Character System Ruined by STK?

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I think wads tend to look boring since they're basically clones. I really wish speed stats would get combined into a set of numbers from 1 to 5, where 1 would be slow accel and fast top speed, and 5 would be the opposite. That will definitely prevent having HMS clones, and add true fairness to custom wads.

And for spinning and double jumps, I would go with some of the abilities Mystic mentioned on the Sky Sanc topic. Just as long as they actually ADD more frames. I simply hate being able to float while on the spinning frames, or having 4 frames for flying's tired frames.
 
The difference between level and character wads is that, in a level wad, all you can do is play the level. Once you exit it the rest of the game is unaffected. When you play with a custom character, the whole game is played differently. This means there must be a certain degree of balance to the character stats, otherwise there's no reason for people not to jam all the sliders up to the max.

I sorta agree with Mystic's idea that there should be a points system in which you have a total amount of points to spend, and if you want to increase something you have to cut back on something else. Knuckles already works a bit like this with the whole jump height/fire rate trade off.

Whatever you do, though, PLEASE expand the maximum values beyond the ones used by the official characters. It's a pain in the ass not to be able to have a character that jumps really high just because all the characters in the game jump no higher than 100 fracunits.
 
Well, Neo, that's what I mean by "dependent variables". You would set something like say, maximum speed, and then it would determine your acceleration stats by a formula instead of letting you set them yourself. This is actually _more_ restrictive but it allows us to make the maximum limits to all of the variables a lot higher because there will be a clear drawback to setting one of your numbers really high.
 
Mystic said:
Well, Neo, that's what I mean by "dependent variables". You would set something like say, maximum speed, and then it would determine your acceleration stats by a formula instead of letting you set them yourself. This is actually _more_ restrictive but it allows us to make the maximum limits to all of the variables a lot higher because there will be a clear drawback to setting one of your numbers really high.
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What? No. This sounds completely atrocious and even more restrictive than it is right now. Please just have a global stats limit and let the author work out the balances, thanks.
 
There would be a lot of variables, though, so in say, a 4 variable equation you could set three of the variables and it would calculate the last one for you. It's not quite as restrictive as a simple slider.
 
I'm not really worried about the character itself so much as the level design.

Because all of the developers use Sonic mainly, the single player levels are all designed for Sonic. Things like long hallways and flat open areas. As a Knuckles user, there usually is never anything to climb on to help me out. In extreme cases, playing as Knuckles means I'm essentially playing as slower, thok-less Sonic that can't jump as high.
 
Mystic said:
Well, Senku, over the 7-8 years I've been with the project, about 90% of MY ideas have been rejected. Just ask AJ. He shot me down constantly.
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When I remember you stating that you didn't approve of SSN's ACZ3 concept, this just makes it even funnier. Seriously, AJ is what turned SRB2 into what it is today, and rejecting ideas that nearly 50%-75% of the community would like, is a bit asanine.

But, I would really have to side with Senku here. The 2.0 character system is horribly gimped, and 2.1 really needs to fix that.
 
BlueZero4 said:
I'm not really worried about the character itself so much as the level design.

Because all of the developers use Sonic mainly, the single player levels are all designed for Sonic. Things like long hallways and flat open areas. As a Knuckles user, there usually is never anything to climb on to help me out. In extreme cases, playing as Knuckles means I'm essentially playing as slower, thok-less Sonic that can't jump as high.
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I never really understood this complaint. Levels are designed around Sonic because he is the most basic character. If Sonic can beat the level, any character can. Tails and Knux allow you to more easily get through certain gimmicks (or in some cases, completely skip them), as well as give you access to secret areas that Sonic can't get to. What are we supposed to do, design levels around Tails? How are characters without flight supposed to beat them?
 
FuriousFox said:
If Sonic can beat the level, any character can.
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Sonic thoks across a gap, swim character... falls into pit, slow fall character tries to glide it and slams into the wall of the floor they were supposed to land on, a slow character or one with a low jump can't even jump it.

Sonic spins though a breakable walls, and under a small hole, characters who can't spin are stuck.
 
Senku Niola said:
Sonic thoks across a gap, swim character... falls into pit, slow fall character tries to glide it and slams into the wall of the floor they were supposed to land on, a slow character or one with a low jump can't even jump it.

Sonic spins though a breakable walls, and under a small hole, characters who can't spin are stuck.
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^This! Of course, wasn't this true of 1.09.4 too?
 
Senku Niola said:
Sonic thoks across a gap, swim character... falls into pit, slow fall character tries to glide it and slams into the wall of the floor they were supposed to land on, a slow character or one with a low jump can't even jump it.

Sonic spins though a breakable walls, and under a small hole, characters who can't spin are stuck.
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There's almost always a tolerance for error in jumps. I can't say I've ever seen a jump that REQUIRED the use of a special ability to cross in the official game.

Now, your characters are going to be expected to have certain abilities, that's just unavoidable. If you design a character of your pet rock, which has a runspeed of 2, we can't help you. Character wadders should design their characters around the official levels the same way that level wadders design their levels around the official characters. I could whine that I have to make each of my platforms only 100 fracunits higher than each other due to Sonic's low jump height, but that's just how it is. As much as I'd like to make higher jumps, I can't. I design my levels with Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles in mind. If you intentionally design a character that can't complete the game, we can't be expected to redesign our levels to accommodate that.
 
Or, even better, you could create a level pack designed around the abilities of your custom characters that STK wouldn't be able to complete. Even with the crappy custom abilities in 2.0 this is entirely possible, and could create some completely unique challenges and situations because the custom abilities could deal with challenges that would be impossible for STK.
 
FuriousFox said:
I could whine that I have to make each of my platforms only 100 fracunits higher than each other due to Sonic's low jump height, but that's just how it is.
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Sonic? Don't you mean Knuckles?

Besides that, why was Knuckles' jump height lowered anyways? If it would've stayed the same we didn't have all these annoying problems.
 
LightspeedX said:
In how? That he would be able to jump a little higher and glide/climb would make him overpowered? Sure, he'd be a little better but NOT overpowered.
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He really wouldn't have any disadvantage at all. He's almost as fast as Sonic, he can climb every wall (unless you check no climb) and thus skip almost all of the level. He MUST have some disadvantage to cover up for this.
 
You don't understand the point of the nerfed Knuckles jump. It's to mimic Sonic 3 in order to make it so that Knuckles is occasionally forced to take an alternate path than Sonic and Tails. The best example of this I can think of right now is in Egg Rock 1. Sonic and Tails can get into the high-speed-running crusher room, but Knuckles can't, and is instead forced into an underground lava room.
 
This is an example of character specific paths that I personally want to see more of. You can see another example in how Knuckles is forced onto his own path in NAGZ as well. You should expect to see the levels be MORE character-specific as time goes on, not less so. Sonic 3K totally had the right idea on this one.
 
About the speed of characters: I disagree that a high-speed, high-acceleration character is necessarily "overpowered". The thing is, any character with both of those maxed out will play as though it is perpetually running on ice, which means that you have to have expert skills in controlling it.

Now, if you are to combine high-speed and high-acceleration with a lot of strength (for instance, a knux clone) then that would be overpowered, but by itself, it's a tradeoff in and of itself.

Also, why is everyone talking about eliminating more features of character design when it was severely nerfed in 2.0 to begin with. On one level, I do applaud it, because it has cleared up a lot of messiness and eliminated some methods to make overpowered characters. However, it also eliminated a ton of flexibility in character design. There must be some way to add new moves and variables for character skins while keeping overpoweredness to a minimum.
 
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