Oh yeah, this thing's back after almost 3 years ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Welcome to a concept demo for what might be the final product for Modern Sonic Adventure 2!

Please note that some things like new level intros & animations are rough as we only just figured out what we want completely and the ideas require custom LandTables (stage geometry). Animations are rough due to size limitations set in the game for lots of animations. You will see Sonic, Shadow and Amy randomly stand instead playing the animation you expect to see because of this. This is a failsafe to avoid crashes. Amy is not finalised due to time constraints. However, Sora's Amy New Tricks is 100% supported and complete for this mod, so you can try that out at least!

did you know this mod has easter eggs in it? Also please do not show this with Reshade mods that make this look worse. Use Simple SA2 by Revenir if you wish as that's a one-size-fits-all preset, thank you!

Required Mods:

Modern SA2 does require a few mods for the intended look. We also based our mod off tweaks made by Speeps (code for those mods will be merged into MSA2 to avoid a lot of mod requirements).

- Action Remap, by SonicFreak94. Because action button light dash sucks. This changes it to the Y button. Best to use this in general for SA2.

- No Battle (optional), by MainMemory. You can use Battle DLC with this mod. However, if you do not like Battle's menus, enable this and witness pretty coloured backgrounds!

- No Model Tinting, by Speeps. This fixes models being tinted darker than they should be in the ports.

- Menu Overhaul, by Speeps. If you're using No Battle, you might as well use this for cleaner menus.

- HedgePanel, by Speeps. Need this to fix the homing attack issue and for the fast somersault. Refer to images for config!

- Character Select Plus, by Justin113D. To load other characters into stages they normally wouldn't be in. Required to see Sonic's version of White Jungle.

- SA2 Volume Controls, by Shaddatic. Fixes the audio engine and my sound design makes use of this mod. Use this for vanilla SA2 as well, as this is a restoration of the Dreamcast sound engine!

- Reworked Afterimages, by End User, Exant & Sora. For enabling coloured, lit-up light dash models for Sonic and Shadow. SET TO LoD 2 IN THE CONFIG AS SHOWN IN THE IMAGES!

INSTALLATION NOTE: If you did not install the brightness fix from Speeps' NMT mod, I have included their Dreamcast brightness restoration. The colouring in MSA2 is made for this brightness fix as this is how the game's brightness is supposed to look. Using vanilla PC's obj.pak will result in a washed out display & colours. Do not 1-click install this mod as it may not download the mod completely. If you are familiar with how Chao World Extended put all its mods into one folder, I have done the same to keep it nice and tidy. The name of the folder where I put the shader in (at the top) will help you find where to drag the shader file to. It is safe to overwrite the vanilla file, don't worry.

Let's get to the meat now, shall we? What does this mod contain?

Codes:

Modern SA2 has a cool code that adds squash & stretch to the ball models when you use the bounce attack. To enable this, head over to the Codes menu in the SA2 Mod Loader, scroll to the bottom, tick it and click "Save". This code was provided publicly in X-Hax by JSonic back in 2019.

Sound Design:

Modern SA2 features new sound design: fixing issues with the original game and adding to the library of sounds you'll hear throughout this project! Here's a breakdown of the sound work done for MSA2.

- Audio no longer clips harshly

- Reworked audio balancing/mixing

- Immersive stage ambience for stages that have them

- 06, Unleashed & Generations and original sounds ported in and balanced well

- Takes advantage of Shaddatic's SA2 Volume Controls mod (for pitch sliders and stereo audio)

- Car audio for karts (still WiP)

- Randomised grunts for Sonic and Shadow

- Randomised spring and dash panel/ramp wind whoosh sounds

- Footstep and Shadow jet shoe sounds

- Footstep sounds change based on the terrain of the stage (cannot be specific per-mesh as we can't make our own collision flags, but this works well considering we changed this for each stage)

- New jet sounds (all other enemy sounds are WiP or not done as of yet)

- Lots of other sound work done to make this sound nice

Stages:

Modern SA2 offers visuals that provides a new way to look at the stages! The artstyle has remained the same as we have only replicated and taken it further where we could. New vertex paint, textures, lighting, fog, overlays & grass effects have been added to beauty these stages too! Minor texture issues have been fixed too. For example: Radical Highway's incorrect global index number for the top walls of a building now use the texture from the terrain texture archive instead of the object texture archive. New light files have been added for where you'd expect the player's lighting to change (still WiP feature). We call this what Hedgehog Engine (HE) calls it to make it easier to understand; lightfields.

