QuoteI feel like my styles are not user friendly because it is not exactly written in stone anywhere that you have to go to Sandopolis to get the steel or get the level objects above from Scrap Brain.

Normally I don't like too much redundancy, but I think Flopsy has a point here.

Tilesets should have steelblocks and even if we have tileset mixing it shouldn't be required to always have to resort/point to other sets. Even more if we consider that the majority of levels limit themselves to using only 1 tileset.

I would allow this minor redundancy across the sonic sets. 

QuoteOr am I misunderstanding something here?

Yes.

The option to choose the style variant would have to be coupled with the terrain/object choosing bottom bar and not with the main theme.

Let's say, you choose a main style, then select (for example) orig_dirt in the terrain/object bar below and opon choosing that another field appears where you can choose the variant which is read from the mentioned textfile by the editor. The images on the selection bar change on the fly. So you can choose tiles from orig_dirt and/or (both is then possible) the genesis variant.

So mixing between terrain/objects would be indeed possible after my example suggestion based on Dullstar's idea.

Quote
Just a question: Did you skip the first three levels? I didn't see any replays for those. 39 was missing because of the missing pieces from plom_psychmd, I know - these have been fixed now.

Checked my zip again and it has Noisemaker 1-3. Maybe you overlooked them

Regarding groupie 40: I think a 100% solution is possible, but let's say I don't want to scroll for ages to search deeper for that.    In a more compact level of this type I would consider trying to find one.

QuoteOn the topic of recolors: I know we have recoloring for lemming sprites. Out of curiosity, how complicated would recolor support for entire styles be? It could be a way to allow recolor styles to exist without causing excessive bloat, although a way to distinguish them from their parent sets would probably be best. I envision a system where you would select the parent style you want and then would have the option to choose a recolor from there. Low-effort recolors could be a potential problem created by this, though, so there would probably have to be some somewhat stringent standards for what's enough to be accepted into the automatic downloads (though I'd say any from the official games I think should be allowed to be made).

I think Dullstar is onto something here and it could be the solution for Proxima's/Strato's problems while also reducing the file/folder clutter! 

Possible solution: Don't treat recolors as a new standalone style in a new folder, but have an option inside the editor to choose an existing variant/recoloring of the parent style. Variants are stored in a textfile inside the parent style's folder.

It's just the question how the recoloring is acieved. We want to avoid having to duplicate all piece files inside the folder. Rather than that a textfile could be made where a color variant is specified. An example for the specifications would be: Change the following colors to these colors now.
It is be quite a bit of work to define all the nessesary color swaps in this textfile as there are probably many nessesary ones, but it's way better filenumber/folder wise than to duplicate everything.
This way the variants are also 100% identical physics wise and only provide a recoloring.

Example for the dirt style would be: You create a dirt level and then choose the genesis/etc variant from a selection field that comes up in the editor when recolor variants exist. All variants and how they are generated are stored in a textfile inside the style's folder.
This way things like the golden crystal style could be added without having another nearly identical style folder.

Simply reversing the names is not the general solution here. No Overwrite reverses the meaning, but it still holds true in the standard case.

I would vote for ccexplore's suggestion "draw last"/"draw first".

Quote from: namida on October 28, 2019, 06:41:22 PM

QuoteI see that we need a bit more quality control though to not let the number explode unnessesarily. Maybe for any future submissions exclude slight recolors or near duplicates to avoid any further excessive duplication.

One possible issue here: We can't stop people from posting their custom styles on the forums, we can only exclude them from the NL download, or at most, make NL specifically recognize those styles' names and use the original even if the duplicate is present. (Okay, technically, as forum admins, in theory we could delete posts of such styles and even ban people who repeatedly post them, but this feels ridiculously heavy-handed in practice - and this is coming from someone who was perfectly okay with preventing new posts in the pre-V10 levels releases forum to discourage new pre-V10 content.) Thus, would this "quality control" just end up leading to a de-facto version of the old ways, just with a much larger amount of "core" content?

I am totally against any censorship. If people want to post duplicate styles let them, it's their right. It's only their problem to maintain then and the standard library won't support those styles.

