The 17 things I hate about most of the J2O uploads (including some of mine)

[DennisKainz]

1) Using someone else's tileset all times
2) Using someone else's music in large levelpacks
3) Never making a 10x7 (or 20x15) picture for layer 8 in tilesets
4) Always using 640x480 instead of 320x200
5) Forgetting one or more of the background layers
6) Using layer 5 as sprite background (like Swamps by Agama)
7) Using a textured background WHILE using layer 5 as sprite background (same as above)
8) Making a background of composable parts instead of a whole looping picture (like the households in Megatropolis and Palmtree Plaza)
9) Using a drawing style too much different from the sprites style (like Blade's crayon style or Disguise's texture made parts)
10) Leaving Jazz too much room to jump and run all over the map
11) Forgetting to apply eyecandy to tilesets or to use it in levels
12) Making levels larger or smaller than 16384 tiles (256x64 or 128x128)
13) Using musics longer than 2:30 (like DreamsOfHope2) or shorter than 1:30 (like alarm or tralala bim boum)
14) Using musics that don't have a looping part, so that they fade and restart (like AWS_FIRE or Mayhem)
15) Making tileset night version from halfing luminance instead of completely changing the colors (like ET's fungi swamps)
16) Being too lazy to make new levels (VERY guilty)
17) Using tiles from other videogames (like Kejero with Donkey Kong)

[Ragnarok!]

1) Using someone else's tileset all times
- Most people don't have time to make sets. xD, or just don't know how or have the skill to do it. I fall in the second category. I don't see it being a problem using other people's sets... Most people make sets for that purpose, for others to use, since they just have a tiny example level that people aren't really expected to play, just to browse to get a feel on how to use the set I believe.

2) Using someone else's music in large levelpacks
- Personally I don't know really how to make music files, especially those that fit into JJ2 either, but I think you're the first person to complain about that hehe.

3) Never making a 10x7 (or 20x15) picture for layer 8 in tilesets
- xD I can agree with that, most of my backgrounds are 1x1.

4) Always using 640x480 instead of 320x200
- Well maybe in SP or something but no levels yet are really made to cater those, and in MP why would one limit themselves to not being able to see the bullets coming beforehand? Hehe

5) Forgetting one or more of the background layers
- While I agree, levels sometimes look plain, sometimes people don't actually have a choice, y'know what I mean? Some sets suck, to be blunt, and you either have to use a layer just to darken other tiles to use it as a background or just have no background, unfortunately! I do this myself though so I'm not talking.

6) Using layer 5 as sprite background (like Swamps by Agama)
- YES. YES AND YES. WHY DON'T TILESET MAKERS THINK ABOUT THIS?!

7) Using a textured background WHILE using layer 5 as sprite background (same as above)
- Not quite sure what's bad about this one!

8) Making a background of composable parts instead of a whole looping picture (like the households in Megatropolis and Palmtree Plaza)
- Has to be done in some cases, even though I'm not a fan of it myself, sometimes it looks creative and innovative does it not? :P

9) Using a drawing style too much different from the sprites style (like Blade's crayon style or Disguise's texture made parts)
- AMEN

10) Leaving Jazz too much room to jump and run all over the map
- Well, most levels are spaz biased, jazz bias is often overlooked though, since noone really complains about it, I think you're the first. - Personally I try to do this one, I like to encourage people to use Jazz, personally I prefer him, he's just harder to use in most levels isn't he. That's why I really appreciate levelmakers like cooba, CelL and BlurredD, they always cater for some balance.

11) Forgetting to apply eyecandy to tilesets or to use it in levels
- Not much to say here. Guilty!

12) Making levels larger or smaller than 16384 tiles (256x64 or 128x128)
- The perfect size of 16384 isn't always viable, especially if someone wants something perfectly symmetrical, you want an odd amount of "x" tiles don't you? :P Also some levels are made for duels, hence being smaller, no point in putting a load of empty tile space is there?

13) Using musics longer than 2:30 (like DreamsOfHope2) or shorter than 1:30 (like alarm or tralala bim boum)
- Heh, short ones annoy me, never had a problem with long ones, however some short ones fit levels, see icunpsych.j2l.

14) Using musics that don't have a looping part, so that they fade and restart (like AWS_FIRE or Mayhem)
- Guilty, olcsbasin.j2l, however I wish I knew what to do about that other than picking a different music file.

15) Making tileset night version from halfing luminance instead of completely changing the colors (like ET's fungi swamps)
- (I can't say anything on this one)

16) Being too lazy to make new levels (VERY guilty)
- Aren't we all? :D

17) Using tiles from other videogames (like Kejero with Donkey Kong)
- Hence tileset conversions!!! Nothing I can --- WAIT THERES DONKEY KONG TILESETS?

- Sorry I felt the need to reply to most points. :)

The four I absolutely cannot stand:
1) is when a level is completely spaz-biased, and has no catering to jazz.
2) winds and floatups, disrupting flow of a level.
3) when I have to use layer 5 as a sprite background.
4) when I see tilebugs. I don't mind a lack of Eyecandy, but tilebugs are just lazy.

