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Why Sonic level hacks are more TC-oriented

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by saxman, May 28, 2024.

  1. saxman

    saxman

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    This is something that I was pondering about recently, and I think it's a really interesting question.

    Back in the late '90s, I wanted to make my own Sonic levels. My main mission was to somehow make that possible. So I began hacking the games and figuring stuff out, and by early 2000, knew enough to create a brand new level inside a savestate (and in the case of Sonic 2 beta, the ROM as well). Eventually the first three ever completely new levels were created for Sonic 2 beta, Sonic 2 final, and Sonic 1, by SSNTails, myself, and Stealth, respectively. These were individual levels not intended to replace everything in the game.

    Now my vision for everything Sonic hacking related was to do things like DOOM, by having some common upload location on the internet to house levels, art music, etc. I figured TCs (aka "total conversions") would be part of that, but to a lesser extent. Pretty much just like the DOOM mapping community. Very individual-map focused.

    By 2002, this stuff was finally starting to gain major traction across the Sonic research scene, with lots of different hacks popping up by some very creative people with big goals in mind. Everyone was taking the TC route to hacking. Fast forward to today, and that approach has remained true.

    But let me back up... WHY did this happen so differently from DOOM? DOOM has Deathmatch, but then many of the DOOM maps were designed to be fully playable in single player mode. DOOM allowed you to load patch WAD files rather than replacing the internal WAD data, which is unlike hacking a Sonic ROM, so maybe that has something to do with it. I don't know what the answer is, but it's very perplexing how despite pushing the community in a direction pretty much parallel with the DOOM community, the Sonic community ultimately took a different approach. Apart from those first number of levels from decades ago, you don't really see individual level hacks done... ever!

    Any theories on why this happened this way?
     
  2. DefinitiveDubs

    DefinitiveDubs

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    Even in 3&K, the average stage takes an average of 2.5 minutes to complete. In contrast, the average Doom II level can take upwards of 10 minutes to complete. A single Sonic level just doesn't hold the same amount of content/value that a single Doom level does. You're likely to spend more time searching for, finding, and installing a single Sonic level than actually playing and beating it.

    Doom levels encourage you to explore every nook and cranny, to find alternate exits or secrets, but they also time you so both 100% runs and speedruns are equally valid playstyles. This means in addition to taking more time to complete, Doom levels have more replay value. Sonic levels don't really encourage exploration; it's more about just beating it in the most efficient way possible. Secret areas in Sonic are intended to help you towards the goal of beating the stage, but in Doom, secret areas are meant to be intrinsically enjoyable by themselves. The act of uncovering a secret in Doom is just inherently more fun than it is in Sonic.

    But more than that, I dunno, the vibes are different. When I play a platformer, I like having a sense of progression, with a final boss to face. I like level transitions and feeling like I'm on a journey, with a story, and Doom just...doesn't really do that. Doom is purely focused on the gameplay, as a series of disconnected challenges, with the final boss being a nice ending to your playthrough, rather than the actual end goal. Platformers need that feeling of adventure and progression, which a single level just doesn't provide, and I think that's why Super Mario Maker's hype died off when people realized something was missing and it was never going to make Mario games obsolete.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2024
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  3. jbr

    jbr

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    Speaking solely for myself - I'm not sure how much it applies to the modding scene in general - creating a game rather than a level was always a creative driver for me. I was more excited by the flow of level to level and the changes from dark to light, nature to technology, building up to a final climax etc. which Sonic games have. I used to think about it and draw designs as a child, and I revisted the idea as an adult, planning hacks of at least three zones rather than a single one. Further, I would plan major aesthetic differences between each of the acts in the zones. That was part of the fun. (Incidentally, I turned out not to have the patience nor art skills for making decent hacks, so I never actually completed anything!).

    Interestingly, being part of this community has made me appreciate the art of single level design much more. Reading what people have analyzed about level design makes me appreciate things that had previously passed me by. And probably, level design is far more important to the player's enjoyment than the aesthetic gimmicks which I enjoyed dreaming up, so I probably wouldn't have made a particularly good hack if I'd ever put the time in. But no matter what, designing a single level is still nowhere near as exciting to me as designing a sequence of levels.
     
