Sonic Unleashed (mobile)

Dummy link
Sonic Unleashed
Developer: Gameloft Publisher: Sega Platform: Mobile

Sonic Unleashed is a 2008 platform video game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The story follows Sonic as he attempts to restore the world after his nemesis Doctor Eggman shatters it with a powerful laser to unleash Dark Gaia, an ancient evil, while dealing with having become a "Werehog", a werewolf-esque transformation, which he gains after coming into contact with the energy of Dark Gaia. Gameplay features two distinct styles, with each being played either during daytime or nighttime. Daytime stages incorporate Sonic's traditional platforming and trademark speed, with a combination of behind-the-back third-person viewpoints and 2D side-scroller platforming; gameplay seamlessly transitions between these two views.

This page describes the version released for mobile phones. The other versions of the game are the "HD" version released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and the "SD" version developed by Dimps for Wii and PlayStation 2.

Information

The following is taken from #READ ME FIRST#.txt in the General Sprites submission by Techokami and Treeki.

---

SONIC UNLEASHED
EVERYTHING RIP

---

1) CREDITS
The sprites and tiles contained within were originally created by
Gameloft for SEGA and Sonic Team.
The rip was created via an automated process by Techokami and
Ninji (aka Treeki).

If you use the contents of this package, you must give credit
to Techokami, Ninji, SEGA, Sonic Team, and Gameloft.

If you did not download this tileset from the following domains:
http://holenet.info/
http://www.spriters-resource.com/
http://www.sonicfangameshq.com/
then you should immediately start yelling at the webmaster for
mirroring this file without permission.
PROTIP: If you ask first, I'll almost always say yes!

2) THE RIPPING PROCESS
Gameloft uses a lot of custom formats and obfuscation in an effort
to protect their games from being cracked. This made ripping from
the game to be messy, ugly, and complicated. Over the span of an
entire week, I worked with Ninji on reverse engineering complicated
obfuscated Java bytecode to get around a completely custom-made
compression format. THEN we had to reverse engineer the custom-made
image format. That gave us the contents you see in the data folder.
From there, I made some PHP scripts to finish piecing things
together. Literally. That resulted in the contents of the out folder.

3) EXPLANATION OF TILESET
The levels are built from 20x20 pixel tiles. There's one map file
for the background, and one map file for the level layout. There are
also two palette sets; one for daytime levels, one for nighttime
levels. I did not bother with distinguishing between the times of
day for the stages, so I mapped both palette sets for each stage.
No objects are present on the maps, which is why things like loops
are missing. They are actually sprites. I have no idea why they did
it that way, but looking at how the sprites are stored, I don't think
they had their heads on straight to begin with. Some tiles are actually
composite images, and are stored in the same animation format as
sprites, but on a 20x20 pixel canvas.

4) EXPLANATION OF SPRITES
Consistent with claims from Badassbill (former tSR admin that once
worked as a sprite artist for Gameloft), the sprites are stored as
tiny, arbitrarily-sized pieces for things like heads, arms, etc. with
sets of palettes for each sprite set. As such, these pieces alone
aren't very useful. Thankfully, the animation format was not that hard
to figure out (save for some oddness with the final boss), and a
script was created to assemble the animation data. They have been saved
as resource -> palette index. It should be noted that some sprites
literally have special effects baked into the animations, so for the
purpose of making them more usable, animations 215 to 221 for Sonic are
actually custom animations by Techokami. Yes, everything is in fact
256x256 pixels when assembled, as that is the canvas size used by the
animation format.

5) EXPLANATION OF SCRIPTS
libripper.php - LibRipper is a general purpose library script written
by Techokami for doing operations on sprite-related imagery.
sumssa.php - Sonic Unleashed Mobile Super Sprite Assembler is a script
written by Techokami to parse animation data for a resource set and
output assembled sprites as PNG images.
sumlp.php - Sonic Unleashed Mobile Level Parser is a script written by
Techokami to parse level layout data and export level maps as PNGs.
There are two missing Python scripts from this package: a script to
decompress the data files, and a script to convert the image data into
PNG images. These were created by Ninji and have not been cleared by
him for release.

6) EXPLANATION OF WHY THE HELL THE FILES HAVE TIMESTAMPS OF 2010 BUT
THIS THING WAS RELEASED ON CHRISTMAS DAY OF 2015 WHY DID IT TAKE 5
YEARS FOR THIS THING TO BE RELEASED?????????
BlazeFireLP. He seems to be gone now, so he's not going to be stealing
all of our hard work.

7) CONTACT
DO NOT ASK FOR LEVEL EDITING INSTRUCTIONS.
DO NOT ASK FOR THINGS TO BE RIPPED.
DO NOT ASK HOW I RIPPED THIS.
DO NOT ASK HOW TO HACK ROMS.
DO NOT ASK HOW TO WRITE PHP CODE.
DO NOT ASK WHY IT ISN'T A GIANT SHEET.
Email: techokami [AT] holenet [D0T] info

8) GREETS
Texelsaur, Ike Adibe, Kinsie, Shadsy, the Something Awful goons, PC0,
Scarred Sun, drx, Dazz, asie, Vexatos, Sangar, Naoshi, and the staff at:
-Mario Fan Games Galaxy
-Sonic Fan Games HQ
-Sonic Retro
-Dynapolitan
-The Spriter's Resource
-SMW Central

9) THE END
Enjoy the rips. Merry Christmas/Shitscram.
-Techokami

VG Resource Pages

• The Spriters Resource