Only the size of the standard library download is the issue here and needs to be prevented from explode any further. The user can hord up as many tilesets as they like, just that standard download is the issue.

Quote
The alternative option may be to go back to how we used to do things - NL comes only with a few core styles, and users must download any extras on their own. Content authors would need to point out what styles are used in their packs, and ideally, where to get them. Downside of this, is that if someone's download link breaks, the style is lost, and all content that relied on it is broken. Also, we now have a whole bunch of content that uses a mix of "core" and "non-core" styles, and creators of this would need to go back and figure out what's included vs what needs to be downloaded.

I am 100% against this. I would rather download 1000 styles than tracking everything down manually and deal with tons of broken links and new topics about missing styles errors like in the old days (Seriously there was one every week or so).

I see that we need a bit more quality control though to not let the number explode unnessesarily. Maybe for any future submissions exclude slight recolors or near duplicates to avoid any further excessive duplication.

For the older near duplicates: Exactly list them, examine the usage and then decide over a possible exclusion.

Seems like we need a little tiebreaker to determine the 2nd finalist! Poll is up!

For the errors:

I still get 1 error: cattrap:catrap is missing on 6 09.

Also you seem to have forgotten to attach strato_generalmd now. I can't find it even looking into the zips.

For noisemaker:

I would still propose to flatten the quite harsh difficulty spikes a bit, as the difficulty itself can be quite over the place. Try to directly point at things in the text and not just vaguely hint at them. Turn some skills into pick-ups near intended positions as that lowers entropy by quite a bit. Even if it's not a tutorial, currently the difficulty is quite unexpectable.

Will continue playing soon.

Quote
OK. Would it be possible to have preferred background colours as a selectable option (where the level creator has not specified one)? For example:

- Default based on style (this would be the default option)
- Black
- Dark Blue
- User Image (upload)

Every level in the game has a specified background, as every level has a main tileset theme that specifies it and this way it is ensured that the background color matches at least reasonably well with the terrain+objects so nothing becomes invisible.

That is the main concern of the background: Everything should always be visible! That's why it's bound to the tilesets (and therefore the levels) and not the user. Here the user option you proposed could really screw you over, as you are not sure anymore if your chosen background creates invisible terrain/objects.

Levels can also have custom background images over the normal background and they can be turned off, but the standard level specific background stays.

Quote from: WillLem on October 27, 2019, 09:39:47 PM
ALSO! I forgot to mention this in the original post, but I much prefer the dark-blue in-game background rather than black. I believe there is an option to create custom backgrounds for individual levels when editing, but it would be good to have this as a basic selectable option in NL itself - dark blue, black, maybe even light blue...?

This has nothing to do with NL itself. The background is determined by the level itself and which tileset it is using. Tilests have different backgrounds as sometimes the standard dark one is working quite poorly with the terrain and/or objects.
So the level designers did in fact chose the background for each level. You would most likely have to edit the level files here.

Quote from: Proxima on October 27, 2019, 08:47:55 PM

Quote from: IchoTolot on October 27, 2019, 05:03:41 PMTileset missing completely:

gronkling_angelisland:block_08    2 33

gronkling_chaosangel:block_23   5 05

I remember these 2 being removed by gronkling's request. So I would swap the tiles out for other ones.

The tilesets were renamed to sonic_angelisland and sonic_chaosangel. The blocks in question still exist.

Thanks, Proxima! Then Strato you only would need to change the tileset name to these by editing the respective level text files.

