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It's worth noting, that they didn't put levels in the worst world if they would've been dropped there by penalties. The 108th place level ate so many penalties it had a negative score. Notably, it wasn't vanilla and recieved a MASSIVE late penalty. imo they should've just not accepted late entries but they wanted to try not being so strict this year I guess.
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Jan 10, 2017 07:07
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Ometeotl posted:I think not being vanilla is a worse transgression than being late in a Vanilla contest. The only non-vanilla part was a small asm patch to change the piranha plant vines to use the right tile. That's why FP and I were confused about the glitchy tiles, the patch was not applied for the compilation. I'm assuming that's why they let it through though, because as we mentioned there's a ton of vanilla ways to actually fix it. This is the only level that lost points for that. Though I agree, there was a bit too much leniency overall with the rules. It's right there in the name that it's a vanilla contest.
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Jan 10, 2017 21:18
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The other guy also only played MMX once. We both assumed Touhou because, well, it's SMWC. Dr. Fetus posted:I really liked that first level. I wonder why it was scored so harshly from that one judge. Afterwards they said that they don't remember why. It's one of my favorites so far at least, but I really like the diagonal platforms and the grassy cave aesthetic.
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Jan 14, 2017 20:20
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It's actually really cool and a clever way to do a midpoint on a level with a secret exit. Basically it looks like this in the editor:  And this when you grab them. It has to be in order, and since we lost the first recording... I don't really remember where it showed up in the actual level.  With the checkpoints themselves you can do some cool things. The game doesn't care as long as you hit them in order with 1, 2, and 3 coming before 4. So a player could hit 1222234, or such. Each one you pass trips a flag before the final one 4 does, essentially. Though I'm not sure if they're used elsewhere (I'm sure they are, it's just 6 AM and I don't remember) they're used up on this cloudy part of Cookie Mountain.  EDIT: And the reason I made this post but forgot in making pictures, coins also can hide blocks, but only if you leave the sublevel and come back. If you die or exit the level the regular coins will come back, and they only act like this when inserted as objects. If inserted as Direct Map16 they will always come back. There's some more quirks about that. Tyty fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Feb 3, 2017 |
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Feb 3, 2017 14:00
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biosterous posted:What the gently caress else are you going to do with your Start lps and then update them twice every year.
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Feb 9, 2017 03:11
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liquidypoo posted:Don't red yoshis always spit fireballs regardless of what sorta koopa they grab? That would have been a good way to maintain a sidescroller shmup feeling, provided I'm remembering that right. Unfortunately the yoshi wing sublevels always make your yoshi blue I would've given the player a cape at least for that level, it makes flying yoshis way easier to control. EDIT: ^^gently caress
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Mar 4, 2017 04:55
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Some of the FE Midori portraits are bothering me. I'm not quite sure why. There's just something off about them. Looks fun though. I appreciated when the games separated strength and magic, since hybrid classes are usually my favorites in RPGs, though I was unaware Thracia had them split like that. It makes sense to port that over to the GBA where it would be hard to fit in another bar on the stat screen.
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Mar 11, 2017 19:45
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Stink Terios posted:All this SMWCP talk is giving me PTSD. It's much more complete than A2MT, the entire overworld and all the levels are done. The current baserom works as-is, if a bit buggy Again, last I heard we really were just doing last boss stuff and bugfixing. There was a bitbucket issue tracker posted back in January listing about 5 pages of issues from the behind-the-scenes ASM fix baserom., and a large amount of those can be fixed by some simple level/palette modifications. The big thing is all the ASM work going into fixing ~6 years of various programmers adding sprites/blocks to the thing.
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Mar 20, 2017 22:59
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It also stems from just romhacking the game. Basically, if you're dedicated enough to romhack a game you -probably- know a lot about the game. I'm pretty bad at Mario but I can still breeze through SMW like it's practically nothing... So naturally you're going to make something more difficult than the original product. It was an issue we had originally with Awful Emblem actually, where since I hadn't actually looked at the maps or anything being the portrait artist I was actually going in blind. It took me whining about it to get it toned down a bit. Even if you don't try to your end product is probably going to be harder just because you're so familiar with the source material so making things "interesting" tends towards difficult. SMW has mostly gotten over it though, thankfully, mostly because it's been around for so long (and partially because of massive pushback after SMWCP). You can make interesting enough setups with the custom sprites and blocks you don't need to rely on making things hard to make them interesting anymore, and the people that want to make/play those can simply label their hacks as kaizo/pit hacks and there's sections for them on SMWC.
