[Open Assets] Mystic Realm v.4.6 (scr_mysticrealm.wad)

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That sounds strange, you sure you didn't use any cheat commands such as god or noclip between there and Mystic Realm Zone? The game doesn't save when you've used cheats after all.
 
Levels that are hidden cannot be saved at all, this is mostly due to how it originally worked back in 2.0. Since Prismatic Angel and Mystic Realm are hidden stages that can only fairly be accessed through level warping, yeah... Prismatic Angel + Mystic Realm is a damn nightmare.
 
wow, it's just so unfair that i have to do that all over again whilst getting the seventh emerald

at least save at prismatic angel so i can have a breather
 
2.2 is going to have level flags that will have the option to save a stage or not, so I'd say hang on tight.
 
I didn't realize it wasn't possible to save game on hidden levels, welp, See ya in 2020 with 2.2 Level header improvements ?
 
That could be useful. We should get someone on that. (Eventually™.)
 
Say, whatever happened to that Neo Mystic Realm thing that was last mentioned about 2 years ago? Is that still being worked on?
 
Whenever I load up Mystic Realm and decide to run through it for funsies I'm always baffled by how one person could make so much consistent-quality content. I've been playing through the pack here and there lately in order to revisit my childhood and to explore the areas I'd never actually found when I was younger. Playing through the pack again with somewhat older eyes has made given me a strong impression that I thought I'd share:


Mystic is a very efficient level designer. That's how he made so many levels - through sheer efficiency. I think that's the best word to describe his approach to level design in this pack, and it's just as well. Who else could make such an impressively huge pack without being efficient? Seriously, there's like a million levels in here - and all made by one guy! There's no way Mystic doesn't hold the record for most SRB2 levels completed by a single person.

Anyway, my point about Mystic's efficiency is that there's very little extra in Mystic Realm. Not in terms of secrets or places to explore, but more that nothing is superfluous. Everywhere you look, the quality is almost perfectly consistent. Scenery objects are there and they add to the beauty, but there's not a single object extra or lacking. There's exactly as many flowers as there need to be to make Tempest Valley feel alive, but no more and no less. Even the level geometry is just contoured "enough". Meaning that each wall has enough vertices to make it feel non-square and this gives the level an organic feeling, but not without getting pushed into that perfectly-round-ledges thing that other more perfectionist designers must agonize over (Seraphic Skylands is the prime example). I myself have gotten bogged down making sectors look just right in Zone Builder, dragging vertices here and there over and over again and adjusting the grid to a resolution that is absolutely unnecessary and it sucks up a TON of time. There's a very fine line that you can cross as a level designer between over-detailed and under-detailed, and Mystic balances on it effortlessly. Not that over-detail is at all a bad thing. I think Mystic Realm looks positively bland in a lot of places, but the point is that it's not bland enough to be offensive. When I made Abandoned Airbase Zone in just about a month (coming to a SUGOI 2 near you!) I had to think about efficient level design, since I was nearing the end of the Fall semester at my university and I was really scrapped for time. Playing through Mystic Realm makes me admire it even more, but this time not just for the sheer scale, but the expert efficiency that went into each zone.


Some more random thoughts about Mystic Realm:

-The bosses are boring and bullshit and they're definitely the worst part of the experience. I actively hate looking forward to a boss fight at the end of each Act 2. I think this pack set the example for most custom level packs from the community thinking that it's not only okay to end your Zone with a bland-ass arena with an eggmobile in the center, but that it's expected! I think if you don't have a fun, unique boss idea then just scrap Act 3 altogether and let us move onto the next zone. Yeah, okay, Mystic Realm is like a billion years old and boss acts should be preserved like ugly fossils. But should they? There have still been minor updates and hey, if the next random update decides to toss out the 3rd act in basically all of the zones, I think the pack would only improve :) ...yeah I don't think it'll happen, but I can dream...

-Most of the secrets are bullshit. The tiny, hard-to-see cracks in the crack textures are simply not enough to signal that there's a hidden area behind there. The abundant use of crack textures to hide, not only useful items, but some EMBLEMS really grinds my gears. It feels like a lazy way to put the splash text on the back of the box that says "hundreds of secrets!". No one feels smart or accomplished when they stumble into one of these breakable walls because it didn't take any actual skill or thought to find it - just blind luck. It's like in Doom, running along each wall desperately mashing the "use" key in hopes that one of the walls will slide open. But I have to admit, the areas that aren't hidden this way are pretty badass, and I approve of those.

-Nitric Citadel has one of the best level progressions I've experienced as an SRB2 player. Struggling through the brutal basements of the building only to climb up the stairs and see the open sky in some windows in the corridor ahead, and then going outdoors to find that you're on the top of what looks like a big building feels like the satisfying payoff at the end of a progessive rock song. Too bad it's that weird sunset THZ texture now. The blue sky felt like more of a breath of fresh air, and it was actually a huge inspiration for me making the aforementioned Abandoned Airbase Zone.

