I downloaded version v1.1 a bit ago and played through a couple times with Amy, mostly enjoyed myself! With v1.2.1 out I tried playing through the new version with Fang, and I came across a couple problematic dead ends. These happened during regular play, there could be other walls Fang can't get through that I didn't come across.

Fang doesn't have a way to break through this wall in Shrewd Blizzard 1, leading to having to backtrack past the checkpoint and take the other path through the level.
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Fang gets softlocked after taking the water slide path in Terrance Mountain 2, as he has no way to destroy the wall, no way to backtrack, and there's a checkpoint. This kills a no-save run.
(Also I'll admit I miss Terrance Trees and its colourfulness, a lot of the zones in CyberDime are pretty gloomy)
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A few other things unrelated to Fang:
This checkpoint in Nightlight Gully 2 spawns the player embedded in the ledge.
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The barrels in the lake area in Techno Trouble 1 still have purple goop. (the change to green goop is neat, also! I feel like some more experimentation with recolouring would help the zone stand out from Techno Hill's aesthetic)
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This sign in Desolated City 2 has a really tall collision, makes it hard to jump over.
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Also, the new boss in Shrewd Blizzard, I feel like Eggman doesn't give enough time between attacks to safely hit him when playing a less agile character like Tails, Amy or Metal. Taking damage at some point feels practically unavoidable to a player playing reactively and not having all the boss' attack durations memorized, as Eggman often starts his next attack right before he's hit. The ice's poor traction makes him slow to approach, and using the snow around the edges of the arena for better traction causes the camera to get obscured by trees, and the player blocked by snowmen. If he had just a split second longer before his next attack he'd feel less "cheap" to fight, in my opinion.

(Oops, double posted! I can't seem to delete this message and edit the previous one, though..)
 
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Nothing i can do about the boss i'm afraid, since i didn't make and don't know the slightest thing about lua. Only thing i could do to remedy that is make the bosses arena larger, but that feels like a rather cheap method...
 
Yeah, I wouldn't increase the arena size too much, it's not really the problem and lets the boss engage with the player. I wasn't aware it was an imported boss, though! Oh well.
 
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Just a little question, is it possible to get all the chaos emeralds in the level pack, some levels have the tokens and some no matter where I look don't, like green hill and bridge, maybe you should add them so there's more reason to explore
 
Yes it is possible, if you search really hard enough you can get all the emeralds very early on
 
This may very well be my least favourite level pack I've ever played. The levels lack a sense of direction and everything looks so similar that I can't tell where I've been, where I am, or where I need to go. The gimmicks feel boring and uninspired and many of the themes seem to be directly copied from the vanilla singleplayer campaign. If I had to pick a favourite zone I would probably say Shrewd Blizzard though, it was very fun to speed through and the visuals matched the music well. To improve, I would reduce the amount of crossing paths so that it's harder to accidentally backtrack/get lost, and highlight important things so the player knows where to go.
 
This may very well be my least favourite level pack I've ever played.

Do you have any other level packs for 2.2 that you could recommend? This is the best level pack I've ever played (having played 24HSRB2, Dimension Glaber, and Apologue), so I must evidently be missing out on some other fantastic packs somewhere for you to be making such a dramatic statement.

Every other pack I've played either suffers from all the problems you've listed, consists of extremely linear hallway levels, or relies heavily on gimmicks and/or kaizo-esque platforming sections.

I've certainly played many individual levels that were comparatively better than the ones in this pack, but I'm yet to see a pack on the board that compares to this one.
 
Hi, apologies but i've just put another very small update out to fix the old eggscaliburs lua causing lag in multiplayer.
 
Bit of a hit and miss, but some levels I really liked. Especially the first one and the city levels. Interesting twists on the bosses too. Neato.
 
Well, after about 45 minutes and lots of running and jumping, I think it's safe to form an opinion about this pack. I liked it!

I can see where the criticisms are coming from. After getting through Terrance Mountain (did you mean Terrace Mountain?), I realized that my brain had fogged over a little bit, and that the level was basically the same as the previous ones but with the assets swapped out. That was the overarching problem with the pack, at least the part I played, as a whole: each level feels a bit samey. The rooms and hallways wind around the XY-plane seemingly at random, and there's a repetitive rhythm of outdoor-room>cave>outdoor-room>cave that is impossible not to pick up on, even subconsciously. To make matters worse, any given outdoor-room and cave even has roughly the same height and width as the other outdoor-rooms and caves elsewhere in the level and elsewhere in the pack. This, and your tendency to stretch the levels a minute or two longer than they need to be, is the recipe for fatigue.

And yet, I found myself enjoying the pack a fair bit! Quite a bit more than I expected, from some of the criticisms I'd heard. I think some of the problem (for the player) lies in playing too much of it at once. If you stack all that level information in your head in one session, the formulaic qualities make themselves more apparent. But if you take your time with the pack, only playing one or two zones at a time, you can appreciate the levels much more easily. Is this still a problem with the pack? Absolutely. But I think you've been given a bit more crap than you deserve.

