It's the little things that matter.

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Eliwood

Eliwood

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I was playing an older build of Sonic Robo Blast 2 the other day (specifically the one right before the current version) and I turned on the Christmas mode. And it felt great to be able to play in this mode. Christmas music was playing, and the scenery was filled with Christmas Trees and it was snowing and it all felt great. Needless to say this honestly disappointed me later because when I tried to load it up on the current Srb2, there was no Christmas mode.

I can understand that certain levels cannot work with the Christmas theme at all, but is there any particular reason why stages just couldn't be fixed to cater to this? Because when I played the older versions, there was nothing greater than being able to load up srb2 on Christmas day to be hit with Christmas music and snow and everything, and it was just great.

And even outside of reasons for not being in there, do you wish it would come back? Do you think srb2 should keep it's Christmas/Winter mode?
 
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Oh not this again.

You want Christmas SRB2? Go grab Glaber's mod. There you go. Another reason was that it snowing on every stage botched up multiplayer since some people wern't in Christmas mode and such, but there's more to Christmas mode's dissapearence then that. There was a topic that covered all of this, but you'll have to dig for it.
 
D00D64 said:
Oh not this again.

You want Christmas SRB2? Go grab Glaber's mod. There you go. Another reason was that it snowing on every stage botched up multiplayer since some people wern't in Christmas mode and such, but there's more to Christmas mode's dissapearence then that. There was a topic that covered all of this, but you'll have to dig for it.
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I suppose I'll get right on that although I'm sure I saw it before.

Although I don't quite understand people's huge hatred for the Christmas edition (outside of Multiplayer) because all it is, is like a different season on the game.

Maybe I'm just out of the loop, and maybe people just strongly disagree with me and I'm probably one of the only small group of people that actually appreciated this mode. If no one else even remotely likes this, I suppose I apologize for wasting everyone's time.
 
D00D64 said:
Another reason was that it snowing on every stage botched up multiplayer since some people wern't in Christmas mode and such
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From a technical standpoint, this should not be a problem, the snow should really be client side.
 
^ just simply it could be a single player mode-only feature and then an unlockable.
 
I'm just going to copy-paste my reply from the LAST thread to bring this up:

The system clock based features are not coming back. There are a ton of reasons for this, but the best reason is that they simply weren't all that well-liked. Constant issues with the feature in netplay, along with the feature not being all that interesting to begin with, lead to a general hate of the feature among a significant portion of the community, myself included. I'd actually been on a crusade to remove Christmas mode for the better part of 5 years at that point.

If you want such a feature to return, my suggestion is that you make a mod to do it, but considering the history of how awful those have been in the past, I really don't recommend it.
 
Mystic said:
lead to a general hate of the feature among a significant portion of the community
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But is the online compatibility really the ONLY reason people hate the feature? Or is there seriously a much deeper reason to hate something such as this?

While I'm not going to play the role of the coding expert, but couldn't there just be a thing where everyone who joins the "Xmas" server has their game automatically forced into that mode along with there being a vice versa? For example if someone is in Xmas Mode, but the server host was playing non-Xmas it would force-change his game mode to be the default mode?

Sorry if my grasp of coding isn't very good as I really don't know too much about this stuff.
 
Oh, I'm not saying that is isn't fixable. It's definitely fixable. The issue is that it's not worth it. Try glaber's mod that reimplements it into the game, and you can see exactly why. There's really nothing good about the mode that you can't get with a pretty picture of snow and some Christmas music, and around here you can get that at any retailer from November 1st to January 1st.
 
That still doesn't explain why a significant portion of community hates the Christmas feature. Or was it just the inability to work online that everyone hated about it?
 
It's a mediocre retexture of the game with music that quite a few people hate and takes up a significant amount of space for any decent quality that automatically enables itself for a rather surprisingly long period every year. The snow textures aren't very good in our game, and therefore obscure things graphically, being absurdly bright, especially in open, outdoor areas like GFZ that the feature works in. It also enables precipitation in maps that aren't necessarily going to be designed for it, which can cause significant framerate problems because the precipitation code is one gigantic hack. There's also the issue that most of our stages really don't work with it like the demo stages did. GFZ and THZ can be made to look like a snowy area. DSZ, RVZ and ERZ really can't.

Again, if you really want the experience again, glaber made a mod to do it in 2.0 somewhere in releases (although the thread was locked because of how awful it is, kinda driving my point home), or you could even make one yourself, as all Christmas mode ever did was change a few textures, turn precipitation to snow, and replace the music. We're not ever going to be reimplementing it into SRB2, though.
 
I think another part may have been the mode sometimes causing crashes, though I personally don't remember crashing on Christmas mode. Another complaint I remember was that the mode lasted too long.

There was also the boot command -noxmas that not many people knew about or knew how to use without the launcher.

Also I thought you locked the thread because of the mod it was bundled with. Not because of the Christmas mode mod
 
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glaber said:
Also I thought you locked the thread because of the mod it was bundled with. Not because of the Christmas mode mod
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Because of both.

I guess this thread just goes to prove that no matter how much people hate a feature, they still want it back if you remove it. The other day I asked the IRC channel what they think about the SRB1 Remake. The general consensus was that it's unbearably awful. Yet when I suggested that it should be removed from SRB2 on these grounds, everybody went "hell no!".
 
I actually really love Christmas Mode. I'd work on a mod to reinstate it if it weren't for the fact that I can't make textures for shit, so recoloring all the textures in the game might be a bit beyond me.
 
If Christmas mode were to be put back in as a single-player unlockable with no netplay, would it negatively affect/break any other part of the game?
 
I personally liked the atmosphere christmas mode brought. A lot. Sure, I miss it, but reimplementing it wouldn't be worth the effort. I'd much rather see some nice christmas-themed levels come along this season; that way we can actually play something new.
 
Not to get your hopes down but, Christmas themed levels have been done a lot.
 
I liked the original Christmas levels, for their holiday atmosphere (especially some of the music) and because it's a relative mess compared to what we have today. We've got levels with no sense of direction, levels with overly narrow corridors, levels with what amounts to navigating through looping air ducts... It's impressive to see how far the game has come, but there's a sense of unbridled and unfocused charisma and limitless potential in the early stuff. It's almost heartwarming.

But I suppose there are always copies of the old releases for that. I've always thought that Drilla Killa would be a good enemy to reintroduce into modern versions of the game, either as an basic, slow enemy that damages you when you jump onto it (like how that turtle robot can't be rolled into) or as an enemy that drops from the ceiling as the player approaches.
 
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