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Rogerregorroger

Animator
✨ Collaborator ✨
Greetings and welcome to Sol Sinstancia.

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A 2 act single player stage.

So, I had a discussion about how it'd be a cool idea if a Sonic game didn't have separate zones, the grass level, ice level, desert level, etc, but instead takes place in one "Super location" that's central to all levels, yet gives each level a unique subtle personality.
A mix between what Sonic Adventure did with the Hub and Unleashed in some action stages.

So I started the Sol Sistancia project, a campaign taking place over about 7 levels set on the same island where you kinda flow from one environment to the next to give the sense you're really traveling across an island rather then just going to "the ice level" next.


At least, that's the EVENTUAL plan. Since I'm a complete noob with SRB2 and I never made a map before, and I'm being ambitious right out of the gate, I figured it's probably a good idea if I made a proof of concept level first, both for me to get a feel of the momentum and speed of the characters and how level design works, and to get feedback from the pro's about whatever I'm doing is doable or doomed from the start. Hence this level. Island Tour. Well, levelS, since I had to split it up into two as the engine was starting to glitch out.


So uh, yeah, do let me know if I'm on the right track or not. In the finished project, the levels won't leap This much from environment to environment, I crammed in as many diffrent themes as possible in each level now for show.
Levels only really made with Sonic in mind, but I managed to finish it with the entire roster. Music's from the Anime Air Gear.
 

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Wait a second... Something seems reaaaaally familiar about you and the art style of these textures... Eh, whatever, welcome to releases!
 
Holy shit, you play srb2! I knew I recognized that art style, and it became blatantly obvious at the end. This level is REALLY good for a first level! Only thing is in act 2, maybe use purple water for the bits of water that can hurt you to make it more clear that it's dangerous. I seriously can't wait to see this become a full project, this looks super promising.
by the way i love your animations <3
 
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This zone scores high on originality at least. I like all of the attention to detail throughout, and the number of unique settings you pass through. There is very much a Loony Tunes feel here with the design overall.

The main thing is that you can create triangles to make a number of sloped surfaces fit into the walls a bit better (as opposed to just looking like ramps placed at random). In addition, as the campaign gets longer, you might want to save the Crawla Commander spam for later levels.

A few more things...

-- A yellow spring (near the beginning) can trap you behind some solid midtextures and prevent progress.
-- The 'hurt water' could use a change in the graphics to make sure it looks different from normal water
-- There's a texture that appears to be for an FoF with an alpha map? The holes have cyan in them instead of transparency.
 
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I really enjoy this! I don't know you as an artist (as far as I can tell), but I like the style of the level. The custom ending really got me!

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I would assume you wanted these flats to be transparent? Make them a translucent FOF and make the front top texture #255 to fix this issue.
 
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It's really cool to see you making levels! I've watched your shorts for yeaaars.

Midtexture and impassable linedef issues seem to be a common hiccup, here's some stuff I found around the early portions of act 1.
As a lot of the tree barriers all over the map are solid midtextures, it's quite easy to jump up and over them, then get stuck due to not being able to jump out. There's also some places where midtextures aren't solid when they should be, and vice versa. Also not too major, but the carpark barrier by the entrance to the hotel can be bypassed by jumping on the ledge.

I realise there's a *lot* of midtextures to check to see if they're working correctly, I hope there's some sort of streamlined way to check their collision in the map builder.
 

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Yoo. I loved the theming of the level (took me a while to figure out who you were).

Pro tip: Check flag [8] on your rings so they float above the ground.
 
Thanks for the responses so far!
Yeah, the transparency issue in the factory.
It's weird, when I test the level trough Zone builder I had the same problem. But when I played the level in trough the main game, the transparency works correctly. I figured it's just a quirk from the Zone builder.
Guess I'll try that trick Zippy suggested.

But in that case, there were more glitches that I only noticed during test plays but not trough the main game. Such as the Welcome sign in Eggman's lobby being misaligned, and one of the truck textures being off. Did that happen to anyone?