  4. Lilly

    Lilly

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    Maybe with the eventual release of Lapper's Sonic Studio, the spirit of individual levels could get the limelight they deserve? A stage-editing game built on years of hacking knowledge, no less.

    In DOOM's case, it's possible to both enjoy a new level on its own, and mix-and-match a pile of levels together, playlist style. (If someone doesn't mind putting time into a script that loads various community-made maps over vanilla levels.) I quite enjoyed that in SRB2's earlier days, before there was a finished vanilla campaign to play. I don't think this is possible with ROMs.

    But I have to admit, I agree with jbr; there's something special about that sense of progression between levels. Something drives me to want to create whole games and be a developer, rather than putting on a stage designer hat every once in a while for fun.

    I never stopped and considered that was The Pattern here?
     
  5. Kilo

    Kilo

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    I'll be a bit snarky and just say that you can find 1 level Sonic hacks. They're just not any good because they're attempts at making TC's that the creators couldn't be bothered to do anything more than GHZ1, or sometimes even just half of GHZ1. :V
     
  6. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    You can do more with Doom.

    With (Mega Drive) Sonic, the maps were made before the artwork, so the art is tailored around Hirokazu Yasuhara's vision. You can rearrange the chunks, but it's not always easy to make brand new levels that flow as well as the originals, and they can often look kinda crappy. And then you have noise like Hill Top Act 2 where when you reach a certain position, the earthquake triggers - you're even more limited in Sonic 3 unless your levels are left broadly in-tact, because it was always very tightly designed. If you need fancy-pants disassemblies and technical knowledge to edit out the hard-coded events, you might as well make something totally new.


    Doom also benefits in that you can get a fair bit of variety even with the stock set of textures. You're not stuck making variations of E1M1 in the same way as you're stuck making variations of Green Hill Zone.


    There may also have been a driving force back in the old days where if your map was really good, it might get picked up commercially, a la Final Doom.
     
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  7. Clownacy

    Clownacy

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    I think one of the main reasons is that Doom's engine is fairly decoupled from its levels, while Sonic has them tied together: you can't swap a zone's badniks without editing PLCs and altering their sprites to suit the palette, you need to edit code to change where the bosses spawn and how and where the camera's boundaries change, etc.

    Perhaps not helping matters is that Doom is effectively one single engine, while Sonic hacking is fragmented across Sonic 1, 2, and 3&K's engines. Doom 2's engine is backwards-compatible with Doom 1's levels, while just porting Sonic 1's levels to Sonic 2 is itself a massive undertaking. Since porting levels from one game to another is so much work, people often resolve to just backport features from later games, like the Spin Dash and Elemental Shields. And if you're going to go through all the effort of backporting features, reworking sprites to fit alternate palettes, and writing new camera boundary events, you're not just simply making levels anymore. Meanwhile, in Doom, the engine leaves no features to backport, all enemies already work in any level, and changing level events is a natural part of the level editing process that is done within the editor.

    There's also the matter of Sonic levels being more complicated: being made of grids of 256x256/128x128 chunks of 16x16 blocks of 8x8 tiles with sloped and directional collision, level geometry is just hard to make - even something simple like a new Green Hill Zone layout. Meanwhile in Doom you draw 2D lines, arrange them into sectors, assign them floor and ceiling heights, textures, brightnesses, and damage attributes. In a way, comparing the process of making Doom maps and Sonic levels is like comparing making something out of vectors and voxels: Doom's maps are like drawing a blueprint, creating an entire wall with a single line, while Sonic levels are like building something brick-by-brick, with even a simple wall requiring that it be assembled out of blocks. Maybe it comes down to level graphics and level geometry being one and the same in Sonic, and completely separate in Doom.

    Overall, my point is that just making a custom level is so complicated that, by that point, you might as well be making a total conversion.
     
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  8. LordOfSquad

    LordOfSquad

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    This is usually true, except when it's not.
     
