Radical Highway (Reloaded or Heroes Mod Loader)

If you're interested in making your own Sonic Heroes or Shadow the Hedgehog mods, our community can be found here at Heroes Hacking Central: Discordapp.com

Feel free to join. We're open to helping with anything you might want to know whether it be setting up the mod loaders for these games or assisting in making mods themselves.

This mod has versions for both Reloaded Mod Loader and the legacy Heroes Mod Loader! Heroes Mod Loader is currently be phased out with all features being moved to Reloaded Mod Loader. Until Reloaded adds Heroes setting support, Heroes Mod Loader will remain useful for that. However Reloaded is much more stable and will likely be used for all future mods. Heroes Mod Loader also has a chance to corrupt your game files due to its inferior file replacement method so I really recommend using Reloaded as your go to mod loader for Sonic Heroes! In addition, mission score ranks are not properly supported in the Heroes Mod Loader version of this mod so if you use it, expect many E ranks!

It's been a long time coming, but it's out. When talking with a friend, I got the idea to do a port of this for Heroes since tools had become very developed and the community was welcoming. Given my experience with modding SADX and how rough comparitively it was to develop mods for for a long time, I wanted to give modding Heroes a go and see just how far I could push things with as little code as I could manage. At present, the only code not a part of the generic stage injector provided with the mod tools is to change mission rank scores/times and I'm told this feature will be implemented into a future release of HeroesPowerPlant. All other things are doable with a combination of 3ds Max, the Heroes community's mod tools, and a bit of playing with the Renderware SDK.

My point is that even if you hate code and refuse to touch it on principle, you can make great mods in this game. I made an effort to get the level as accurate as I reasonably could and on most fronts hopefully that shows.

While the majority of the files in this can be imported into editors and viewed in HeroesPowerPlant and various other tools designed for this game, I've also uploaded the .max file I used for the level as well as the Flash project used for the custom title card I made to the GameBanana page for this mod. Aside from some minor code which will hopefully be obsolete with new HeroesPowerPlant versions which sets rank scores for the level, all code for the Heroes Generic Stage Injection for Reloaded, which will be included precompiled with future HeroesPowerPlant releases for projects, can be found here: Github.com

Art fixes from original:
-Street textures now all line up perfectly. In SA2, particularly in parts with streetlamps down a slope, the textures would often be misaligned. All instances of this I've noticed have been fixed.

-Street lamps by tollbooths now use proper vertex coloring and have their shine. While this may have been an artistic choice in the original, I decided it didn't interfere with what was already there and was a neat way to use what the model was already set up for (all circular lights on the ground by lampposts have extra polygons specifically for this)

-Sharp vertex color cutoffs. There were a few areas in the original where vertex coloring would give an odd, sharp transition from say, purple to yellowish. I tried to smooth this out in all situations I noticed it in.

Known bugs:

-Street Lights damage you! This is due to the original object I used for them being fire. This object was the only one I could pick that seemed to look accurate and while future developments into custom objects are happening, for now this seemed like the best solution to ensure an accurate look to the level. There is one exception to this and it's in a location where the camera isn't intended to move much.

-The camera is not perfect. I may revise this at some point, but there are definitely areas where the camera is not as smooth as it could be due to lack of knowledge about the camera system. Please understand that while I did my best with this, the Camera objects have at least *thirty nine* variables, not counting potential shorts and the like. While some of these are just positions and rotations, these and their functions can vary wildly from camera type to camera type. This is without factoring in how different cameras affect each other. For an idea of how complex this gets, many vanilla stages use HUNDREDS of cameras for a single stage. While Radical Highway is shorter than most Heroes stages and so has less cameras, just know that there were numerous days of work put into not only learning how cameras worked enough to use them, but also experimenting with placement to ensure a camera from the opposite end of the level didn't suddenly grab focus.

-Team Chaotix seems to have a crash when transitioning back to the stage select menu. No clue on this one.

-There is a low, low chance of a completely random crash almost anywhere in the stage due to oddities with custom collision. It's very uncommon, but if your game exits out of nowhere while playing the stage, that's probably why. Hopefully this can be fixed with updates to the collision generation software.

Huge thanks to Sewer56lol, Igorseabra4, and DeadlyFugu for not only making the tools which made the creation of this mod possible, but also for helping immensely with advice throughout in order to make this mod happen. Shoutouts as well to MainMemory for HeroesONE, aap for his 3ds Max Renderware import/export plugin rwio, and the developers of MagicTXD for their amazing tool. And of course, to the Renderware devs, those who leaked their SDK, and Sonic Team for all that they did.

Thanks as well to the Sonic modding community as a whole for being awesome and constantly surprising me with cool things.

Special thanks to Kappatan for not only inspiring the mod, but supporting me immensely on a personal level throughout its development.