Windy Valley - Sonic Adventure Autodemo

Windy Valley in the Sonic Adventure Autodemo.

This stage is infamous for looking nothing like it does in the final game. According to a 2018 interview with Iizuka for the magazine Retro Gamer, it was left alone until he rebuilt it from scratch near the end of development.
After fixing up and playing this stage in its original form, it's clear to me why it was left alone, and why he chose to start over with it.

To say that this stage was a mess would be an understatement. It needed numerous patches before it could run and it slows the emulator down to a crawl, which would be worse if it were on an actual console.

It wasn't just the matter of fixing broken pointers - Act 1 has 1813 objects, far above the 1023 the game is usually limited to. This meant that the object limit had to be extended just to make the objects load.
Then there were two extra crashes to fix:
Act 2 loading a null pointer as a texture, which needed to be removed before it could load.
The object PU WIND (The wind that carries Sonic up) being placed 9 times before the tornado in Act 1, overloading the game with the sheer amount of leaves it generated. It seems like 4 of these were a mistake, as they're all duplicates - the game is able to handle 5 instances.

Act 1 has a lot of lag due to object spam (mostly decorations) and the leaves generated by PU WIND. It's a complex effect - the leaves follow Sonic when he's carried by it. I changed its draw function to lessen the lag, it's worse when it uses the one it normally does.

Act 2 is generated by unconventional means - it doesn't have a landtable because all of the geometry is animated, so the main stage function does it - they're all task objects.
These floating platforms have broken collision by default due to a missing flag, which was patched in this video to make the act playable. The springs for the act made to support the geometry movement (TSpring) were also patched to prevent them all appearing at Y:0.

Act 3 is more incomplete than the other two. There are numerous barren spots around the map and the wind paths don't work right. Despite this, it's the only map that didn't need to be patched.

The textures were taken from the 2018 restoration mod and the lighting files were taken from the final game, since the AutoDemo has neither.

Credits:
evilhamwizard - Object list patch, Act 1 CAM file and providing his original work from 2016 to help with restoring pointers/textures.
woofmute - Object editor
ItsEasyActually/supercoolsonic - Textures
Exant - Floating platform fix, pointer for reducing leaf lag.
My stupid girlfriend, whom I've been neglecting during the making of this video

Download as a mod via X-Hax's GitHub:
https://github.com/X-Hax/dreamcast-mods
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