[Kharen]

Possibly some stupid questions, but please bear with me...

First off, because the formats are so similar, would you be able to potentially port the shaders from Generations (Either the vanilla shader or the Unleashed shader) to Lost World? Would it make it easier to do if you were to reduce the frame rate down to 30 or 45 instead of a full 60 FPS? If not the shaders, what about other things like the models and animations? Could we possibly get Classic Sonic in Lost World?

Second, even though you had said that you had no interest in back-porting the Lost World levels to Generations, I'd like to ask something anyways. Lost World has the spinning gravity for long tube levels, so you don't just run off the side and fall to your death. Would that be something that could be ported to Generations for the benefit of people actually trying to back-port levels? What about other gimmicks? Even if we don't back-port the full levels, the gimmicks for those levels could be interesting to work with.

[Pexs]

That's very interesting.

With it being somewhat similar to Colors, I half expected it to be using the updated Wii BRRES system, BFRES.

The idea that it's kind of a Colors game ported to a simplified Hedgehog Engine is incredibly interesting. I can't wait until the true dump gets released (by the original dumper) so I can dig into this thing myself.

[Paraxade]

Kharen, on 01 January 2015 - 06:43 PM, said:

Possibly some stupid questions, but please bear with me...

First off, because the formats are so similar, would you be able to potentially port the shaders from Generations (Either the vanilla shader or the Unleashed shader) to Lost World? Would it make it easier to do if you were to reduce the frame rate down to 30 or 45 instead of a full 60 FPS? If not the shaders, what about other things like the models and animations? Could we possibly get Classic Sonic in Lost World?

Second, even though you had said that you had no interest in back-porting the Lost World levels to Generations, I'd like to ask something anyways. Lost World has the spinning gravity for long tube levels, so you don't just run off the side and fall to your death. Would that be something that could be ported to Generations for the benefit of people actually trying to back-port levels? What about other gimmicks? Even if we don't back-port the full levels, the gimmicks for those levels could be interesting to work with.

Shaders aren't feasible to port because shaders are a very hardware-dependent thing, which means the shader formats between the two games are completely different. Generations uses HLSL shaders for DirectX while Lost World uses Nintendo's shader formats (language is similar to GLSL) for GX2. The shaders are pre-compiled in both games, so the source can't be easily modified. As far as assets are concerned, like Dario said the formats are extremely similar to Generations, so it should be relatively easy to port them over between games.

Also, the gimmicks aren't portable. That's the exact reason why backporting is a bad idea; gimmicks rely on a lot of hardcoded behavior that can't easily be transferred from game to game.

[Twilightzoney]

We don't have the DLC data yet, but we'll upload the music to that when we get ahold of it.

Kharen, on 01 January 2015 - 06:43 PM, said:

Possibly some stupid questions, but please bear with me...

First off, because the formats are so similar, would you be able to potentially port the shaders from Generations (Either the vanilla shader or the Unleashed shader) to Lost World? Would it make it easier to do if you were to reduce the frame rate down to 30 or 45 instead of a full 60 FPS? If not the shaders, what about other things like the models and animations? Could we possibly get Classic Sonic in Lost World?

Second, even though you had said that you had no interest in back-porting the Lost World levels to Generations, I'd like to ask something anyways. Lost World has the spinning gravity for long tube levels, so you don't just run off the side and fall to your death. Would that be something that could be ported to Generations for the benefit of people actually trying to back-port levels? What about other gimmicks? Even if we don't back-port the full levels, the gimmicks for those levels could be interesting to work with.

Well converting shaders to Wii U specific shaders don't see to be possible. They seem to have converted the PS3 Shaders of Generations and added more from them and converted them to Wii U shaders. They have the same extensions as the PS3 Version FPO and VPO and so on. Being that the PS3 and Wii U graphical wise are similar so I assume thats why they converted over their PS3 Shaders to the game.

We could do Classic Sonic in Lost World, but I"m not really willing to animate that model but its a definite possibility to do in the future though when modding comes around for this game.

I too would like to see the levels work in Generations only to do BullShots and such. But levels working is a no go. They handle the gravity different in this game, so you couldn't just use the gravity object in Generations to make it work.
They have Gfield objects that refer to splines to define the gravity collision areas.

This post has been edited by Twilightzoney: 01 January 2015 - 09:32 PM

[Dark Sonic]

Twilightzoney, on 01 January 2015 - 05:10 PM, said:

Regarding the Sonic Lost World Model Mod, I'll be releasing it once I get the rest of the models ported over for it so he can run with his figure 8 stuff and get the sound effects ported over as well for it.

Feel free to not bother porting Lost World's double mouthed Super Sonic. I don't know if it was laziness or just them trying to hark back to the days of Sonic 2 but christ was it lazy.

[Twilightzoney]

Oh, they actually didn't bother to code in mouth swapping for Normal Sonic, and just hid the other mouth mesh by the bone. But for Super Sonic they didn't bother to code anything to hide either mouth by bone. Even thought they use Generations Skeletons so putting them into Sonic Generations they work perfectly as intended. They just screwed it up. And they call for Sonic animations in the Super Sonic Files. Super Sonic uses Sonics animations for anything he doesn't already have animations for. Thats why his quills went downward. It was just pure laziness.

