In around 11 days we're gonna have our most important level design contest of the SMW Central. That's it, the 10th Annual Vanilla Level Design Contest, "VLDC X". For who never participated or never heard of, the Vanilla Level Design Contest is an annual contest where users are challenged to design a level that is closer to the original Super Mario World levels, which they're pretty much restricted to use original SMW textures and physics, which is commonly called as a vanilla level or vanilla hack.
Although there's many different meanings and visions of the term "vanilla", which was already questioned been many times in our previous VLDCs, we usually end up with common agreement with how strict should the entries be compared to the original Super Mario World, so we can have a fair balance between authentiability and flexibility for the level designers.
It's far a very big contest, with over 115(?) entries last year and I believe this time we're gonna have much more, if everything goes right. Specially because it's the 10th edition of this contest. It's a whole decade! When the first VLDC went up, I was 8 years old. A kid! I barely knew how to use computers at that time. What about you?!
But yeah, I'm here to bring up this preliminary discussion to we discuss possible changes and new ideas to be applied to this special contest and then we can get in a common agreement before it starts.
Some points that are pretty much obvious to happen are:
- We won't have anonymous judging. Although the idea was nice and all, in practice we just had much more work to do for the little benefit. The judges are reliable enough to make a non-biased judgment.
- Judging scores are gonna be scaled a little more. While the 30/20/10 scheme worked well, there were a considerable amount of ties, with the previous one having to add "tie breakers" as decimal points to determine strategic positions. Instead, we're gonna have a wide score range that is good enough to avoid ties (when merging the 5-6 judges scores), taking in consideration the potential of 200 or more entries. To the scores don't end up arbitrary, we will set up basic scales like: design - 30+ points => excellent, 20+ => very good, 10+ => average, 0+ => poor. and then the remaining 10 points difference will be more comparative to the other levels to get the desired ranking order that the judge wants to. Of course that's still an example, the proper judging system will be determined once I finish picking all VLDC judges.
- Because of some complaints of repeated music from the previous VLDCs, this one we will make an extra effort of making unique music for the contest, just like a new game. That means music from VLDC9, 8, 7, etc. may get replaced by the newer ones depending of the how good these new songs come out. I'm counting with you, musicians!
- More freedom will be given regarding level limits. Expect VLDC X to allow much more map16, graphics and sublevels compared to the previous ones.
And now some questions:
- How strict should we go this time? Force more vanilla styled levels? Less vanilla styled and let some additional features, like upscaling graphics? Look below for more details.
- Should we add or remove some patch from the base ROM, including non-fix ones?
- DQ joke/kaizo/etc. levels?
Together with that, here is some ideas I'm been proposing on the staff forums for the past weeks. Some are obviously stupid and other brilliant, but they're there for discussion!
1 - I can imagine VLDC10 having different level categories. I'm not saying making a contest for desert levels, another for ice level, etc. I'm talking about making categories like "regular level", "run game", "mini-game", "mega challenge", etc, where the author can even participate in multiple categories. And then we can have an even greater bundle, involving multiple kind of levels. For all people's taste.
2 - During the level contest period, there will be a dedicated music requests thread in the VLDC forum, where there will be a poll where people can vote for kinds of music remixes they're interested in. For example, let's assume the poll contains "Athletic", "Ice", "Desert", "Rock" and "Cave". People would vote which one they're interested in having a remix from and then a musician would be able to claim and produce music based on the (partial) voting results.
For example, let's say Rock is winning with 70%, followed by Athletic with 69% and Desert with 42%. Torchkas saw and based on the interest, he does a Rock remix of SMW, later S.N.N. gets interested in making an athletic song and finally at the very last minute Redngreen does a desert song. That way, the musicians won't be idle during the level contest period and at the same time they can produce music that the public is interested for.
3 - mode 0
As most of you guys should know, SMW runs at screen mode 1. Mode 1 contains three layers, where two of them (Layer 1, Layer 2) are 4BPP and the last one (Layer 3) is 2BPP. Mode 0, however, allows four layers, with the major drawback being all layers 2BPP. However, it would allow new ways of designing levels, such as fancy scrolling, independent elements, fake sprites and parallax scrolling. The proposal is to have a Level Mode which unlocks Mode 0 support to the designers.
