The Chase is On pack V4.0 - (s_sonicchase.wad)

windows 7 actually

Try this. If it's already on full, I guess you're out of luck.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090625093503AAjQNpS

I tried it.

I reach a point where it says "If your current display driver allows you to change settings, click this button" The button in question is grayed out, which I assume means my driver does not allow for settings to be changed.

So looks like I've hit a dead end again.

Meh, sorry, dunno what to tell you, I use XP. Actually, the reason I switched back to XP was because SRB2 was running slow on my lo-fi pc here, what with Windows 7 hogging so many resources.

I just managed to dig into the info about my computer's graphics system, and found that the computer does have DirectX 11. So the problem is not whether I have it, its that DoomBuilder doesn't recognize it.

Is DoomBuilder too old for DirectX 11 or something? Does it only run on a lower version?

I just tried out your newest version. You seem to have a fair grasp on what I recommended you do, particularly in CDZ, but this pack still has a LONG way to go before it is decent.

The bizarre thing is, you seem to have made an effort at tackling the big things (like sector scenery), but you completely ignored all the littler problems. I don't care how funny you think that army of enemies in CDZ is, it needs to go. Your attempts at improvement are commendable but extremely insufficient. For example, you still need better texturing in CDZ, and you still need more scenery. I like the barn a lot, but why did you only use it once? Put barns all over your level, and maybe hide some secrets in a few of them.

You also need to do a lot more to fix bad room design; practically all of your rooms are way too cramped or way too open. Your gimmicks, too, tend to use only a tiny amount of the space within rooms. You still rely far too heavily on enemies to spice up rooms, and you use enemies like Sharps and THZ Turrets in totally inappropriate situations.

The net effect of all this is that your levels (especially CDZ) aren't interesting, don't build suspense or difficulty, and simply have no flow. In a good level, every room is interesting for some unique reason, hallways compensate for a lack of content with excellent scenery, and the difficulty increases slowly but steadily. Here's what you should do before releasing this again:

1. Follow all my advice. ALL of it. Don't come up with some flimsy justification for why you think I'm wrong. Just do it. Start with the simple advice, and then gradually start incorporating my more elaborate suggestions. I may not be the best or most insightful critic on the message board (*coughcoughSpiritCrushercoughcough*) but when it comes to this pack I sure as hell know what I'm talking about.
2. Think about your favorite levels for SRB2. They could be the official ones, OLDC winners, some zone within a level pack, anything that you particularly like. Play through it several times. Keep exploring it until you can pinpoint what it is about that level that you like. Do your best to add that quality to your own work.
3. Here's a strategy that I found really helpful in the creation of Tortured Planet. Whenever you release a new version, set up a netgame with your WAD and get someone else to play it and make comments on everything. Use F12 to follow his progress so that you know what area he is talking about at a given time.

Please, please listen to me. I want to help. I want to see The Chase Is On become decent. It won't until you start paying meticulous attention to what other people have to say about it. This new update was a step in the right direction, but it wasn't enough.

I have several things to say.
1. Ouch
2. Regardless of comment 1, thank you. This is what I was looking for.
3. I'm going to attack this pack with revamps again, version 5.0 will surface eventually.
4. Fine, if you really hate the enemy parade, I'll take it out. It was kind of CDZ's signature thing, but whatever. (Just so you know I totally understand it's not an acceptable gimmick.)
5. I think I finally understand what you're getting at now. I was looking for reviews on my design of specific gimmicks (which was why I've been encouraging people to look at stages 4, 5, and 6.) But the problems people see in the pack are less with the gimmicks themselves, and more in how they appear, how they are executed, and how the flow, mood, and difficulty curve of the level works. So, v.5.0 will be a different sort of overhaul than the previous ones, focusing on aspects of making the level feel like a standard SRB2 level in flow.

My month long Christmas break starts this afternoon. I'll have plenty of time to work on this, and maybe 5.0 will be up by late Jan-early Feb. (If all goes well.)