[Dark Sonic]

Twilightzoney, on 01 January 2015 - 10:30 PM, said:

Oh, they actually didn't bother to code in mouth swapping for Normal Sonic, and just hid the other mouth mesh by the bone. But for Super Sonic they didn't bother to code anything to hide either mouth by bone. Even thought they use Generations Skeletons so putting them into Sonic Generations they work perfectly as intended. They just screwed it up. And they call for Sonic animations in the Super Sonic Files. Super Sonic uses Sonics animations for anything he doesn't already have animations for. Thats why his quills went downward. It was just pure laziness.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Sonic Colors do basically the same thing with Super Sonic sharing Sonic's animations, like with him standing? In that game though at least they bothered just swapping out the head to prevent those attempts at Sonic animation glitches like in Lost World.

This post has been edited by Dark Sonic: 01 January 2015 - 10:47 PM

[Twilightzoney]

If they did they probably set it up to ignore the quill bone rotations. But I think that he had his own set of animations in Colors to deal with that.

[Twilightzoney]

So it actually turns out that the .anm files define what function goes to what animation to call for. And Super Sonics .hkx files are identical files copied right from Sonic's animation files.



And find out what makes the mouth swapping work in the game. They have new file type called Vis-Anim which controls what mouth shows up during the animation. Funnily enough they have one for Idle_R and Idle_L but they only set it up to show the right mouth to show up on both sides. Super Sonic has no Vis-Anim files so thats why no mouth disappears. I'm curious if we were to renamed the file and add it to Super Sonic if that would fix that issue honestly. I'm guessing the Idle_L and Idle_R Vis-Anim are for all the movement animations since they have them for the result animations for what mouth gets shown which we've seen the left mouth being shown off.

[Lanzer]

Wow, this is great! so how much do you guys think of this LW research can benefit Generations PC? I'm guessing by mounds considering that LW and SGPC share similarities.

[Paraxade]

Lanzer, on 03 January 2015 - 11:53 AM, said:

Wow, this is great! so how much do you guys think of this LW research can benefit Generations PC? I'm guessing by mounds considering that LW and SGPC share similarities.

Not really at all honestly. If anything it's had the most benefit on Sonic 06/Colors modding, since they all use the same offset table format, which Dario and I cracked from looking at the Lost World files. That opens the door for a lot of Sonic 06/Colors mods, which led to this:



As far as Generations is concerned there isn't really anything in here that helps.

[Dark Sonic]

Paraxade, on 03 January 2015 - 04:10 PM, said:

Lanzer, on 03 January 2015 - 11:53 AM, said:

Wow, this is great! so how much do you guys think of this LW research can benefit Generations PC? I'm guessing by mounds considering that LW and SGPC share similarities.

Not really at all honestly. If anything it's had the most benefit on Sonic 06/Colors modding, since they all use the same offset table format, which Dario and I cracked from looking at the Lost World files. That opens the door for a lot of Sonic 06/Colors mods, which led to this:



As far as Generations is concerned there isn't really anything in here that helps.

Oh jeez don't tell me Colors and Lost World were actually built off of 06. How strange that it's even connected to the Wisp games at all.

[Paraxade]

No, probably more just a case of the same people developed the formats for both games. 06 and Colors both use U8 archives, but aside from that I don't think they have any formats in common; they just both have a bunch of formats that use the same kind of offset tables. 06 uses it for sets, paths, collision... Colors I'm not so sure about but I know it uses it in the .orc set files at least. Lost World uses it fairly commonly; it's in the .pac archives, for example, and still in .orc, as well as most of the new formats. We had a bit of an easier time analyzing it properly with Lost World since with a lot of 06 formats you need to ignore the first 0x20 bytes (the header), while in Lost World there isn't really any common header to worry about, so it was a bit more straightforward.

It's funny that looking at a game from 2013 helped us figure out how to mod a game from 2006, but that's what happened. :P

[TheKazeblade]

That's pretty outstanding. What's the extent of information gained about Sonic '06 from this? Obviously a lot of it was showcased in the Emerald Coast mod, but in terms of what is known now, what kind of possibilities has this opened up for researching and modding Sonic '06? Does using the same types of file formats between Lost World's and '06 mean that Lost World's collision behavior with objects could be ported over to '06?

I know '06 is far beyond saving, but what I'm getting at is, has this yielded discoveries that might be able to help "fix" '06 to an extent?

[Paraxade]

They don't use the same formats. They just both have formats that have the same type of offset table. The formats for this stuff were mostly already cracked, but we didn't know how the offset table worked so it prevented us from generating new path/set/etc files. Now we do. It's not a ton of new knowledge, it's just one piece; albeit an important one we were missing before.

Sonic 06 is never going to be "fixed" unless you've got the source code and a large team with a loooot of time on their hands.