Why do you think the output of the Sonic Hacking community has been so tiny compared to other popula

Compared to the Mario, MegaMan, Metroid, and Zelda series, all of which are roughly on par with Sonic in terms of popularity, the Sonic scene has produced far less output in the way of actual 'new' hacks to play, despite the benefit of a level editor already being released and a high degree of technical knowledge on the part of many in the scene.


Why do you all think that is?


The best guess I can see, looking around these forums, is an incredible amount of drama -- Someone's emo this week or that week, everyone's hoarding their betas to themselves and worried about people 'stealing' their work, plenty of sniping back and forth, etc. If you look at the hacking community that surrounds other games, things tend to be far more supportive.


The other difference I see is a big emphasis on 'stylistic' hacks -- palette and music swaps, character swaps, etc. -- rather than an emphasis on designing new levels. The emphasis in other hacking scenes seems much more weighted toward producing new, interesting levels for everyone to play.


I'm a big fan of the Sonic games, and it saddens me to see an obviously dedicated and talented community produce far less in the way of actual new gameplay than it should.


Thoughts?

 

I agree about the drama, but I've been finding it very hard to find anyone who is capable of being staff to help curb this problem. I haven't been able to stop it by myself unfortunatly, it's a deep problem in the scene that needs fixing.


I would say the reason the sonic community is different is because it isn't easy to just pick up and make a new level. The graphics in a sonic level have to be very varied, colourful and compared to the others, high resolution. This means that making a brand new level takes a lot longer for a Sonic game than it does for the others you mentioned. Most of those tend to get away with a lot more repetition, and focus more on layout than varied graphics.


SonED 2 isn't the easiest editor to set up either, and although I've tried to make it easier with video tutorials, it still remains a mystery to use to the general public. This comes at a very large advantage, in that it works with split disassemblies, as opposed to say, Lunar Magic for Mario, which edits the ROM directly.


Palette hacking is and always will be incredibly pointless and I agree entirely that there should be more original levels instead, and soon I will be creating a series of video tutorials for this very purpose, but for now you'll have to live with Sonic 2: Advanced Edit.

 

Every community whose hacks you've promoted certainly have more output in terms of quantity--or, well, at least in the Mario hacking scene, as far as I know--but what I find in addition to that is a rampant lack of unoriginality in pretty much every single hack that gets released, save for a very few excrptions whose work inevitably shines above the rest. BMF's work, Demo World, SNN's Keytastrophe hack--those are works of creative expression and hard individual effort on part of each hack's creator; a majority of the others I see are public archives of "ExGFX" in a very similar reign to our SCAA, which everyone promptly nicks work from without a second thought and calls their work "original." They even promote the stealing of material from other hacks, to which even Megamix has been a victim. It's fucking stupid, honestly.


Do you want to know the problem, though? Sonic fans are unoriginal. There are far fewer factors to consider in designing a level for every single one of the games that you've listed than it is for Sonic, purely because of the nature of the game--a momentum based platformer with an emphasis on speed and action. Each level must flow to very precise extents; each level chunk must be aligned at x and x grid; each 8x8 tile must be put together manually. People can't stand putting effort into achieving the results they want, it seems, so they leech off of the ones who do looking for an easy break. What people seem to be spoiled into thinking is that hacking is supposed to be "easy," but it's the exact opposite--hacking isn't easy. Efforts from several talented individuals have certainly made it more accessible, and by extension easier, but no practice like reverse-engineering is meant to be performed by every single individual effortlessly without exception. That's not how things work.


I've seen very few hacks in the Sonic scene with new, well designed layouts, as you have; the best reason I can come up with for this is because a majority of the people who attempt to hack either have no idea what it takes to design a Sonic level properly, or simply never knew what made the original games' levels so appealing in the first place. It's almost something you have to study; analyze the old layouts and see what flows together, why, and why it made it as fun as it was when you first played it. Then you brainstorm your own level concepts that stick to that basic principle. Very people manage to fulfill this goal. With a Mario level, though, it's like... enemy, coin, block, incline, pipe, some other shit. I've designed a Mario level before and it was dead simple--it didn't take me any thought. The resulting level was pretty fun, but that's because Mario as a game is simple in both concept in execution. Sonic is inevitably more complex, and it seems that a lot of people simply can't live up to that kind of complexity enough to reach some sort of tangible goal.


