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Sonic Mania Plus (Consoles Physical; PC Digital) - Non-Leaks Thread

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Chris Highwind, Mar 16, 2018.

  1. Lilly

    Lilly

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    Valve has recently sneaked in an update to the Steam client that's very useful: Instead of storing a folder of DirectX libraries for each game, every game in your library will now look for them in a general directory in your Steam folder instead. (It should be in Steam/steamapps/common/Steamworks Shared/_CommonRedist) If you have a lot of games, the space savings will be easy to appreciate moving forward. I'm not sure if this applies to all games yet, so I haven't removed the _CommonRedist folders for various games for the time being.

    (Steam overall pushes a lot of "0 bytes" updates like these. Their purpose isn't always clear, save for not being a content update for the game itself.)

    This is isn't an implication for future Mania or SEGA-related updates, but it is a nice quality-of-life change for games across Steam.

    I don't know what value my anecdotal experience is, but I have seen and talked to plenty of people who liked both Mania and Forces, or hated both of them equally! :v: Never have I heard someone complain about Mania's existence, or fear it would take over the brand. In my experience, your average Sonic fan is going to buy a Sonic game, regardless of whether it's Classic or Modern; what "style" it is is irrelevant, much like how it is with Mario fans. I own a large mix of 2D and 3D Sonic games, myself.
     
  2. Frostav

    Frostav

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    This is one of the most baffling posts I've seen in a while.

    The idea that the Sonic fanbase is split between two endlessly warring "modern" and "classic" sides is a complete fiction created by people outside the fandom to spread the myth that the fanbase is some eternally fractious lost cause. I don't think I've EVER met this mythical modern fan that hates classic sonic. Mania's success was widely appreciated by everyone including us deranged Adventure fans waiting for SA3 for like 15 years.
     
  3. Laughingcow

    Laughingcow

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    It's not fiction. The mess of the Sonic Fanbase is a reflection of the bad state of the franchise hence the odd divide of "Classic", "Adventure", "Modern", and "Boom". That last one is mostly dead though.

    And to state the obvious, if you are here, you aren't one of the "Deranged Adventure fans" who have been quiet as of late. If you're really curious to see the rabbit hole, send me a PM cause I ain't linking any of that shit here.

     
  4. Frostav

    Frostav

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    Adventure and Modern are pretty much the same fanbase segment. It's what I'd consider myself (even though I also love Classic nearly as much), if you twisted my arm. Also no one unironically likes Boom besides the cartoon. That gives us basically two segments, Classic and Modern.

    I'm not denying that such a split exists (and that it was completely SEGA's fault to due having no fucking idea what it was doing post-Adventure 1), I do contest that the "war" between said two segments exist outside of singular pockets of weirdos. I adhere to the "Sonic fans will buy a Sonic game regardless of what it is, just make a fucking good game" mentality. Ya know, what Mania did.
     
  5. Laughingcow

    Laughingcow

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    Not by a long shot. And yes, I count fans of Boom as fans of the cartoon.
    If you're going to downplay fans as just "weirdos", you're ignoring why such divides exist in the first place which only leads to Sonic 4 (which was aimed at Classic fans without any understanding of what that means) and Sonic Forces (which has Adventure era overtones but goes nowhere). Saying "just make a fucking good game" will only net you different definitions of what a good Sonic game is. Sonic Forces is a blatant example of not knowing your audience (or not caring if you are cynical).

    This is derailing the thread so I'll just state that Sonic Retro were considered "weirdos" during the release of Sonic 4 which any reasonable arguments....I'll just link the hit piece by known shill Jim Sterling.
    https://www.destruct...cs-188594.phtml

    Still waiting for that apology Jimbo.
     
  6. Beltway

    Beltway

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    Maybe if you're talking about the base character design, sure, they're pretty much the same. But I don't know how anyone could say otherwise, considering just how frequent and how popular "Adventure gameplay vs. Boost gameplay" and "edgy/serious stories vs. Saturday Morning Cartoon stories" debates among the fandom are so prevalent nowadays.

    Maybe the differences are not as visible between Genesis/Saturn Sonic and everything that's followed since 1998, but it's pretty hard to not notice.
     
  7. Dark Sonic

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    Good news! It appears that Denuvo has officially been shit canned and patched out of the PC version of Sonic Mania! The current beta patch that's out gets rid of it.

    About time. Unfortunately this means the mod loader is most likely broken but this will hopefully allow for more modding in the future.

