Note that while the Preview proto still has the same level model as the Dreamcast, there’s an issue related to the lack of OIT. Screenshots from the original Dreamcast version, and the SADX Preview prototype (Gamecube). The Dreamcast’s GPU had a unique hardware feature called order-independent transparency, which allowed Dreamcast game developers a lot more freedom in how they built their renderers and assets in comparison to other consoles and PC games. For example, one of the biggest problems I ran into was related to transparent polygons and textures with alpha channels. The PC version has a lot of not so obvious but very important technical differences, which prevent Dreamcast levels from looking or working correctly, so I had to fix a lot of things. However, getting the DC level functional in SADXPC is only the starting point. Getting this to happen was an ardous process, between having to fix many porting issues and coding back in previously absent features. This very first official release would be made avaliable by PkR on that same day, and featured all the Action Stages with Dreamcast Landtables along with most of the content that was previously released in separate mods. The second mod would be the culmination of PkR’s previous testorations (as well the idea behind SADX 99′ Edition): Dreamcast Conversion. Lightning and different time of days really bring life to the game. I think my favorite mods for SADX are definitely Lantern Engine and Time of Day cycle mod, which changes between day, evening and noon. And of course, this was received with great fanfare from Sonic Retro members and Sonic Adventure fans, between being an incredible technical accomplishment, and also a huge improvement for the game’s visuals. This mod restored the original lightning engine from the Dreamcast through the use of an external shader (as described in the previous part), and used the Dreamcast palette files to add colored lightning in each stage (this also meant that you could modify the palete files with a tool to alter the lightning and colors if you wished) it even helps the original untouched SADX levels look much better than normal. The first mods to talk about is the SADX Lantern Engine mod. The culmination of these efforts would arrive as two mods in the 18th anniversary of the original game’s release in Japan: December 23, 2016. This not only involved figuring out the formats of models and sounds, but also finding how to implement them into the DX PC port (which often needed the use of coding).Īt this point, everything was building up for what most in the scene had been waiting for, which was restoring what was lost from the Dreamcast game into SADX PC. On the previous part, the discussed topic was the research done on the protoypes of Sonic Adventure, how these contributed into figuring out more aspects from the Dreamcast version, and the gradual process that was restoring piece-by-piece the original assets into Sonic Adventure DX. You can find the previous parts as well after that or by checking the end of this page. If you haven’t read already the introduction of this article/topic, you can do so by clicking right here. This is the fourth part of The History of Sonic Adventure DX Modding article.
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