Oh. That's a little disheartening. I was kind of hoping that eventually we'd see a fixed port featuring both good lighting and good transparency. Might that be in the cards in the long-term (few years?) or is no one working on it anymore?
My apologies if this is innapropriate for a month+ bump or not, but I've been itching to get this thought out of my head. This isn't a request or anything, but I was just looking into Sonic Shuffle and was really digging the Cel-shaded graphics. I did a google search and checked out gamebanana, which is so frustrating to navigate, and it appears that there has never been a mod for SA1 (or likely SA2 and Generations) that would replace the applicable characters' model. I find it pretty bizarre that none exists, but perhaps not everyone digs that style as much as I do. So I just have to ask, would anyone here even be interested in a mod like that? Or are we all just content with the original Dreamcast graphics?
There was an attempt at a cell shaded Generations mod, but it's probably harder to pull off than it sounds. To get it right you'd have to update a lot of textures and modify the lighting. It's probably more than just swapping out the models (which are essentially lower poly versions of the SA1 models iirc)
Since the prototype discussion forum is closed, I decided to post this here. Very late to the party, but I just wanted to share this information and hopefully get someone interested to help. Both Preview and Review prototypes have additional versions of the game's main binary that go unused. The game uses the file _Main.rel, the alternative versions are AdvMain.rel and AdvMainD.rel. These binaries appear to be from an earlier build of the game, possibly from before the time they started introducing "Director's Cut" changes. There's a string in AdvMainD that says "Sonic Adventure 1 for GAME CUBE". If you scan AdvMain and AdvMainD with the object scanner in SA Tools, you will find that all characters have their original Dreamcast character models. There are also "d" versions of several stage files. For example stg01d.rel has untouched Dreamcast Emerald Coast, and advertiseD.rel contains the model for the original SA1DC title screen, which is missing in the used version of the file. I suspect those "d" versions would've been used together with the old main binary. I think it would be really interesting to get the game to boot with these alternative binaries. But, as expected, simply replacing _Main.rel with AdvMain or AdvMainD makes the game hang, and replacing any of the other files with their "d" counterparts freezes the game or drops the characters into an empty level. I think the DOL file needs to be hacked to load the alternative binary properly. Sadly I don't have the knowledge to do it on my own, so I hope someone can help. In any case, when the next update for SA Tools arrives you will be able to explore the levels in both prototypes, and eventually we'll extract all models from them.
I'm looking to unpack the .VMS files for the Dreamcast DLC. Any utilities that can do that? edit: nevermind, but now I'm trying to extract MLT files. I've got SA tools, which apparently has a tool called MLTextract according to this https://info.sonicretro.org/SCHG:Sonic_Adventure/Sound_Editing/Sound_Effects , but I can't find that anywhere in the programs or SAtoolshub.
