Sonic Mania: Hacking Discussion

I found a few interesting files/features no one has discussed yet.

When in developer mode, you can press F3 to toggle through the game's shaders. Backspace speeds the game up. F12 freezes/unfreezes the game, like how pausing worked in the Genesis games. Pressing F11 while the game is frozen advances one frame.

There is a file, \Images\CESA.tca that appears to be a Japanese copyright notice:

Spoiler

Trying to make sense of Google Translate gives: "Attention! It is strictly prohibited by law to distribute or attempt to distribute this game's software over the Internet without permission--or to knowingly download it from an illegal Internet distribution. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation."

The interesting thing is that it's called CESA.tca. CESA (or the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association) is a Japanese organization--whose chairman is the president of Sega Holdings--that holds Japanese game shows and game awards. I'm not sure why this is here.

Several unused sprites from TMZ Act 2 Boss Fight (\Sprites\Eggman\EggmanTMZ.gif):

Spoiler

Namely, the bottom two rows.

All of the sprites except the one on the far left, second from the bottom, are used in the GHZ2 cutscene but reversed. Perhaps Eggman would try to sic the HBH on Sonic again here?

There's sprites in the \Sprites\Editor\Icons.gif that seem to be left over from, well, the level editor the devs used:

The .bin files in the folder suggest that the "Start" boxes are for marking level starting positions for the characters and that the other sprites are for elements of the editor.

There are three unused but fully functional test special stages in \Stages\SpecialBS named SceneTest3, SceneTest7, and SceneTest8. Test7, in particular, has some unexpected behavior with its first set of blue spheres.

EyeKey beat me to the punch on the CFG files. I just couldn't figure the structure of the palette settings out (other than they used 24-bit RGB color)! I'm still not quite sure how the size of each palette struct is defined. I'd love to hear a quick explanation.
I have a few clarifications about the .CFGs, too.
About that byte for .wav files that your parser labels "unknown": it controls how many times the sound can be playing at once. Most sounds are set to 1 for obvious reasons, but rings are set to 2. This is because the game plays the ring SFX in either the left or right audio channel, so when you get two rings simultaneously, both channels play at once. The difference is VERY noticeable if you set the ring byte to 1 or the jump byte to 2 with Sonic & Tails. Setting the byte to 0 appears to remove the limit altogether.

The section in GameConfig.bin directly after the global .wav files controls development mode settings. You can modify the menu text and even what zones are loaded in the development menu options by adjusting the file accordingly. The changes made here will also affect the level order, so now you can remove Hydrocity completely :specialed:. I have no idea what the last section is for though!

 

Nice! I wanted this to happen since I first saw that light blue on Sonic. You forgot about the life icon, though, does it use the same pallete, or is just a gif with no pallete?

@TuxKnux: I can't see your images! Neeeevermind.

 

I just did the player palette. Menu's and such are not edited.

 

It's funny. Sonic and Tails' life icon do not use the player palette, but Knuckles' does. I wonder why that's the case.

Anyway loving all the progress being made with the mods. Can't wait to see more.

 

Nice findings! I will update that info on the WAVs in the struct.
And about the palettes, for each palette the first word is a bitmap. Each bit indicates wether that column exists in that palette. 1 for the first column, 2 the second column, 4 for the third and go on. And than each column is 16 pixels.

 

Sharing a post from another thread becauseeeeee

SOMEONE FIGURED IT OUT

 

Thats pretty sweet! The stage music is great, so to outright lose it sometimes is a missed oppertunity.

If someone could instead speed up the stage music when you go super that would be really neat, because then you wouldn't lose the stage theme, but it would act different when Super.

 

That would require adding sped-up variants of the songs.

 

Or someone could port the speed-changing algorithm from Sonic 1 (or 2) mobile. (There's no fast version oggs, they're rendered on-the-fly)

 

Nope, Stealth said they made faster versions of the songs as separate tracks and then made an algorithm that'd match up where one song ended and another one began so it'd be like the classic speed shoe effect.

Since there's more music in this game, and it's more complex, and since there wasn't a need to imitate something from an earlier game, they just decided to go with the speed shoe music.

 

So they aren't stored with the normal level music because I didn't find them in the RDSK folder of the normal songs.

 

Such an algorithm is much easier said than done unless you want the music to go chipmunk (change pitch as well as tempo). There are no freely available libraries that can do a good job on music, and I don't think anyone on the team has the necessary level of specialization in digital signal processing to make their own.

 

I'm always surprised that an effect that was pulled off on hardware made in 1991 cannot easily be emulated in 2017.

 

It can be easily emulated in 2017... if you use sequenced music. Streamed music has always had difficulty with tempo changes.

 

You expect Sonic Mania to start up Adobe Audition every time you get speed shoes?

 

People, I know making streamed songs faster makes them sound wonky. After all the soundwaves will be reconstructed using an FFT algorithm which has always the accuracy vs. smoothness trade off. But I was just giving an alternative to pre-rendering the songs and including them.

But, the best program to change the tempo of a song, to date, is Melodyne IMO.

There's plenty algorithms to choose from, implemented in various languages. Audacity comes with some and you can find a bunch on github.

 

Sonic After the Sequel uses the speed-up method with streamed tracks, but it DOES sound kinda wonky and speed shoe monitors seem to be REALLY rare in that game, so perhaps the composers and Lake were unhappy with the implementation.

 

Speaking of... Any chance we see something like this for Mania?

 

Um... I'm gonna say, not likely. I guess it's possible, if I can figure out how the game handles music playback, but I don't really know where to start for that.