  9. Billy

    Billy

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    I've always had a theory, that if a 2D fangame could replicate what was done with SRB2, we could see such more individual levels, characters, etc. being distributed on their own. Granted, SRB2 runs on the Doom engine, so it had a leg up. But the idea would be lower the barrier of entry in the same way. That means people being able to open an editor, and make a level or whatever that can be distributed in a self-contained file, similar to Doom's .wad files. The game would have built-in support and an in-game UI for loading addon content. Also, I think it's important that it be a game that people can mod (again, like SRB2) and not an engine/framework/etc. We already have plenty of the latter. As far as I know such a thing doesn't exist, not as I'm imagining it anyway, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I've had ideas for such a thing myself, of course.

    A similar thing could be implemented as a hack, but it'd be harder technically, I imagine.
     
  10. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    It's the WAD format. It makes single level editing much more easy in doom, because you can wrap everything up in the single level. Despite this, when you load the WAD, it still usually has the doom dressings. Doom makes it much easier to load single level mods than Sonic.
     
  11. DigitalDuck

    DigitalDuck

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    Of all the reasons given, this is the most likely one. Doom mods are shared as individual levels, because levels are stored as individual files in the game. On the other hand, the Sonic ROM is all packaged together, so you can't just share a file and put it in your game.

    Custom levels being more complicated to make in Sonic doesn't help, but I don't think it's the main reason.

    It would be nice to be able to create individual levels and share them. Maybe Sonic Studio will help with that?
     
  12. Kilo

    Kilo

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    I do have an idea of how you could implement a WAD styled format into the Mega Drive games (Or Sonic 1 at least) but that's probably putting too much on my plate given the other projects I've got going on. But it's not impossible. Although Sonic Studio would absolutely be more flexible and designed for that type of sharing.
     
  13. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    wad style format is just a huge byte list of values in a file, it's less of a format and more just serialized data. You read it by creating typedef structus the size of individual elements you want to read then putting them into a larger struct and casting the data to it. There's really nothing special about the wad format itself, it's more the concept of compartmentalized data that's important. Today, it'd be far easier to use modern data formats, like json or even lua tables to store single level data and creating a tool to go along to convert the readable format into data you can inject straight into the disassembly as incbin.
     
  14. Brainulator

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    I also suspect part of it is that the Sonic Hacking Contest tends to lead creators to more extensive hacks than single-level mods.

    Sonic Mania, on the other hand, I remember seeing a good number of single-level mods upon release. I think Sonic 3 & Knuckles comes in a more level-modular format in Sonic Jam, though I don't think that's particularly conducive to ROM hacking.
     
  15. Cooljerk

    Cooljerk

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    Thinking about it, there are tons of single level mods for Sonic Generations as well. There's one really well known TC mod for it, but far more lesser known single level ports/original creations.
     
  16. Blastfrog

    Blastfrog

    See ya starside. Member
    Not entirely true. While most source ports remove this restriction, Vanilla DOOM2.EXE explicitly disables any and all object code from Doom 2 whilst running a Doom 1 game (however it still permits all map action specials). Reason for this is likely so that people couldn’t put Doom 2 monsters or the Super Shotgun in Doom 1 maps, they wanted you to buy the new game (much like how the shareware version of Doom 1 itself refuses to load any PWADs, buy the game cheapskate).
     
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  17. This "TC over single-level addition" thing can be said for the ROM hacking scene as a whole. Look at the Mario hacking scene. Most level mods for SM64 aren't just one new room in the castle. They're completely new sets of levels.
     
  18. Blast Brothers

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    As someone who got into Doom mapping but never really did much Sonic hacking, I think the two communities produce bodies of work with very different characteristics, and I think there are a lot of things that cause that.

    Here's the key: you can enhance the Doom experience without actually adding anything. I would say the biggest difference between the original Doom maps and modern mapsets is less about increased complexity or ambition (though that's definitely present), and more about the advances in level design, enemy placement, pacing, environmental storytelling, understanding of monster behavior, progression, etc. that have taken place. People are still coming up with new applications for the guns, monsters, and especially the textures that have been in the game the whole time.

    For whatever reason, it doesn't seem like Sonic hacks have benefited from the same design maturation as Doom. Maybe it's because AAA studios don't make 2D platformers anymore, but have been making FPS games (and learning how to make them good) nonstop since the 90s. Maybe it's because Doom as a medium is simply more flexible than Sonic is. Maybe it actually has happened and I didn't notice. I don't know. But I think that's the biggest difference between the two communities.