Pros: Another possibility of level design. Does not require designing new ExGFX, so it's vanilla. Supported by Lunar Magic (by ctrl-f7).
Cons: Not present in original SMW. Not vanilla, because it requires inserting custom ASM to activate the mode 0, upload and control the layer 4 image, requires VRAM realignment. Can't view Layer 4 on LM.
I'm against this one, but just posting because it's an yet another idea I had.
y/n
4 - exit unbeaten levels
Super Mario 64 lets you exit unbeaten levels by pressing start and then picking "exit". Or simply start + select. The only requirement is the player must be on ground.
Pros: Considering the player has infinite lives, implementing that on VLDC would be a nice idea, when the player failed at some puzzle or for other reasons. The effects of quitting a level is pretty much same as dying, so the yoshi coins, etc., won't be affected.
Cons: The player must die to account the statistics or replay the whole level, when failing at some puzzle or collecting yoshi coins.
Case: During raocow's VLDC9 LP #3, he managed to beat that lava level, but took the wrong pipe, losing the last yoshi coin. Beating the level would imply having him to replay the whole level, before midpoint and collecting all yoshi coins again. He had the option to die by time uping, but that's boring.
y/n
5 - fancy score chart
In VLDC9, by pressing L+R, a small message box appeared displaying the level judging information and level options. While it seemed nice, some people apparently complained because it caused some issues(what issues?) and then a better one would be required.
The proposal is to use SA-1's free BW-RAM space and the unused SNES WRAM to copy half of the VRAM and then create a complete new screen (game mode), being able to implement much more detailed information and advanced options. It reminds of Yoshi Island's pause menu and Roy's pause menu. The idea is to make something similar to Roy's pause menu, except faster (less transitions/animations) and not (too much) vanilla graphics clashing.
Pros: much better than the current menu. The patches needed won't affect the levels because the patches will not be used for the levels itself.
Cons: requires some more advanced patches that are usually used with chocolate hacks (UberASM only?). Pauses will delay a little more. People will complain because there's too much information on the menus (whaT?) (yes I'm paranoic).
Case: should that pause screen be moved to the overworld instead? -- might reduce the amount of available options(???)
y/n
6 - timers
It's not recent that people like to measure how many time they take to beat a level. The idea is to put a timer in the level which measures how many time the player takes to beat a level and to get the secret exit. The timer is only displayed after the player beat the level (like Super Mario Maker) and on the OW, so no status bar modification is needed.
Pros: allows users to make small speed runs and compare performance at beating levels. SRAM files could be used to build a database which holds who beat certain levels faster and maybe give a badge for who beat the most levels faster or get into a good mark.
Cons: what is the point of that? it's too many levels, people won't like to measure it nor speed run that. and it would be too few people to be worthy the effort.
y/n
7 - fly free region
One thing to be noted is the cape powerup is, if not rarely used, a bit uncommon in VLDC levels. The main reason is obvious: the player can go ahead and skip the whole level by flying over it. For that reason, the level designer would have the option to either allow or disallow flying. So certain levels the player would be able to fly while others not. A symbol would appear in the overworld to indicate if the player can or cannot fly in the level. Message boxes also can be used.
Pros: allows to the cape powerup be used more often in levels.
Cons: not vanilla? SMW never had the option to enable or disable flying. Also it can bring inconsistency to the game?
y/n
8 - optional patches
From a list of common bugfix patches, the level designer would be able to enable or disable a certain bugfix to the level. Because bug fix patches can end up "killing" interesting vanilla oddities used, the designer would have full control in what should and what should not be affected from the original SMW physics.
Pros: allows more control to the level designers and different behaviors. People won't complain that "bugfix X was applied and now I can not do Y anymore".
Cons: inconsistency can increase, with some levels behaving different to others. And no, you still can't disable SA-1 in your level, sorry.
y/n
9 - sfx sample changes
VLDC allows custom musics. That's a fact. But what should be the limits applied?
