While Felik is just being Felik as usual, his comment does underline an issue with fangaming coming into the 3D age though. I mean, you have everything from concept artists to asset creators to the actual level designers to lighting engineers in the actual industry pipeline. The more complex the game, the harder it is for individuals or small groups to wear all the hats and come close to commercial products, and to a large extent it shows. I'm not saying it's a bad thing - no one expects a small group of people in their free time to create something like what's in the game currently from scratch (as opposed to, say, working off Sweet Mountain) but the fact remains that as talented as some people in the community are, there really are a limited of man hours anyone can throw at stuff like this. The only way I can ever foresee stages with a reasonably close amount of visual candy to existing stages being created from the ground up is via combined efforts, with people working on little things and someone in charge keeping style/detail/etc consistent and putting it all together, but hey, this particular fandom has a notorious track record w.r.t community projects so... Otherwise, lower your expectations. Gee. This isn't a slight to all the amazing work people are doing with the tools we have right now. I'm just being realistic.
If you're having a tough time porting SA2 levels to Generations, Gorilla5 made this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1ZYNp9bEc&feature=plcp It's a pretty detailed tutorial, so I imagine it'll answer most questions related to SA2 and Generations.
I know that you're Sonictheplumber, I just simply forgot to point it out. Sorry for the confusion involving that. Anyways, I am happy that you found the 'combination' (I can't really call it a proper mod.) to be fine. In fact, I was thinking about making a mod that removes the dash panels and homing attack chains from the levels. (Replacing the homing attack chains with platforms and having classic spring-pads.) Although, I need both the permissions of you and DarioFF, since I would be using both of your material. I will be giving credit to both of you, if I do get permission. Sorry if I sound too demanding or anything.
I'm actually working on removing the dash panels in the levels right now for the next update, which will be out soon.
I think one of the possible, main solutions to this problem would be creating a bunch of "building block" models that can be easily modified, expanded and/or retextured to fit the kind of levels one is trying to create. I'd like to be able to build 3D levels entirely with 'tiles' like I would a 2D level.
A potential issue that crops up from that is you don't want the world to look blocky. In fact, the less perpendicular things are, the more 'natural' or 'modern' it looks. (Barring obviously expected things like walls being 90' from flooring herp) Back in the Quake/Worldcraft days (which essentially was the first truly 3D modding scenario/community) the concept of prefabs was a really big step forward in workflow - and in fact is the foundation for level creation in almost any number of modern 3D games (see: Call of Duty, Skyrim, etc) where essentially assets like houses, trees, bins, etc were created by people other than the one who actually puts the level together. You could say it's similar to tilesets, but not limited to being of any set size, and not being required to fit like a jigsaw just due to the more organic nature of a 3D environment. Most level designers are capable of putting the basic 'playable area' geometry together in a sane amount of man hours. It's all the little details, be it within the playable area itself (street lamps, benches, breakable objects, bridges, buildings, etc) or dotting the background to break up the simplicity of a horizon ('facade' in industry jargon) that would be insane for any single person to attempt to tackle alone.
Anyone mind helping explain why I keep having Collision Creation give me this warning "Shape shrinking not supported for mesh shapes. 'Extra Radius' will be 0. Performance may be affected." Now it doesn't seem to be a problem but well... Collision is about 17000% bigger than the stage itself. (That's a small rock in the stage. Don't mind the image resolution either, I play in forced window mode whenever I'm testing my stages.) I tried convex hull but that seemed to make it worse.
This is only partially true. It all depends on how much effort someone wants to put into a project, their skill level and their general willingness to make it look pretty. I've spent the past 48 hours alone just touching up existing geometry and making collision in Sweet Mountain and Radical Train. No offense to Damizean (although, I'm sure he wouldn't take offense, since he didn't create this fanbase), but lumping Blitzsonic "level designers" with what we're doing is fucking retarded. (Referring to Felik.) Any number of us could produce a better level than 99% of Blitzsonic's userbase. Also do note that layout comes first, pretty lights and geometry come last. Always. Melpontro and Hinchy know this.
Not to discredit your work so far (screenshots pretty much have my jaw on my lap) but that's working off assets that are already there. To a certain extent that's always the way hacks have been done (tileset editing, extension, spritesheet touchup, simple palette swaps, etc) but my point was, the amount of effort it takes to create an entire landscape in a 3D environment out of nothing but a concept far exceeds the amount of effort it takes to create tiles/sprites/backdrop/etc out of nothing but a concept. You're absolutely right that dedication and persistence go a long way regardless. How many of us actually have that luxury though.
Yeah, what I meant by saying that was, I'm using existing geometry and it took me two full days to get where I am now (screenshots I've shown so far were only a day in), just think of how long it would take for me if I made my own.
Well, that's actually mostly what I meant, honestly. More quality open-source assets would go a long, long way to helping prospective level designers to actually realize their visions.
How would more assets mean more copy and paste? I'd figure it would give you more options and possibilities. Or does it entirely depend on the level designers' vision?
Copy and paste is the basis of a great deal of 3D level design. The trick is to obscure that fact from the player in various ways. If your level LOOKS like a whole bunch of copypasta, you're not doing it right. Edit: Also, this guy makes some absolutely fantastic open source 3D models and textures. The models are mostly plants, barrels, boxes, bombs, and some sweet pillars, but they're quality stuff.
If there's a set of assets out there, made for fans to use to get cracking on custom levels, then we're going to get a bunch of levels that look the same, because they're ALL going to use those assets. I have nothing against the creation of these assets, but it's not going to help diversify and increase the overall quality of custom stages. I mean, if all the assets look good then the stages will, of course. But they'll all look the same...undermining the point of making those assets in the first place. The people that have the vision, determination, and skill to make a completely custom stage will do so without much use of pre-made content, and the rest of us will snap these assets together like lego blocks and have fun with it. Absolutely. But what I'm saying is that most people don't have the skill to "do it right". So there'll be that one diamond in the rough that makes great use of these assets, and a million straws of hay that just cobble things together because they want to make a custom stage for Generations. Let me reiterate, I have no problem with this happening whatsoever. Unlike other assholes, I don't turn up my nose at "BlitzSonic stages". It's not like I'm paying for them. I'm just expressing my concern that the result of such an endeavor will undermine the endeavor itself.