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Apr 5, 2017 22:00
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PurpleXVI posted:You don't see many vertical levels. There's a couple reasons for that, mostly stemming from the fact they're actually quite glitchy. There's a lot of weirdness with object wraparound, sprite weirdness due to loading when you scroll vertically and not horizontally, things like that. The goal post doesn't work properly in a vertical level, which is why the goal sphere exists (they can only be used on screens 0 and 1, and they still end without the fadeout ala a goal sphere anyways)... Not to mention SMW's vertical camera being a little bit weird. Since you can't use objects on the boundaries, you can just use Map16 but using wholly Map16 tends to make levels much larger in size, and layer priority doesn't work properly. You have less screens than a horizontal level, and there's a lot of layer 3 weirdness. Backgrounds can have issues with scrolling either due to tiling, or garbage showing up. Not to mention simply how hard it is to design a level where the player has to climb up, and how simple levels where you fall down tend to end up. Usually people just don't bother with them.
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Apr 10, 2017 21:41
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Basically, how all the 2D Mario games (except Mario maker) works is the levels are built out of "objects." These objects are built out of the individual tiles. I'm not 100% on the other games, but I've fiddled with SMB3 a little bit before, and if you want to place custom things you need to make custom objects. Lunar magic, however, has a system called "Direct Map16 access." I'm not sure why it's called Map16 exactly, but probably because it's a tilemap of all the 16x16 tiles. This allows you to place the tiles directly instead of having to place the objects, and it's pretty goddamn powerful. It's a must when using custom graphics.  You have two ways to look at the Map16. The one on the left is through the Place Objects window, and the one on the right is the actual Map16 window. Each Map16 tile is constructed out of four 8x8 tiles, and each of those can be flipped in the X or Y direction, and have their own palette row selected. Each 16x16 tile can be set to act like another one (this is how you use things like custom blocks) and can have its layer priority turned on or off.  And the Map16 window has its own 8x8 selector to help with building these tiles. Here I've made a block that is the SMW grassland ground block with four different tiles set to act like tile 25 (which is air). The 8x8 selector can look at all the non-sprite graphics files you currently have selected for your level. EDIT: For reference, this is what the extra tileset of my VLDCX level ended up looking like:  Although all of these tiles are already in SMW, because I ended up remapping them or changing their palettes I had to place them on the Map16 page. Tyty fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 20:31
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He also plays Super Metroid with a control stick Including single-wall walljumps FP is basically crazy.
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Apr 16, 2017 02:52
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25, 130, 100, 1F0. These are the building blocks of SMW. I kinda agree with both sides honestly. Level design -should- come first and it was emphasized for a few years of vldc... But the rules were incredibly stifling to a lot of people. Even some of the less-busy stuff we've come across wouldn't have been allowed using those rules. That's why it's been relatively unrestricted. Basically to showcase everything you can do just using the assets in the game, graphical or otherwise, but level design is still scored above all. The judging on this one was just a bit weird.
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Apr 26, 2017 07:13
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Then you're ninjaboy
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Apr 27, 2017 22:42
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Cheez posted:I can see that nobody is actually going to actually step up and justify the Ninjaboy mudslinging and I can safely disregard any opinions from anyone doing so. Fancy! So you can safely ignore half the commentary in the videos then. Ninjaboy is the source of almost all the controversial level rankings. Nimono is much less so, and the stage he's talking about is possibly the largest one. We haven't gotten there yet but there's apparently a massive misplacement in the best world caused by ninjaboy's style of judging. A LOT of people have brought up the fact he literally ignored difficulty in his judging due to savestates, and the fact he did it all in one sitting and got MUCH more lenient as he went on (which is why the vldcx entries were randomized before Vitor sent them to judges and they're only judging the levels in small groups at a time) So I guess we'll see as the LP goes on. I might start posting some of the judge commentary when FP posts videos so there's some context to scores and placement. Edit: Hell, just for my point Here's the scores for Flash Back. Look at this poo poo: Nimono DESIGN: 5/30 CREATIVITY: 13/20 AESTHETICS: 10/10 TOTAL: 28/60 Tough level. A jump before the midpoint is very, VERY tough to make since there's no indication where the ground is, even with coins like every other area... And that's pretty far into the level! On top of that, the level is a marathon, and the Key location is very obtuse, as is the Keyhole. Who would think to bring them BACK through the level...? ninja boy DESIGN: 26/30 CREATIVITY: 20/20 AESTHETICS: 10/10 TOTAL: 56/60 This is an amazing level which challenges the player to take it slow and remember the surroundings. The only problem I had with it is going up the note blocks near the end since some of them become unreachable once they hit the left hand wall making you fall all the way down to start again. Eternity DESIGN: 15/30 CREATIVITY: 17/20 AESTHETICS: 7/10 TOTAL: 39/60 If this was done with just two colors it would probably work out a lot better, but right now it just involves way too much waiting to be fun. I'm not particularly against slow paced levels, but this one is just dragged down a lot by how it was done. It's particularly bad in the layer 2 sections later on (and even more in the blue note blocks part). The idea certainly has a lot of potential, but right now I don't think it was executed very well. Koopster DESIGN: 1/30 CREATIVITY: 10/20 AESTHETICS: 1/10 TOTAL: 12/60 Yeah, as blunt as this sounds, this gimmick flat out doesn't work. My biggest issues in the first half (which is about where I played without savescumming) were the blind drops and then that insane spin-jumping section where you also have to race the P-switch. The second half seemed to be doing better with the disappearing cement blocks, but then you added in more sections with layer 2 shenanigans and it just felt it would never end. The amount of attention, memorization and luck this requires is insane and just drained all the fun from me. That's really unfortunate; I think if you had designed this a LOT differently, this gimmick might have worked, but as-is, this is a no-no! :< Also, I have no absolute clue how I am slightly supposed to figure out that secret exit without peeking in Lunar Magic. Tyty fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Apr 28, 2017 |
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Apr 28, 2017 00:11
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It takes a pretty long time. VLDC9 came out a bit before VLDCX started, so almost a year. It's due to a combination of all the judging, getting the levels together and remapping everything to fit, and they've been holding Overworld contests to decide what the overworld looks like for the collabs.