It's not really common anymore, but in the past, when smkdan's Sample Tool was present, it was normal to sampled songs end up changing the original SFX. The classic example is Jimmy's YI ports putting YI sfxs in the level as a side effect. To avoid inconsistency, things like that would be banned from VLDC. Also removing original SFX would be banned too, as long it affects the level gameplay.
Pros: will remove sfx sound changes from the level.
Cons: we're simply overcomplicating things that probably will never happen and/or in case it happens it can be safely fixed.
y/n
10 - level badges
You know, some levels aren't that great to be between the top levels, but they have something unique to the others that deserves some special award. That's it, level badges.
Currently, VLDC9 shows what are the level placement and also if the level is some judge's favorite level. Together with that, the levels would also get certain special badges, like "most awesome", "most fun", "most creative", "most visually impressive", etc. It's like some kind of Mosts except for the levels. The judges, together, would decide both categories and which levels get them.
Pros: another way of recognizing the best level in some category.
Cons: didn't really find anything against the idea.
11 - apply spinjump fix patch
I don't know about the fix patches, but one thing that is lacking on VLDC9 is definitely Alcaro's spin jump fix patch. It fixes when you try spin jumping over two spiky sprites, for example, and get hurt from them even if you weren't supposed to.
12 - double exgfx files
Self-explanatory. Currently you can use up to 10 ExGFX files per submission, which includes layer 3 graphics and tilemap. The idea is to you allow using up to 20 ExGFX files, which will give the level creator more freedom and variety gfx available for his level. There's absolutely no ROM space-wise nor out of slot risks.
-------------------------------------
the ideas below are or can be questionable.
13 - graphics upscaling
Basically allow the level designer to upscale (2x,3x,4x,8x,etc.) the original SMW graphics, as long he don't redraw it and don't use any filter other than nearest neighbor (aka leave "pixeled"). The Mass Rotate Tool can do this job.
14 - graphics rotation
Currently it's implied that the level designer can rotate the graphics by 90° or 270° (180° is same as flip y+x).
The idea is to allow the level designer rotate by whatever amount of degress he wants, as longer he don't use any filter. The Mass Rotate Tool can do this job as well.
15 - graphics overlap
Currently you can overlap only two tiles. example. The idea is to allow unlimited graphics overlap.
16 - conditional map16
LM has the conditional map16 feature. Unfortunately, you can't use it because the conditional bits are disconnected from the SMW RAM. The idea is to connect the conditional map16 bits to known SMW RAM address (mostly the same ones connected in the ExAnimation triggers) so the player can take advantage of using LM's newer features but still using vanilla triggers (citation needed).
17 - more exanimation space
Currently you can have up to 6KB of ExAnimation per level. However, you can have up to 32KB+6KB of ExAnimation per level by using GFX60-63. Obviously we can't allow to one use all these space because there's only four 32KB slots. However, we can safely grant more 2KB of ExAnimation for whoever needs it, so in total the level designer can have up to 8KB of ExAnimation per level.
18 - more exanimation triggers
Currently you're restricted to the LM's default animation triggers. The proposal here is to map the 16 custom triggers to SMW's RAM, giving a few more combinations to the level designer.
Some additional triggers would include:
- 0 Collected >= 0 dragon coins
- 1 Collected >= 1 dragon coins
- 2 Collected >= 2 dragon coins
- 3 Collected >= 3 dragon coins
- 4 Collected >= 4 dragon coins
- 5 Player is small
- 6 Player is big
- 7 Player has fire flower
- 8 Player has cape
- 9 Player is in the water
- A Player is mounted on Yoshi
- B No sprites on screen
- C/D/E/F No good found
19 - clean/minimalist status bar
No, we're not editing the status bar. But removing unused counters and therefore making the level cleaner to the player.
For example, "MARIO x infinity" is clearly a constant text. We don't need that and we can remove it. We can also remover the timer from the status bar when the level's timer is set to 0.
Of course, for the first case, since I'm aiming for the two players mode (or more), the "MARIO" text maybe can be kept and replaced with "LUIGI", etc.
