Possible to "import" the original SG into Survivor?

[dex909]

Hello!

I finally bought Survivor today (could not find it in stores earlier and I wanted it boxed hehe ) - and it's GREAT! You get experience and level up, you can select different characters, new moves, more levels - all I could ever hope you would implement is there

So I wanted to ask if it might be possible to get the original SG missions into the game (as a mod for example). Would be great to replay the original game with the opportunity to level up ;D I didn't try anything yet, just asking if someone might have an idea.

[fb_joel]

Heh, cool, great to see you again.

Getting the original levels working in Survivor should be easy in every other respect but the heightmap. I think we made Survivor heightmaps more accurate, so that could cause some problems. I tested exporting the third mission of SG to SGS (Survival mode) and it seemed to work fine, so I'm not sure what the problem with heightmaps is (but I'm sure there is at least some problems, maybe they're not visible on the surface).

Anyway, the bigger problem was that all the buildings were gone. Shadowgrounds Survivor uses blocks for buildings, and the original used large building models. In theory it should be easy to just copy all the required buildings to a mod Data\Models\Buildings directory, and then it could work. Also all scripts would have to be copied. Other than that, I don't see why it wouldn't work... Of course, with all the building models, the mod size would be quite big (I'm thinking 500 MB or something).

I can give it a shot and try to make one original SG mission playable in SGS, and then report how easy/hard it was... Not sure when I'll have the time though (should also test the Sentry thing from another thread etc)...

[dex909]

Hello ;D Nice to see that the devs still care!!

Well, sounds interesting It would be cool to have SG in SGS because then you could have one original campaign and an extended campaign in one game. I would just need to redo the textures of SGS as I did with SG.

And by the way - I actually like this game more than Alien Breed now ;] It should also get even more praise from the media. All people I showed this game to liked it instantly. And I get back to play this every once in a while. Well, even if you have games like PGR4 or GTAIV, Shadowgrounds is plain good fun and it has enough depth and story to keep you interested for a long time. I guess most people just see it as an arcade title, but it's so much more. Like back in the day when a game like this was the AAA title to get

Mmh.. if you could release this game as an XBox Live Arcade title with Shadowgrounds campaign (for the story) and SGS campaign (for the depth) together as well as online co-op play - you would just SCORE. Instant hit. Did you have a look at recent XBLA titles? This game is all up there - even better.

[fb_joel]

Glad to hear you're still enjoying the game(s). I do agree that Shadowgrounds could have been a big hit if it was released a few years earlier. And yeah, we're keeping a close look on what Microsoft does with XBLA. They seem to want to improve it and get good games on, so who knows what happens.

Naturally I haven't done any further testing with the actual idea here, but I'll try to do some this week.

[dex909]

Yeah that would be very cool indeed!! ^^

And here is something that's also interesting:

If you have the freeware tool DXTweaker you can use this "postfilter" to get more realistic/gritty next-gen graphics on Survivor ^^ Similar to the effect I tried to achieve with my first mod for SG.

http://rapidshare.com/files/80830352/Surreal.xml.html
Here is the original thread: http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?t=8006
For Survivor you should edit the second vector entry in the Surreal.xml to <Vector X="0.25" Y="6" Z="0.5" />

By the way, would it be possible to implement such a post filter/custom shader into the launcher of Shadowgrounds Survivor?

[fb_joel]

Hmm, interesting. Didn't really have time to test that yet, though.

There's a similar script command existing also, setCustomFilterEffect 15,50,0,0,0 which does some tweaking. It's used on more or less all levels to a small extent (sniper01 in this example). Negative image was xx, -200,0,0,0 I think. You can do quite a bit with these but they're not perfect (e.g. there's bugs with e.g. rocket launcher nuke and so on).

[Roidal]

Hi dex,
is it possible to download you mods?

[dex909]

Well, sorry for this _very_ late answer. Of course it is possible to download my mods You can find the links on this forum at viewtopic.php?f=6&t=160