For the first time in forever, I'm releasing a new stage! Ever since the AutoDemo version of Sonic Adventure was first put on the internet, everyone has been wondering if this stage would ever be playable. That build of the game is *very* broken, and is clearly an in-between build.
When the level was handed over to me, it was a huge mess. Catley and ItsEasyActually had gone through and re-created most of the textures and had extracted the stage's geometry data, but most of the objects in the object list had no equivalent in the final and the wrong objects loaded when using the original SET file. There was only one CAM file for the stage, and that was for the first act. Predictably, that file didn't work well either. The stage had no lighting baked in, lots of the texture coordinates were messy. The second act was mostly made of SET items. I wrote 2 custom scripts - one that lets you import a SET file into 3ds max (you do lose a little bit of rotation info) and another one that lets you clone a model to as many point helpers as you like. Using this I was able to convert most of the object models into level models. This has the added benefit of letting them have vertex lighting. Without this script, act 2 would have been empty and not very playable.
Speaking of vertex lighting, I also used radiosity and vertex paint to light the level, giving it shadows and light colors and all sorts of wonderful prettyness. Adding all of these level models made the collision situation in the first act kind of dicey (col buffer overflow, collision stopped working in many places), so I made some updates to the nodetable exporter (not yet public) that allowed me to make custom collision meshes and set many of the object models to be non-solid. I also figured out more of the collision surface flags and found the surface flag that makes it so characters are deflected off of a surface instead of being able to stand on it.
I wrote several new features into SADXLVL2 for this project - the camera editor, the gizmo, and the view frustum culling were all built to satisfy the needs of this project. I wanted to implement a triangle strip generator but I was only able to get it partially working.
Act 2 and 3 had no camera layouts at all - so I had to create them myself. I used everything I had learned so far about the game's camera system to make a layout that not only guides you through the level but doesn't constrain the player either. It was a difficult balance.
Act 3 had a nearly empty, but not completely empty SET layout. It was mostly rings and springs, with some trampolines. I dug deep into my level designer's bag of tricks and pulled a bunch of the object models from the other 2 parts of the stage to decorate. I did my best with all 3 stages to stay as true to the spirit of Sonic Adventure as possible, and so I hope you can forgive any artistic liberties I took with the design.
Also, as you can see in the video, I made a race path for Sonic, so if you decide to play the stage as tails the level functions as intended. Before I did that, Sonic never even appeared in the level, he just kept falling far below the stage.
With all that being said, this is without a doubt the coolest project I have worked on so far. I'm looking for a paid level design position and I hope this stage shows that I'm capable of doing it. If you know a game developer in New England who is looking for a level design specialist, send them my way. I'll also do (small) commissions for indie games or other hobbyist projects.
Download (Link others to the video instead of the download, if you'd be so kind):
https://mega.co.nz/#!lxtgkQRZ!CLtXFwA...
http://x-hax.cultnet.net/OldWindyVall...
Source Code and Development Materials:
http://mm.reimuhakurei.net/sadxmods/S...
