Long Forgotten Sonic Heroes Tech

I would definately be interested in looking at this. A potential means to rip Sonic Heroes level geometry? Hell yeah!

 

I think Heroes has some of the most creative Sonic level geometry (The actual designs, not the layouts.) in the last decade, so yes. I'd be super okay with seeing a super good layout being made out of seaside hill pieces in Sonic GDK or something.

 

Huh. This might make things more interesting in my endeavors to do stuff with this game -- thanks for that.

 

Have levels, will port to SADX. I am definitely interested in this. This doesn't export to anything though, as it's a viewer right?

 

For those, who might be interested:

• no need in rw sdk (it is quite useless in my opinion) if one wants to get levels' geometry. Because
• There is rwsreader lib.
• you have to figure out collisions format for anything else.
• everyone here hates heroes lol.

Good luck with that though.
Maybe I'll come back to it sometime.

 

I'm interested in seeing if someone can view the models for the E3 Xbox version of Sonic Heroes, since that has some data for levels that aren't playable in the demo.

But the file format is an older version than the one used in the PC version, so no current tool can properly make use of the files.

 

Have you even tried to look at formats first? There are no major differences between "newer" and "older versions". All essential chunks are the same. Get rwsreader already or google "renderware dff format" (or something like that). There are lots of info about chunks used in file formats (dff, anm, bsp), so you can make a proper tool for that.

 

I don't really wanna bother making an entirely new topic for this, so I figured, since we're talking about Sonic Heroes editing here anyhow, I may as well notify ya that I think I FINALLY figured out a solution to the whole Mipmap-trouble. Whatcha need is a folder with all the files from the TXD-archive ye wanna try and edit (including the Alphas for those files that actually have them) -- I recommend ViceTXD for this step — change the files within the limitation of the pre-established file-dimensions and when yer done, use the rather obscure tool G-TXD to create a new TXD archive. It's gotta be in Vice City format for what we're planning.
Import all the files from that folder with your edited and remaining textures. It should recognize the appropriate alphas automatically by filename. Now, you gotta create them mipmaps -- select the files to receive them, enter the number of mipmaps to be generated (e. g. 6 for 32x32 textures, 7 for 64x64, 8 for 128x128 etc.) and when yer done, save the fucker.
But even if you replace the file like this now, you'll find the game will crash upon attempting to load it. What do? Open it up in ViceTXD, "replace" any given texture with it's identical counterpart from your folder and watch it auto-save. Lo' and behold, it should work perfectly fine now.

I have so far only tested it on the common effects texture archive, but, I'm confident it works with the rest of the game as well.

 

Fuck yeah. I'm totally in favor of this.

 

I guess the levels would require some minor edits, to make up for the lack of Fly/Power formations and blue tornado.

 

Easy, for blue tornado and fly; just stick in some light dash ring trails, or some enemies in a homing attack chain. Better yet, I'd love to actually play as tails or knuckles in these levels.

For power formation, yeah, I guess you'd have to get rid of some walls and shit.

 

Regardin' that mipmap bit I posted earlier, maybe it's not so universal after all -- the lens-flare texture archive causes the game to crash if modified like that, despite it being virtually identical, format-wise, to the common effects one. Also forgot to mention that G-TXD needs to be closed and re-opened in order for Mipmaps to be applicable. :v:

 

Heroes had problems with mipmapping? I just launched the PC version and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, at least nothing like SADX without the mipmap pack.


*EDIT* Water looks kind of... weird now that I see it *EDIT*

 

It's not that Heroes itself has any problems with mipmapping, no. The problem arises when trying to edit level textures in the game. With the methods I had at hand previously, I could either only edit the base textures (which left the mipmaps exactly the same way as they were before, meaning you can only see the changes when the camera is up close) or by creating an entirely new archive without any mipmaps at all (which just looks weird on most stuff from a distance).

 

Considering I doubt the layouts keep enemy/item positions they'd probably need minor edits anyway, so stuff like that would just be part of the porting process.