Fixed Water in the Chao Gardens (Sonic Adventure DX PC)

The water in the chao gardens in both PC versions of Sonic Adventure DX sucks. It has ugly textures, lacks the ripple effect and, in the Egg Carrier chao garden, the ocean water isn't even animated! Here's a video that demonstrates all of the problems that I have either fixed or are going to try and fix.


I started with the Mystic Ruins chao garden. I wanted to fix it and get it as close to the Gamecube version of Sonic Adventure DX as possible.





The problem I ran into gave me headaches for days until Morph (creator of Sonic Adventure DX: Fixed Edition) gave me some advice. The texture for the ocean in the background and the texture for the ugly blue surface of the lake is the same texture. If you change one, you change the other. How could I remove that ugly blue layer on the surface of the lake while changing the background ocean to the color it is in the Gamecube version? Well, as Morph pointed out to me, the background ocean ignores alpha channels. Therefore, if you make the ocean texture 100% transparent, you will still see it in the background ocean but not on the lake! So I took the textures from the Gamecube version of the game and replaced the textures in the PC version with those textures and then made the ocean textures transparent for each time of day. Check out the difference it made!

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Here are the fixed PVMs if you would like to try these changes out for yourself. In case you're wondering where the texture on the lake in the mod came from, that was actually already there underneath the texture shared with the ocean. You can see it in the video as the ocean texture didn't even cover the whole lake. That's how lazy this PC port was.

Place them in your Steam\SteamApps\common\Sonic Adventure DX\system folder. This also works in the 2004 release, so place them in the appropriate folder for that version if that's what you're using.

Next steps: Fix the water in the Station Square and Egg Carrier chao gardens. The PC version of Sonic Adventure DX lacks the ripple effect that the Gamecube version has (cause Sega's PC ports suck) and I currently have no idea how to make things animated, so this will be a challenge. I will update this thread as I make progress on these projects.



UPDATE: For now, I fixed what I could have in the Station Square chao garden. In the Gamecube version of Sonic Adventure DX, the water had no texture at all and just relied on the ripple effect (see the video I linked to above).



Because of the lack of a ripple effect (I REALLY wish Sega would have brought this back for the 2010 PC release) we needed to be able to see the surface of the water. So what did they do? Did they make a new texture and use that? Nope! They used a texture that was already in the game (notice a trend here?), and that would be the texture for the water coming out of the fountain. Therefore, you couldn't change the pool water without changing the fountain water.

Because of an inability to bring the ripple effect back for now and because making the pool water transparent would leave the fountain water transparent, all I could do was improve the water texture. I replaced the original 64x64 water texture with a seamless 256x256 water texture without that unrealistic blue hue and it definitely looks a lot better.

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Here is a link to the download. Place this file in the same location as the Mystic Ruins water fix. I know, this isn't the best fix in the world, but at least it looks SOMEWHAT better than what the game comes with.

Now I just have to try and fix the Egg Carrier chao garden. The textures in this one are fine, but the animations are missing and I'm gonna have to see if they are even possible to bring back.

UPDATE 2:

This isn't a fix to the chao garden water, but the pond in the Mystic Ruins has been bothering me. The Gamecube and PC versions use the same texture, but the Gamecube applied transparency while the PC version didn't. I fixed that myself. Still didn't add the nice flowing water/ripple effect the Gamecube version had but this is still much better. Oh, be sure to re-download the Mystic Ruins garden mods too as I fixed a texture glitch.

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Here's a download link. Place it where you placed the rest of the textures already.

UPDATE 3:

The Egg Carrier chao garden water has finally been fixed! Special thanks to PkR for making this one; he figured out why the water wasn't animated. Turns out the function that animates the water was there but a COL flag was missing from the water object. So a simple fix was all that was needed. PkR fixed the function and I made sure the textures looked good as mucking around with the object data messes with how transparent the water texture is. Here's a link to the complete fix!

 

I have just added a temporary fix for the Station Square chao garden for those of you who are watching this thread.

 

What MainMemory said. They have added proper button textures to the Steam version if you would like to use those.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to update this though as I have absolutely no idea how to re-animate the water in the Egg Carrier garden and I sure as hell don't know how to add shader effects to make the water ripply again. We're better off petitioning Sonic Team to fix it.


Also, MainMemory, on a completely unrelated note, did they remove the ability to activate the glitchy SA title screen from the game after this new update? I was messing around with cheat engine and I can't seem to be able to do that after they added the new texture_replace folder.

 

Update: Just fixed the evening Mystic Ruins chao garden! I didn't make the entire texture transparent so there were floating orange specks in the water. Oops! Should be fixed now.

 

UPDATE: Just added another fix. Not in the chao garden this time, but you get the silver egg from this pond so it counts, right?

Oh yeah, I changed the Station Square water again. I think it looks a lot better now.