Sonic Adventure 2 Battle HD Project v2.3 (June 21, 2019)

[Matrix2525]

Hoo boy... here we go. It took a week longer than I anticipated, but I think it was worth the wait as I am pleased to present version 2.0 of my Sonic Adventure 2 Battle HD Project. And yes, no longer GUI+, but Project. The scope and size of this endeavor has gone from a modest 771 replaced textures weighing in at 354MB to... uh... 4672 replaced textures and 1.83GB. Yep, just a few order of magnitudes bigger. That said, I'll let the changelog speak for itself, plus some new screenshots, and the download link.

Changelog:
Version 2.0 (3/30/2019)
- 4672 textures redrawn and upscaled
- Major characters and vehicles upscaled and redrawn (Standard Costumes)
- inc: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Shadow, Eggman, Rouge
Amy, Metal Sonic, Tikal, Chaos 0, Chao Walker
Dark Chao Walker, The Tornado, Egg Walker
Big the Cat, Maria, Rouge Story Kart, Omochao
- Chao World UI (Lobby, Gardens, Race, Karate, Kindergarten)
- Boss Titles redrawn
- Pickup Icons redrawn (rings, 1-ups, etc)
- Collectibles Icons upscaled (animals, chaos drives)
- Additional UI elements
- Most Animal textures upscaled and cleaned
- Chaos Drive textures upscaled and cleaned
- Enemy textures upscaled and redrawn
- Mech Bosses (Bigfoot, Hotshot, Flying Dog) upscaled and cleaned
- King Boom Boo textures upscaled
- Chaos Emerald textures upscaled
- Standard Kart Race karts upscaled and redrawn
- Character Menu Themes upscaled and cleaned
- Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Shadow, Eggman, Rouge, Amy
Omochao, Secretary, Maria
- Story Recap Backgrounds redrawn
- Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Shadow, Eggman, Rouge
- Most Stage and Environment textures upscaled, touched up, and redrawn
- Inc: All single player stages, all boss stages,
Downtown Race Battle Stage, Chao Lobby

Note: Many textures now sourced from the original Dreamcast release of SA2
and blended with the SA2 Battle textures because they do not
contain the compression artifacts of the Gamecube release.
Dreamcast textures ripped by Shadowth117.

Texture upscaling done with a combination of Waifu2x and ESRGAN

Screenshots:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Version 2.0 Resource Pack Download: Here

*Important Note: As of version 2.0, this texture pack is now a resource pack in compliance with Dolphin's new format. Simply drop the .zip file into "*\Dolphin Emulator\ResourcePacks". Load up Dolphin and go to "Tools - Resource Pack Manager". Finally, highlight "Sonic Adventure 2 Battle HD Project" in the list and click on "Install" When the title turns green, everything's set to go (make sure you have "load custom textures" checked in the graphics options).


So yeah, this is a huge release, and by far the largest texture pack I've put out here on the forums. Ha, I figured I would write up about everything a little more in-depth here, but honestly I've done so much that I could go on for a while. So instead, I'll just expand on the changelog a little bit. As stated, I have redone every major character's textures, including those characters exclusive to battle mode. This was done through a combination of ESRGAN upscaling, cleanup, and some original work. I created new eye textures for every character, which I think come through pretty well in the screenshots above. The vast majority of the new textures are stage and environment textures. As expected, most of these are almost exclusively the result of the ESRGAN upscaling, with a caveat. Wherever I could, I used the textures from the original Dreamcast release. In most cases, the textures are identical, except the dreamcast versions are free of compression artifacts introduced in the gamecube release. As I continued to dump textures from the game, I also found the gamecube release saved on memory by outright halving or quartering some of the larger textures. Thanks to the Dreamcast version textures, I was able to restore their original size and detail, and then upscale that. The last screenshot I included from Death Chamber is a good example of the result. That mural at the top of the frame was half the resolution of the original texture from SA2. Yeah, you know what, if anyone has questions about any part of the pack now, I'll be happy to answer them, or post screenshots of specific things.

