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Mania Mod Loader

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by MainMemory, Sep 1, 2017.

  1. codenamegamma

    codenamegamma

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    on release day once I saw people were hacking at the top of the leaderboards I added 6 people on steam from it. All of them all had the save addresses, Rings, Lives & Time, and maybe 1 or 2 other ones but nothing hard to find or unique because they didn't know how to look for anything else. So even with us doing anything people still managed to find it themselves and will again when a new game comes out.
     
  2. RikohZX

    RikohZX

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    They're already long since cheated, even before the Mod Loader started adding the cheat codes to itself. Better to compare yourself to friends or within certain communities (cough) than to measure up worldwide when any and every other game out there with time records like this gets cheated inevitably.
     
  3. Techokami

    Techokami

    For use only on NTSC Genesis systems Researcher
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    Sonic Worlds Next
    Booooo. :(
    I hope this won't reflect poorly with SEGA, then.
     
  4. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    I really doubt it would make any difference to them if it locked out the leaderboards.
     
  5. RikohZX

    RikohZX

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    I've noticed that starting off the Special Stage at Mach 3 has the UFO start its speed off exponentially faster than normal, but I assume that has to do with balancing factors via the game automatically speeding it up. I've also noticed a weird quirk in that I have that code and no ring loss for Special Stages, but apparently that results in the game instantly going to the Chaos Emeralds results screen when I gain one instead of having Sonic fly away and the camera pan out. Neither of these are gamebreaking glitches resulting from the code, more like strange oddities that result from the tampering.
     
  6. CUD

    CUD

    Member
    Has this been updated since the new Mania patch? No rush if you haven't, just wondering.
     
  7. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    I am not presently willing to rewrite the mod loader to be compatible with the new version of the game. In the mean time, you can download the previous version: open steam://nav/console, enter "download_depot 584400 584401 2423105704892348622", then put the downloaded files into the Mania folder.
     
  8. Shade Vortex

    Shade Vortex

    The Black Vortex Member
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    To be honest, I saw this coming. :P Small patches that happen decently frequently, plus every single one requiring to redo everything basically. I'm sure once the updates calm down (there probably won't be any after 6 months after release, for example), there'll be a "final" update for the fully patched version of Mania.
     
  9. Perhaps rather than following official updates, maybe monthly/bi-monthly updates might be more favorable? Just so that it can be kept up with builds of the game that have less crippling bugs (Tails in FBZ) and also so it's not too taxing to update it every time the game is patched? Dunno. Either way it's best to just wait a bit before updating the loader anyways haha.
     
  10. EDIT: I did some googling. Apparently it's my antivirus and I'm late.

    Someone trash this post plz.
     
  11. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    I'm thinking about trying to add support for looped audio formats (LOGG, ADX, BRSTM, etc) to the mod loader. Would that be useful to any of you? Of course that would restrict any mods using those types of music to only working with the mod loader, and thus only working with the older version of the game, until I decide to update the mod loader.

    Of course, this is entirely theoretical, and there's a big difference between replacing the music playback system outright, and supplementing it.

    I suppose an alternative option would be to allow overriding a song's loop point with a text file or something.
     
  12. I think that'd be a great addition for custom playlists, easily swapping tracks around, and testing. Especially considering how many pre-looped BRSTMs and ADX files there are out there. Even still, it would be nice to have some way to externalize loop points from scene files.
     
  13. Chimera

    Chimera

    I'm not a furry. Tech Member
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    Castlevania prettyness
    Again, regarding features that restrict people to using an older version of the game, I don't see why that's entirely a problem considering we've resigned to working with a "gold standard" already. I say go for it; if an update becomes critical for us to download, all the work would have to be ported anyway, and I don't see anything game-changing happening any time soon.

    Hell the latest update's only relevant change, if I recall, is its fix to Tails and how he handles the Flying Battery tube, because originally he would slow down and fall off. That, however, is something I feel could be backported to our "gold version" and then distributed with a/any patch for the game. Outside of that though I don't see any issues that have been fixed or anything we need to worry about for the future, at least right now.

    Also yes personally I'd be a fan of BRSTM support and the like, but I'm even more interested with the text file song loop mod. That sounds a lot easier and will likely both give you less stress and work out better anyway.
     
  14. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    Well someone has gone ahead and made an updated fork of the mod loader, and codenamegamma hasn't stuck with the old version, so I don't know who exactly this "we" is that decided on a "gold standard", especially since I never ruled out upgrading entirely, I've just said not now.

    I tried implementing vgmstream, but when it goes to play a non-OGG song, it also starts playing a repeating sound constantly, and all OGG music refuses to play from then on. I have no idea what I need to do to fix it, so I might have to just release a new version without it. I did implement the text-based loop selection though, that works just fine.
     
  15. I suppose if someone's willing to update it like that and save you the time it's fine, yeah? I'm assuming there's some kind of way I can build from this source and use it to run mods on the newest version of Mania just fine, right? I'm not entirely familiar with how this works...
     
  16. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    Yes, it does make a lot of stuff easier, but, there's still my two custom code mods that would need to be updated, and I'd still have to start a disassembly of the new version if I wanted to do anything new code-wise.

    You should be able to build it with Visual Studio 2017, I can't personally vouch for it but it seems like everything's updated to work with the new version of the game.
     
  17. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    New version of the mod loader:
    • Added support for downloading mods from GameBanana. Go to the Options tab to install the URL handler.
    • Mods can now specify loop points for songs using a [MusicLoops] section in mod.ini, with values such as GreenHill1=1234
    • Added more clarity to the "unsupported version" message.
    • Added more cheat codes: "Invincibility Lasts Forever", "Speed Shoes Last Forever", "Disable Autosave Popup".
    • "Anyone Can Break Breakable Walls By Touching Them" code now works on LRZ rocks.
    Unfortunately the vgmstream support has hit a dead end for now. I don't know if I'll ever be able to figure out what's wrong with it. I put the code into a separate branch until it can be fixed.
     
  18. RikohZX

    RikohZX

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    So wait, which version is this for? I downloaded the latest version of Mania, no dice. I grabbed the September 6th version to revert back and that's no dice either.
     
  19. MainMemory

    MainMemory

    Kate the Wolf Tech Member
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    It is definitely for the September 6 version, SonicMania.exe MD5 94343144a2436a41f7dda712772ef234. Are you sure you have the right files?
     
  20. RikohZX

    RikohZX

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    Yeah, I got some stuff mixed around and it's working fine now. I seem to be bungling a lot of these things at first, huh?