Unity downgrading scripts from Sonic Runners vid?

[CakeLancelot]

Hey all, long time watcher first time poster here,

I've been doing some research on how difficult it would be to decompile some games made in Unity3D: FusionFall Heroes, made in 3.5.7, and Adventure Time Battle Party, made in 4.3. After watching Matt's video on Sonic Runners (which was made with 4.6.9), Battle Party seemed pretty promising. In theory, I would just need to follow the same (or at least similar) steps to achieve a successful decomp.

While pretty much all the tools needed are publicly available, I wasn't able to find the scripts Matt used to downgrade uTiny's output from 2017 to Unity 4 anywhere in his repositories (linked timestamp below for reference).



These would honestly be a godsend to have, while there are tools that will extract assets for older Unity versions, uTiny is the only tool I've found that exports the entire project and preserves all the connections/references between assets. Reconnecting all of these manually would take ages and is prone to human error.

So I guess the TL;DR is, are these scripts available somewhere and I missed them? If not, would Matt be able to release them?

Thanks in advance for any info!

[MattKC]

Unfortunately even if I do still have them somewhere, I doubt they would actually be very helpful. The scripts I wrote were not designed to be used by other people or even more than once; I wrote them very quickly for this one project and never assumed I would need them again. All of the paths were hardcoded and I would often rework an existing script to fix something else, not caring to preserve whatever the script did originally. It just never occurred to me that anyone would want/need to do this again.

I honestly think you'd be better off writing your own script. It'd probably be easier than untangling my spaghetti code from 3+ years ago (the project actually happened in 2020 even though the video was released in 2022).

Also isn't AssetRipper a direct fork of uTiny? Are its results really that different?

[CakeLancelot]

From what I can tell the output from both AssetRipper and uTiny weren't really usable as-is, and will need to be downgraded if I want to use the editor version the game shipped with. AssetRipper just crashes the editor immediately, with uTiny you can import the files it gives you, however they're pretty garbled. Other asset extractors do a decent job at exporting individual files, but so much of the game depends on various connections to scripts, prefabs, resources etc that I feel an all-in-one solution is better.

I've yet to try the opposite approach of opening in a newer editor, but I can't imagine it'd go that well. I think matching the original version and optionally upgrading from there would be the best approach.

When I get deeper into these projects I'll probably write my own scripts like you said, or modify AssetRipper/uTiny to work for my needs. Right now it's very much in the research stage, I have a working server emulator for both games currently so I was curious to see what I could do with the client. All in all it's not a super huge priority, since you can still play it on modern Windows.

Still, thanks again for the reply - if I make any progress I'll be sure to post it here! (it'll probably be a while, I've got a few other projects that I really be doing first )

[MattKC]

When I get deeper into these projects I'll probably write my own scripts like you said, or modify AssetRipper/uTiny to work for my needs.

Oh yeah, this is something I started considering towards the end - that it probably would have been better to just fork uTiny and export the correct result right off the bat rather than have a ton of messy scripts. But we never really needed much more downgrading so I never ended up doing it.

If you do, best of luck!