There's actually a good amount of beautiful scenery and solid level design on display here. I rarely felt cramped or slowed down, and each area had a consistent level of detail put into it, which is something you tend not to see in ginormous packs like this. It showed that you really cared about what you were making. The consistent pretty visuals are even more impressive considering how much freaking content there is in this mod. And I rarely got turned around or lost, though sometimes I had to use a little extra brainpower to find the way forward, which wouldn't be necessary if you used some more rings to telegraph where the player should go. Again, I'm pretty astounded by how many acres of level you managed to put in front of the player, and how consistent it is in visual quality and playability. You deserve a big round of applause if only for that.

Here are my personal suggestions for improvement:

- I wish you'd use slopes in the gameplay a lot more. They're there in the levels but mostly as an afterthought. I rarely felt like the slopes were anything more than a smoothed-out stair case. As far as I'd gotten, the lava level, there weren't any fun hills to roll down or big ramps to shoot off of, which is a shame considering how much your design style seems to emphasize speed.

- You should vary your level lengths a lot more. With few exceptions, I was hitting the 4-5 minute mark on every single level. This got meta-repetitive. Here's a Gary Provost quote about writing and sentence length that I think is relevant:
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

- You didn't HAVE TO represent every classic level theme. Hell, you don't HAVE TO make three acts for every zone. Playing through the levels, I sometimes got the feeling that you'd run out of steam by Act 3, sometimes by Act 2, and sometimes that the whole Zone was made with you just going through the motions. Maybe this is because you felt like you HAD TO make a level of a particular theme in order to check a box in your head, or to fulfill an idea you had a while ago. But the Parade of Obligatory Themes gets really old unless you have a unique idea for each of them. I say, if you don't have an engaging idea for a level, one that fills you with energy as you put the pieces together, then screw it! You don't have to make it!

Overall I think you've made something special and deserve some more praise for all your hard work. If this pack had come out during the Final Demo era, or even the early 2.0 era, it would've been a hit. It probably IS a hit on the master server. See, I think there's a time when quantity is better than quality, and it's for all those kids online who have endless time to blast through level after level with their friends. I think you've provided them with an excellent levelpack to do just that.
 
It took a while but here we are with an actually big update this time! Read the changelog for what's been updated.
 
Maybe it's an issue I'm unaware of, but I can't seem to access Timeless Wastes or Terrance Trees from the level select.
 
Good Shit

Decided to play through the pack for the first time since v1.1 (Holy shit there's a lot of changes, I haven't payed too much attention and just assumed `.x`'s would be... minor patches,)

Once I realized that there were big updates, I decided to play through the whole thing again. Boy was this a treat. Much, much improved from last I remember.


There are some real minor nitpicks I have that add up, but listing them all would be too much of a hassle and I'm sure if you went over the stages to polish them more it would clear out a lot of the gunk. (Not to mention most of them are minor enough that I don't remember them LOL. Don't worry they haven't changed my overall opinion of the pack, which is that it's really damn good.)

But some more major things that I noticed that I also still remember, haha.
-Aghh Dry Gulch Act 2's track is awful and very distracting. Something about it's mixing makes it grating, it may just be my headphones *shrug*
-CEZ2 is not a very fitting track for Dark Woods 2. It just doesn't have the right vibe.
-You said Terrance Trees and Timeless Wastes are in level rotation? I didn't see them in my playthrough (although I didn't actually finish it, per say, see below gif.)
-Cyberdime 1 still uses 2.1 Greenflower.
-Cyberdime 2 has some pits that you can't see coming until you've fallen into them, and the boss's homing missiles can and will hit you after you've hit eggman, which leaves a small gap of time in which you can safely hit and is very frustrating. I lost many lives to this boss.
-You screwed up Cyberdime 3 lmao.
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I'll probably get to writing my full thoughts about this again after these updates some other time, but the short of it? Way, way better than it was on release. I find this pack to be really fun to play now. It tends to be my default for playing modded characters, especially Modern Sonic.

-You screwed up Cyberdime 3 lmao.
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This was always present since release. I don't know why it happens, but I think you can avoid it by slowly entering the teleporters at the end of each section. I just jump on the edges and then walk into them and it doesn't happen to me anymore.
 
Maybe it's an issue I'm unaware of, but I can't seem to access Timeless Wastes or Terrance Trees from the level select.


I forgot to mention they're unlockable levels, just check the extra checklist for how to get them.

---------- Post added at 10:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:00 AM ----------

Small little update, some small bug & texture fixes, and also fixed a particular spot in Dry Gulch 1 & 2 where you could get softlocked and would have to reset, and also i made another attempt to fix the dreaded softlock problem in Cyberdime 3
 
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I wanted to say: I get to the third act of TMZ, and I have this. I can't get the boss. And for some reason, this is happening to me.

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