Been awhile since I've posted here, sadly not had much Sonic stuff come through my hands. Until recently.. me and a group of users from ObscureGamers acquired 28 xbox 360 systems from a private seller. 9 of these ended up being trade show kits which would have been used at the likes of E3/Gamescom/Tokyo Game Show, There was a couple of normal xbox dev kits along with a custom colorware giveaway system that appears to never have been claimed? Anyways, while digging into the hdd's deleted contents we uncovered a near final build of Sonic Adventure that had some goodies buried. (And a Crazy Taxi/Vanquish TGS build). What were those goodies? It was PDB's and XDB's! I'm no expert with coding so I'll drop @evilhamwizard's response to these. We're releasing this later this month and will update this thread here once ready. But wanted to post this before I forgot as I have alot going on. :P EDIT, released enjoy! https://mega.nz/#!SV8z1QzJ!Gl32PiekzukRikiu_wALU-l7lMB9wPnCaTK6pEHQLKU
If SADX modding via the latest decompiled codebase was like finding what you need via a map with holes in it, this’ll be like a GPS. Might even allow optimizing things like beta windy valley perhaps? Or finally understanding how splines work? Bravo. Amazing find.
So... I'm dumb. What's a pdb and how will ths potentially help modding? EDIT: Oh just read the description. Well this is interesting
Awesome find! I'm sure that the SA1 modding scene will become very fun to watch after this gets released. Though I'm kind of curious about the the build itself as well, I hope we can find some interesting differences there, though I doubt it.
Oh god, will we finally be able to make level mods for SADX? I like the Adventure games controls much better than the boost games, so it always sad to me that Adventure modding was pretty much skin and model swaps while Generations was basically open-source at this point. God, if we get even just a few high-quality maps like the Windy Valley beta for SADX...
Unfortunately I don't think we will ever be able to make stage mods for SADX. We would probably need some ingenious devs to be able to even BEGIN to start cracking the code for the- wait... We already have stage mods. Like the ones porting Sonic Heroes stages to SADX.
er, what? there's been several level mods for SADX there's the mushroom hill mod by Dude, for instance
I don't mean ports, and the fact that I didn't even know of those speaks to how extremely tiny SADX level modding is compared to Generations. Presumably there is a reason no one mods SADX whereas Gens. is extremely popular. I want to see an SADX mod that actually leverages the game's surprisingly faithful slope physics for fun and inventive level design.
Even if it does help us understand "da gwaficks" (which we already understand fairly well due to it using the Ninja library from the Dreamcast SDK), it almost certainly won't help us do anything involving shaders in the 2004 PC version. Besides that, we already have a mod that implements the Dreamcast lighting via a shader, so really there's no reason why anyone couldn't make any kind of shader mod they want right now.
yooooo if this helps OG Sonic Adventure modding, I wonder what that means for the efforts to figure out wtf is going on with the autodemo windy valley?
I'm no expert, but I feel like the further you move away from the source of the symbols, the more difficult it will be to use them to find anything. The 2004 PC port is the direct ancestor of the 360 version, so the code is likely to be structured very similarly. When porting from GameCube to PC however, they did some pretty major restructuring of the game's code: instead of every level being a largely self-contained file, everything got dumped into the main executable. The AutoDemo is from before parts of the game engine were even finalized, and Windy Valley in particular is from an even older build for which we don't have the main executable that it's supposed to be linked with.
To add to what MainMemory said, the 2004 PC port doesn't remove all of the separate binaries. Adventure Fields and Chaos 0, for example, are still separate from the main executable, and some new binaries were added, for example the one that contains character models (which were part of the main binary in the original game), or different daytime DLLs for the Mystic Ruins garden. What's interesting is that the X360 version has kept this layout, but the PS3 version and even the Steam version didn't. In the latter two, everything is built into the main executable. The similarities between the X360 version and the 2004 PC port give me hope that these symbols can be salvaged to relabel our disassembly of the 2004 PC EXE, which would help a lot with things we haven't figured out yet, and make modding a lot easier. That said, I imagine there's a lot of platform-specific stuff and new additions to the X360 port (the reworked menu system for example) that doesn't make it easy to match stuff up between the two versions. I hope MainMemory and SF94 figure it out, though