Thanks again, I'm going to carefully analyze and compare this pack to well-liked levels now, and fix what I can.

Fawfulfan said:

I may not be the best or most insightful critic on the message board (*coughcoughSpiritCrushercoughcough*)

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Oh hi there.

Anyway, I don't really think this pack is salvageable. My advice would be to scrap these levels and make new ones, this time making sure that you don't rush things and plan every room with care. I don't like the "making a terrible level and adding to it later" approach that you probably got from Fawfulfan, because it makes the level feel cluttered and you can't do much about it. Some time you will find that the shape of your level prevents you from doing certain things, and to prevent that, make a clean start. If you want to, reuse gimmicks, but none of the stuff that got negative feedback (for example, no mazes, this is not a game that lends to mazes).

Fawfulfan will probably disagree with me on this, because my opinion goes straight against his approach on level designing, but that's my take, from a player's point of view. An aware player will notice if a level was rushed and then improved or not, and the more rushed it was, the more obvious. Take Country Dream Zone from your pack, for example, which I'm sure took the least time to originally make. Take Spacewalk and Alien Armageddon from TP, which Fawfulfan admitted were rushed in enthusiasm to get the pack out. Work on one level at a time, never rush things, and don't release until you feel your level is as good as it can get. If that means the next version won't be out for another year, fine.

SpiritCrusher said:

Fawfulfan will probably disagree with me on this, because my opinion goes straight against his approach on level designing, but that's my take, from a player's point of view. An aware player will notice if a level was rushed and then improved or not, and the more rushed it was, the more obvious. Take Country Dream Zone from your pack, for example, which I'm sure took the least time to originally make. Take Spacewalk and Alien Armageddon from TP, which Fawfulfan admitted were rushed in enthusiasm to get the pack out. Work on one level at a time, never rush things, and don't release until you feel your level is as good as it can get. If that means the next version won't be out for another year, fine.

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I don't totally disagree with you on this; I just think that yours is a somewhat simplistic view of level design. Scrapping a bad level is sometimes an indisputably better alternative to trying to correct what you already have. But it is my opinion that the worst levels are not necessarily always the ones that most desperately need to be scrapped. Remember the original versions of Sunshine Atoll Zone and Eruption Conduit Zone? SAZ1 was certainly worse than ECZ1. But I chose to scrap ECZ1 and simply tinker with SAZ1. Why did I do that? I did it because I had known for a while that ECZ1 had far less improvement potential than SAZ1.

I believe that there are really two scales with which you can rate a level: how good it is and how much better it could be. Due to a complex combination of factors, some levels are harder to improve after their initial creation. I find that, as a general rule, levels which are compact, cramped, and vertical are much, much harder to salvage than levels which are open, flat, and boring, even if a given instance of the former happens to be more enjoyable than a given instance of the latter.

Think about it: what are the most important things you have to do to fix the level in either case? Let's say you have two levels (We'll just call them Level 1 and Level 2). The general consensus is that Level 2 is better, but in the grand scheme of things they both suck. However, they suck for entirely different reasons. Level 1 sucks because it has no sector scenery, boring textures, wide open rooms with no content save for swarms of random enemies. Level 2 sucks because it is really compact, cramped, narrow, and has the player taking elevators and springs and fans every which way.

There are all kinds of things you can do to make Level 1 better. Sector scenery can go all over the place, new gimmicks can be invented and placed into rooms that served no purpose, textures can be redone, the landscape can be contoured, enemies can be deleted or moved, and the walls can be pulled in to cut out any space you still don't need. But for Level 2, you'll spend ages reorganizing everything that already exists before you can even start to consider adding in better content. You'll have to expand rooms, and move around other rooms so that everything fits. You'll have to ease up on the vertical variation, which in a presumably multi-layered environment will disrupt all kinds of mechanics. And you can just forget about adding in any good scenery until everything is tidier.

