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SADX/SA1 Hacking/Modding

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by MainMemory, Aug 15, 2009.

  1. PkR

    PkR

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    SADX Dreamcast Conversion, The Emeralds' Awakening
    I thought it would be difficult to fix but it turned out to be a 1 line difference - I just had to move the lights mesh to make sure it's rendered after those crystals. You can redownload the updated mod from my previous post, should be fixed now.

    That one I'm not sure how to address since that bridge is a different object altogether. I don't really know how to handle that.

    It's mr_016f_kouseb in MR_FINALEGG. The outer glow is mrd_032s_efhikari (turns out this one uses a very simple transparency mask - the darker the pixel, the more transparent it is. You can make it more vibrant by basically brightening up the image). Try playing around with it and see what happens if you make it darker or lighter. It might be enough to just brighten up the black parts.
    You can edit the PNG files directly in the mod's texture pack folder to save time. You can also confirm which textures are used by different parts of the model by checking the materials in SAMDL.
     
  2. MainMemory

    MainMemory

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    Nothing that's been written down, although the SADX Preview for GameCube does have a mission editor that could provide significant insight into how the system works. I've been wanting to put a mission editor in SADXLVL2 for a long time.
     
  3. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    That can't be. I've tried replacing it with another texture and the beams kept looking the same.

    Thanks for the tip. Will take a look at SADX Preview later.
     
  4. PkR

    PkR

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    SADX Dreamcast Conversion, The Emeralds' Awakening
    Like I said, you can see in SAMDL that it's indeed the texture being used by the beams. However, there seems to be a texture with the same name and global index in MROBJ.PVM, which explains why the edited texture is not loaded: since it has the same global index as the one in MROBJ.PVM, the game discards it and uses the one it has already loaded. The easiest way to fix this is to edit index.txt in the texture pack folder and change the number next to mr_016f_kousenb to something that doesn't conflict with other textures in SADX, like I tried 228299 and it worked fine. MainMemory has a list of SADX textures with their PVMs and global indices here.
     
  5. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    I see. In that case, here's the edited texture:
    http://www.mediafire.com/view/y6zbd2dsxlld679/mr_016f_kousenb.png
     
  6. Sappharad

    Sappharad

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    I would totally love it if you did that. I don't believe anyone has done a proper analysis of the DLC data. A few pages back I posted a tool that I threw together which will decrypt the VMS files for the DLC.
    It's pretty obvious where the text data and texture data are in the files because they have known headers, and even the Japanese XMAS download that played a MIDI of Jingle Bells when you touched a tree you can easily see where that music was stored, but nobody's documented the actual offsets that point to those or how the structure works. Oddly enough there didn't appear to be SET data plainly visible in the files. At the end of every download there is always a chunk of data usually a KB or more that is either compressed, encrypted, or some form of byte code. It's not PRS, and I didn't run through the game in a debugger to try and figure out what that is.

    I did confirm that there is no SH2 assembly code in the downloads, so any logic present in the downloads like the quests for collecting things or actions that occur when you touch something must either be baked-in templates where the downloads just control objects and locations or actual custom byte code like quests in Phantasy Star Online did. The format used for the MIDI music in the Japanese XMAS quest is used by other DC games, although I never found any tools or documentation on it other than some references from people who did DSF soundtrack rips.

    If you ever manage to figure something out on that end, I'd love to play around with the possibilities going the other way and make some custom DC downloads.
     
  7. E-122-Psi

    E-122-Psi

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    Mission Mode was a decent idea ruined by how dull and hack-like the actual tasks were. I'd welcome someone making them reprogrammable so they can be fun.
     
  8. Blue Spikeball

    Blue Spikeball

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    TBH, I was merely planning to convert the downloadable challenges into missions and porting the models used in the DLC minigames at first. Though I was also considering looking into the DLC's object and quest data or whatever and possibly making a more throughout port later, doing the holiday events as well. I wouldn't be surprised if the code to run holiday and minigame events is still in SADX, and all it takes is porting the objects, models and scripts.

    This is all theoretical so far, though. Keep in mind that I've never done much SADX hacking besides editing textures and level layouts, and I haven't looked into object formats yet, so I'm not the best qualified person for the job. And I cannot promise I'll get to do much work or research before next year. Life calls :v:

    I'm pretty sure that the real challenge and satisfaction with most missions is supposed to come (besides finding the mission cards or whatever they're called) from solving the riddle in the mission description and figuring out the objective, rather than performing the task itself. Granted, some of them were painfully obvious.
     
  9. Sable

    Sable

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    This is unrelated to the prior discussion but, in PC 2004 at least, there's a one-pixel border on both the left and top sides of the screen that isn't affected by most fades and transitions, at least on some (all?) resolutions. Is this possible to fix? It's always annoyed the hell out of me.
     
  10. Speeps

    Speeps

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    So I found out something funny the other day and thought it'd be worth putting here. :v:

    Turns out if you plug a controller into Port 2 and play Sky Deck as Tails, you can control the opponent Sonic.
    For some reason getting shot out of the cannon at the start of the stage enables the 2P controls. It goes back to normal if you restart at a checkpoint.

    No idea if anyone else knew about it but I found it hilarious.
     
  11. E-122-Psi

    E-122-Psi

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    Concerning some of the DLC, this guy seemed to uncover it's data in the Dreamcast version, taking a look at their work might be a step towards finding it in the DX version (there's download links on the actual video page):

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcBmasdbM-A
     
  12. Fred

    Fred

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    "This guy"
     
  13. E-122-Psi

    E-122-Psi

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    You're JmTsHaW by any chance?
     
  14. Pokepunch

    Pokepunch

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    A Sonic 2 Hack
    Look one post above the video you posted.
     
  15. E-122-Psi

    E-122-Psi

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    .......

    Okay, now I feel like an idiot.
     
  16. Speeps

    Speeps

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    That's not really uncovering any data, the DLC is pretty easy to find online I mean.

    Awesome, now I have this:

    [​IMG]

    Anyway, I put some stuff through that tool today but couldn't really do much aside from getting sounds and textures of course. I tried to see if I could change anything but the game wasn't having any of it sadly.
    If anyone else wants to go through the DLC though here's the decrypted vms files for all of them:
    https://www.mediafire.com/?n6s98mq1qm3tx8i

    Who knows, maybe there's something worth finding in there.
     
  17. E-122-Psi

    E-122-Psi

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    The missions shown have at least looked less awkward and more professionally made than the SADX ones.
     
  18. Sable

    Sable

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    So, uh...

    In the JP Dreamcast version there's files called PDATA10-PDATA19 that have a whopping total of 119,083 Japanese commercial addresses ranging from cemeteries to hospitals to Literally Capcom.

    Download, if you're interested. They're plain text files with Shift-JIS encoding.
     
  19. PkR

    PkR

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    SADX Dreamcast Conversion, The Emeralds' Awakening
    Thanks for the interesting find! I've had a quick look at those, and they seem to be lists of Japanese postcode addresses rather than real addresses. For example, PDATA19 contains all postcodes for Okinawa, and PDATA11 is for Tokyo. The reason some specific buildings are included there is that they have a dedicated postcode. Most of the time it's just streets, though.
     
  20. Lanzer

    Lanzer

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    EDIT: Wait hold on we were just talking about this in another topic:
    http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=8815&pid=878600&st=4755&#entry878600

    Did you just take Jmtshaw's link and post it here?