Sonic Mania: Hacking Discussion

This may actually be the case considering the fact that sprites/SPZ2/LoveTester.bin exists.

 

FWIW A lovetester is a type of arcade amusement machine that measures electric resistance on the hand via moisture. Those images of Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails makes sense now, love testers usually rank your supposed love making skill on a scale like "cold fish" or "hot stud."

 

That's disappointing. I'm hoping those can be patched in, as Tails' reaction is very underwhelming.

 

Noticed a downside to Debug Mode being forced... level transitions don't seem to work.

 

These are located in a Blueprints folder. A lot of them make sense, but some of them make me wonder. There are a lot of Sonic 2 ARZ sprites in there (grounder, those totem poles, boss tiles). ARZ was shown off in the reveal trailer, along with GHZ and FBZ, both which made it into the game. Is it possible that ARZ was planned but cut for some reason?

Also hi Egg Gauntlet :specialed:

 

Fixed versions:

Spoiler

Holy hell I'm an idiot, it is reversed. Lemme fix that. :\

 

Looks finished to me.

Please implement via patch (or someone mod it in :v

 

That GIF seems to be playing in reverse. Also, I don't think it takes into account any potential hold frames...

Still, that's neat as hell. Thanks for putting it together.

 

The slug badnik that fires from its back in there from Sonic 3... did that appear in any other zone besides Launch Base Zone? Because if not... it sticks out in that sheet like a sore thumb.

EDIT: Wait, are some of those tiles from Sonic Crackers?!

 

I could probably make a version of my standard mod loader (SADX, SA2, S&KC) for Mania by creating a proxy DLL for steam_api.dll. The tricky part would be figuring out which functions to hook to make the game load files from external folders.

 

Oh shit, those tiles ARE from Sonic Crackers!!

 

Well some Launch Base gimmicks are in Press Garden Zone. Perhaps it was meant for that? Also there's a similar badnik in Studiopolis Zone

And yes, they are from Crackers. Originally for Sonic 2 mobile they planned a Boss Rush called "Egg Gauntlet" that put all the bosses in one level with some platforming inbetween each boss. Sega had it axed because they didn't like the idea of the bosses existing outside of their original levels. Here's what it looked like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSrEAVFnKc0

Apparently the crackers tiles were placeholders. Had they had the go ahead to make the level they'd of created new graphics for it.Also, it begins... poorly, but it begins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoxsmgCtRz0

 

Aaaaah, that's way less exciting then. Booo!

 

Also this is a good page to follow:

https://tcrf.net/Sonic_Mania

it's being updated a fair amount today with some goodies.

 

It's being updated as people post findings from this topic onto the tcrf IRC, lol. That's a bit circular.

 

That's just an edit, the actual special results gif looks like this. This and other findings (like intact Super Emerald sprites rather than the damaged rocks in the final) do confirm there were plans for Hyper Sonic at least, though, but Iizuka probably shut that idea down.

 

Or they could have planned to add those to GHZ, similarly to how Sonic Generations had Buzzers in Green Hill, but in the end decided (or were told) to put only Green Hill enemies in it.

 

Just an FYI - nextvolume informed me that the Retrun RSDK extractor tool has been updated to v1.51:
http://unhaut.x10host.com/retrun/

You can use the file list from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/koolkdev/rsdkv5_extract/master/sonic_mania_files_list.txt to extract the data with this command:
retrun x data.rsdk -M -L=sonic_mania_files_list.txt

I believe this should also let you repack the data as well as extracted, but haven't tested this yet.

 

The Blueprints thing isn't special at all really. "Blueprint Zone" was something that existed very early on while I was developing RSDKv5. We just ported a bunch of stuff from the remasters to test the tools out, and simply forgot to delete the sprite sheet when it wasn't needed anymore.