For it's that's all. Feel free to discuss and add more ideas for the project. This thread will be open until february 1 for discussion. After that, I will fetch all posts and then start the preparations for the contest, which will happen at february 3. Oh and for who read until at this point, if you're interested in judging the contest, feel free to PM soon as possible and then we can schedule an interview where I will pick the 5-6 judges for the contest.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Discuss.
Although there's many different meanings and visions of the term "vanilla", which was already questioned been many times in our previous VLDCs, we usually end up with common agreement with how strict should the entries be compared to the original Super Mario World, so we can have a fair balance between authentiability and flexibility for the level designers.
It's far a very big contest, with over 115(?) entries last year and I believe this time we're gonna have much more, if everything goes right. Specially because it's the 10th edition of this contest. It's a whole decade! When the first VLDC went up, I was 8 years old. A kid! I barely knew how to use computers at that time. What about you?!
But yeah, I'm here to bring up this preliminary discussion to we discuss possible changes and new ideas to be applied to this special contest and then we can get in a common agreement before it starts.
Some points that are pretty much obvious to happen are:
- We won't have anonymous judging. Although the idea was nice and all, in practice we just had much more work to do for the little benefit. The judges are reliable enough to make a non-biased judgment.
- Judging scores are gonna be scaled a little more. While the 30/20/10 scheme worked well, there were a considerable amount of ties, with the previous one having to add "tie breakers" as decimal points to determine strategic positions. Instead, we're gonna have a wide score range that is good enough to avoid ties (when merging the 5-6 judges scores), taking in consideration the potential of 200 or more entries. To the scores don't end up arbitrary, we will set up basic scales like: design - 30+ points => excellent, 20+ => very good, 10+ => average, 0+ => poor. and then the remaining 10 points difference will be more comparative to the other levels to get the desired ranking order that the judge wants to. Of course that's still an example, the proper judging system will be determined once I finish picking all VLDC judges.
- Because of some complaints of repeated music from the previous VLDCs, this one we will make an extra effort of making unique music for the contest, just like a new game. That means music from VLDC9, 8, 7, etc. may get replaced by the newer ones depending of the how good these new songs come out. I'm counting with you, musicians!
- More freedom will be given regarding level limits. Expect VLDC X to allow much more map16, graphics and sublevels compared to the previous ones.
And now some questions:
- How strict should we go this time? Force more vanilla styled levels? Less vanilla styled and let some additional features, like upscaling graphics? Look below for more details.
- Should we add or remove some patch from the base ROM, including non-fix ones?
- DQ joke/kaizo/etc. levels?
Together with that, here is some ideas I'm been proposing on the staff forums for the past weeks. Some are obviously stupid and other brilliant, but they're there for discussion!
1 - I can imagine VLDC10 having different level categories. I'm not saying making a contest for desert levels, another for ice level, etc. I'm talking about making categories like "regular level", "run game", "mini-game", "mega challenge", etc, where the author can even participate in multiple categories. And then we can have an even greater bundle, involving multiple kind of levels. For all people's taste.
2 - During the level contest period, there will be a dedicated music requests thread in the VLDC forum, where there will be a poll where people can vote for kinds of music remixes they're interested in. For example, let's assume the poll contains "Athletic", "Ice", "Desert", "Rock" and "Cave". People would vote which one they're interested in having a remix from and then a musician would be able to claim and produce music based on the (partial) voting results.
For example, let's say Rock is winning with 70%, followed by Athletic with 69% and Desert with 42%. Torchkas saw and based on the interest, he does a Rock remix of SMW, later S.N.N. gets interested in making an athletic song and finally at the very last minute Redngreen does a desert song. That way, the musicians won't be idle during the level contest period and at the same time they can produce music that the public is interested for.
3 - mode 0
As most of you guys should know, SMW runs at screen mode 1. Mode 1 contains three layers, where two of them (Layer 1, Layer 2) are 4BPP and the last one (Layer 3) is 2BPP. Mode 0, however, allows four layers, with the major drawback being all layers 2BPP. However, it would allow new ways of designing levels, such as fancy scrolling, independent elements, fake sprites and parallax scrolling. The proposal is to have a Level Mode which unlocks Mode 0 support to the designers.
Pros: Another possibility of level design. Does not require designing new ExGFX, so it's vanilla. Supported by Lunar Magic (by ctrl-f7).
