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Ask Vitor Vilela!

As you guys know (or might not?), I'm the host of this current Vanilla Level Design Contest. This means I'm responsible not just for handling the contest, but also for setting up the compilation ROM, judging metrics, planning and overall ideas for the contest.

I heard many people are worried about my plans for the contest, so just like when we had a ask the judges thread (which got merged into discussions/questions), I decided to create this thread for actually personally asking questions for me. You can ask anything you want about the contest, either from current issues until the final compilation ROM steps. I will be sure to try replying everything as possible.

I could have done that in the Discussions and Questions thread too, but considering the overall concern about the VLDCX future, I thought it might be important to have a separate thread so you guys can have the freedom of making more direct questions for things that involves me directly.
first second were that timer that shows "VLDCX ENDS IN:" ?


Can we use MSU1 music as an alternative if the player is using higan as their primary emulator?
Layout by Erik557
Hi.
How involved are you going to be in the judging process, and judge discussions? Are you going to intervene with personal opinions, try to steer conversations a certain way, or involve yourself in any other way? Or are you going to stay back and trust the judges to do what they've signed up to do.

Is organization on map16 pages something we're going to have to worry about? Do our tiles need to be efficient, lined up in a proper order and properly culled to minimize space before submitting?
ask me if i give a f*ck...
I don't have a question, I just wanted to say thank you for making this thread.
I agree with Noivern - thanks for opening up the communication lines. I really think this will help strengthen the project overall, and being as transparent as possible will assist in that.
What motivated you to do global feedback and level commenting, even though you aren't involved in the judging?
Later.
Originally posted by RussianMan
first second were that timer that shows "VLDCX ENDS IN:" ?


You mean what happened with the countdown timer? Basically, since it's a very long contest, I turned it off after 24 hours from the scheme restore. Additionally, the timer for some reason was some hours off, probably due of some server timing bug. But don't worry, the counter will be enabled again around 1 week before the deadline, so you can have some idea of the real time left for submission.

Originally posted by Wind Fish
Can we use MSU1 music as an alternative if the player is using higan as their primary emulator?


Considering how the music affects the overall level atmosphere and the overall judges concern about the entries's songs, I'm not allowing it. For two reasons. Some judges may use an emulator other than bsnes, which can affect the judging final score. And second, the compilation ROM wouldn't include the MSU-1 track, because it would turn almost impossible to host it, considering each track can be around 10 MB in a 3 minute playback. Imagine if we had like 200 tracks of MSU-1. That's almost 2.1GB just of music. Pretty much inviable.

Originally posted by Hobz
How involved are you going to be in the judging process, and judge discussions? Are you going to intervene with personal opinions, try to steer conversations a certain way, or involve yourself in any other way? Or are you going to stay back and trust the judges to do what they've signed up to do.

Is organization on map16 pages something we're going to have to worry about? Do our tiles need to be efficient, lined up in a proper order and properly culled to minimize space before submitting?


Good question. I will be mostly acting like a mediator between the judges and a helper for ensuring they will make a fair and consistent judging. In the judging forum, I'm been creating lot of threads with stuff like, "things you should not forgot during judging" like taking yoshi coins into consideration, score references, what score range you can use if you consider the level good, bad, excellent, average, etc. and overall recommendations for a efficient judging period. For example, I will be responsible for getting all entries, mixing the names and giving to them, so they won't know the author during judging, I will certainly make tools for submitting judging scores, comments, etc., quicker and better, pretty much for making the judging period less annoying to do.

Once the judging period is done, I will also be promoting the post-judging discussion, where the scores will be crossed and then we will discuss the levels that had large score differences between the judges (25+ points difference compared to the average or 50+ difference compared to another judge score), plus an additional discussion for the top 10 and lower 10 entries. I will not make any influence over them unless if there's some really obscure issue that would require my intervention (e.g. clear evidence that the score given for a certain entry doesn't make sense or isn't fair at all). But I don't think that will be needed at all, specially because each judge was interviewed by me and all of them looked trusted enough to make a fair and consistent judging of the entries.

In tl;dr, my function will be mostly for assisting and making sure the scores will be fair, acting like the community eyes on them.

Organization and compression on the map16 is always welcome, but not required. I believe we will not have map16 space issues, because FuSoYa is making me a custom Lunar Magic version that doubles FG and BG map16 and the dual ROM system will automatically double them again since it's two ROMs in one, so technically we have 256 FG and 256 BG map16 pages available for VLDCX.

