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Sonic Adventure DX: Fixed Edition

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by SF94, May 19, 2011.

  1. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    If you can figure out what's wrong, sure - Cream is otherwise very low priority for me =P. It looks like it could be a simple texture issue, but if it's otherwise a mesh problem... I'm not sure I'd bother. From what I can remember, Cream is a horrible monster.

    The last comparison in this video is very different from the rest. Also re: last note there: materials can have transparency applied directly to them regardless of whether the texture it's using has an alpha channel.

    If I recall, you fixed them by modifying the textures' alpha channels, right? Honestly, the only reason I haven't used your fixes is because I first want to confirm that it's the texture's fault in the first place; I just haven't taken the time to do it yet. It could be a number of other issues, like differences in rendering behavior between PC and GC (which is most certainly different in fact, it's just not enough to affect everything), material mishaps (which are more frequent than one could probably tell), etc.

    I'd also almost argue that the basically-completely-transparent water in the GameCube version is "wrong", but I'd certainly agree with you if you were to say that the PC's alternative looks terrible. And a bit of a nitpick, but the transparency isn't missing in that last case you posted, it's just not as aggressively transparent as the GameCube. If you can still see Sonic through it, it's transparent (translucent?).

    So tl;dr I guess: don't get me wrong, I want to fix that stuff, I just want to make sure this is the best way to do it. That'll help prevent the need to re-do it later.
     
  2. CheatFreak

    CheatFreak

    Catgirl expert. Member
    Actually I think it was IndyTheGreat that went out of his way to fix them- though in the case of Station Square's Chao Garden he flat out made his own higher res texture so it seemed more subtle- a bit like the subtle ripples.

    I'm fairly certain that it in fact isn't the textures fault- just sonic team's laziness an error in porting the levels. The reason I was bringing it up again is actually because I'm pretty sure that the texture itself didn't have any transparency on them in the GameCube port- and that it was actually something else entirely. Editing the texture is sort of a hodgepodge way of fixing it- It's probably a material mishap or something along those lines like you were saying.

    As for Cream- I think there probably is an issue with the mesh. The texture for her character seems to be identical to the one used in Sonic Heroes though. Not sure if that's helpful at all.
     
  3. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    Ah, I guess I mixed the two of you up somewhere down the line. I think I've seen both your usernames in the same place.

    Not sure what I can do about Cream, but thanks for bringing that other stuff up again. I'll be sure to look into it... eventually. I've got a lot of other--albeit related--things to work on at the moment.
     
  4. IndyTheGreat

    IndyTheGreat

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    Honestly, I wouldn't mind if the water shader effects couldn't be brought back. I feel like that's a completely different issue. But the Egg Carrier garden's water being completely stationary is unacceptable and I've been trying to figure out how to fix it for months now but I can't seem to figure it out. If the people who ported this game went out of their way to add places where existing textures were put (Mystic Ruins garden pond, Station Square garden pool) and animated those duplicates, why the hell couldn't the Egg Carrier garden ocean be animated? It boggles my mind.

    The mystic ruins pond has the same texture in the GC and PC ports, but the GC port applies more transparency when its in the level itself and it looks a lot better. I already fixed that by editing the texture itself.

    As for the Station Square chao garden, the water normally uses the same damn texture as the fountain water and it's extremely ugly, so I photographed my pool water, grayscaled it, made it really transparent and put it in. While it makes the fountain look somewhat worse, it still doesn't look bad and the water looks a LOT better.
     
  5. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    If 'separate model for each animation frame, in Chunk Model format' is a horrible monster, then yes. Editing anything would be difficult.
     
  6. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    For the same reason mesh got randomly and erroneously rotated, and why random faces on mesh went missing between two builds of the same game, maybe? But even that's still a mystery. =P
    Either way, it's not really fixable right now; or at least, not cleanly. We don't have a standard method for texture animation set up yet.

    So that being the case, modifying the texture itself is probably the wrong approach strictly in terms of Fixed Edition. I'd need some way to confirm whether it's just the way it's rendered or if it's just a material thing before I implement something similar.

    I'd say you did a pretty nice job then! And you could always take that a step further by modifying the stage and giving the water its own separate texture.

    confirmed for horrible monster
     
  7. IndyTheGreat

    IndyTheGreat

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    If I could modity the stage and give the water its own texture, I'd take the texture out of the shallow water in the fountain, put the old texture back on the water coming out of the fountain and keep my texture in the water itself. Sheesh, it's astonishing how many little corners were cut. With the oridinal SDK, doing this properly would have taken an extra 5 minutes or so.
     
  8. Elliot

    Elliot

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    I think I have one more post here so let me just say thank you for this. I really appreciate it and all of the mods and fixes for these games.

    Thank you for also making them easy to use.
     
