Sonic Generations Hacking (and More!)

You monster.

 

Don't forget to replace the spring and dash pad sounds with Sonic's inane dribble, too.

 

Don't worry it'll work out in the end.

http://youtu.be/-JSlPcOGDuM

 

I wonder just how much stuff we'll dig up from Boom that can be used in here.

 

Gave a go at the new Metal Sonic mod. Gotta say I love your model work Joe, it's incredible. They look more well done than the official ones. Gave it a go with a full game run through. Still fun stuff after all this time (except for Time Eater... that boss is awful).

Also, thank you for making a classic Tails icon for that mission in Chemical plant. That was a minor thing sure, but it bugs the crap out of me knowing that they have an icon for classic Tails in the level itself.

 

Are there any specifications on .terrain-model and .terrain-instance files? I'm trying to load Sonic Generations level geometry in a custon engine. So far .terrain-model seems to be similar to .model, which there is MaxScript for, but there are different vertex data entry types than it tries to handle.

 

TZ, a question. just how tall is Boom!Sonic's model compared to, say, 2006!Sonic's model? I'm curious to know if he outbeats him in lankeyness.

 

In other words, you're saying that we should be adding this info to SCHG:Sonic Generations? =P

I mentioned this a few years back now, but nobody seemed to take notice. The lack of sufficient documentation is honestly what has kept me from doing anything with Generations.

 

It almost as tall as 06 Sonic but still has the proportions of Unleashed in terms of his quills and stuff. Its not and lanky as 06 though.

Regarding to the tutorial stuff might want to wait before making tutorials since Dario is making his new GLVL to make things easier for people to mod. By then everything will be kinda self explanatory and all in one program to handle most of the things.

 

When you get a chance I love to see a model comparison one of these days.

 

The problem at the moment with tutorials is that the entire workflow of the new branch of SonicGLvl has been changed drastically, making pretty much all previous tutorials useless. (Although it will be much easier to use with FBX support) I'm taking longer than expected on it as usual, but there's not much point for me to write information that will be outdated pretty soon.

However the current download of SonicGLvl does include some tutorials on the help folder that actually aren't on the wiki so I wouldn't be too scared without looking at those first. :v: Besides I'd say the hardest part of doing the levels is what you already know how to use: modeling the stage and doing level design.

 

FBX support? Does that mean we don't have to use 2011 anymore?

 

Speaking of 2011, I just reformatted and Autodesk no longer offers student copies of Max 2011. I definitely hope that is the case.

 

FBX is just for terrain/model imports, so it mainly means you don't need to export Ogre meshes from Max anymore. I believe the main reason Max 2011 is required is for exporting Havok resources, which hasn't changed unfortunately. Maybe Dario'll be able to come up with something to make hkxs from later versions of Havok compatible with Generations. (Zoney did get Lost World Havok files working in Generations recently so it doesn't seem too far-fetched.)

 

Yeah, I kind of want to try to do stages again. I kind of want to try to do this. I need to find a copy of 2011 it seems.

 

Custom shader support is a bit of a dodgy thing at the moment but it's certainly possible. The problem is I haven't done any tools whatsoever yet to export custom .pixelshader, .vertexshader, .shader-list, .psparam, .vsparam files, despite all of them being completely cracked. That is just for adding new materials to the supported stuff, but modifying existing materials and basically re-doing them from scratch is certainly possible. The Generations rendering pipeline only uses one shader for the color buffer (what you see on screen) per material, although they generated different versions of them to save performance depending on whether they have dynamic lights close by or use uv animations.

Doing custom shaders like this from scratch for each material is certainly possible, as demonstrated here. Modifying the rendering pipeline however or adding post-processing (which is commonly misinterpreted as "custom shaders" when it comes to injectors like SweetFX) is another story and you certainly can't add custom effects that rely on parameters the game does not give you (say motion information), or passes that the game does not do. The cel shading example uses HLSL ASM shaders compiled with the Windows SDK, but I believe getting a regular HLSL template working that uses the same constant registers as the game would be the better alternative (and much easier to code with).