Now, I will replace the hypothetical levels with real ones. Level 1 is Country Dream Zone, and Level 2 is Mount Crumble Zone. I don't think anyone disputes that Mount Crumble is a better level than Country Dream. But I think improving Country Dream is a much more achievable goal than improving Mount Crumble. Indeed, that seems to be exactly what happened in this new release; Country Dream had a lot of noticeable modifications, and Mount Crumble had only a few.

As such, I advocate that BlazeFan1 should make some more attempts at improving Country Dream, but he might want to write off Mount Crumble as a redo. Though I really can't know for sure--only the creator of the levels really can understand what it is like to build and reshape them--I am making an educated guess based on my experiences constructing Tortured Planet, and my knowledge of the flaws in The Chase is On. In any case, I think it's safe to say that determining whether or not a level is beyond hope really isn't quite so simple as how bad the level is. The relevant question is why the level is as bad as it is, and what will have to be done to address the problem.

Fawfulfan you hit the nail on the head describing those two!

I often look at Mt. Crumble and just stare at it, wondering how I can really improve it in the way I need to. Mt. Crumble was the first level I built correctly, since while building CDZ I didn't really understand thok barriers and that level is actually one gigantic sector full of smaller sectors as a result.

So when I built Mt. Crumble, I was completely new to the process of building rooms that way, and it wound up being a cramped level, which at the time I didn't know was a problem. I've widened some things, but it's still sort of a mess.

The other reason I may scrap MCZ is that the theme not only doesn't allow for many gimmicks, but also very little sector-based scenery. I mean, the theme is mountainside. What's on mountains besides rocks, water, and a few plants anyway? Not too much. (Though I was thinking of adding a new area with maybe some kind of village. That could provide scenery and maybe a gimmick.)

Consider the themes of my later zones (Stormy lakeside power plant, jungle, and warehouse/waste processing center.) And immediately more ideas for both gimmicks and scenery come to mind. So at the very least, those three will stay, but the other three, with boring themes (field, mountainside, and lake) as well as poor level structure, will either need to be massively redone or scrapped.

I realize this pack is kind of laughable in the face of some other SRB2 stages, but the reason I'm still trying to fix it up is so I don't make similar mistakes when building my next (hopefully better) levels.

I'm not sure you should scrap the concept of Mt. Crumble--just the level as is. I think the theme could work, even if it isn't too original.

That's what I meant.
But before I do anything with it I'm going to think of some more stuff to spice it up. It's kind of a dull level right now.

Fawfulfan said:

stuff

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Well, I definitely agree that certain levels can be improved more easily than others. But if you take SAZ, for example, the problem is that you crammed so much into it that you didn't even think about while making the level. The result is that it feels cluttered. When I enter any room in SAZ, I get the feeling that you didn't carefully plan how it should look but rather made an empty shell and then just threw stuff in. As a generalization, that's exactly what happened. Of course, SAZ doesn't need to be redone as much as ECZ does, but I'm sure almost of your levels could benefit from rebuilding them from ground up, of course while using all of the ideas found in the original, just like you did with ECZ. I think the same applies for this pack.

Fawfulfan said:

Scrapping a bad level is sometimes an indisputably better alternative to trying to correct what you already have.

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Okay, well, I'm not quite sure exactly what to quote out of your message to directly respond to. But I'm going to read between the lines and read your thesis as "Rush jobs can be later made into good maps."

I'm sure you know what a rush job is from experience, but the gist of a rush job is that putting a finish on the map is more important than the new content being worth playing. I think that, by our arbitrary standards of quality exalted in level design 101, a rush job can meet all the same qualifications of a standard map, if not more: my creative process frequently neglects gameplay.

Rush jobs, however, leave an irreversible framework woven into the core of the map. My favorite example here is the hallway. You can make it tall; you can put some floating platforms in it; and you can even put in a balcony. But at the end of the day, you've still got a hallway.