  9. Lanzer

    Lanzer

    The saber calls for its master... Member
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    You have 20 more actually, trials are given a 21 post shot if you pass you get bumped to member status.

    Good luck don't make any dumb posts. ;)
     
  10. I noticed two minor inconsistencies regarding Emerald Coast between the GameCube and PC versions. The first inconsistency is that in Big's version of Emerald Coast, the water textures used for the secret fishing spot are higher than they were in the GameCube version. Previously, the textures were located very slightly below the actual surface of the water. The second inconsistency is that the light that would be reflected off of Sonic, Metal Sonic, and Big's character models in Emerald Coast always travels away from the camera in the PC version instead of traveling in only a single direction, so the character models are always very shiny in that level regardless of the camera angle. Is it possible for those two things to be fixed?

    After looking at the water textures that aren't as transparent as they were in the GameCube version, I noticed that those textures tend to be ones that are composed of two layers like Station Square's water textures. None of the water textures that have only one layer have this problem. Also, I'm curious about how the PC version's lighting seems to be overall different from the GameCube version. After watching some gameplay footage of the GameCube version, I noticed that everything seems to be slightly darker and the colors are a bit more vibrant.
     
  11. Shade Vortex

    Shade Vortex

    The Black Vortex Member
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    I'm not sure if this is because I used Better SADX to convert my Steam version of SADX to the Fixed Edition of SADX 2004 PC version, but I've noticed Tikal has no voice clips and cutscenes are pretty much silent. Also no voice clips for character select or anywhere else, except for the ingame character sounds. All in-game SFX and music work fine.

    Also, I notice the Mod Manager's config doesn't seperate "voice volume" and "SFX volume" even though the official config tool for SADX did have this (at least for the Steam version, I had never played the 2004 version before this so maybe that's normal).
     
  12. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    If the system/sounddata/voice_us/wma folder is full of ADX files, that's why, they have to be WMA (unless I add ADX voice playback to the mod loader).
     
  13. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    If you would like to grab some screenshots of those emerald coast differences, I'll take a look.
    As for the lighting, the GameCube version has very minimal actual lighting on anything but the characters, and the characters have a shader applied to make them look the way they do. The Steam version of 'DX has a DX9 version of this shader which I'm going to see about back-porting it to DX8 for this version of 'DX.

    Yeah, that's just how it is in this version. Voice and sounds are rolled into one, and music is separated. It might be possible to hack it to do otherwise, though.
     
  14. Shade Vortex

    Shade Vortex

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    Well... that's weird. They're .wmas in the wma folder you specified. So shouldn't the voices work?

    EDIT: Looks like if I put the sound/voice volume to 100, it works fine. At 50, the voices weren't playing (but the sounds were). That's a weird issue... I don't like listening to things at full blast, so that's kinda annoying.
     
  15. Here is a screenshot of the discrepancy with the secret fishing area that I took: the screenshot. The water textures are placed noticeably above the actual surface of the water instead of being placed right where the surface of the water is, which is what the GameCube version does. I don't have any pictures that show the discrepancy with the light that reflects off of the characters' bodies in Emerald Coast. However, if you run in a circle while rotating the camera, then you'll notice that the way that the light is reflected does not change at all in the PC version while it does in the GameCube version. This seems to not affect E-102 Gamma for some reason.
     
  16. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    To be clear, that's not just a texture, it's an actual piece of mesh. The texture is the image that is applied to the mesh. It's important to distinguish them since fixing them would require entirely different approaches. I was a little confused by that from your previous post. In any case, thanks for the report.

    That's really strange... I'll add these issues to my research to-do, thanks for the info.
     
  17. CheatFreak

    CheatFreak

    Catgirl expert. Member
    Do you think that adding ADX voice playback would fix that stutter that happens when you go over all those dash jump panels in the kart section of Twinkle Circuit?
    That's a rather annoying issue that seems to happen- not sure if it's because the game stops to load the WMA or what.

    Edit: I'm all for that change for the record- it'll drop about 112mb off the BetterSADX patcher for the steam port because I won't have to include the WMA voices. The smaller the download- the better. :v:
     
  18. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    I was honestly wondering the exact same thing. Switching the music to ADX has reduced a lot of stuttering as it is, so I'd say it's worth trying it out.
     
  19. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    Two questions:

    1) What was the reasoning behind undoing the random ring capsule icon fix and changing the speed shoe icon back to the Sonic R version in the latest releases?

    2) I'm currently replaying the game and noticing a number (15+ so far) of problems and small issues that still haven't been fixed in SADX:FE. Shall I post them here (with complementary screenshots), or that would come off as too whiny and demanding? :v:
     
  20. SF94

    SF94

    Tech Member
    I would like to apply the fix in code, I just haven't taken the time to do it. As for the icon, it was an unnecessary aesthetic change. I sort of changed my philosophy on how to go about things so I decided it didn't have any place here.

    Go right ahead!