    Additionally, the Sonic games don't have quite as smooth of a difficulty gradient when it comes to making edits to the game. It feels like there's a valley between what's trivial and what requires deep knowledge. I think this manifests in a distribution of hacks that skews towards the extremes of creators' capabilities. Doom has more low and medium complexity tasks - and thus releases - by comparison.
    • It's really easy to add things like new graphics and music to Doom, not just because of the WAD format itself, but because of the formats of the files within: MIDI for music, a custom format for graphics (which is easy to convert PNG's into), and so on. Even things hardcoded into the EXE, like monster behaviors, are stored as a giant state machine that's pretty easy to parse and edit with external tools. No need to worry about arcane data structures like DPLC's or FM patch banks. Another benefit of this is that there are lots of applicable resources just lying around - the Internet is full of MIDI's, and it's easier to make/find/rip wall textures than it is to find or make full Sonic tilesets with a bajillion slope variations.
    • Community improvements to the Doom engine (and the fact that the engine itself is open-source) have made a bunch of modding features and improvements over the base game very easy to implement. You want conveyor belts in your map? Target Boom compatibility and you get them for free, with the bonus that an ad-hoc scripting language was accidentally invented as a consequence. Trying to add conveyor belts to GHZ is a Herculean undertaking in comparison, requiring deep knowledge of the physics, level layout, and animation structures to pull off. There are tutorials, but it's not in the same ballpark in terms of complexity.
    • Sonic hacking is declining in popularity, whereas Doom mapping has arguably never been more popular than it is now. This means the Sonic hacking community is relatively lacking in newcomers, and its population skews towards veterans who, naturally, work on projects that put their experience to good use.
    It's worth noting that, because games like Mania and Generations are modern-developed games with modern engines, it's a lot easier for the average dev to make changes, which is probably why there are more medium-tier releases for those games. It might also be why Sonic fangames exist while Doom fangames mostly don't.

    Basically, if you're dedicated and knowledgeable enough to make a Sonic hack with a moderate amount of changes, you probably know ASM and understand the game on a deep level, and at that point you know everything you need to know to make a very advanced hack. (This is basically what Clownacy said.) Meanwhile, in Doom, it's a given that an author will at least throw in custom music for all but the noobiest of noob efforts, because it's so easy. And because of the nature of 2D vs. 3D art, you're guaranteed to get something that looks "new" even if no new assets are included. So it's only natural that the two communities diverged in this way.

    ===

    Still, I want to try and answer the original question directly. Why are Sonic hacks more TC-oriented than Doom WADs?

    Well... what's a TC, exactly?

    In the Doom space, megawads are mapsets that meet a high length requirement (usually 15 or more maps), while total conversions are mapsets that meet a high custom content requirement (new textures, enemies, weapons, etc). What might surprise you is that the most influential, and consensus "best", Doom mapsets are mostly not considered TC's, though they are either megawads or really long single levels, equivalent to several Sonic zones. WADs like Ancient Aliens and Eviternity use a ton of custom textures and music, and even some tweaks to enemies and weapons, but aren't considered TC's, because you can still tell it's Doom at a glance. But reading this thread, it seems like people are using that term more loosely to mean "multiple-level hacks with custom stuff in them". So I guess I have a frame challenge: Neither the Doom nor the Sonic communities focus on TC's as the Doom community defines them, and if you define a TC more loosely, then I think the bulk of releases from both communities fall under that umbrella.
     
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  19. Battons

    Battons

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    I think most people could in theory open up one of the many disassemblies and move chunks around with how easy the tools are to use. For me the biggest hurdle was not knowing enough about collision and being able to make my own chunks with custom artwork, which there isn’t exactly an easy way to learn for new people. Just gotta put your head down and hammer away at it. That was my experience anyways.
     
  20. Laura

    Laura

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    Single level fangames are actually quite common though. Sonic Overture and Sonic Utopia for example. There are many others too. Different reason but ultimately they are still single level fangames.