Trotim wrote:I gotta say I never got into Lunar Magic. It's just not a very friendly level editor at all with all sorts of arbitrary hoops and whatnot. Sure you can learn it but I never found it worth the effort since if you really wanted to make a Mario game you can probably program it from scratch easier than trying to learn Assembly and figuring out all the limitations and mechanics of the SMW rom.
Lunar Magic is like, the most user-friendly ROM hacking tool ever. Is there something about "click and drag" that is difficult to grasp? Does pressing buttons that are clearly labelled as to what they do confuse you? Do you not understand what you see in the fully functional 'what you see is what you get' GUI? Or are you just complaining about SMW's actual limitations that have nothing to do with Lunar Magic at all? In that case, why are you singling out Lunar Magic when it's obvious that you just can't be bothered with ROM hacking?
I know for a fact that games like Starcraft 1 and 2 have
official map editors packed with the game intended to be used by the public, so everything is designed to be customisable. However, with ROM hacking, obviously the game was not made to be edited, the game was made to be the game and not any other game. There's a difference between official editors and fan-made editors.
And you're saying it'd be easier to code
an entire video game engine from scratch than to edit levels in Lunar Magic? I don't know what to say. If you come across a quirk in the SMW engine, then oh well, that's ROM hacking for you, and then you work around that. (Well, I suppose there are actually a lot of quirks in the SMW engine, but still.)
Adding to that last point, personally, I don't want to make my own Mario game; I want to make my own levels for an existing Mario game. There's a distinct difference there. Though I don't know if this applies to most of the SMW hacking community; most are interested in replacing all the graphics, adding in music and new gameplay mechanics and enemies and stuff, essentially to make their own game with little effort. And it takes very little effort, because
Lunar Magic is incredibly easy to use, hence why it is so popular.
tl;dr what argumentable said.
Also liking the LP so far. The thing looks fun too, with some pretty well designed levels, though (in reference to the engine, not the levels) I've never been a fan of the physics and graphics of most Mario games, especially SMB3, but I guess I'm sort of alone on that one.
not sure why i posted this, but eh.