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Sonic Mania: Hacking Discussion

Discussion in 'Engineering & Reverse Engineering' started by Chimera, Aug 29, 2017.

  1. Lanzer

    Lanzer

    The saber calls for its master... Member
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    I'd like to know the story of Egg Reverie and why theirs unused object placements within the stage. hopefully Taxman can come by and explain whats up with that.
     
  2. Kurausukun

    Kurausukun

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    Not to be needy, but among my research, there's one thing I still haven't figured out. Neo found where the loop point for BlueSpheresSPD.ogg is, so I tried replacing it with a custom theme. As soon as I enter a bonus stage, the game just crashes. It's not from editing the loop points in the exe because 1. I've edited other loop points with no troubles and 2. I tried replacing the .ogg in a vanilla exe and it still crashed. So does anyone have any ideas why it would crash? Just to be safe, I even tried using an audio file that had the exact same amount of samples, but even that crashed. I'd like to be able to have a custom Blue Spheres theme as well, but I'm not sure if it's possible now.
     
  3. Retroman

    Retroman

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    I'm not involved in the hacking scene, but the .ogg's sound settings might not match. Like HZ, Mono etc.
     
  4. minichapman

    minichapman

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    The final ending is most likely the Easter egg ending from the Knuckles & Knuckles mode.
     
  5. Hydr0city

    Hydr0city

    > Kamikazee Member
    It is, the Dev Menu also calls it "True End?"
     
  6. Gammatron

    Gammatron

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    I'm pretty sure that "True End" is meant to be a joke, because it's a picture of Knuckles telling a tall tale.
     
  7. Mastered Realm

    Mastered Realm

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    I'd never guess with that big question mark after the filename! :v:
     
  8. flarn2006

    flarn2006

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    Even if he doesn't want to release the SDK, why hasn't Taxman at least given us a technical description of the file format it uses so we can make our own tools?
     
  9. Overlord

    Overlord

    Now playable in Smash Bros Ultimate Moderator
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    Because you're not entitled to it?

    This is the man's livelihood, he's not obligated to make it easy for you.
     
  10. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    Just be grateful he's not/Sega's not shutting this down.
     
  11. Dr. Mecha

    Dr. Mecha

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    I'm going to assume that the Retro Team used vertex animations for their models similar to that of Naughty Dog during the PS1 days:
    [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbABCheN6rA[/media]

    Any kind of High Poly models would out of the question since they'll be a pain to animate.
     
  12. Dude

    Dude

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    Eh, you can always bake bone animations down to vertex animations. You'll get some vertex swim and the occasional weird lerping but it's nbd to execute.
     
  13. flarn2006

    flarn2006

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    I know I'm not. I'm just surprised he doesn't want to, or if he does, I'm curious what's stopping him. What led you to assume I feel entitled to it?

    Why would Sega shut this down, like what good would that do them? And especially why would Taxman shut this down? That I'm really wondering; I couldn't imagine him doing that by his own decision, can you?
     
  14. nineko

    nineko

    I am the Holy Cat Tech Member
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    It's likely that Taxman signed an NDA or something like that, so I don't really think he's allowed to say things or share details, I'm actually surprised that he posted several times in the discussion topics, but all his posts were very general, e.g. how to get the controllers to work and stuff like that, we're already way more lucky than we should, the fact that the developers are our friends doesn't mean that we should get a special treatment, if you really want to know, there are no Mania secret posts in the Tech Lounge, either, when it comes to commercial business everything gets way more serious.

    edit: also, too bad that getting Mania to work in XP seems very unlikely, let's hope that the culprit functions really are part of Denuvo and someone manages to completely remove them.
     
  15. winterhell

    winterhell

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    Are there a lot of Windows XP users here?
    Hopefully the lacking requirements are just using an arbitrary dll function with nothing too special. The GetTickCount64 function MM mentioned has an older equivalent GetTickCount in the same dll that does about the same thing, just giving a 32-bit value instead of a 64-bit one and
    "Retrieves the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the system was started, up to 49.7 days.". So with the old function you have to restart your PC once every month or so.
     
  16. ResistantWartortle

    ResistantWartortle

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    I ended up fiddling around with the GameConfig.bin file and tried to swap the level order for MSZ and GHZ, at first I never noticed the difference with Knuckles, but then this happened... https://youtu.be/LQslfefDkrU?t=13s
     
  17. Fred

    Fred

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  18. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    That could be a side effect of debug mode in general. It seems to dump Sonic in Knuckles Mirage Saloon Act 1 so it prob thought to do that here.
     
  19. Kurausukun

    Kurausukun

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    Samplerate needs to be the same anyway, since the game always plays audio at 44.1KHz, regardless of what the audio's actual samplerate is. BlueSpheresSPD is also a completely regular stereo .ogg, no different from any of the other ones. I think the answer must lie somewhere in the .exe; I don't know what weird things they do in there.
     
  20. McAleeCh

    McAleeCh

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    EDIT: Accidental misinformation due to a misleading wiki image - thought the unused Sonic 2 HPZ art removed in the latest update contained a version of the Jellygnite badnik different to both the Sonic 2 and the Mania versions. Actually, on looking at videos and reference screenshots, this isn't the case - the confusion was caused by the current wiki image for the Sonic 2 version, which appears to have been at least partially redrawn from scratch as its leg segments are all 1 pixel bigger and there are some colouring differences. Currently reassembling an accurate version of the sprite to replace the offending image.