That said, our output has been far from tiny. Each of our accomplished hackers can explain how every single tidbit of the game engine works without a second thought; ask anyone in, say, the Super Mario World community how the engine works, though, and you probably won't find anyone short of BMF54123. Technical knowledge is scarce there. I know--I tried to learn how the game works and found nobody could even begin to explain things to me. It's pathetic, honestly, but I think it reflects on us pretty well as a community--we make the game's goddamn source code freely available and easy to manipulate by even the most novice of hackers. I think that's an accomplish in and of itself that makes us stand about above the rest, even if certain hacks have fuck all in terms of creative expression.

 

So, wait a moment; you say that all scenes do a certain thing, but then say that you only know one scene does it? What the hell? The Mario scene is the biggest... and not the same as the others. I mean, have you even played a recent, good, Megaman/Metroid/Zelda hack? There are many people hacking around with Super Metroid, and Megaman 2, as my knowledge goes, and most of what I've seen done is very high quality work.

Last I checked, ExGFX archives were around before the SCAA. There's also the fact that, you know, setting up ExGFX properly requires effort. Also, just because it's availiable somewhere doesn't mean that everyone that uses it didn't rip it themselves; for all you know, they might have! I'm surprised you only mentioned three "hacks", though; I think that there are several other noteworthy hacks, as well.

Oh, really? I don't recall stealing work from other hacks being promoted in ANY community, not even the SMW ones.
Also, why specifically mention Megamix? Why should Megamix be an exception to those stealing thieves that rip off other peoples work? If anything, Megamix's popularity is like a gigantic red painted sign saying "Steal from this, because it's good!"

You do realize that he said Zelda, and Metroid, right? Exploration-based games? Games like those, quite simply, won't work without complex levels and stuff.

Putting 8x8 tiles together manually? I think someone's a bit messed up!

Correction; SOME people.

Not with SonED2, it isn't! But most hacking tools for popular games work far better than that, and are, to an extent, easy to use.

Sonic levels aren't just in one specific style; there are several different ones, that differentiate per level. Some levels are platformers, some are speedy, and some are a combination of the two. And then again; what's wrong with breaking the mould? If you design a level that plays completely differently to the original levels, but is still fun, why should it matter?

Things vary. I've played some pretty tricky Mario levels (They were fun, just so you know) before; one thing does not equal every other thing.

Sonic can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be; that shouldn't, however, matter. It should all be down to how fun the damn level is, really.

BMF still hacks Mario?
Your knowledge, I think, is outdated; last I checked, there were several other people familiar with the inner working of SMW.

Maybe you were asking the wrong people? You know, not everyone has, nor needs a full knowledge of a game's engine to edit it. Having the knowledge is nice, but it shouldn't be necessary.

Why should having the source code make us better than others? What, because we can hack easier? I've seen some amazing things done by people hacking assembly in raw hex.

 

My first thought was the drama - from what I've heard, even outside the festering sonic deviantART community or the group of e-friends that write sonic/tails slash, drama permeates deeply.


However, regarding sonic output being tiny compared to other scenes, is every crappy abandoned demo being taken into account? The reason that smw has so much of that junk is because lunar magic is extremely user friendly. It attracts people who will make one terrible level or so, put it up on youtube and lose interest.


Speaking of which, the editor's ease of use is most probably the largest factor. How exasperatingly difficult is it to use SMILE, and how many super metroid hacks are there? Note the ratio of total hacks:completed hacks.

 

...?


Most hacks start off with designing new levels. There are a few hacks, like SoNineko that focused on new palettes, music and asm, without new level layouts, yet most hacks start off with a new layout, and then art is added later on (or vice versa.)


The layouts show just as much as the hacker's creative and stylistic abilities as the artistic side of the hack does too. Even Pixel Perfect, a hack that is based on art, gave their levels a whole new layout. And most newbies who are trying to build a good layout can't stay away from the palette editors in their utility. A level isn't finished until the hacker's creative resources are depleted. If a hacker can only make layouts, but are terrible at drawing new art, then he'll only make new layouts, and if it's good, it'll be accepted whether or not he has anything else that wasn't in the game already.


And how many posts have you read that even hinted that it's not good unless there's new art/music?


With the info that we have today, it's not that difficult to add new art, and music, so why wouldn't you? It's not that we emphasis it, it's just because it's there to be hacked, so let's hack it. If a level layout wasn't trying to be emphasized, why is the first thing that the split disasm tutorial tells you to download is SonEd2?


And we DO have a large amount of hacks, most of which are just beginner's hacks that go nowhere and are forgottened, and some hacks are great, but go unrecognized, and unremembered.