#SONIC GENERATIONS UNLEASHED SHADERS HOW TO#
#SONIC GENERATIONS UNLEASHED SHADERS .EXE#

The cause of the red was a parameter common to all shaders named ' g_ForceAlphaColor'.With some small scale testing I eventually figured out the differences, and I could get a regular shader from the vanilla game (in shader_r and shader_r_add) to look correct on the alternate renderer.

#SONIC GENERATIONS UNLEASHED SHADERS HOW TO#

Instead, I decided to learn how to work with some basic disassembling and recompilation of HLSL vertex and fragment shaders. There were some alternate materials that just didn't work correctly or look as they should, so this could have led to some bad results in the long run if not solved. I decided to look into why the old shaders worked fine with the alternate renderer while the modern ones didn't. This didn't seem fixable by just finding something else in the executable, so more work from a different angle was needed. While the directional shadows were a very cool feature to regain, the fact that they didn't blend properly with the enviroment really defeated the purpose of having them in the first place.

#SONIC GENERATIONS UNLEASHED SHADERS .EXE#

exe led to getting back the color, but there were still more issues to work out: The alternate renderer was defaulting to 'not restored' for the actual stages, so everything was white. This is used in White World in the vanilla game to 'restore' color when stages are completed. In the regular game, a variable called 'mrgPlayableParam' handles whether or not to color an object. However, this still wasn't enough, as everything was white for some reason. This probably hinted that at one point in development, they were using these shader files before they decided to overhaul the rendering pipeline completely. Swapping these files actually gave the alternate renderer a completely different look. There wasn't much more research done on it at the time other than thinking it was a cool find, but nowhere near viable to use yet.Įventually, Lobotomy found a bunch of unused packfiles in the game named shader_s and shader_s_add (the real ones used by the game are shader_r and shader_r_add). Swapping the vtables of both Rendering Managers allowed us to enable this alternate renderer. However, the first results were less than ideal: This alternate renderer apparently still had some of the visual features from Sonic Unleashed that didn't transition into Sonic Generations, like the inclusion of dynamic lightshafts, directional shadows, and different motion blur/bloom. exe itself, and eventually led to this hidden renderer tucked away in the executable. His work into finding it involved a lot of debugging what was in the Sonic Generations. Korama discovered the functionality of an alternate renderer left over from some point in development.

Sonic generations unleashed shaders