I wonder if it would be possible to source the stock photo they used for that Speed Highway skybox. That's clearly just New York City. Here's what five minutes on Google Image Search got me, where you can see roughly the same skyline and the same bridge: Problem is, there's literally a billion photos of New York from around this area and getting the angle right is gonna be tricky.
It seems to be a cut and paste from the image used at the start of Sonic's story (the still city image he's planted over). This was helpful in many parts, though the building foreground obscures a lot of the stock art there. They obviously had some stock photo they used for both.
There's at least three if not four images in that scene alone as I seriously doubt the stars are part of the same image as the city scape. There's also the possibility the buildings themselves were cut out and layered on the sky image behind it as well. Considering how much of it is composited and the fact the images were obtained probably in 1996 or 1997, finding the exact source images would be impractically difficult at best, and nigh on impossible at worst.
The skybox used for the Los Angeles night sky in Duke Nukem 3D was scanned from a book, and the skies used in Doom are from a CD of stock images. I suspect those are the kinds of places you would need to look.
http://youtu.be/t60p00H0xtI Just a test of SADXLVL2's mission editing, and some custom coding. Hopefully I can turn this into some more interesting missions in the future.
Are we shrewdly trying to endorse something here? XD The concept is good (love the Sonic money) but the presence of ring boxes confuses things a bit. Maybe if there was a way to add a separate counter for the 'dollars' over the ring count. This is a cool function. If you want to try making a custom Mission Mode, may I advise making some missions that involve searching around the Adventure Fields more. They always felt kind of under-utilised in the game, so having more missions that involve intuitive looking around the hub worlds with each character could be fun. The only ones I specifically remember doing such in the original Mission Mode were Big's fishing missions and a handful of item collection ones, though even they felt a bit lazily done. One thing I wondered might be a cool idea, is there a way to alter the music specifically for when you're playing a Mission? There's loads of unused goofy riffs that would be ideal, and they'd help give the feel you're playing a mini game. I know the Dreamcast DLC did this sometimes (eg. the Y2K mission playing Palmtree Panic) and unlike cases like Hedgehog Hammer in the hubs, the music actually has reset points before and after the mission.
I would totally love a faithful recreation of SA1 DLCs as SADX missions. I think there are quite a few people like me, who have never played SA1 DLCs on a real Dreamcast and probably weren't even aware that there were DLCs for this game until many years later. It's relatively difficult to get the DLCs working on an emulator, and adding all that content to SADX will let more people experience it. Also, some of the DLCs had actual new content - they added new level decorations, music and Twinkle Circuit courses, unlike the SADX missions where most of the time you just get a dumb objective to complete, with almost no change to the environment around you. I want to give it a go someday, but I'm going through enough trouble with converting the main game at the moment. If someone does pick it up, I can help with translation of Japanese-only DLCs.
The ring boxes are simply because I was too lazy to edit the textures, I won't be using them for the actual custom mission mod anyway. Playing specific music during a mission is possible, though that might necessitate locking you in to a specific area while the mission is active.
Well I was thinking more specific missions, obviously ones you that have free time would become an irritance (imagine a little jingle playing throughout the whole game until you beat the dreaded Icecap jump mission :P) but ones that have a limited time or only appear in a level when a certain flag is activated could work (as said the Y2K DLC for example).
Very nice! It seems like the editor actually expands on the capabilities of the original mission system. I also like how the mission card doesn't go away in case you want to replay missions; Maybe a texture change to indicate when they're completed? Also, I'm curious about something else: What would it take to "finish" Tikal and Eggman, if it's even possible? I'd imagine the biggest hurdle is creating new animations to fill in what's missing, along with mapping unique life/1up icons to them. Admittedly it would be cool to see missions where you temporarily switch to them as a sort of "no attacks or special moves" challenge.
The editor doesn't expand much, both of the missions in the test mod are made possible by custom code. With just SET editing, you'll get the same types of missions the game already uses. In order to get Tikal and Eggman playable on the same level as the other characters, you'd have to not only add new animations, but also reprogram the characters entirely to add new actions, which hasn't been attempted as of yet.
I'm actually curious about the life icon part. Do Tikal and Eggman actually have life icon spaces? Because I noticed that there are like 2 or 3 extra Sonic life icons in the file containing all those graphics, and all the other characters are only seen once. Could those extra Sonic icons correspond to Eggman, Tikal, and Super Sonic?
Abiding by some of the character mods we've had, it would likely be easier to import Tikal's SA2 model over one of the fully playables than try and 'finish' SA1 Tikal. Adding in new actions/animations would be certainly a hurdle (I've tried 3D animation, trust me), but a beneficial one. Imagine all the fixes that could be made, Super Sonic could be completed, the other characters could be made compatible with all level gimmicks, the cutscenes could be reanimated to look halfway good, etc.
Yes, Eggman and Tikal have slots for life icons in the HUD graphics (but not 1up icons). Super Sonic doesn't, as he's not a separate character slot. Metal Sonic is a hardcoded special case, as usual. Adding 1up icons for Eggman and Tikal would require expanding the texture list, which would be problematic if used with other mods that modify the same PVM. That would require us being able to properly read Tikal's SA2 model, and convert it to SADX's format. It would also be easier to keep SA1 Tikal intact, for cutscene purposes, and make a new Tikal object for gameplay.
I thought it would be a fun idea to mess with, so I made a small mod that cycles between day, evening and night every time you take the train between Station Square and Mystic Ruins. It only works in Adventure Mode (I'm not familiar enough with the Missions so I decided to play safe) and it requires completed story for the current character. It has always bothered me that you can't explore the Adventure Fields at different times of day after beating the main story. The Dreamcast version had a glitch that made Gamma's Adventure Mode stuck at night time after beating his story, but that was fixed in SADX.
It wasn't quite. You play only Adventure Mode after beating Gamma's story it's still stuck in night time. Only when you play Mission Mode does it reset to day time on both modes.
Does this mean the Evening/Night versions of the Mystic Ruins Chao Garden are available anytime post story?
Okay, finally experimented with making my own mod. Here is a test with some skybox texture packs: https://www.sendspace.com/file/tsjcsj This is just an incomplete test right now, featuring a handful of level backgrounds in higher resolution: * Station Square (Day) * Egg Carrier (Post-crash) * Emerald Coast * Speed Highway (Act 1) * Windy Valley (Act 1 and 3) There's some here I'm far from satisfied with at this point (Windy Valley 1 and Speed Highway SUCK) but I want to see if it's an improvement and I might have my first contribution to SADX modding underway.
http://youtu.be/tvB6xghGZ-g So the time has come to say that the Dreamcast character models are in the works! The benefit of this is that character mods will be possible in the future as well. For those who are wondering about release, that's tricky. There's more stuff to be added and some minor bugs to work out (Sonic's head has some bizarre lighting issues). I'm hoping to have a public build ready with just Sonic sometime soon, but I want to do some heavy testing before that and get some of the other stuff working correctly in the meantime.