First of all I still got some errors to report:

I have already tracked down the issues. Following tiles are missing (+ I put the affected levels next to it):

Tiles missing from a set. Here I got the set but the standard library where I got it from doesn't have these tiles. Would suggest replacing them with tiles from the standard library:

plom:psychmd:alt5     2 24, 5 06
plom:psychmd:alt7     1 39, 3 23

For this one gigalem_treemd exists, but not gigalem_treemdbright. Maybe use gigalem_treemd?

gigalem_treemdbright:window         2 02,
gigalem_treemdbright:exit                2 08, 2 09, 4 08
gigalem_treemdbright:trunk_02       4 13
gigalem_treemdbright:leaves_03     6 21

Tileset missing completely:

gronkling_angelisland:block_08    2 33

gronkling_chaosangel:block_23   5 05

I remember these 2 being removed by gronkling's request. So I would swap the tiles out for other ones.

cattrap:cattrap    3 17, 3 21, 5 26, 6 09, 6 33, 8 01, 8 07       

Include this in the download (maybe even in strato_standardmd) + submit to the standard library


I played the first rank (except 1 39 because of a missing tile) and groupie 40. I attached my solutions.

My thoughts:

I think the 1st rank has good levels, although even with the prelevel-texts it fails as an introduction/tutorial rank. The core here is that some of the levels just jump up several stages in difficulty compared to others. I had quite a lot of levels where I really needed like 5-15mins to get it and after that comes a level where I simply need to turn up the RR to 99. For comparison: I would put several of them easily in rank 2 or 3 of Reunion or something similar.

I would either simplyfy the following levels down to ONLY the lesson, or reduce entropy with pick-ups, or maybe make a rank below this called "tutorial" or so (the fat ones are quite extreme cases):

1 04, 1 05, 1 08, 1 10, 1 11, 1 15 (more to that later ), 1 17, 1 19, 1 20, 1 21, 1 22, 1 26, 1 28, 1 35

Spoiler

(here the problem is also that the climber is needed earlier than the wall to get up onto the bottom right corner and it's not explained why)

, 1 38

Even if I acted a bit like a dummy in some of these, the fact that I easily did so proves that way less experienced players will most likely have much bigger problems.


Again these are not bad levels, in fact most of them are excellent! But they are put together with actual tutorial levels (difficulty wise), where you just assign a handful of clear skills or just need to turn the RR up. They need to have lower entropy to be actual tutorials, be it with pick-ups, culling of non-tutorial elements, or a new rank.

1 15: This level should be burned or made fair!   Dissapearing lemmings because of invisible traps is just *insert mean word here*. It's also quite hard for the position.


For groupie 40:
Took me ~60 mins and a few tries to adapt some parts and reduce builder usage. The main difficulty here is the sheer size and needing to scoll slowly across the landscap a ton as even max zoom-out doesn't help. Nepster's Final Frustraition achived a way higher diffuculty with a much smaller size, less multitasking and less imidiate danger I must admit.

Thanks, that's valuable feedback!

Quote- You can double click the release rate to get to 01 or 99 quickly. This is mainly just convenient, but it can also help with certain level solutions as well.

NL has the same thing, but here it's the right mouse button rather than a double click.

Quote- The control panel has "clickable" buttons, rounded edges and cartoon icons; all of which adds texture and provides a more tactile interface (I'm currently working on one that could be used in the Hi-Res mod, if needs be).

This is a problem you or another user needs to tackle most likely: If a good replacement is made by someone you can simply swap out the default ones with your preferred choice.

Most graphics in NL are swappable/customisable. They just need to be created and be the same size.

Quote- The main menu/level screen text & images are in the correct aspect ratio rather than being stretched, as they are in NL. This may seem a minor point to most people, but it just adds to the overall aesthetic when everything is taken into consideration.

Could the window mode in the right size fix that at least partly for you? NL has a windowed mode with several window sizes.

Quote
- The level selection window automatically saves level stats upon successful completion of a level, which is great for reviewing/trying to beat your time/skill count/% saved etc.

Stats are certainly something the F2 level selection screen could display. Consider making a suggestion topic!

QuotePlayer should be allowed to assign unlimited skills, e.g., to test ideas in later parts of levels. Allow the numbers in the skill panel to drop into negatives. An attempt counts as solved only if no excess skills were assigned.

I am only for that if you seperately must activate a "cheat mode" in the options. I really don't want my skills to drop into negatives! The chance is high I don't actively notice this, play on and then get really angry when I thought I solved the level only to find out a number dropped to -1.

So if this becomes a thing do it as an option, that is off by standard, to activate "cheat mode".