I ran into some computer trouble which unfortunately delayed this release by a couple days, but here's a preview release of my Sonic 3 Special Stage editor, S3SSEdit! Download All of the main editing tools are fully functional, but there are several things that have not been implemented yet: Project support, including S&K layout and Blue Sphere support Background grid option Image import Image export Automatic perfect counting (no idea how to do this one) Saved sections (stamps) Full 3D rendering
Hey, nice work MainMemory! While I don't have a reason to use this, I would say one important feature would be to have the stage spread out a bit, with the orbs separated a little more. This'll make it harder to make mistakes.
Well, I was thinking a little wider in distance than that, not at the extreme distance of the actual game mind, but at least large enough: If selected anywhere in that red box, that sphere is effected, there's enough space there that one can quickly, without painful and slow alignment of the mouse, click and change that sphere at lightning speed, because there's enough range not to miss it. Likewise, there's little chance of accidentally changing a sphere that they don't want to change. It'll reduce mental anguish. One thing that does look exciting, is the tool-set you have on the left there. The bucket fill, square, diamond, line, and even ellipse! Looks like quite a nice and solid tool-set, I can see a great deal of promise in those who will use your tool. It has great potential!
I find that to be a bit too much space, but I may just make the grid size configurable. I may also scale up the sphere graphics to multiples of 24 when the grid is large enough. Maybe you have no use for an S3 Special Stage editor, but I will probably be able to adapt it into a S1 Special Stage editor(/S3K Slot Bonus editor). I may also port the tools into SonLVL's drawing feature, and potentially a new plane mappings editor.
Looks nice! I will definitely use this whenever I feel motivated to start hacking S3&K again. I have one question about one of the planned features though. How exactly will Blue sphere support work? There are like 134 million stages...
^considering that Blue Sphere produces all those levels from combinations of a relatively modest 128 quadrants, I would assume Blue Sphere support would come in the form of editing the individual quadrants or expanding the set of quadrants and then letting Blue Sphere do it's thing to create levels from the modified/expanded quadrant set. Does make me wonder if there's ever been a hack that allows direct input of quadrant numbers or that challenges the player to beat the 128 levels formed by four copies of the same quadrant.
Technically Blue Sphere does allow you to directly choose the quadrants by entering a code. For Blue Sphere support, I'm definitely going to have individual chunk editing, but I'm also thinking about supporting full stages, by entering a level number, stage number, code, or by supplying a rom to read the header of.
I thought the algorithms used to produce the seemingly random levels from the individual chunks also gave the same kind of randomness to the level codes. Then again, it's been years since I've been able to play blue sphere or played around with one of those online map/code generators for Blue Sphere, so if I ever noticed a pattern in the codes, I might just have forgotten.
Release 2 is now available in SonLVL's updater. Increased grid size. Added layout section support Added option to save undo history Paste once action selects the pasted area Added project file support with S&K stage support Added indicators for yellow sphere landing areas. Edit: Oh right, you can get a project file for the S&K disassembly here. Put it in the root folder of the disassembly.
Release 3 adds full support for Blue Sphere, including individual chunk and full stage editing. I also fixed a mixup between east/west starting angles, and a crash when the empty space is the selected foreground item.
Update, now includes a text insertion feature (on the context menu), adds support for codes for Blue Sphere stage layouts, fixes bug where Blue Sphere stage layouts wouldn't save, fixes issue with start position tool not drawing correctly, and S3SSEdit now remembers your settings and the files you've recently edited. Additionally, I've upgraded the program from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.6.2.