-The buzzes in Silver Cavern Zone can kiss my ass.
 
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-The bosses are boring and bullshit and they're definitely the worst part of the experience. I actively hate looking forward to a boss fight at the end of each Act 2. I think this pack set the example for most custom level packs from the community thinking that it's not only okay to end your Zone with a bland-ass arena with an eggmobile in the center, but that it's expected! I think if you don't have a fun, unique boss idea then just scrap Act 3 altogether and let us move onto the next zone. Yeah, okay, Mystic Realm is like a billion years old and boss acts should be preserved like ugly fossils. But should they? There have still been minor updates and hey, if the next random update decides to toss out the 3rd act in basically all of the zones, I think the pack would only improve :) ...yeah I don't think it'll happen, but I can dream...
Standards were different back then, and Mystic Realm wasn't really the first to do boss acts like that, or to even popularize it, really. It's a completeness thing: A zone needs a boss act, and much of Mystic Realm's staying power to this day stems from it representing a complete, self-consistent game in and of itself.

It's really not an exaggeration to say that it WAS 1.09.4's singleplayer campaign, and that's not something it could have done without those boss acts.

Of course, these days that's blown out of the water to a ludicrous degree by all the lua shenanigans flying around: by contrast, the few custom bosses MR has were made concurrently with 1.09.3's rolling implementation of VAR1 and VAR2, with not so much as even A_RemoteAction to give it any punch. "Flying chair with new guns" was cutting edge back then, as crazy as that sounds - almost the entire reason eggman pauses after firing his first frisbee before firing a bunch more is because that actually worked as a surprising and shocking reveal back then! ^_^()
 
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Standards were different back then, and Mystic Realm wasn't really the first to do boss acts like that, or to even popularize it, really. It's a completeness thing: A zone needs a boss act, and much of Mystic Realm's staying power to this day stems from it representing a complete, self-consistent game in and of itself.

It's really not an exaggeration to say that it WAS 1.09.4's singleplayer campaign, and that's not something it could have done without those boss acts.

Of course, these days that's blown out of the water to a ludicrous degree by all the lua shenanigans flying around: by contrast, the few custom bosses MR has were made concurrently with 1.09.3's rolling implementation of VAR1 and VAR2, with not so much as even A_RemoteAction to give it any punch. "Flying chair with new guns" was cutting edge back then, as crazy as that sounds - almost the entire reason eggman pauses after firing his first frisbee before firing a bunch more is because that actually worked as a surprising and shocking reveal back then. ^_^()

Wow...time really flies, doesn't it?
 
Standards were different back then, and Mystic Realm wasn't really the first to do boss acts like that, or to even popularize it, really. It's a completeness thing: A zone needs a boss act, and much of Mystic Realm's staying power to this day stems from it representing a complete, self-consistent game in and of itself.

It's really not an exaggeration to say that it WAS 1.09.4's singleplayer campaign, and that's not something it could have done without those boss acts.

Of course, these days that's blown out of the water to a ludicrous degree by all the lua shenanigans flying around: by contrast, the few custom bosses MR has were made concurrently with 1.09.3's rolling implementation of VAR1 and VAR2, with not so much as even A_RemoteAction to give it any punch. "Flying chair with new guns" was cutting edge back then, as crazy as that sounds - almost the entire reason eggman pauses after firing his first frisbee before firing a bunch more is because that actually worked as a surprising and shocking reveal back then. ^_^()

The big problem here isn't even that they're bland, it's that they're bland and take too long. 1.09.4's egg mobile was pretty docile and didn't try to run away from you after every hit, so it was pretty easy to just ignore it and move onto the next act. Now the boss has fucking lasers and reverse skull_chase, so it can get pretty droll in an arena where there's death pits everywhere.

-Most of the secrets are bullshit. The tiny, hard-to-see cracks in the crack textures are simply not enough to signal that there's a hidden area behind there. The abundant use of crack textures to hide, not only useful items, but some EMBLEMS really grinds my gears. It feels like a lazy way to put the splash text on the back of the box that says "hundreds of secrets!". No one feels smart or accomplished when they stumble into one of these breakable walls because it didn't take any actual skill or thought to find it - just blind luck. It's like in Doom, running along each wall desperately mashing the "use" key in hopes that one of the walls will slide open. But I have to admit, the areas that aren't hidden this way are pretty badass, and I approve of those.

I actually don't agree with this for the most part. I think the cracked walls are a nice little touch and encourage you to pay attention to the level design. I guess sometimes they can be a little too subtle, but on the other hand if they were too obvious, you'd find all of the little secrets in just a couple of runs. The fact that they're so abundant and so small means that you get new little discoveries in every playthrough; honestly it's one of the reasons I keep enjoying coming back to it. It's basically running on the same philosophy of exploring and secrets that Zelda uses, and I think it works just as well there.