    Also the DRM was so bloated the exe file went from 117MB to 3MB...

    EDIT: Here are some of the patch notes

     
  8. LukyHRE

    LukyHRE

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    An update? Wow, that's really good news, I thought development was over! Good to see they are still fixing things. And it's wonderful they finally removed the Denuvo crap, I'm sure a lot of members here will be happy (excluding the fact that, well, Steam is another DRM but well).

    Though I think I heard MainMemory's cry because of another update :P but...

    ...wouldn't this mean it's easier for him to update the Loader?
     
  9. rata

    rata

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    If this is true, I will finally buy it.
     
  10. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    Unfortunately all the updates seem to be technical, so nothing in the game itself was changed just stuff surrounding the game (the DRM, shader loading issues, controller detection). Mighty's palette still breaks when you go Super and the "Press W/Y to infinitely increase your speed in the special stages" thing still exists. But I guess Sega's been removing Denuvo from all their PC titles lately so it makes sense that Mania would be one of the titles to get the treatment.

    But yes hopefully now that the exe is less bloated the mod loader updates shouldn't be too complicated, but I have no idea what I'm talking about in that regard.
     
  11. McAleeCh

    McAleeCh

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    Great news~! I'd just heard about it myself from this tweet and came to post about it - should have known Retro would already have the details, haha. It's annoying that they've waited this long to remove it, but definitely a case of "better late than never" - there definitely seems to be a concerted effort from SEGA to strip this crap out from any games they've embedded it into previously.

    Also, from the patch notes you posted it also looks like replay storage has gone up. Will be interesting to see what the max cap on those is post-update - I've always felt the Switch version didn't let me save nearly as many as I'd like, so if it's a substantial increase it might tempt me back to the PC version for any Time Attack shenanigans once I actually have some time for gaming again.
     
  12. Spanner

    Spanner

    The Tool Member
    The reduced file size is hilarious yet ridiculous at the same time. Thanks Denuvo!
     
  13. Overlord

    Overlord

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    114MB of pure DRM, versus 3MB for the actual fucking game code.

    Jesus christ. Good riddance.
     
  14. HEDGESMFG

    HEDGESMFG

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    Huh.

    Guess I can actually buy the PC port now.

    I blatantly cancelled my PC preorder when Denuvo was added. No regrets to this day.
     
  15. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    Just note that the patch is still in beta. If you bought/downloaded the game now you'd still get it in it's Denuvo form, although I'm sure this patch will leave the beta soon.
     
  16. Flygon

    Flygon

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    I... buh... 114 megabytes of DRM?

    How the hell do more complicated Denuvo'd games even RUN?! :psyduck:
     
  17. BlazeHedgehog

    BlazeHedgehog

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    Heavily encrypted data can be significantly larger than the source. Undoubtedly there was some kind of Denuvo encryption layer that would run around the game, decrypting the data and then executing it. My (arguably very limited) understanding is that Denuvo would decrypt the data and then store it on the HDD somewhere temporarily while it ran.

    In theory, that means what's being executed by your PC is still that 3mb executable, it just looks like 117mb of data before it gets decrypted.
     
  18. MainMemory

    MainMemory

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    Yes, the mod loader won't work with the beta. I have no plans to update the mod loader until the patch is moved to the main branch. I don't want to waste a bunch of time reverse engineering a build that may be made obsolete in a few days.
    The overall size of the EXE has little to do with how difficult it is to update the mod loader. As long as I can find the things I need, whatever else is in there is irrelevant. However, the most recent updates prior to this have been obfuscating the code to increasing degrees, so if they've rolled that back too, then it will be much easier to find things.
    The data isn't encrypted, the game's code is all there in plaintext, but it is heavily obfuscated (wrong segment names, wrappers on nearly every function call, generating imports at runtime).
     
  19. TheOcelot

    TheOcelot

    Scooty Puff Jr sucks! Member
    Yeah, this is a nice surprise. A little late perhaps, but still a welcome patch.

    I've downloaded the beta and it seems to run absolutely fine. Hoping this will permanently fix the issue of the intro cutscene sometimes playing in black and white.



    At least it's another excuse go to play Mania again. I've been playing Mania quite a bit lately. Messing around playing with &Ray or &Mighty (as your AI partner) in Mania mode, which you can get by glitching into Angel Island Encore mode and then returning to Mania mode after freeing Mighty or Ray.
     
  20. Laura

    Laura

    Brightened Eyes Member
    The game runs so much better now without Denuvo!