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Apr 28, 2017 00:21
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i'm not sure if you can tell but about a quarter through our total time in oops i stopped paying much attention and didn't resume until the switch palace. I kinda looked up and we were at the PICK A PATH part. I may also be wrong about diggin' chuck being randomly timed, it's him or puntin' and I didn't remember which 
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Jul 18, 2017 08:23
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Dragonatrix posted:e; Also, uh, between Nimono blatantly score tampering because "well it's getting penalised anyway" and then the level's score getting bumped higher later, it really makes you question why they have judges and scoring anyway. Outside of deciding 20 levels that stand out as being overall the best and the worst (which could easily be done any number of ways), it really doesn't seem to actually mean anything. Like, the judges don't even seem consistent with what they consider good and bad a lot of the time. Instead of flat scores, the judges gave each level a letter score. Out of all the ones to score well (there was a handful of levels that had even A-B splits across the judges) they picked their top 6, and from that 6 they picked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. The problem ended up being that although this ranking system was fine for feedback (you had to read the judges comment instead of just looking at numbers) there was a lot of issues with people outside the top 6 wanting to know how they wanted relative to other people. They didn't have a solid ranking to look at and were frustrated that they did "somewhat okay" compared to bring in the top or bottom whatever.
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Jul 18, 2017 19:57
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Then you run the risk of it becoming less a contest about level design and more about simply making an impressive or good looking level. While I don't agree with a lot of the recent trends in what's considered good level design at smwc, I'd prefer the level design contests stay about that. Otherwise you get levels like This
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Jul 18, 2017 20:29
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Blaze Dragon posted:That said there had to be a better way to undo the forced Mushroom from the midpoint than that.  El Classico Big Mario filter Used in kaizo hacks longer than I remember, and since there's nothing in the item box you don't need to worry about a powerup dropping down. If you think the player is going to try and slide under to intentionally break it...  This will prevent them from getting through big or from getting stuck by spinjumping into a wall.
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Aug 16, 2017 06:34
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Basically levels made by the people behind JUMP iirc. The reason they picked the moniker swiss is beyond me but I actually think it has to do with this level. They chewed out someone not part of the "cool kids club" for wanting to use the word swiss in their level name in VLDCX this year and I don't exactly think particularly highly of the design ethos myself. Unfortunately this is the direction SMW level design seems to be trending, so, eh.
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Aug 22, 2017 03:34
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Tile 1F0 (the weird one we've seen that causes sprites to lose vertical momentum and kinda slide) looks like random fill dirt (tile 03F) by default. This was made YEARS before people started abusing 1F0 as a weird sprite-only solid tile. FP is hinting that I have a small LP of a romhack recorded that I haven't started editing yet.
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Sep 11, 2017 07:42
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It's time for a romhacking history lesson friends. Hacks 101 is a hack from 2010 by Tails_155 which, at the time, was intended to combat the absolutely rampant amounts of bad hacks out there. During this time basically everything was a pile of cement blocks, cutoff dirt, and munchers. Hacks were still kinda rough around the edges, and other than some standout exceptions, most people didn't want to put in the effort to make them great. Now we almost have the opposite problem where things never get finished but, well, that's another issue. Unfortunately, most of the stuff in here isn't very good from a "how do I make an SMW level" perspective. It's more hints on how to use Lunar Magic and visual advice, more of a "Hack Polish 101" basically. It also, unfortunately, caused some particularly nasty visual design trends to take root for a few years. The hack itself isn't that bad, maybe a bit boring in level design, but while well-meaning it taught the wrong message. FPzero and I decided to take a look at it basically as a history tour. -------------------------------    ------------------------------- In part 1 here we tackle the first third of the whole thing. It's pretty short honestly. Tyty fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Feb 9, 2018 |
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Sep 12, 2017 00:27
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In general, a lot less stuff actually comes out but a lot of it is of a high quality. Since there's no real community centered around hacking a single game in the series it ends up a little spread out as well. It -is- fairly difficult to make levels in the context of design, let alone actual tools. Only recently have there been real efforts to make lunar magic usable tools for genesis Sonic hacking. This is why so many hacks are mechanics based or new characters (Sonic 2 XL edition, Yoshi in Sonic 2, Sonic 3 Complete, etc) A lot of the hackers are also old school ASM hackers so there's less of a push for that kind of hacks in the Sonic community. A lot of that goes into fangames instead, though overhaul hacks with new level design -do- exist... They just tend to take a VERY long time to come out.