- City Escape - New textures, object layouts, music, afternoon-to-sunset transition, lightfields (WiP), fog. Afternoon to sunset was first introduced many months ago by Hoppy, which later was included into Modern SA2. Click here for this mod!

- Radical Highway - New textures, object layouts, street lamps & lights affect characters, new SFX. These new lightfields were shown earlier by Hoppy as a teaser for what is in this project. Click here for this standalone mod!

- Metal Harbour - New introduction (WiP), object layouts, a few new textures, SFX, music, lightfields.

- Green Forest - New grass effects, textures, object layouts, music, alpha issue bug fixed, SFX, fog, light, overlay, stage gradually becomes more red as time runs out.

- White Jungle - New grass effects. textures, object layouts, stage ending, music, SFX, vertex paint, fog, light, special overlay that gradually darkens for Sonic.

- Sky Rail - Very WiP stage intro, dynamic stormy weather (rain to be added), colouring & textures (far from final), music, fog, light and ambient sounds.

- Pyramid Cave - New WiP stage intro, indoor & outdoor fog and lightfields, object layouts. NOTE: Restart this stage when you spawn in as the camera is bugged. Restarting or falling off the stage will fix the camera!

- Crazy Gadget - WiP textures, object layouts, lasers change player's lighting to red, poison pits change player's lighting to green, other lightfield additions.

- Final Rush - WiP textures, object layouts, rails change player's lighting to yellow, lightfields.

- Final Chase - WiP textures, object layouts, restored access to a spline you normally could not reach, rails change player's lighting to cyan, lightfields.

- Green Hill? - Play to see this one ;)

- Kart Racing - Textures, music, SFX, car sounds, the legendary BMW M3 GTR in all its glory + higher res vinyl. Play as Sonic to whip about in that beauty! Car, tyre, crashing and landing sounds are straight from Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Carbon, Burnout Revenge and the car itself in Nürburgring (used for the high pass turbo whine).

Characters:

Sonic, Shadow and Amy are playable in this demo! Sonic and Shadow are the most finished characters as of now. As stated above, Amy New Tricks (by Sora) support is finished and you can see the new animations and sounds when using this mod with ours!

Our character models are a first for Sonic Adventure 2. Although you saw the false rim light effect last year with Dash Adventure 2's models, this was first introduced in our dev build. It was brought over to DA2 when I nailed the look for it. Our characters also now have 99 bones, compared to 61 in vanilla SA2. Moving mouths, eyebrows, fingers, wrists and quills are in thanks to this. This does hit us with SA2's animation size limits sadly, and so most animations in the characternamemtn.prs files cannot be replaced. Stage animations, such as boarding, pole swings, vine grabs, etc, do not have this issue. Figuring out which bones are needed and bones that are not needed took a while, and experimenting with 100% ports of Gens characters and partial ports of them. The bones in our armatures are all the bones that are required to have the character and game function as intended, such as particle effects, character leaning, independent eye and head control, etc. If you wish to check how the armatures work in SA2, you can check the SA2 wiki here!

Animations are recreations of Unleashed, Generations and Forces animations. However, these have been edited to look as lively as possible. These will receieve improvements in the future. Some animations are also original, such as the idle animations for Sonic and Shadow.

Character Mechanics:

- Modern Sonic Adventure 2 v6 brings new mechanics for players to have fun with. These new mechanics are also here to offer new ways to design levels for SA2, should anyone wish to make stages for MSA2's physics and gameplay.Speed characters have the ability to collect rings to increase their acceleration speed and accelerate faster on rails (hold X/blue action button)!Shadow has the ability to stomp (hold X/blue action button, will stomp faster the longer X is held). Currently, this does not break objects and does not damage enemies. This is a WiP mechanic which is why "Shadow has Bounce Bracelet" code is activated by default*More mechanics yet to come!

