I have noticed the bug before, but only in the final moments of getting the blue spheres. Like, I see six in front of me, but the counter says only five remain. Also, is it me, or is it harder to recover in blue sphere? I wasn't an expert by any means, but I seem to be making mistakes and errors I normally wouldn't have done in S3K.
I heard that the Denuvo has already been cracked. Is that true? If so, then that makes the DRM even more pointless.
I was right, did it myself with all four of those groups in that stage: Edit: And while we're on the subject of Blue Sphere, this is the order that the 32 new stages appear in-game - it seems to be consistent from my testing and experience:
The problem is clear right in the beginning: that first group you closed only has 20 blue spheres due to the star in the middle, yet the game is still subtracting 21 from the total (it went from 120 to 99 when they turned into rings). Apparently the game is counting spaces instead of actual blue spheres when turning them into rings.
Yes,the jumping is off. Evidenced by one of the "classic" stages where a yellow doesn't shoot you far enough.
@ ApocalypticSalad: Nice job figuring out the bug. And also with the stage documentation - that order was not different from my own, if I remember right. So, possibly another bug, but a question too: How do I get the achievement for getting gold in Blue Sphere stages? I have all of the gold medals in the list, but haven't done anything beyond that. Spoiler Do I have to do the extra ones too?
You should've got the achievement the moment you got the last gold medallion. If you didn't, I'm not sure how you can remedy that... Edit: Yes, a cracked copy of the game was made publicly available five or six hours ago. Literally less than a week after release. Was it worth delaying the game two weeks and pissing off thousands of people, SEGA? Edit2: Cracked version is giving me the same horrible performance as my Steam copy... Bleh.
From what I hear the cracked verison simply uses a DLL exploit (which is HILARIOUS) so Denuvo is still present, meaning it basically acts as it would while the game thinks it's connected to steam; that, by the way, also being the only thing denuvo seems to check for now with DRM since SoE was convinced to get rid of the always-online check. So, now we have the game: Decompiled Cracked "Tampered with" i.e. a few EXE mods that allow for file replacement Modded any way we please Hacked online and the only things Denuvo has successfuly done is: Overheat PCs Drop sales Bravo. An anti-tamper DRM that failed at protection from tampering or even being functional DRM. It now exists only as a weighted tumor slowing the game down on PCs that otherwise could run it smoothly, and its inclusion was the sole reason the PC port got reviewbombed and didn't acrew as much profit as it could have. Literally nothing useful came out of this.
Good job guys, now the only thing that's left is finding a way to get it to run in Windows XP. Any ideas?
The part that kills me is that ALL of this was foreseeable. This always happens with games that use Denuvo. Almost makes me wonder if Sega of Europe was trying to tank the game as part of some kind of internal power play. As for the achievements issue raised above - I'm also missing a bunch of achievements I definitely should have. Another bug, I guess.
This "crack" is functionally useless to me if it isn't removing Denuvo altogether. If I wanted to simply disable it, there was already a 1 byte hex edit on launch day that did the trick. The exploit they used is amusing, though. As for performance issues, I'm not sure if the problem is Denuvo or Vsync still being broken. Seemingly, people with dedicated GPUs only see 2% CPU usage at most, while people like me, with APUs in both machines, see sky-high CPU usage. The busted Options screen needs fixing so we can finally rule it out. Denuvo needs to go either way, if only for the sake of preservation. This wouldn't have been true during Denuvo's inception. At first, it was so hard to crack, a popular hacking group gave up on it. Now is different, however. Denuvo is well understood and no longer a reliable method for copy-protection. SEGA of Europe using DRM that's several months outdated is blatantly lazy.
Have you tried disabling Vsync in the settings.ini file? Might help. Yeah it seems Denuvo or the Vsync (Leaning on the former cause Vsync should NOT heat up a laptop even w/o a dedicated GPU) is causing this issue. I'm sorry you gotta deal with this, man. My condolences.
I think Denuvo is living off past cred when their copy protection system was uncrackable for six month stretches at a time and Sega didn't seem to notice that crackers became much more advanced and can now solve Denuvo in a week tops, meaning Denuvo was an absolutely disastrous and beyond pointless choice. Review bombing, overheating computers (including mine) just doesn't seem worth it when all is said and done. I have a new powerful machine now, but I don't want to run the Denuvo Steam build of Sonic Mania on it because of what it did to my last machine, causing the fan to go in to overdrive and overheating the shit out of it. Performance any better in the cracked version? Steam sales have also plateaued as of late, and I can't help but think the negative review swarm and Denuvo shit is contributing to it. Hit 100K and now it's staying the same/declining. Disastrous decision by Sega and I hope this forces them to keep Denuvo out of Sonic Mania 2 and even Sonic Forces. It achieved nothing for them but negative press. Ah, this makes sense and seems right on the money. My old machine that Sonic Mania tried to fucking destroy was a dual-core AMD A6 APU with the Radeon graphics unit built-in. So AMD's signature APU tech. And Sonic Mania did run fine performance-wise but the fan blared at max speed, with stratospheric CPU usage and potential overheating issues. Rocking an Intel i5 Quad Core at the moment with a dedicated GeForce GTX 1050 GPU - so theoretically shouldn't have the same issue on this machine? I'll give Mania a spin later and report back.
Performance won't improve with the cracked version, because all it does is fake the phoning home process for Denuvo. However, on a reasonably powerful machine, the current Steam version will run without your machine breaking a sweat. My desktop is fine with it, even though Mania's using slightly more of its power than I'd like. I tried editing the settings file, but I can't tell if it did anything. The game's Options menu still reports that Vsync is on, or that it's off but-not-really. The GUI is totally broken. There are times when the settings are finicky, too. It doesn't want to remember my control settings some of the time, so I had to reconfigure Joy2Key around the default configuration. It's a little frustrating. As for Vsync itself, I'm assuming it's that because every game, and some emulators, handles it differently. 64-bit builds of SNES9x let me use Vsync with no more than 12% CPU usage at max on my laptop, while 32-bit games are a mixed bag of Vsync either being of no consequence, or being fairly chunky on the CPU. Not sure if it's an optimization problem or not.
Ah, thanks dude. Appreciate the reply and the insight. I can kind of understand Mania taxing the hell out of my last machine, a quite ancient low-end AMD laptop that was pretty much outdated and low-spec even for the year of its release (2013) but I swear to God Mania better run decently on this one. I can run Doom for Christ's sake at a rock solid 60 fps at max settings and not even that starts the fan, so if Mania stresses this one out it'd be fucking ridiculous. Having said that it'll probably run Mania without breaking a sweat, Denuvo or no Denuvo. What's worrying me is this shit storm is actually having an effect on sales. Steam sales have just plateaued. Even declined. 92K owners down from 98K with no increases in a few days and you just know the bad reviews are having an effect on the game. Sonic CD eventually broke 350K at its peak so Mania should theoretically be well on the way to 500K. But it's not as of yet and I'm pretty sure this shit storm is the reason why. The game does seems to be faring well on consoles however, so perhaps Sega will give us a decent estimation of sales soon.
Okay, SEGA, will you remove Denuvo from Mania now? It failed to protect the game, so quit fucking over legitimate users! I promise I'll buy it the second it's patched out completely.
I dunno if we're still posting times and stuff, but I managed to break into top 5 of Metallic Madness 1:
Also SEGA while you're removing Denuvo feel free to put these back in the game: Spoiler Because what the fuck why aren't these in the final game