Cons: Not present in original SMW. Not vanilla, because it requires inserting custom ASM to activate the mode 0, upload and control the layer 4 image, requires VRAM realignment. Can't view Layer 4 on LM.
I'm against this one, but just posting because it's an yet another idea I had.
y/n
4 - exit unbeaten levels
Super Mario 64 lets you exit unbeaten levels by pressing start and then picking "exit". Or simply start + select. The only requirement is the player must be on ground.
Pros: Considering the player has infinite lives, implementing that on VLDC would be a nice idea, when the player failed at some puzzle or for other reasons. The effects of quitting a level is pretty much same as dying, so the yoshi coins, etc., won't be affected.
Cons: The player must die to account the statistics or replay the whole level, when failing at some puzzle or collecting yoshi coins.
Case: During raocow's VLDC9 LP #3, he managed to beat that lava level, but took the wrong pipe, losing the last yoshi coin. Beating the level would imply having him to replay the whole level, before midpoint and collecting all yoshi coins again. He had the option to die by time uping, but that's boring.
y/n
5 - fancy score chart
In VLDC9, by pressing L+R, a small message box appeared displaying the level judging information and level options. While it seemed nice, some people apparently complained because it caused some issues(what issues?) and then a better one would be required.
The proposal is to use SA-1's free BW-RAM space and the unused SNES WRAM to copy half of the VRAM and then create a complete new screen (game mode), being able to implement much more detailed information and advanced options. It reminds of Yoshi Island's pause menu and Roy's pause menu. The idea is to make something similar to Roy's pause menu, except faster (less transitions/animations) and not (too much) vanilla graphics clashing.
Pros: much better than the current menu. The patches needed won't affect the levels because the patches will not be used for the levels itself.
Cons: requires some more advanced patches that are usually used with chocolate hacks (UberASM only?). Pauses will delay a little more. People will complain because there's too much information on the menus (whaT?) (yes I'm paranoic).
Case: should that pause screen be moved to the overworld instead? -- might reduce the amount of available options(???)
y/n
6 - timers
It's not recent that people like to measure how many time they take to beat a level. The idea is to put a timer in the level which measures how many time the player takes to beat a level and to get the secret exit. The timer is only displayed after the player beat the level (like Super Mario Maker) and on the OW, so no status bar modification is needed.
Pros: allows users to make small speed runs and compare performance at beating levels. SRAM files could be used to build a database which holds who beat certain levels faster and maybe give a badge for who beat the most levels faster or get into a good mark.
Cons: what is the point of that? it's too many levels, people won't like to measure it nor speed run that. and it would be too few people to be worthy the effort.
y/n
7 - fly free region
One thing to be noted is the cape powerup is, if not rarely used, a bit uncommon in VLDC levels. The main reason is obvious: the player can go ahead and skip the whole level by flying over it. For that reason, the level designer would have the option to either allow or disallow flying. So certain levels the player would be able to fly while others not. A symbol would appear in the overworld to indicate if the player can or cannot fly in the level. Message boxes also can be used.
Pros: allows to the cape powerup be used more often in levels.
Cons: not vanilla? SMW never had the option to enable or disable flying. Also it can bring inconsistency to the game?
y/n
8 - optional patches
From a list of common bugfix patches, the level designer would be able to enable or disable a certain bugfix to the level. Because bug fix patches can end up "killing" interesting vanilla oddities used, the designer would have full control in what should and what should not be affected from the original SMW physics.
Pros: allows more control to the level designers and different behaviors. People won't complain that "bugfix X was applied and now I can not do Y anymore".
Cons: inconsistency can increase, with some levels behaving different to others. And no, you still can't disable SA-1 in your level, sorry.
y/n
9 - sfx sample changes
VLDC allows custom musics. That's a fact. But what should be the limits applied?
It's not really common anymore, but in the past, when smkdan's Sample Tool was present, it was normal to sampled songs end up changing the original SFX. The classic example is Jimmy's YI ports putting YI sfxs in the level as a side effect. To avoid inconsistency, things like that would be banned from VLDC. Also removing original SFX would be banned too, as long it affects the level gameplay.
