Sonic Adventure 2 Hacking

So, it's been a while. We've all been working hard over in the X-hax Discord server, and today, we see the results of our work.

The first custom character model for SA2 with functioning weights/skinning! Justin113D wrote the import/export plugin for Blender (with help from Exant and myself) which you can find here, and also made the model. This is hopefully only the first of many mods for SA2 like this.
You can download the mod from GameBanana.

If you're wondering about SA Tools, we have been working on new import/export options as well as support for the GameCube model format, but it's not quite ready for prime time yet. Hopefully soon.

 

Thank you MainMemory, you're a massive asset to this community. Keep up the good work.

 

Hey, so, the scene has kind of exploded since Justin finished his exporter and SA Tools finally got that importer.





If you are interested in creating custom models for SA2, there is a (slightly outdated) guide here, or you can join our Discord to get more direct guidance.

 

Very excited by that Sonic Heroes port. I've wanted to play those levels solo and in a better engine for absolutely ages. With some clean up on the camera, splines and enemy placement that could end up something very special.

 

Cool mod! It looks like he still moves like Eggman, though; how difficult would it be to make Gamma a bit more nimble like he was in Adventure 1? (Unless I have no idea what I am talking about and they don't actually control differently.)

 

I'm gonna go ahead and say very difficult.

 

Does anyone know where this came from?
https://pastebin.com/mzbaURpE
It contains the same kind of text that I pointed out on page 40 of this thread. Looks like more model data in the same format, which I can't find anything about on Google.

 

That's NJA, Ninja ASCII, a set of preprocessor macros that allow you to represent Ninja models in a more human-readable format. It's in the Dreamcast Katana SDK. SAMDL can export to it (maybe for Basic models only?).

 

I wanted to ask. I was searching around and I couldn't quite find anything about this. Can animations be replaced in SA2 as well, or just models now?

 

Animations can be replaced. You can use AnimJSONConverter to convert .saanim files to JSON, where you can edit them by hand, or you can use this tool with 3DS Max.

 

Oh! Awesome! I've only got access to Maya Lt and Blender at the moment, but maybe when the time comes I can collab with some people to do a total character conversion. Between doing the modeling and animation myself, it honestly sounds pretty fun.

Is everything replaceable in the game? Cutscenes and dialogue too? If so I'm surprised no one's given it a complete overhaul a shot yet.

 

Cutscene models are complicated. We have no tools to edit the shape motions used for the faces and hands, unless you want to do it manually in JSON, but that sounds like a nightmare.

 

I just have a question for y'all hackers: do you think realistic shaders mods (like this Minecraft mod) will ever exist for this game? I've noticed from my own playthroughs that shadows do act sorta realistically when, for instance, you're running sideways. I know it's easy in Generations because the Unleashed shaders are still in the game, I was just curious if it was possible in SA2.

 

Update for Amy Adventure 2 adds alternate costumes for Sonic and Shadow, hopefully the first in a full set where Amy wears everyone else's clothes.

Download
Sonic Amy modeled by Sui, based on Sonic's "favorite clothes" from the OVA, Shadow Amy modeled by Shadowth117, based on this art by Wizaria.

 

For anyone who has used the "Retranslated" mod for SA2, is there any way to display subtitles during the pre-rendered cutscene dialogue? In particular the "Eggman's Announcement" scene, where I realized I don't understand Japanese. :p

 

Not as far as I know, unless they get baked into the video itself or something.

Funny thing about all that though, all of those FMVs have unused copies of their voice clips in the AFS file, as well as subtitles. If you change the ID for a playing event (8C51A444 in the DC version) to one that gets skipped over for the videos you'll start hearing the characters use the lines. It explains what the second set of unused President dialogue is (it was intended to play during the FMV after Finalhazard).

 

If the timing information for these lines is still intact, and lines up well enough with the final FMV scene, then mixing the former into the latter might be a good video idea.

 

The FMVs don't use this ID system and there's no timing data at all for them, as they have no E0XXX_1 file. That said, it's not like they're hard to create manually.

The only way I can think of doing it would be to create a custom cutscene with a movie player (Think Gerald's video) over the camera and putting in the audio as BGM. This would still present a problem with the Day X scenes though, as they don't leave a gap in the list. All of Eggman's subs and voices for that are hidden in the scenes that take place after them (Eg. "Half the moon is gone?").