Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Kharen - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

So, I finally got around to downloading a copy of 3DS Max 2015 to use to model some video game level ideas that I had. However, I have a slight hurdle. I have absolutely no idea how to use this program and need to learn from scratch.

I figure that there's enough people on this site that use the program, whether it be for designing through SonicGDK or levels to add into Sonic Generations that somebody here would have a recommendation on how to learn to use this program. (it is WAY more advanced than SketchUp!)

Right now, I'm using tutorials by some YouTuber called "thenewboston". They seem to be going fine, but very slowly. I know that I should expect to go straight to modeling something amazing, but I'm five videos in and I haven't even learned how to attach two boxes to each other.

So, what do you guys recommend?

I was wanting to play with editing the Game Gear/Master System games, and remembered that the Aspect Edit program is supposed to be able to let me do this. However, the link to the tutorial and directions on how to use the program doesn't work anymore. Google provided no results, so I was wondering if anybody here knew where I can learn how the program works. I'd like to see if this is something I'll understand using before I devote any large amount of time into it. I've bought programs and tools for other projects before and hit a wall when it came to the learning curve. I'd like to look into this one beforehand, just in case.

I'm sure many of you guys know of the unlicensed NES game "Somari", where Sonic-themed levels are played through using Mario. While the enemy placement and controls leave the game difficult to the point of nearly being unplayable, the level design itself seems rather well done for an unlicensed game. A bit rough, with a few un-escapable spike pits and such (in Green Hill Zone, no less!), but interesting enough to leave me rather impressed. I've been playing with the idea to port the levels themselves to a more competent engine (probably hacking them into a Sonic game, preferably one of the Master System/Game Gear ones for consistency to what the original seems to be trying to imitate), but as far as I have been able to find, no map viewer exists for this.

Playing the game and recording it isn't the most optimal solution to figuring out all of the level layouts due to the difficulty of the game, so I wanted to ask. Does anybody have any ideas on how to view the level designs to this game?

I've had the GameCube discs for Sonic Mega Collection and Sonic Gems Collection for a fairly long time. My parents are divorced, and several years ago I went to live with my mom, leaving nearly all of my old gaming stuff behind for my little brother, including these games. Fast forward to present day. I recently got into hacking my Wii, and started looking through some old GameCube ISOs to put onto a flash drive and play. The other day, I downloaded the ISO for Sonic Mega Collection and I started thinking about how it was put together.

Exactly how do these two collection discs work? Do they just run an emulator with the old games on it, or are the games actually ported over to the more recent systems? If it is just an emulator and ROMs, would it be overly difficult to exchange the Sonic ROMs with other Genesis ones and play them instead? I am absolutely never going to play the games like Spinball, Mean Bean Machine, or Flicky, but I wouldn't mind piecing together my own little collection set. (1, 2, 3&K [removing the separate 3 and S&K games], CD, R, Saturn 3D Blast, NiGHTS)

I was thinking about the different processes behind hacking Sonic CD, or at least what I've managed to pick up from reading different conversations about the topic on this site, and had a couple questions I'd like to ask. I recall reading that each level is programmed as though it is its own game, and that you can change things on a per-level basis. If I were to make it so there would be different levels where you play as Sonic, levels you play as Tails, and levels you play as Knuckles, could I just copy and paste the character code after implementing it once, or are there individual things that I would need to set and have to manually go into each one and do every single level by hand?

My other question is if it's a difficult process to rearrange levels. I was thinking about removing the time travel gimmick and using each version of each level as its own unique level, to add length to the game. (Actually, I wanted to do things like Sonic Adventure, where each character has their own unique story, and they go through different levels when you play as them, but simple ideas first.) I've never hacked a Sonic game before, and this would probably be a casual spare-time project instead of trying to produce something all at once. (5 minutes here and there, doing things as the ideas come to me instead of having everything planned out at once), so most of what I want to know is just idle curiosity, not preparing for some huge crazy project. Still, for some reason it's bugging me and I would like to know.