However, I will grant that larger secrets, like Emblems and temples, probably shouldn't be hid this way. Restricting bustable walls to hiding monitors would give it a uniform purpose and is more intuitive for the way the campaign is laid out.
 
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I actually don't agree with this for the most part. I think the cracked walls are a nice little touch and encourage you to pay attention to the level design. I guess sometimes they can be a little too subtle, but on the other hand if they were too obvious, you'd find all of the little secrets in just a couple of runs. The fact that they're so abundant and so small means that you get new little discoveries in every playthrough; honestly it's one of the reasons I keep enjoying coming back to it. It's basically running on the same philosophy of exploring and secrets that Zelda uses, and I think it works just as well there.
Back in the day I was just thankful that the walls were actually cracked period. There were many versions in which the bustable walls had no identifying graphic at all, and the best way to find them without resorting to spinning every segment of wall was to pay attention to the texture alignment and thok barriers for places where stuff went vertically out of synch.
 
Heh! I remember doing that for Flame Rift Zone because that zone was absolutely LOADED with secret bustable walls.

After all, you had to do that to find the temple in the now removed second quest.

Speaking of Second quest, I bet you someone can use the power of Lua to transform each level into Second Quest without the need to make more maps....
 
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Say, whatever happened to that Neo Mystic Realm thing that was last mentioned about 2 years ago? Is that still being worked on?
Honestly it's not. The main problem is that it would take real work to actually make it a proper update, and that real work is better spent on vanilla instead of a decade-old level pack.

I am considering doing some minor cleanup to the package for 2.2 to get rid of some of the most offensively terrible parts, though.

The bosses are boring and bullshit and they're definitely the worst part of the experience. I actively hate looking forward to a boss fight at the end of each Act 2. I think this pack set the example for most custom level packs from the community thinking that it's not only okay to end your Zone with a bland-ass arena with an eggmobile in the center, but that it's expected! I think if you don't have a fun, unique boss idea then just scrap Act 3 altogether and let us move onto the next zone. Yeah, okay, Mystic Realm is like a billion years old and boss acts should be preserved like ugly fossils. But should they? There have still been minor updates and hey, if the next random update decides to toss out the 3rd act in basically all of the zones, I think the pack would only improve :) ...yeah I don't think it'll happen, but I can dream...
I always wanted to have seven simple custom bosses back when I made the package, but practical reality meant that I had to reuse the two vanilla bosses three times. I actually think I did a pretty okay job of making the arenas unique, but obviously there's only so much you can do to make the same boss interesting three times.

Most of the secrets are bullshit. The tiny, hard-to-see cracks in the crack textures are simply not enough to signal that there's a hidden area behind there. The abundant use of crack textures to hide, not only useful items, but some EMBLEMS really grinds my gears. It feels like a lazy way to put the splash text on the back of the box that says "hundreds of secrets!". No one feels smart or accomplished when they stumble into one of these breakable walls because it didn't take any actual skill or thought to find it - just blind luck.
I think the cracked walls are a nice little touch and encourage you to pay attention to the level design. I guess sometimes they can be a little too subtle, but on the other hand if they were too obvious, you'd find all of the little secrets in just a couple of runs. The fact that they're so abundant and so small means that you get new little discoveries in every playthrough; honestly it's one of the reasons I keep enjoying coming back to it. It's basically running on the same philosophy of exploring and secrets that Zelda uses, and I think it works just as well there.

However, I will grant that larger secrets, like Emblems and temples, probably shouldn't be hid this way. Restricting bustable walls to hiding monitors would give it a uniform purpose and is more intuitive for the way the campaign is laid out.
One of the things I did when I created Mystic Realm was push in things I cared about that I wished the vanilla game did. One of those things was having more bustable wall secrets. I think I pushed it a bit too far in retrospect, but I do still kinda wish we had some more of that kind of thing in vanilla, because while I agree it shouldn't be hiding anything super important, there's something really satisfying to me about seeing something odd, checking it out, and finding something for my effort.

The buzzes in Silver Cavern Zone can kiss my ass.
I still think one of Mystic Realm's greatest successes was managing to make the very limited enemy variety in 1.X into a god damn threat. It's not even occasional cheese anymore thanks to the buzz making noise now.
 
Okay during levels I keep getting an error that says "Music lump default not found!" and then the music gets screwed up. How do I fix that?
 
Any particular levels you get the error in, or can it occur in any level randomly?

Are you playing Mystic Realm with any other files loaded?

Also, what exe are you playing with? v2.1.17's srb2win.exe or srb2dd.exe, or an exe of some other mod?
 
Any particular levels you get the error in, or can it occur in any level randomly?

Are you playing Mystic Realm with any other files loaded?

Also, what exe are you playing with? v2.1.17's srb2win.exe or srb2dd.exe, or an exe of some other mod?

Nevermind. Turns out it's because because of the character I'm using.
 

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