Every single player stage from City Escape to Cannon's Core and the final battle has been redone, including all of the boss stages. With this release, I think I'm done for a bit with the pack as two weeks non-stop burned me out a bit. So, stuff not done:

- Probably some cutscene specific textures
- all of Chao World (minus the lobby)
- battle mode specific stages (minus Downtown Race)
- All the chaos
- Alternate Character costumes
- Alternate karts for the Kart Race minigame
- anything else I've missed at this point

Eventually I hope to finish those up... eventually. Now to update the topic post... Enjoy!

[KHg8m3r]

Holy cowabunga, this is amazing! Thanks for the hard work!

[hyperspeed]

Outstanding work @Matrix2525 those looks gorgeous almost like a remaster (I mean... MUCH better than many remasters actually) definitely a must have for any SA2B player!!

[Matrix2525]

@KHg8m3r and @hyperspeed, thanks for the kind words! For the new screenshots I added with the last update, I kind of forgot to add anything to see from the rest of the UI textures I overhauled. So I figured I'd share a bunch showing off the improvements to all of the Chao World menus and UI:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

With this, unless I'm forgetting anything, I think the UI for the entire game is essentially finished. Unfortunately, there are a couple instances of low-res text that I can't easily do anything about, and they all occur in the Chao Kindergarten. Most of the text that pops up in the Chao Kindergarten Lobby, text boxes, and the shopping list in the black market are dynamically generated from the game, so a new texture is created every time text is displayed. That's a shame, but oh well. Anyway, enjoy the comparisons, and to re-iterate, these updated textures are all in v2.0 of the pack.

[KHg8m3r]

Even if the Chao world stuff hasn't been fully updated, the menus alone already make it better

[Matrix2525]

A little unexpected, but here comes version 2.1 out of the blue! I just couldn't stay away, heh. With this update, I've taken care of all of the story cutscene textures, of which there were a lot more than I expected. I've also upscaled all the textures unique to the battle mode stages. Pretty much all of the Chao World textures are redone now as well, including all the gardens, kindergarten, karate and all the races. I also took care of the hidden alternate karts for the kart racing minigame. And finally, I took the time to redraw some of the characters' skin textures after I noticed the upscale result didn't look all that good, and the results are much cleaner now. Despite adding almost two thousand more textures, version 2.1 of the pack is a smaller download than version 2.0 was thanks to compressing the archive. At this point, I'll move things along with the usual; latest changelog, followed by some new screenshots and the download. Enjoy!

Changelog:

Version 2.1 (4/12/2019)
- 6506 textures redrawon and upscaled
- All story cutscene textures redrawn and upscaled
- All unique Battle Mode stage textures redrawn and upscaled
- inc: Grind Race, Pool Quest, Planet Quest, Pyramid Race
- Chao World textures upscaled and cleaned
- inc: Kindergarten, Hero, Dark, and Neutral Gardens
Chao Karate, Chao Race Lobby and Courses
- Many Chao textures (but not all, game appears to generate
an infinite number of slightly different body textures)
- All alternate kart minigame karts upscaled and cleaned
- inc: Sonic alt, Shadow alt, Knuckles alt, Eggman alt,
Chao, Egg Robo
- Various character skin textures manually redrawn and fixed
from rough upscale result
- Changed Resource Pack logo to look like the Dreamcast VMU Icon

Screenshots:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

For fun, I also changed the Resource Pack logo and styled it after the Sonic Adventure 2 Dreamcast VMU Icon:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Version 2.1 Resource Pack Download: Here

*Important Note: This texture pack is a resource pack in compliance with Dolphin's new format. Simply drop the .zip file into "*\Dolphin Emulator\ResourcePacks". Load up Dolphin and go to "Tools - Resource Pack Manager". Finally, highlight "Sonic Adventure 2 Battle HD Project" in the list and click on "Install" When the title turns green, everything's set to go (make sure you have "load custom textures" checked in the graphics options).