Originally posted by Noivern
I don't have a question, I just wanted to say thank you for making this thread.

Originally posted by S.N.N.
I agree with Noivern - thanks for opening up the communication lines. I really think this will help strengthen the project overall, and being as transparent as possible will assist in that.


Thanks. After a couple of messages I received, including yours S.N.N., I thought the best way to solve the whole speculation was making this thread a thing. Of course, while I'm a pretty self-centered person, I will try doing my best to make sure everything is transparent though the VLDCX process and warrant everyone will be satisfied with my job, or otherwise I wouldn't have confidence over part of the community, which is a thing I don't want at all.

Originally posted by Prizm
What motivated you to do global feedback and level commenting, even though you aren't involved in the judging?


I think all levels there are important for the contest, doesn't matter who made it and how good is it. There's always the possibility for improvements. Commenting every entry will not just make the forum more active or with more feedback, but will also motivate the people responsible for each one. It would be really bad if you made a level, with lot of care and effort and nobody comment about it. Probably my comments are far from the perfect. Some of them may not even make sense at all. But I think it's a pretty important thing to ensure for the author that "hey dude, keep doing it!". And in my own way of feedbacking the levels.

I rarely play SMW hacks today, but I do have some principles of what make a good, a fun level and what does not make it. The key point is for making all levels balanced. a good, appealing (aesthetics) level, with an unique gimmick/idea (creativity) and fun (design) should be the secrets for anyone going well in any level design contest.

And judging is another reason for that. For obvious reasons, the judges avoids commenting the level threads because they don't want to put some possible influence in the judging phrase, for example, associating a certain level with a author and end up remembering it in the judging process. So in the end, me, the VLDCX host, end up with the responsibility with actually making some basic feedback in the levels, even if they don't mean that my feedback will make their levels score better or worser during judging.
GitHub - Twitter - YouTube - SnesLab Discord
Alright, thanks for answering my question. I honestly didn't take space into consideration.
Layout by Erik557
Hi.
I also want to say thank you for making this thread. :)
It's easily the best thing I've done
So why the empty numb?
What is the meaning of life?
Originally posted by KDeee
What is the meaning of life?


I don't know.
GitHub - Twitter - YouTube - SnesLab Discord
What's your favorite map16 tile?
Realistically, how long to do you think assembling the collab will take? Do you have a team of people that can help you assemble the pieces if you think you need it? If you're doing it solo, is this a task you are guaranteed to be okay to do alone?
I wasn't around last year so I don't know all the specifics that caused delays, but it'd be really unfortunate for that kind of dev cycle to become a vldc staple
ask me if i give a f*ck...
Can you add Alcaro's 999 life counter in the final game to make lives more valuable?
My Mode 0 guide.

My Discord server. It has a lot of archived ASM stuff, so check that out!

Do you and the judges check the legitimacy of the graphical resources used in a level in some way? Like, do you have any way to make sure it's all from the vanilla game? Or is it all down to the participant's trust and the fact that it "looks" vanilla? If there were to be doubts regarding the legitimacy of a specific graphical resource in a level, what would you do?

Originally posted by MasterSkodwarde
Can you add Alcaro's 999 life counter in the final game to make lives more valuable?

Personally, I'm hoping for infinity lives like 9.
Switch: SW-2766-9108-9399Twitter: @Vine_STYouTube: that ivy guy
Originally posted by Eminus
Do you and the judges check the legitimacy of the graphical resources used in a level in some way? Like, do you have any way to make sure it's all from the vanilla game? Or is it all down to the participant's trust and the fact that it "looks" vanilla? If there were to be doubts regarding the legitimacy of a specific graphical resource in a level, what would you do?


Yeah, and going off what Eminus said, how do you check for the legitimacy of gameplay elements? If something appears super not vanilla but actually is, in terms of glitches and gimmicks?
From the rules thread:

Originally posted by Vitor Vilela
You can color remap (recolor) tiles. Note that every instance of a color in a individual tile must be remapped. So for example, if you want to remap color 1 to 2, every instance of color 1 must be replaced by color 2 in that individual tile.

You cannot use recoloring to reduce the number of colors in a tile, which is to say you cannot remap both colors 2 and 4 to color 4, for example. The exception for this rule is when converting 4BPP to 2BPP, for usage in layer 3.


So, my question is: What is the dimension of the said tile on YY-CHR? One square (1x1)?
There is a color I want to remap and I don't really understand how deep I have to replace it on the ExGFX file.
One "tile" in Super Mario World is always 8x8 pixels.
Your layout has been removed.