Oh yeah, we're back again ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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

NOTE: Do not play with story mode as the in-game cutscenes/mini events will crash the game due to armature differences. Nearly all animations have been completed for Sonic and Shadow. You will see Sonic & Shadow randomly stand instead playing the animation you expect to see as not all animations have not been produced. This is a failsafe to avoid crashes. We also recommend playing with a completed save file so you have all upgrades and can play all the stages with ease.

This version of the Trial build introduces many new animations, fixes, level design imrpovements, new sound design and the lot! Our code has also received a major update, thanks to developments from Hoppy and Shaddatic's help!

Thanks to Shaddatic, MSA2 will now detect if you have the original shader file for SA2, or if you're not using a fix for the brightness issue the ports have. If this is the case, MSA2 will restore the Dreamcast's brightness, so you can view this project as it is intended!did you know this mod has easter eggs in it? Also please do not show this with Reshade mods that make this look worse.

Be sure to update your mod manager, check "disable loading animation" in the Options menu so the game crashes less. Please DO NOT 1-click install this mod as this ZIP contains 2 mods in it and 1-click installing it will not install the main mod and stage geometry. Just extract the first folder in the ZIP into the mods folder ;) (IF YOU DO NOT SEE OR HEAR THE NEW CHANGES, RE-EXTRACT THE ZIP!)

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). Please refer to the first image in the gallery below for the mod manager setup!

- 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!

- SA2 Render Fix, by Shaddatic. Fixes issues with SA2 in general. Gives a performance boost as backface culling has been restored. Also required as we're no longer using the Global Index system Sonic Team used for the game. This means we can add as many textures as we want without needing to change the texture's ID to avoid conflicting with another texture.

- 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!

- 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 bug 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.

- 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!

- Eggman's Lighting Fix, by Exant. Our Eggman stage lighting is made with this in-mind.

Let's get to the meat now, shall we?

What does this mod contain?

Mod Loader 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. THESE ARE ENABLED BY DEFAULT WITH THE MOD ENABLED SO DON'T WORRY ABOUT THIS!

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.

- New, original voice acting! -> Sonic, Shadow & Tails menu themes, Sonic, Shadow & Mech Tails (WiP) in-game. Actors: @HvaAndrew, as Sonic the Hedgehog. @ShibiPaffu, as Shadow the Hedgehog. @abluemoon88, as Miles "Tails" Prower.

- Audio no longer clips harshly

- Reworked audio balancing/mixing. New sound design for speed & mech characters!

- Immersive stage ambience for stages that have them (annihilating cars in City Escape has never been so satisfying!)

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

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

- Car audio for karts -> New wind sounds for when you accelerate. Wind gets louder when using the boost. New engine, braking, damage and tire rolling sounds.

- Randomised character SFX and object sounds (e.g.: spring & 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 & terrain layout, music, afternoon-to-sunset transition, lightfields (WiP), fog.

- Radical Highway - New textures, object layouts, street lamps & lights affect characters, new SFX.

- 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 and lighting.

- White Jungle -> New grass effects. textures, object layouts, stage ending, music, SFX, vertex paint, fog and lighting.

- 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 indoor & outdoor fog and lightfields, object layouts.

- 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? -> Rainbow Road from Mario Kart DS!!!

- All mech stages feature the same changes -> New ligthing, fog and some object layout changes here and there.

- 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). Knuckles' kart uses the top speed engine sound of the BMW M3 GTR from NFS: Heat. Sonic, Tails and Knuckles have new sense of speed sounds and much better car audio in this build

- Chao Lobby -> WiP retexture of a Norse-themed Chao Lobby. Get your good glimpses of the character models in here! (ONLY AVAILABLE IF YOU HAVE ALL GARDENS UNLOCKED)

Characters:

Sonic, Shadow and their alternate models ("COLLEXTION" by MentorDex Shirt Sonic & Shadow 2099) are available to play with in this demo! Sonic and Shadow are the most finished characters as of now. Our character models are a first for Sonic Adventure 2. Although you saw the false rim light effect in 2021, 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 (this unfortunately results in Knuckles, Rouge, Tails, Metal Sonic and alternate characters crashing the game with this mod due to bone differences). Moving mouths, eyebrows, fingers, wrists and quills are in thanks to this. 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. The shading on the eyes seen in Sonic Unelashed (HD) has been brought to the MSA2 models with some trickery! No more flat eyeboard models. Hello sweet shading ;)

Animations are recreations of Unleashed, Generations and Forces animations. However, these have been edited to look as lively as possible. Some animations are also original, such as the idle animations & results animations for Sonic and Shadow!