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Sep 18, 2017 02:53
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Mak0rz posted:Are all the music tracks from other games? This is the only one I recognized aside from the Pokemon jingle you hear after finishing a stage. Literally every song is from another game, though iirc there are some other Mega Man songs. The stage select is Ripple Star's stage select from Kirby 64. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 24, 2017 05:57
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Welcome to what I guess is tutorial world, where we get told what to do by message boxes for the better part of 25 minutes. There's some levels at the end of it all though.
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Oct 1, 2017 09:59
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Cheez posted:That does not make it unfun. In this video alone you've complained about every single application of layer 2 obstacles. It's not the levels, it's you. Cheez posted:Fun is a subjective thing.  I have never found a variable scroll layer 2 level fun and that's my subjective opinion. It just so happens to be one shared by many people, especially considering they CONSISTENTLY place lowly in contests. The problem with variable layer 2 is it's really -really- fucky to actually play. Having to deal with two interactive layers scrolling at different speeds absolutely messes with the brain, especially when one of them can be directly controlled by shifting the camera either with L/R scrolling or even turning around. It's one of those weird mechanics that seems to pop up every now and then when someone tries to find the hip new thing to change how vanilla SMW is designed (like 1F0 and the eating block snake) but it never works out and really, outside of the VLDCs I don't think people should even be trying to do. You can directly add new mechanics to your Mario, why rely on awkward janky glitchy interactions? Tyty fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Oct 29, 2017 |
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Oct 29, 2017 20:04
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That's precisely why Mario maker forces you to. (The other reason being midpoint traps but, well, that's another problem entirely)
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Oct 31, 2017 23:55
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That's just a part of the wave of "creativity" taking over smw hacks recently. Because, y'know, being one step away from kaizo sure is creative in these modern times.
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Nov 6, 2017 04:50
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Yeah, definitely. From what I understand though is that the whole staff invasion thing was kinda a last minute thing they added (because VLDC8 had something similar) and it didn't turn out the best balanced because of it. Strange to me the judges didn't get people to test their stuff in private but... Eh. I'm not entirely surprised. Again, like VLDC8 there was this idea of a secrecy behind it so it kinda makes sense. I always try to get other people to play my stuff, from people I know are good at Mario to those who aren't. It's really helpful to have someone who just doesn't know what's coming.
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Nov 6, 2017 05:10
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Speaking as a member of said target audience, it's a good eye-opener for me to hear about what other people think is a reasonable amount of acrobatics for the game to demand of the player. During the Eris 2012 LP, someone mentioned not even wanting to do a jump into midair morph (to get into a morphball passage that wasn't at ground level), which I considered basically second nature at that point. My perspective is clearly badly out of line with that of the average Metroid fan. My baseline is basically if Zero Mission or Fusion asks you to do it it's fine. I'm not much a fan of required mockball or any underwater suitless sections or stuff like that. Meanwhile my only problem with the Super Metroid hacks I've played that demand wall jumps is that I'm really bad at them, and they tend to ask you to do a -lot- of them when they do. I played way too much Zero Mission and am so used to its physics and controls that Super Metroid feels really floaty and alien to me. Admittedly Redesign felt so bad to me to maneuver in I never even got to a part where I had to wall jump. I think I've mentioned it before (Since I'm real bad at Mario) but it's really hard to find hacks that are even just a little bit harder since the kind of people who make hacks have dumped so much time into the original games they're just naturally used to it and are going to develop stuff that's way harder. Even some of the easier SMW hacks end up with their baseline basically being about what I'd expect out of the Special World in the original.
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Dec 28, 2017 20:25
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And here's the end of Hacks 101 Sorry for taking so long to post the last update. I was having some nasty audio desync issues, but I sorted it out eventually. In the final episode we go over what not to do and make fun of the wacky dirt some more. I hope everyone enjoyed the ride, because it was super nostalgic for me going through this again.
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Feb 9, 2018 02:48
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