Sonic Generations Hacking (and More!)

It has multiple paths and skydiving. What more could we ever ask for!??!?!

 

GUN truck

 

Add Rouge from that Seaside Hill challenge.
Just what everyone wanted.

 

Thats another custom level to be coming sometime in the future.

 

Nothing groundbreaking but lovely none the less:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4rS6xRU7U

 

Not really a question, more of an observation, but why do most all character mods have to change the hud? I can understand changing the outer color on the numbers (though in this instance the yellow does not look good either), but they also ruin the look of the boost bar. Is there any way I can not install their hud but keep the rest? Maybe another mod loaded after the character one?

 

I just can't stand his stubbornness in terms of having more than one homing attack animation.

 

What are you talking about?

 

He insists on just having the one back-flip animation for homing attacks, which looks dumb, imo.

 

Ah. Yeah, I can agree with you there.

 

So does anybody know how I can (legally) get the student edition of 3DS Max 2010? Its no longer available on the Autodesk website.

 

Wondering this too. I still don't know why there hasn't been any proper development to get Blender working for Generations mods, considering it's free.

 

You can't get it anymore. I've tried looking around the Autodesk site, but it seems that their policy is that they won't offer any download of any Autodesk software older than 3 years. For some reason, even if you have an active student license for the product, they still won't supply a download meaning you better hold onto it or you just simply lose it (totally not a first-hand account)...

Guess the wiki should be updated to reflect this.

 

Well, crud. You'd think they would prefer you to use their obsolete software if you're not paying them anything.
In any case, this throws a huge wrench in the works, especially given how dependent Generations modding is on 3ds Max 2010/11.

 

Yeah... is there anything from Dario maybe about work on getting the plugin to work in a different program or maybe a newer version of 3ds max?

 

The main reason is due to dependencies on the Havok 2010 3ds Max plugin, which is required to export collision/skeletons/animations. AFAIK there's no way to export Havok files that will work in the game with any other program so focusing on developing with other tools is kinda pointless.

I don't really know anything about how the Havok formats work or converting between them, but since TwilightZoney's had success backporting Lost World Havok files to Generations, the best approach might be to develop a tool that can take later versions of Havok formats and convert them to the Generations-compatible version.

 

I figured we'd run into this problem eventually. The only alternative we have is the Havok SDK for 2010 2.0 as it's still free for non-commercial use. (And much easier to keep a copy of unlike an installation of 3DS Max)

The tool developed with the SDK would need to be able to do the following:

1) Create Havok Shapes for an imported mesh node. (Convex Hull / Mesh / Etc.)
2) Create Rigid Bodies for said nodes. (For either static terrain or dynamic objects)
3) Import and convert animations to native format. ( <- No idea how this one would work out)

1 and 2 are fairly easy to do with little knowledge of the SDK. 3 I have no clue. Moving the functionality of converting geometry / animations into Havok formats would allow the pipeline to move away from Autodesk's stuff other than just the SDK for the tool.

The other hurdle would be moving away from FBX as the only importing method in the current branch of GLVL so far, but Paraxade has pointed me to Assimp and I've had some good results with it in another project.

Like I said I'm currently without free time to do any of that, but I imagine this would be the best plan in the long run for the sake of preserving the functionality without depending on Autodesk.

 

It's a shame that everything is so firmly ingrained in the Autodesk ecosystem. As much as I like 3DS Max, they need to update their licencing policy to be less medieval.
On a mildly related note, you've added LibS06 to the Glvl repository. Will there ever be an interface for these tools? I'm quite interested in messing around with some of those files.

 

I don't plan to make one but anyone's free to make a command line tool that interacts with it if they want. (Mostly a matter of looking at the .h of the classes and seeing what they support) I'd rather that thing be separate and mostly be used for research purposes though, it's just there because it shares the Math/File library that LibGens uses.

 

Just going to share a bit of junk because I don't have the time to make a fully fledged Generations mod anymore.
Junk: http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/64ba73e25529c42c6a200e9750556dd3
Things I think you guys might care about in this is an old scrapped WindyHill stage that went through multiple reboots. It doesn't have much anymore as a result and I lost the older versions with more content. Fun fact: It was originally supposed to be completed by Lost World's release date :/

I even had a glitchy 360 degree physics idea on this once. One method worked only for the top half of the cylinder and hopping, homing attack, and air boost were virtually unusable. Another worked very much like this that involved editing some of Sonic's prm xml, last I remember setting a few things to zero? It was a while so I don't remember the exact name of the parameter(s).

Other stuff are a few unused models I made. These are like the only two worth using:


The rest are either old or really bad. Anyway, use as you please and no credit needed.