is caused because your version of the game isn't updated. Common problem with people who haven't booted it in Steam, or pirate copies.
  Update: Or you can update CPKREDIR v0.4.1 on your Sonic Generations folder.
  
  
• Q: Release Date for full mod?
  A: Nope. We haven't even started polishing the rest of the levels, it's really time consuming to even polish ONE like this, given how much stuff needs to be recreated. Unless you want Sonic '06 quality, don't ask. When it's done, it's done.
  
  
• Q: Can you port levels from <anything that isn't Sonic Unleashed>...
  A: Nope. Not because I can't, but because I likely find it a waste of time, and you should probably do it yourself.
  
  
• Q: Can you port bosses/cutscenes/story?
  A: No, and even if I could, there's not much point to it since this mod tries to act as if it were DLC. Given the internal workings of the game we can't really ADD more levels, just replace for now. With SonicGMI, switching shouldn't be an issue though.
  
  
• Q: Will you keep releasing individual levels like this?
  A: While it's a neat idea, doing these kind of Mini-demos is really time consuming. I'll likely use the same approach to polishing the stages though. The ideas are still up in the air, but for now, working on the rest of the Day Levels and releasing them as the full pack is the plan.
  
  
• Q: Will this tamper with my Time/Score/Red Rings?
  A: SonicGMI comes with save redirection by default, and this mod comes with a save that lets you play right away on Dragon Road. The rest of the levels are disabled, to encourage the user to learn how to use the Mod Loader to switch from the regular game, to the Unleashed Project.
  
  
• Spoiler

  
  Q: Dumbass, it's Skyscraper Scamper, not Empire City.
  A: Skyscraper Scamper is a stupid name, nobody relates to it, and everyone just calls it Empire City. It's pretty much begging for the rename. And it doesn't actually fit in a regular title card, but that's TOTALLY NOT THE MAIN REASON.
  

Credits:
Dario ff, Chimera, TwilightZoney - Mod Development
Additional help from Falk(HUB World Tunes), JoeTE(Music Replacement), Lobotomy(HD Retexturing), Korama(CPKREDIR), MainMemory(Generations Archive Editor), and to everyone who keeps using SonicGLvl(efficiently)! It's really good motivation to keep working and improving on it, and it makes developing this mod so much easier.

Lots of thanks to Sega for making Sonic Generations and releasing it on PC! We care about your games here, so when are we getting a patch or two?

And that's all I've got to say. Download it, enjoy it, do anything you want with it. I don't require you this time to post videos or anything, but it's all cool and really appreciated! (Particularly some of those high-res shots from you PC Gaming Battlestations)

Feel free to post any feedback and questions you got.

Sonic Generations PC Unleashed Porting Project - Public Hardware Test #1

EDIT: Download got updated with Instancing support. Grass and Flowers will show up now. The link is the same.

Description:

These are the files for playing Windmill Isle Act 1 in place of the Green Hill Zone level slot.

This demo is merely for testing purposes and checking to see if it runs in as many systems as possible. If enough systems have satisfactory performance, we'll go ahead and start converting all the stages, aiming for the final state of them.

Credits:

• Dario FF, Chimera, and TwilightZoney, community members from sonicretro.org, main developers.
  
• Additional Help from JoeTE(SonicRetro or SSMB) for song ripping.
  
• Special thanks to Korama from sonicretro.org for CPKREDIR, the solution we'll be using and testing for mod distribution.
  
• Also thanks to MainMemory for developing Generations Archive Editor, which is pretty much the main tool used for developing, and is currently used by SonicGLvl.

How to install
Download the files here(73.9 MB). It already includes CPKREDIR v0.3.1.
Filebeam Mirror since you guys dun goofed the dropbox account.

There's 3 ways to install the mod, depending on your current setup. I recommend to go with #1 or #2.

1) I have no (major) mods installed, I just want to play

• Copy the whole contents of this folder(mods folder included) to the Sonic Generations folder(the one where the .exe of the game is).
  
• If you never installed CPKREDIR, run cpkredirInst.exe. All this exe does is patch the imagehlp.dll string in SonicGenerations.exe to cpkredir.dll(Given the previous dll is a common system dll, you just can't override it by placing it in the folder). If you don't trust the exe, just do the patch manually with a hex editor.
  
• You can just run the game now, you should be able to play Windmill Isle on the GHZ level slot(Act 2).
  
• If at any time you want to restore the original game, either run the cpkredirInst.exe again to unpatch the game, edit cpkredir.ini to Enabled=0, or just delete the mods folder along with the ini.

2) I already have CPKREDIR installed

2.a) If you're using CPKREDIR advanced mode with the ModsDB.ini

• Copy the "Project Unleashed HW Demo Act 1" in the mods folder to your own "mods" folder.
  