Soundtrack:

With a banging project, must come bangers with mash! The music featured in MSA2 are the best remixes we could find to suit these stages! There are also some alternate tracks that were used in previous dev builds which you can use by renaming the ADX files in the project's ADX folder! Take a look at the list down below:

Stages:

- City Escape 1, 2 & 3 | Escape from the City & The Mad Convoy Race (Sonic Generations)

- Metal Harbour 1 & 2 | That's the Way I Like It (S.A.M.E 2016) & Can't Stop, So What?! (by Kamikaze B*tch)

- Green Forest | Won't Stop, Just Go! (by ThePlasmas, part of Gamegrooves' Live: A Hero's Tribute to SA2 album)

- Pyramid Cave | Keys the Ruin (S.A.M.E remix)

- Crazy Gadget | Crazy Gadget (Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2012, by Jun Senoue)

- Final Rush | Metal Cover by ToxicxEternity and RichaadEB

- Radical Highway | Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (by Jun Senoue)

- White Jungle | Eggman's Facility - Rhythm and Balance Remix (by Tomoya Ohtani & SEGA Sound Team)

- Sky Rail | Mr. Unsmiley (S.A.M.E remix)

- Final Chase | The Supernatural ...for Final Chase (by Fumie Kumatani & Everett Bradly). This is straight from the Multi-Dimensional OST so it's in full quality. No suitable remixes are available at this time for this stage.

- Kart Racing | Chasing Drive ...for Kart (by Kamikaze B*tch)

Menus:

- Title screen: Joshua Taipale - SA2 ...Main Riff for "Sonic Adventure 2" | GameGrooves

- Main Menu: Menu Theme Jam on 4 guitars (Advertise: SA2 ver.B) | Husky by the Geek

- Story Mode: Green Light Ride intro looped | Crush 40

- Stage Select: Burnout Paradise Theme (Part A looped) | Criterion Games

- Tutorial: Burnout 2-styled loop for Burnout Dominator's theme | Criterion Games, edited by me.

- Options: KMT Instrumental | Instrumental by Kush Beats. Original song by Drake & Giggs, OVO Sound. Figured I'd put this in since it samples the 06 theme lol. This will change in the final build.

Jingles:

With all of Modern SA2's big changes, we haven't forgetten about the little things! Dark characters now have their own round clear jingle, which you can also listen to in Sound Test!

- Speedup | Sonic Heroes (by Jun Senoue) (ripped from the Xbox version for best quality)

- Invincible | Unused Sonic Generations jingle with added SFX

- Round Clear | Sonic Generations (by Sega Sound Team)

- Round Clear DARK | Shadow the Hedgehog (by Jun Senoue)

- Timer | Sonic Generations (by Sega Sound Team)

- Item Get (played when getting upgrades) | Live & Learn ending riff (Crush 40)

Branding:

It's dangerous to create thumbnails without content branding. Here, take this!

Modern Sonic Adventure 2: The Trial Branding

Modern Sonic Adventure 2 Branding

There is also a separate folder in the main content's folder with 5 promotional images! 3 posters and 2 logos. Feel free to use this however you want!

Known Issues:

- Characters will randomly shrink and grow back to normal scale when braking and going back to standing. This is an issue with custom animations and the fix for this has not been found.

- Some collisions will be bust in Green Hill and Metal Harbour's new intro. This is a combination of the game acting up + models not being fixed 100%.

- Vanilla SA2 glitch spots & out of bound tricks have not been patched.

- Pyramid Cave's intro camera is bugged. Fall off/restart the stage to fix the camera. Metal Harbour has the same issue, but was fixed by a hacky force restart on frame 1 of when the in-game timer starts.

- The board object does not appear with the characters as I do not know what bone(s) the object is parented to.

- Metal Harbour's goal ring is placed at the rocket launch area as there is no pointer for the rocket grab animation, which results in the crash. I have an animation made for this though. You can check it with SAMDL in SA Tools. When the pointer for this animation has been found, the early goal ring will be removed.

- In the rare case you're able to use the anti-gravity objects in Crazy Gadget, the game will crash as I did not make an animation for this action. We have automatic gravity switches, so it did not seem practical to make an animation for the action.

- Doing board tricks with Shadow and Amy will crash the game as I have not setup their animations