The reason I don't close off corners with slopes is that a few early test maps ended up imploding in on themselves. I think whenever a slope touches a wall that I later use for a diffrent section of a level, it starts interfering and glitching out. So I was a little paranoid with slopes in this level, always making sure they're isolated from any other geomatry.
But right, I'll experiment more with slopes and see how much I can do with it without causing another meltdown then.

Oh, hah, so many places where you can break trough the scenery. With Sonic even.
Yeah, I have to be a lot more clever with closing off sections for scenery, I vastly underestimated how much height and speed the characters can get. I'll fix up a few for an update, but I fear there's always going to be a few spots where flying characters can get past the scenery. Guess I'll just make the floor deadly, or put in more springs to help curious explorers out of their misery.
And I'll have to be a lot more careful and clever with scenery in the future.

Also, I have a question for a future idea, I wanted to make a section where, say, you run on a railtrack and a train suddenly speeds toward you and kills you if you touch it. Or perhaps even a highway with cars.
How's the best way I could make a hazard like that?
Was thinking about using the sliding door trick for that.
Walk on a trigger that makes a door slide open, except make it a train instead of a door, and make it slide into the direction of the player. I think the Wiki mentions it kills you if it goes fast enough.
Is that feasable, or is there a better way?
 
Also, I have a question for a future idea, I wanted to make a section where, say, you run on a railtrack and a train suddenly speeds toward you and kills you if you touch it. Or perhaps even a highway with cars.
How's the best way I could make a hazard like that?
Was thinking about using the sliding door trick for that.
Walk on a trigger that makes a door slide open, except make it a train instead of a door, and make it slide into the direction of the player. I think the Wiki mentions it kills you if it goes fast enough.
Is that feasable, or is there a better way?
A sliding door-style setup would probably be the best way to do it. To my knowledge the train at the end of ACZ2 uses papersprites, but I don't know how good that would look up close.
 
But in that case, there were more glitches that I only noticed during test plays but not trough the main game. Such as the Welcome sign in Eggman's lobby being misaligned, and one of the truck textures being off. Did that happen to anyone?
Not sure why the midtexture offsets are behaving differently in the builder testing (it shouldn't matter if it's just loading up SRB2), but that would explain why a lot of the decorative characters have their textures repeated weirdly. there's quite a bit of stuff like that around the place.

The theme of the island being a large interconnected space would work really well with an Arid Canyon/Castle Eggman style skybox, I feel! That's more something to implement later down the line when the levels are mostly designed, but a skybox that's made up of the entire island and consistent with where the player is would be really neat, like a Super Mario Sunshine feel.

I personally don't know how flexible SRB2 is with horizonally moving walls like the train idea, I hope it can be pulled off.
(Oh and uh, please don't put killzones in areas where it looks like the player should be able to stand safely! giving them a way of getting back sounds better)
 

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I realise there's a *lot* of midtextures to check to see if they're working correctly, I hope there's some sort of streamlined way to check their collision in the map builder.
You can in fact set up Zone Builder's line colors to highlight things like midtextures, and whether they are solid.
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These are my settings for line colors for my work and they help quite a bit, shown is solid midtextures.
 
Hey, just so that you know, this isnt how you do sky-boxes in srb2.


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Each level has a set to do a sky-box like that, rename your sky texture's filename to "SKYn", but replace the "n" with a number. Then, open your level header and add a line that says "SkyNum = n" but replace the "n" with the number you entered for your sky texture's filename.



Then, in Zone-Builder, set a ceiling or floor texture to F_SKY1, and then set the walls to have no textures, by typing "-" in the lower, mid, or upper texture slot. The F_SKY1 flat isn't actually a real flat, the engine just treats it as a way determine where it renders a given level's sky-box.