• Edit in your on your modsDB.ini the following lines:
  

      [Main]
      ...
      ActiveModX="Unleashed"
      ....
  
  

  
  Where X is the number you should give it according to how many mods you have. Remember to increase ActiveModCount as well by 1.
  

      [Mods]
      Unleashed="Project Unleashed HW Demo Act 1\mod.ini"
  
  

2.b) If you're using CPKREDIR in simple mode, without ModsDB.ini

• Go into the "Project Unleashed HW Demo Act 1" folder, and copy the two folders("disk" and "Sound") to your root Sonic Generations directory(the one where the SonicGenerations.exe is)

3) I don't want to install any mod installers, let me do it myself with the CPKs

• In that case I'll assume you're familiar enough with CPK tools, and the contents of everything you need is in their respective folders inside "Project Unleashed HW Demo Act 1", named without the CPK extension of course. Simply copy and overwrite anything that's needed.

FAQ

• Question: Does this test mean you're getting closer to releasing the mod? Can we have a release date?
  
• Answer: As stated, this test is just to confirm if our Terrain conversion process works for most hardware configurations, as we lack enough systems to test it on. Most of the time has been spent on familiarizing ourselves with this engine, how it works, researching, and advancing the modding scene as well. I can assure you that thanks to all of that, working on this should be far easier and faster than before.
  
  Release date is still a good ol' "When it's done". But we have an internal deadline on trying to submit something(either privately or for the public) for the Hacking contest, be it just a few levels or not, but we'll see. Quality is the first priority though. We're not getting paid for this and we just do it for fun and because we want to play this at its full potential, so we work at our own pace in whatever is needed.
  
  
• Question: Does this mod work with the demo?
  
• Answer: In theory it should, but it uses the Egg Fighter and the Aero Cannon files. If those are missing on the demo, it'll either crash or they just won't appear at all. So you might just be able to delete them off the layout using SonicGLvl in that case.
  
  
• Question: Will you keep releasing single levels like this?
  
• Answer: The goal is still releasing all the 8(or could be 9?) day stages, along with most missions and DLC we can port, in a single, big mod later on. Night stages with Classic Sonic are a possibility that's being looked at, but it'd probably be a second priority for a new version. I can assure you it looks sexy enough to be considered.
  
  
• Question: Can you port Metal Harbor/Aquarium Park/My Fancharacter Hill Zone?
  
• Answer: That's something not related to this project, nor do I intend to work on that since I'm not a good enough 3D modeller. You can check out SonicGLvl and start working on it yourself though!
  
  
• Question: I want to help
  
• Answer: We're not looking for help from anyone right now other than some music composition for the White World HUB themes(which I think others already agreed to, but I'm still willing to look at your work if you send it). We don't need beta testers, nor designers or modellers at the moment. If we do, I'll inform you about it.
  
  
• Question: All this wait just for a 1 minute tutorial level?
  
• Answer: A lot of progress has gone behind that little level you see there. If you follow the videos you'll realise a lot of the bullshit we had to go through. Here's a summary of it:
  - Converting Terrain Geometry from the XBox 360 format to PC compatible format. Includes a full reverse engineering of the model format.
  - Reverse engineering and updating the Terrain Configuration files to work with the converted geometry.
  - Mass conversion of animated models.
  - Developed the only software capable of converting Havok 360 HKX Binary files into PC compatible binaries. This allows conversion of Animations, Skeletons, Collisions, etc.
  - SonicGLvl developed as a sister project for it, which allows fixing the layouts and understanding even better how the game works.
  - A lot of research into the XML configuration used by the game, and pushing its limits to see how much can be done without modifying the game's code.
  - Material reverse engineering and inconsistencies fixing. Quite a bunch of materials had to be fixed for this level to look like that.
  - General fixing of any inconsitencies in object layout, archive tree organization, and such.
  - Fixing skyboxes to use Generations' routines.
  - Going through repacking CPKs for anything almost for 4 months, and just until recently using CPKREDIR.(Took about 3 minutes to test a single change for several months)
  - Crashing. CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING. That's what you get for doing the initial research on a game that's never been opened before and is brand new.

Known Bugs

• The camera of the first loop is bugged. It's not radically game-breaking, it's just a different angle.
  
• The bloom/glare of the water is ridiculously high. We're checking if this is a hardware problem or just a configuration problem.
  
• Trying to pinpoint if the excessive lag that might occur after playing various stages over and over again is caused by the windmill isle level or CPKREDIR.

TL;DR; We want you people to do anything you want with it. Record footage, report any issues, even try modifying the layout if you want! Put your character swaps, or even your fancharacter. I don't care, we just want to see if it works alright.