The animation system has been reworked for this mod! This allows us to control animation speeds, transition speeds, next animations, relocate existing animations and add new ones! An example of this is the new spindash -> run transition, which SA2 does not originally have. Shadow's new results animation is split into two parts. Part A being the walk-in -> pose. Part B being the looped pose. We also have a new camera animation for this, thanks to the new Blender SA I/O Addon, by @Justin113D!

Character Mechanics:

- Modern Sonic Adventure 2 v6 brings new mechanics for players to have fun with... or at least that's what we have planned for the final build. For now, we have one new mechanic. Speed characters have the ability to collect rings to increase their acceleration speed and accelerate faster on rails (hold X/blue action button)!

- Character turning and inputs have been fixed with this version of MSA2! As you go faster, the controls will tighten. This means you'll no longer fly off to the sides when rotating the left stick at top speed!

- Mechs have looser controls now. No matter the speed, mechs will never stiffen up, making their gameplay a little more fun!

- Hoppy's smooth collisions mod has been included into MSA2! This essentially removes some of the jank experienced when colliding with walls and other collisions.

- Speed characters now lose rings in the same manner you did in Shadow the Hedgehog! (NOTE: Due to a bug duing development which allowed the player to never die after being hit by an enemy with 0 rings, there's a quick patch for that, featuring our infamous goofy ahh FOV)

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 | Echoes of the Supernatural (Modern SA2 OST - Ultimate Redemption, composed by @BitchKamikaze)

- Kart Racing | Chasing Drive ...for Kart (by @BitchKamikaze)

- Iron Gate | Dark Arsenal - Team Sonic Racing [OST]

- Sand Ocean | Sonic Advance Egg Rocket Zone Theme - Metal Cover || ToxicxEternity

- Lost Colony | End Credits (Journey Underwater RMX) - Sonic vs Darkness OST

- Weapons Bed | OC ReMix #2066: Sonic & Knuckles 'Chromium Asphyxiation' [Death Egg Zone: Act 1] by Level 99

- Cosmic Wall | 1-06 Hedgehog Elimination Engine [DusK]

- Prison Lane | Sonic Adventure 2 - PRISON LANE || Metal Cover by RichaadEB

- Mission Street | Cover by "Mohmega (ft. Ro Panuganti)"

- Hidden Base | Down In The Base ...for Hidden Base (SA2 OST) no suitable cover could be found so we're using a higher quality vanlla track

- Eternal Engine | On the Edge ...for Eternal Engine (Sonic Adventure 2) - GaMetal Remix

- Green Hill | Rainbow Road (Mario Kart Wii) - GaMetal Remix (2018)

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 | Street Fighter II - Guile's Theme [METAL VERSION] | ToxicEternity

- Stage Select: Live and Learn (Instrumental) | RichaadEB

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

- Options | can't leave without it (instrumental) | 21 Savage

- 2P Battle | GTA IV: Lost and Damned Main Theme

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!

There is a separate folder in the main content's folder with promotional material for the project. 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 issue has been partially fixed with the new Blender SA I/O Addon, by @Justin113D.

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

- The board object does not appear with the characters in City Escape due to an unknown issue with the game. The board works as intended in Metal Harbour, weridly enough.

- 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

- Collecting upgrades will crash the game as I haven't set up those animations yet

- Knuckles, Tails, Rouge, Metal Sonic and their alternate characters WILL crash the game due to armature differences. Dev build contains their WiP models & animations but were not included in the public build as they're heavily unfinished characters.

Final words...

Hope you lot all enjoy this! Lotta research and development went into making all of this possible. Please refer to the screenshots for setting up the mod manager.

Do NOT play this game with story mode as the in-game cutscenes will crash the game due to armature differences and do NOT use other model mods with MSA2.

Love this project? Join the Discord server here!