Aside from that, the level is pretty fun, if a bit and unpolished. I think your levels would improve greatly if you added more vertical variance in the level geometry. Right now, you have a lot of slopes and hills and such, but generally, when your level goes down, it tends to go upwards right after, resulting in the level still feeling flat. There are a few exceptions to this, though. The part in the first level where you jump down into the city is pretty good, cause it makes the level feel more like an actual island with varied elevation, instead of a flat plane with a few bumps. Also, I think that you should try using fofs for decorative stuff more often. They can act as a really good way of preventing your levels from feeling overly Doom-ish, you know? Also, try to use 90-degree or 45-degree slope linedefs as often as possible, because otherwise you'll risk having all these ugly seams in between your slopes.
 

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Well, what can I say except... Hot dang.
You really gave this level a good feeling of being an open space in a lived in area, with plenty of ways to go that feel on-par with a more adventure-styled level. I loved running this and trying to move as quickly through as possible, and the music choices definitely help. I've also noticed that, while you haven't included any major gimmicks, for the most part the two levels available feel different enough that they don't really need the gimmicks, as both have their own little sense of speed and scope.

However, alongside everything else mentioned here, I do have my own two major gripes to give, and as I can't seem to put gifs in my post like everyone else for some reason, I'll have to use an imgur collection. I'll still post my descriptions for posterity.

https://imgur.com/a/soVoADa
In my opinion, those tight twisty and turny sloped areas don't exactly work too well in srb2. While it my just be my opinion for all I know, I do suggest making them have a little bit more space to stand on so that extensive slope-based paranoia doesn't start setting in. I am talking about specifically a part in both act 1 and act 2, of which the first two gifs show.

Second, try to avoid, whenever possible, letting enemies access checkpoints like they can at the end of act 2 with all the commanders. This is not fair to the player and caused me a fair share of deaths before I could properly see and react to them. As for why I didn't spin, I panicked, sue me.
 
Ah yes, the Skybox.
When I made a test map to try out the 3d skybox I managed to pull it off.

But with the current pk3 file setup, the F_Sky texture ignores my commands whether it's assigned to a specific SKY135 texture or the Skybox viewpoint thing in the level itself. It either shows a random inapproperiate texture if I'm lucky, or flickers between several textures and crashes if I'm less lucky.
Guess something I wrote down in the SOC script messed it up.
Hope I don't trigger it again when I start a new project.
 
Ah yes, the Skybox.
When I made a test map to try out the 3d skybox I managed to pull it off.

But with the current pk3 file setup, the F_Sky texture ignores my commands whether it's assigned to a specific SKY135 texture or the Skybox viewpoint thing in the level itself. It either shows a random inapproperiate texture if I'm lucky, or flickers between several textures and crashes if I'm less lucky.
Guess something I wrote down in the SOC script messed it up.
Hope I don't trigger it again when I start a new project.
SKY135 is part of an unused animated sky, so you'll need to pick a different number. 136 is free.
 
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhh.
There we go, now I can get it to work. I'll be darned. Of all the random numbers I had to pick. And I could have seen it if I checked the actual sky texture file names instead of just assume since there's 45 of them, anything above that is fair game. Derp. Oh well. Thanks PencilVoid.

Hm, a 3d skybox only works on flats, does it? I can get a regular 2d skybox to project on an untextured wall, but not the 3d skybox, that's normal?
The Wiki doesn't seem to tell.
 
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If you're trying to get the sky-texture like it is in normal levels, you need to have the ceiling of your map set as the first basic sky texture. Not the one you want to use, that one is set by the level header. I believe the proper one is Sky1? It's just blue with clouds, used back in 2.1.

Next, to make walls show the sky texture, you need to make a Thokbarrier. You do this by setting the top of the wall's height to the same height as the bottom, so that the difference between the top and bottom equals 0. Doing this right will produce an effect similar to this one on the Wiki. this will let you show the sky all around, while the bottom of the thokbarrier looks like floor.
300px-Sample-thokbarrier.png


If you want to make it seem like the floor goes on endlessly in a direction (for example, the water), set the outer linedef on your thokbarrier as this. https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/Linedef_type_41
This'll give the illusion of a texture stretching on indefinitely, somewhat like this
SEJylsY.png


They may show older versions, but the info I'm giving is up to date, Roger.
If I am wrong, correct me pals.
 
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