Generations PC Unleashed Porting - Public Hardware Test #1

I love how even the Unleashed glitches came together with this mod. :3

 

The mod works fine for me, no FPS drop until I started recording video using Xfire, and recording video is always going to have the FPS take a hit no matter what game unless you've got a godly computer.

EDIT: Video'd

 

It looks like the barrels don't have the right destruction capabilities, as you can actually stand on them. Standing on them sideways causes some really weird teleporting, especially if you hit this sweet spot.

Don't have Fraps to show it off, and for some reason whenever I try to print screen, I only get a black screen as the saved image. Cell phone camera it is.

 

Would you want the barrels to break by merely standing on them? I think they shouldn't, they look rather solid.
Anyway, someone already made a video about it over at SSMB, you can find Dario's comment there, too.

 

More like jumping on them, really. At least make it slightly more difficult for the bug to occur. Spin jump should crack the barrels open if it is going to cause stuff like this. I would imagine that would be a more simple way of covering up the problem if getting on a barrel could be an easy thing to do currently.

 

Flora and Fauna join the Brawl!

 

This is a double post because ambient occlusion.

 

Looking great, Lobotomy! It may sound nitpicky but I believe the folliage textures are kind of too much colorful in comparison to the grass texture on the ground making it pop-out a little more than it should. But this can be easily fixed by making the ground texture a little more saturated and bright I believe. For example take a look at this video that I made in UDK:

The "base" of the folliage is the same color as the grass texture on the floor and it gets brighter gradually upwards so it stick out enough to sell the magic that the whole island have grass sticking out.


Whoever is working on the retexturing care to send me by PM or whatever a .rar file containing the textures of the stage? I would like to help change 'em a little bit and make it more HD looking :3

 

Looks like it should be heavily toned down. It shouldn't be that noticeable, especially when the game already has global illumination.
Also, those flower textures don't fit the colours at all. Make them the same tone as the originals - they look like you just slapped in "Vurt's All-Purpose Flora Textures" and called it a day.


The demo looks and runs well here, even under ridiculous circumstances. Sonic seems to be automatically sidestepping when he comes into contact with invisible walls, which wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't doing it towards them. Those steps with the pots also seem to have strange collision behind the plants. Otherwise, excellent.

 

That's where the placeholders came from, yes. Good eye. They aren't permanent, I just don't have a proper texture for the flowers yet. Either way, ferns do look interesting in lieu of daisies, if a bit overabundant.

You do realize Sonic Unleashed had a similar level of AO, right?

 

Playing my Xbox 360 copy of Sonic Unleashed right now and I'm not seeing any Ambient Occlusion at all. If it's there, it's so subtle that it's basically invisible and definitely not like it is in your screenshots, Lobotomy.

Edit:





No AO here, or, again, definitely not like your screenshots. :v:

 

I suppose I should have rephrased. I meant the lighting quality more reflected AO than Generations did, and if I must say, the AO and GIA compliment each other perfectly, contrary to the notion that it fucks with the GI. It's something you'd have to experience yourself to understand fully I guess, but I'm strapped for time right now so I'll fully explain later.

 

well, here's my test run I guess
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxcai7pCo58
apologies for the horrid quality, but I assure you it wouldve been an unmitigated disaster had I tried to use fraps or somesuch software
anyway, pretty much everything seems to work (it even seems to maintain a higher framerate than most of the actual generations levels, for that matter) on my piece of crap laptop running at 800x480, so good work

 

Is there a way to return Sonic's realistic shadow back? I feel like it looks much better than "shadow always under Sonic's feet". I don't care that platforming is harder if shadow is not directly below Sonic's feet cuz realistic shadow just looks so much better.

 

I prefer solid gameplay over graphical beautification, personally :v:

 

Don't be silly. Unleashed was designed around Sonic having a "realistic" shadow. Not only is this sort of shadow of practically no extra value, but it looks weird, too.

Besides, if you want solid gameplay you could do far better than the Sonic series. Ha, ha.

I'm guessing there's no way to make the colour grading in-game look more like Unleashed?

 

The HDR is handled differently than Unleashed did it. You could get it to look exact. But we'd need to also figure out to decompile the xpu shaders and make them wpu shaders or whatever it is for PC Version. Since the Sonic Shader from Unleashed is different than Generations. Which Unleashed had Luminosity and Fresnel control or something to that extent while, Generations had different settings. Which is why Sonic is so dang shiny and bright. It makes it unsettling to see, when he should have a softer tone to fit in with stages.

But it is all doable, we just need someone who can help with those shaders. That could possibly fix the shadow issue as well. Or either that, or its handled via xml but they made the default value be vertical. And just took it out to edit it. But if you found the values for what it is, it would work to change it.

 

Getting away from shadows and shaders, I noticed a little quirky thing recently: I went to go play Chemical Plant with the mod running, and the title card shows up as Dragon Road XD (I still get Chemical Plant, though)

Nothing too big, just a little nitpicky thing.

 

My fault :P


back to shadows and shaders, unfortunately the "useverticalshadow" param or whatever has been either disabled or depreciated (or maybe even repurposed). I tried leaving lambert shadows on for a stage and only set "isverticalshadow" or whatever to false, but there was literally no change. Object shadows were still being cast from overhead and not in the direction of the sunlight.

I'm starting to think it'd be really optimal if people found out how to decompile and recompile the Generations shader files. They're simply compiled HLSL code, but the problem is I don't think we know what Is used to decompile the shaders, let alone compile them. I asked Gen to look at them a few months ago but he said he was busy and would do it later, and has not gotten back to me at all since :P so if anyone else feels like tackleing the shaders, in the files, it says the wpu files were compiled under "ps_3_0 (pixel shader 3.0 I guess) Microsoft (R) HLSL Shader Compiler 9.29.952.3111" (so we know what the compiler is, but where is it? And where's the decompiler? :U)

 

That's not my department, unless you count the new hub Chimera and I are working on.