Taxman, I know you can't just magic things to happen, but we all beg for mod tools for you and the team's glorious game :v:
My theory was that you guys started to intentionally adding a bunch of unused stuff to follow the tradition with all classic titles. Pretty much like Johnny Cage transformations.
Nice insight into the development process, I'd be interested in a "making of" video or blog post if you ever find the time. Also, how are we supposed to have any "Area 51" type mysteries if the developer shows up and spoils it?
It sure is :specialed: I just noticed some things posted on there that I hadn't seen here yet, so that's why I thought to post it. And thanks for the clarification Taxman! I wonder how much stuff is in here that you guys left on purpose for us to find
All this unused content, could have been replaced with more level remixes from other games. I could totally see Sonic Mania containing 36 Levels to explore and still utilize the Super/Hyper forms of the Chaos Emeralds. Let's hope the modders can do better! I really like the new Retro Engine, Cheat Engine allows you to change the Player 1/Player 2 character with ease, compared to the older engines.
Not sure how you meant that to come off, but it sounds real dickish. The developers did a great job, realistically they would not have been able to remix every Classic Sonic level and, honestly, why would they when most of the original games reuse the same tropes (would we really need Palmtree Panic and Emerald Hill in a game that has Green Hill)? And Hyper may have been cut at Sega's discretion. So yea, please be respectful.
Soooo the Amy bit was fake? Damn, I was about to bust a nut over that. Still, everything else there is super interesting! Or should I say, "Hyper" interesting. ...I'll go find myself the door. EDIT: Uhhhh... The hell is that "Dunkey mode" code? I sincerely doubt that's real, but I also don't know if TCRF can be edited by anyone. EDIT 2: Holy shit it's real, I CAN'T EVEN RIGHT NOW.
Those are probably their reactions to being matched with Eggman and Amy, respectively. Sonic's reaction to Eggman is "D'oh!" and Tails' is "ROTFL" (his face kind of reminds me of Knuckles' in that old promotional artwork with the fountain).
It's kind of surreal seeing a dev show up in a topic about taking a game apart and trying to find its secrets and actually giving us insight into how it works. Especially after 20 years of people ripping Sonic games apart, trying to figure out how they tick and solve mysteries about them. It's pretty cool. But also kinda surreal, like hell froze over or the Cubs won the world series, you know? Oh wait, that actually happened.
So it turns out making Mania load from a folder is ezpz. Open SonicMania.exe in a hex editor, go to the offset 0x19FC3B, and change the byte "01" to "00". The game will now load all the files from the directory the EXE is in (so you want the folder named "Data" to be next to SonicMania.exe). EDIT: Things seem to be a bit bugged at present with this, though, I'm presuming it's because not every file has had the MD5 cracked yet.
I dunno how true this is, but someone told me that the Retro Engine was mostly script based and the majority of the games code is in the .rsdk files rather than the .exes. I wonder if this means that a "retro engine emulator" of sorts would be at all possible. It would be great to be able to play Sonic 1 or 2 on PC without having to run them through bluestacks.
Looking at the Special Stage UI graphics, there's an odd banner/notice: "Time to escape!" I've never seen this before. There's no banner when you collect the Emerald, the camera just pans up and the screen fades out. Was the original plan, like a "heist" (i.e. the stage's musical track is named "Dimensional Heist") was to get in, get the goods and then get out? How would that have worked? Get the emerald and then get another speed level to 88-mile-an-hour it? Complete a lap and jump into a portal? Unless of course this banner is used and I'm not very observant... EDIT: I'm also seeing "Act 3" graphics in the Globals/Display.gif file. The only stage in the game which has an "official" Act 3 in the stage select is Lava Reef, but entering it as any character simply registers as "Act 2" as it's just the boss arenas for the respective characters. EDIT 2: Some good debug strings in the StringsEN.txt file: Code (Text): TEST STRING THIS FEATURE IS NOT\YET IMPLEMENTED. PLACEHOLDER...\SIMULATE LOG IN? These strings go untranslated in any other string file. Also while going through the localised files, I'm noticing other English strings that are not localised for whatever reason, mostly PC-specific strings like display options, not sure if that's intentional or what. I'm also noticing that the game has localisation files for Korean, Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional) which I don't believe are used. There's also Korean "Press Any Button" graphics in the title. In the options menu only 6 languages are selectable, EFIGS and Japanese. Are there Chinese and Korean versions of the game that are separate or are they just there for future potential releases in those regions?
Maybe it was going to be like a game of tag, where you would take the Emerald from the UFO and it would try to chase you back to grab it again, essentially making it a game of keep-away?
don't be. because this happens in game without sprite hacking. https://youtu.be/CEtkiVMaY6E?t=262 CodenameGamma's Ultimate Cheat Table For Sonic Mania http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OlEEftCnXs&feature=youtu.be https://www.dropbox.com/s/4179rm9fkgm91is/SonicManiaPub.CT?dl=0
One thing that would be really cool if it becomes possible to modify would be Super Tails pulsating color. I don't know if I'm the only one, but I find that the color change during his Super state is way too minimal. It goes from orange to like... slightly, slightly lighter orange. It would look far cooler if it changed to something closer to yellow like in S3K. At least Knuckles' is more vibrant and noticeable.
AFAIK we can't access the scripts in any recognizable form because they're compiled into bytecode, so we'd have to crack the bytecode format before we could get anywhere
Here's everything I've found looking through sprite & other files not yet posted on TCRF: -Text-wise, there's a test string (literally "THIS IS A TEST STRING") and "THIS FEATURE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE." which I want to say isn't used in-game anywhere, though it may have been used for leaderboards on early copies. Can't say for sure though. -Almost every (oddly excluding Hydrocity) classic zone has a "Objects-Classic" file, which is just the zone's assets as they existed in their original games. Either I read this here or somewhere else but I remember a developer interview mentioning that they just inserted the original assets & level design and then would change up the level design and assets. Also, there are Objects-Classic files for Scrap Brain Zone and Sonic 2's Hidden Palace Zone, so they were probably cut early in development in favor of Metallic Madness and Lava Reef. -Mean Bean Machine has full sprites for each character & Eggman, but only the top half is seen in-game. I can post all of these a bit later.