SpiritCrusher hinted at this, but he didn't really elaborate on it. I'll call it "the wisdom of the player." At least as a level designer, I'm reverse engineering your creative process as I'm playing your map. I'm looking at which shapes formed the room in the beginning, and what you've added inside that beginning room. Generally rush jobs have only the most basic layer showing, the raw framework. More developed maps have a second layer just inside the basic framework, which make the basic framework more interesting. On top of that, you have sector detail.

Okay, that didn't make any sense, so I'll have to use an example. I know my own maps best, so I'm using FFZ1. Go to the first room with water in it, by my count the fourth room. (The reason there's a door right between rooms two and three is because I had at first planned on making that room lead to an outside area, but I thought better of it and started on the room you see today. But you didn't need to know that.) The first thing I started with for that room was one, long sector. A hallway in all its glory. The second was the raised sides. The third was the waterfalls. By the definition I've put out in the previous paragraph, the core framework for this room is a hallway. It looks like a hallway in Doom Builder, and changing it into something else is really, really hard. The second layer, which would distract from the blandness of the hall, is made up of the raised sides and the waterfalls. The raised sides give the map shape, and the waterfalls make the walls more interesting. Everything on top of that, (except maybe the trees) is sector scenery.

And, well, capturing map making in such a crude and primitive procedure devalues the creativity of it. If nothing else, I'm trying to describe my process with language where it normally lies just under the surface of my conscious thoughts.

Point is, improving a rush job seems to be throwing sector scenery on top of a basic framework. Sector scenery is only that polish on top of the map that is already there. By the time you've finished your rush job map and decided to go back and improve it, changing the core framework of one room is hard because it's linked to the framing of the other rooms, and adding any sort of "second layer" (okay, that phrase is totally useless) will seem like an addon instead of part of the room's basic structure. Granted, if you're looking hard enough, everything starts to look like a hallway.

Oh dear, I'm not making any sense now, am I?

BlueZero4 said:

Oh dear, I'm not making any sense now, am I?

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You are making perfect sense. That's exactly what I meant, but my somewhat limited English makes my explanations kinds crude.

You can improve on rush jobs, but you can't change their basic layout (the first layer) anymore. And if that first layer isn't good (or good enough), you're stuck. The only way around this is rebuilding the first layer and thus, the map.

Ok I've looked at Mt. Crumble long and hard for the last few days and come up with a sort of plan for it.

At first, I'm not going to totally delete it, I'm going to ATTEMPT to drastically alter most of it. If this creates a mess rather than an increase in level quality, the level is going in the trash.

As for the details of the level update... it's kind of hard to explain that. I really can't say anything about how its going to work out until I try it.

As for Country Dream Zone, does anyone know how I can improve the structure of that level? Since it was all built in one giant sector, the tall walls and strangely shaped rooms make it very hard to sort of fix the flow, which is what I (and many others) hate most about that level.

I don't think you can improve the structure of Country Dream. There's hardly anything in there. You should probably start it from scratch, moreso than Mount Crumble.

Just a little update on how 5.0 is coming along.

Here's one important newsflash: my copy no longer contains CDZ's "enemy parade". In the next release, it will be replaced with something much more interesting.

CDZ has been hugely "condensed". I finally found some effective ways to reduce some of the huge open spaces that comprise the level, improving level navigation, without the loss of any of the (minimal) content that level already has to offer. Some texture variation is also occurring, I'm sticking grass borders on platforms, and even adding more barns, a large cave, and some other sector based scenery.

And that's just in CDZ!

That level will likely never resemble a truly good level, but this time it might actually be... passable.

Mount crumble is, as always, a pain to work with, but I'm adding an entire new wing to the level, containing four new rooms that hopefully will be full of enough detail to spice up the level a bit. The rest of the level is of course, undergoing the usual attempt at changes.

The other four stages are being revised too, but to a much lesser extent given that 1. I like them better, and 2. I haven't recieved nearly as much feedback on them (which is a shame, actually.)

Don't expect to see 5.0 soon though, its still got a lot of work to be done before I can release it with no regrets. I'm guessing another month minimum, or more depending on how busy I am.