So, amazingly, I think I'm close to calling this texture pack complete. The last major textures I have to go through are the alternate character costumes for Battle Mode. I would have waited on the version update, but the costumes are specific to Battle and unfortunately, like the rest of Battle's textures, are pretty mangled from bad image compression. So, they'll require a bit more work to make sure they look good. Otherwise, it's down to any random textures I may have missed and I may or may not find. Part of the large increase in new textures this release was also due to chao textures. I upscaled a lot of textures and included them before realizing that for Chao body textures, the game essentially generates an infinite number with minute color variations, so I figured it wasn't worth trying to add any more. On the other hand, most of the Chao facial expressions should be covered, as well as their floating emotion icons, and probably most of the animal parts they can have. Welp, time to update the top post again so I will say one final time: enjoy!

[KHg8m3r]

The amount of work you've put into this (and the surprise updates) never fails to amaze me. Thank you for your hard work.

[Matrix2525]

Entering the final stretch of this project, my work on it has slowed down, but not stopped. I mentioned before, but the alternate character costumes for Battle Mode are the last major textures to rework, and they very much require more work to help make them look decent compared to the standard character textures. Therefore, I decided it would be fun to give a little update and visual comparison as I finish work on each costume and work towards the last major release of this texture pack.

So, the first of the six battle mode costumes to be completed is Sonic's, and I'm pretty pleased with the result:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

The screenshots don't do justice to how bad the original textures were (except the shoes. Those are visibly pretty bad in the second shot). I had to edit and clean up the textures a good bit both before, and after upscaling, and then I continued to add some extra detail in. What's a bigger shame is that I've thought about adding an optional pack to replace the characters' standard costumes with their alternate ones, but for characters like Sonic and Shadow, it's only possible to replace the shoes. The jumpsuits work only with the specific character models for battle mode, so there's no easy texture swap for those.

And with that, on to the next...

[KHg8m3r]

They do look needlessly complex. I didn't even known they existed because I haven't gotten all A rank yet naturally.

Do you have any plans to replace the alternate costumes with reworked alternate costumes that were exclusive to SA2 on the Dreamcast (which I only just learned was something not ported over to SA2B)

Have you found a 100% save file yet to do Green Hill Zone, or are you going to try and get that one manually?

[Matrix2525]

@KHg8m3r: Back even before the 2.0 update, I knew I needed a 100% file to dump certain UI elements like the Green Hill Zone title card. So, thankfully, I was able to find two different 100% files, plus a couple files with multiple high-level chao with medals in order to see and dump every texture in the game. As much as I still love playing SA2, getting 100% of everything in the game is almost impossibly hard and I haven't even come close yet on my own save file.

So yeah, the 100% files unlocked a bunch of stuff. The alternate karts for the kart race, which I never knew were a thing; the alternate battle costumes, Green Hill Zone, and all of the extra menu themes. Just getting most of the medals in the game lets you buy the Amy Rose and Omochao themes from the Chao Black Market. The President's Secretary theme is unlocked by spinning through the theme icons in the options menu. And the final theme, Maria, only shows up in the Chao Black Market if you have a gameboy advance connected with Sonic Advance, and you've transferred a chao to and from the Tiny Chao Garden on the GBA. Thankfully, I found a second 100% save file with this theme already unlocked. I'm not sure if SA2B on Dolphin works with VBA-M properly, or if there are still issues like there apparently were a couple years ago. I've never tried to set any of that up.

And yes, I "have" all of the dreamcast costume textures for every character, though they're all combined across single image files. These include Halloween and Christmas costumes. I might look into making an optional pack for these, but it will be after the main pack is finished. And, as with the battle costumes, not every part of the costumes may be translatable. Sonic's christmas costume, for instance, looks like it has a jacket or hat, which has nothing to replace on the default model. And finally, while I have all of the alternate textures, they're jumbled together, so I need to look up some reference to figure out which textures go with which costumes for the more complicated ones.

And finally, since you asked, I'll leave a few shots of Green Hill Zone here, plus a bonus shot of Maria's theme:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)