Pros: will remove sfx sound changes from the level.
Cons: we're simply overcomplicating things that probably will never happen and/or in case it happens it can be safely fixed.
y/n
10 - level badges
You know, some levels aren't that great to be between the top levels, but they have something unique to the others that deserves some special award. That's it, level badges.
Currently, VLDC9 shows what are the level placement and also if the level is some judge's favorite level. Together with that, the levels would also get certain special badges, like "most awesome", "most fun", "most creative", "most visually impressive", etc. It's like some kind of Mosts except for the levels. The judges, together, would decide both categories and which levels get them.
Pros: another way of recognizing the best level in some category.
Cons: didn't really find anything against the idea.
11 - apply spinjump fix patch
I don't know about the fix patches, but one thing that is lacking on VLDC9 is definitely Alcaro's spin jump fix patch. It fixes when you try spin jumping over two spiky sprites, for example, and get hurt from them even if you weren't supposed to.
12 - double exgfx files
Self-explanatory. Currently you can use up to 10 ExGFX files per submission, which includes layer 3 graphics and tilemap. The idea is to you allow using up to 20 ExGFX files, which will give the level creator more freedom and variety gfx available for his level. There's absolutely no ROM space-wise nor out of slot risks.
-------------------------------------
the ideas below are or can be questionable.
13 - graphics upscaling
Basically allow the level designer to upscale (2x,3x,4x,8x,etc.) the original SMW graphics, as long he don't redraw it and don't use any filter other than nearest neighbor (aka leave "pixeled"). The Mass Rotate Tool can do this job.
14 - graphics rotation
Currently it's implied that the level designer can rotate the graphics by 90° or 270° (180° is same as flip y+x).
The idea is to allow the level designer rotate by whatever amount of degress he wants, as longer he don't use any filter. The Mass Rotate Tool can do this job as well.
15 - graphics overlap
Currently you can overlap only two tiles. example. The idea is to allow unlimited graphics overlap.
16 - conditional map16
LM has the conditional map16 feature. Unfortunately, you can't use it because the conditional bits are disconnected from the SMW RAM. The idea is to connect the conditional map16 bits to known SMW RAM address (mostly the same ones connected in the ExAnimation triggers) so the player can take advantage of using LM's newer features but still using vanilla triggers (citation needed).
17 - more exanimation space
Currently you can have up to 6KB of ExAnimation per level. However, you can have up to 32KB+6KB of ExAnimation per level by using GFX60-63. Obviously we can't allow to one use all these space because there's only four 32KB slots. However, we can safely grant more 2KB of ExAnimation for whoever needs it, so in total the level designer can have up to 8KB of ExAnimation per level.
18 - more exanimation triggers
Currently you're restricted to the LM's default animation triggers. The proposal here is to map the 16 custom triggers to SMW's RAM, giving a few more combinations to the level designer.
Some additional triggers would include:
- 0 Collected >= 0 dragon coins
- 1 Collected >= 1 dragon coins
- 2 Collected >= 2 dragon coins
- 3 Collected >= 3 dragon coins
- 4 Collected >= 4 dragon coins
- 5 Player is small
- 6 Player is big
- 7 Player has fire flower
- 8 Player has cape
- 9 Player is in the water
- A Player is mounted on Yoshi
- B No sprites on screen
- C/D/E/F No good found
19 - clean/minimalist status bar
No, we're not editing the status bar. But removing unused counters and therefore making the level cleaner to the player.
For example, "MARIO x infinity" is clearly a constant text. We don't need that and we can remove it. We can also remover the timer from the status bar when the level's timer is set to 0.
Of course, for the first case, since I'm aiming for the two players mode (or more), the "MARIO" text maybe can be kept and replaced with "LUIGI", etc.
For it's that's all. Feel free to discuss and add more ideas for the project. This thread will be open until february 1 for discussion. After that, I will fetch all posts and then start the preparations for the contest, which will happen at february 3. Oh and for who read until at this point, if you're interested in judging the contest, feel free to PM soon as possible and then we can schedule an interview where I will pick the 5-6 judges for the contest.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Discuss.