Sonic Generations - Unleashed Project v1.0 Available

I'd also like to say just for the record that I had nothing to do with the S-ranks. Dario came up with all the cutoffs himself and he was able to do all of them with no skills. So yeah. You don't need to be me to get S-ranks. :P

 

Oh that is beautiful. I gotta learn to do that.

 

I really appreciate the amount of work you guys have put into this mod.

I'd like to report one small thing. It's not a bug, but rather a design issue.
I kinda noticed it in the old Dragon Road demo, but I thought it would be fixed in the full mod... As it wasn't, I'm posting it here. This:

I like the starting animation in some levels and the way the camera spins around Sonic, but I think it looks pretty stupid when Sonic's mouth gets plastered with "Ready"/"Go!" signs. It looks fine with NoHUD mods, but I think there should be a better solution.

Also, Wentos in Dragon Road

Spoiler

 

Since a few people are mentioning some glitches/bugs/etc., I figured I'd mention one.
When playing as Super Sonic (the skill, not that one mod of mine,) or any modded character's "Super form" in general, they don't use the proper animations while using the bobsled in Cool Edge and the "Rockets" in Dragon Road. This is a bit odd, since the Super forms used the proper animation while riding the rockets in the Dragon Road demo.

P.S. - Remember when you were originally thinking about having Classic Sonic do the Night-time stages, and how I sent you the songs (and some crappy speed-up variants of them)? Well, you accidentally left-in the night-time songs (and the crappy speed-up variants) for Empire City and Jungle Joyride.

 

Aha! Mystery solved. The music just loops back to the pitch mod at the end, I always wondered what would happen. Although I'm still not sure what the music would do if you died.

 

This is good to hear. I don't really want to use an AA injector because I'm getting a little sick of installing new programs on my computer, so I don't like to use the FxPipeline renderer, but I'm really bothered by the weird glitchy look of the ice in Cool Edge and stuff like that.

Otherwise, though, I have to say this is absolutely fantastic. I love how you guys went all-out with this and didn't succumb to any limitations.

 

I'm actually curious now, though - how exactly are rank requirements handled? Is it just an XML variable you can set somewhere, or do you actually have to add/remove content from a stage? I believe I saw Dario mention it earlier in the thread that it would be difficult to change.

In the few games I've made where you get graded on your score, all I generally do is run through a stage a few times (casual play, not skill play), tally up and average those scores, and then have testers do the same thing (often times even getting a newbie to play through the level). I then have an overall average score for that stage, and balance from there. Scores that are closer to my average are higher ranks, and scores more towards the tester average are generally "medium" skill ranks, relatively speaking. But to keep it balanced, I make sure that my score is not the absolute "high grade" requirement - usually it's like, 8/10th of my score, rounded down.

Even if there are numerous elements that contribute to getting a certain type of score, that should hopefully iron out many of the kinks to give you a good baseline.

But I also notice that Sonic Generations specifically gives out an estimation like "10 seconds to next rank", so I'm not 100% sure how that works out. Is it just factoring in time bonus difference?

 

It's some sort of XML.

 

Makes sense. Thanks for answering that.

Turns out it likely is. When I was playing Rooftop Run this afternoon, I was having the same kind of problems with the side-stepping during the alleyway. I guess my controller's bumpers are just shitty (otherwise a great controller for 2D games because of the D-Pad).

 

Holy shit, you're still alive? Welcome back!

OT: The mod is amazing, the trailer's music is eargasmic, good job etc.

 

Small graphical bug in Rooftop Run:




Only noticeable if you're deliberately going slow hunting down red rings. though. It's right before the big drift that leads in to the quickstep section. Basically, as you jump, a section of wall seems to disappear (or maybe just turn black? it's hard to tell). Does it on the other side, too.

 

It's something with the lighting. I see it happen quite a bit on Cool Edge where things would shimmer more than they should.

Not surprised all the kinks aren't worked out. It's a complicated system.

 

In time I'll have a good computer and I'll be able to play this properly...

For now I dream and watch videos and play on this fucking macbook. I'm getting a good computer with graduation money though, I've had enough of this thing.

 

So, I thought of something while playing through the mod again.

You guys aren't dropping this mod and calling it a day, + - and I've seen the unlisted sneak peak video for doppleganger races from finding Wentos   . If and when you decide to port over the addtional/DLC levels, could you make them into nighttime levels? Since some of the challenge stages in Generations could be of different times of day, and as a final fuck you to the Werehog, having these additional stages take place at night seems like a neat idea. Would there be any technical issues that would prevent it from happening?

 

Fantastic release guys! I haven't been able to play Unleashed in years, so this is a great help; not to mention the replay value it adds to Generations. The hub is at least 3x better than the official one, and I just can't get enough of this in general, HNNNGH

I'll upload some speed-run and bug report videos shortly, but in the meantime, what the actual fuck.

 

HAH! The folks on that site obviously have never experienced Generations on the PC. That's the only way to explain their ignorance on just how much awesomeness this mod brings to the table. I particularly liked the dude who was like, "Well, MAYBE it would be okay if I was lazy and didn't want to switch disks." XD

On a more whiny note, I saw in the FAQ how a save file was included to get all abilities and music tracks. That's a great idea, the problem NOW being that whoever this save file belonged to, they did the Generations levels too quickly for me to be able to complete their Unleashed equivalents and chart anywhere. In other words, I can't use it to keep track of best times.

The only solution to this that I can see is if someone took a save file through the Unleashed mod and did poorly on the levels while getting all the red rings, then took that save file back to Generations and completed all the missions.

That, or just figure out the save format and edit something that way.

 

Great mod! I had a lot of fun with this on my first playthrough. I've only played about half of Unwiished so I didn't recognise the stages which means this was basically a free DLC with great content . It was pretty laggy in some parts even on the lowest settings but I blame that on my Radeon 4950 :p

I can't believe people are complaining about S-ranks being hard in a game basically built with speedrunning in mind though. If it wasn't a challenge to get it, what's the point of even having it? I personally never bothered S-ranking any other Sonic game because I felt it was meaningless but this system is actually rewarding.

On the note of speedrunning I have a request/idea if/when you plan on doing an update in the future. Basically you could add a time-attack mode kind of like the one in Sonic Generations 3DS. If you're not familiar with that system it basically removes the life counter and whenever you respawn at a checkpoint you gain 10 seconds on the time you had as you passed it.

This would be great for practising parts of the acts that you have problems with or having to suicide because you only have one life left which only is an unnecessary nuisance, without letting people abuse the checkpoints like savestates.

Obviously it doesn't have to be that exact same system and in all honesty something like a skill giving you infinite lives would probably suffice, but I think it would be appreciated by those wishing to time-attack the mod.


EDIT: Something I forgot to mention. I'm guessing it was intentional. In any case, the beginning of Jungle Joyride was a bit challenging until I realised I could just run straight forward on the water and then towards the end simply jump up on the bride from underneath. If it's something you want to fix I'd just make the bridge solid from underneath or perhaps even making the water treacherous such that it's simply yet another possible route to take.