[Obi1mcd]

8) Making a background of composable parts instead of a whole looping picture (like the households in Megatropolis and Palmtree Plaza)


This one interested me, partly because you mentioned my set, heh. Sometimes this can be a problem, but the main reason I did it in that set specifically was to give levelmakers more variety to choose from in the backgrounds. A lot of tilesets have backgrounds you can't do anything customizable with, and the levels made look very similar.
Main things that bug me would be:
Levels with emphasis on 'cheap' difficulty, like unavoidable enemies.
Levels with tilebugs.
Dark levels where you can't easily tell what's solid.
Tilesets that use Epic's standard textured background.

[Violet CLM]

12) Making levels larger or smaller than 16384 tiles (256x64 or 128x128)
13) Using musics longer than 2:30 (like DreamsOfHope2) or shorter than 1:30 (like alarm or tralala bim boum)
These two I found the most ridiculous. I'm not going to address the second, but for the first, assuming you're basing it on your unvoiced principle of doing everything like Epic did, it's total hypocrisy. Have you looked at Capture1, Capture2, Capture3, Capture4, Race2, or Race4? Yes, Epic usually made their levels 256x64 or 128x128, probably because there used to be a constraint against any other level sizes that they later removed in subsequent versions of level files, but they didn't hold to it as an unbreakable rule. In fact, many of their levels that are 256x64, you'll find, don't even use the whole space, and would have been better saved with a smaller width in order to reduce filesize and presumably memory use.

Actually, while I'm at it, let's point out some other ways in which Epic deviates from the ideal version of them that I think you've built up.

1) Using someone else's tileset all times
2) Using someone else's music in large levelpacks
Nick and Dean made the tilesets; Cliffy and Jeh made the levels; Alex made the music. Those are different people. If you say that's okay because they worked as a team and so you want everyone to make levels as teams, you're just going to get fewer levels, and thus conflict with your point 16.

8) Making a background of composable parts instead of a whole looping picture (like the households in Megatropolis and Palmtree Plaza)
Castle; Labrat (foreground); Tubelectric. Again, not an exceptionless rule. Really, I think part of the issue here is your rule 1. There's plenty of reason to make a looping picture in a tileset that you're making for your purposes alone; we see this in its most extreme form in .j2t files that are nothing but text used for credits or introductions or what have you. But the more everything is a looping picture, the fewer options there realistically are for other people to use your tileset differently, and while I don't exactly have hard numbers on this, I would guess that one of the top contributing factors to how much a tileset gets used is how versatile it is. On the one extreme you have tilesets like Desolation, WTF, and to an extent Odyssey and 7th Lava Fall, which are extremely composable in nearly all their layers and thus lend themselves to a whole variety of images. On the other extreme you have 3D Battle Pack, although I should note that all those tilesets have been used for other levels at least once. If you're only trying to please yourself, there's no reason not to have a bunch of large images for the background; it does look good. But the more you want other people to use your tileset -- in conflict with your rule 1, which you must admit is scarcely a universal principle -- the more this point becomes hazardous to uphold. And while I'm waffling...

6) Using layer 5 as sprite background (like Swamps by Agama)
There's no right answer to this one either. I think lots of people would agree you that this is some sort of ideal, but it conflicts with three different practical realities:
Most people use other people's tilesets. Either they may wish to use the tileset in a different or more complicated way than its author originally intended/expected, or the tileset simply wasn't built with this ideal in mind. Someone may want to use tiles in the background that are entirely different from the ones from the example level, e.g. many tilesets built using Damn or Jungle, since those sets don't have any layer 4 background tiles of their own. And again, interesting as a world would be where everyone made their own tilesets all the time -- perhaps what we are approaching in JJ1? -- that world would have a slower rate of production.
Even if you make your own tileset, there's another ideal: make your tileset compatible with 1.23. This means that your tileset can be no larger than 1020 tiles, and it's very easy to run out of space with that number of tiles, especially if you want to allow room for more than three animations. Rarely will you see a tileset in which every single tile with transparency has an equivalent version over the layer 4 background tile, and even if you did...
Once again, level makers are creative. Let's say someone is being very respectful of the tileset maker's intention and is using all tiles in the way they were intended to be used. The main wall type is the main wall type, the layer 4 background is the layer 4 background, and so on. But then suddenly they run into an issue: there's no tile that has a 22.5 degree sloped floor in front of the right edge of the layer 4 background! And there's no reason to expect there to be, either. Pretty much the only tilesets you'll see that even attempt to support that level of variability are Blade's (Forest, etc.), and even they can't cover every possible interaction because there's simply no room. The tileset creator can never be reasonably expected to provide for every possible interaction of wall and non-wall, unless maybe if it's a very simple tileset where everything is a 32x32 block.

Okay, so I feel kind of negative now. Here are some of your points I completely agree with:

15) Making tileset night version from halfing luminance instead of completely changing the colors (like ET's fungi swamps)
Absolutely. We get some really weird "Evening" sets this way, but it's still much better than a quick brightness effect. It works best with 8-bit drawing styles, but those should be encouraged anyway...

5) Forgetting one or more of the background layers
While part of this is a matter of which tileset you use (looking at you, Haunted House), it's definitely a very worthwhile ideal to strive for. More layers makes for prettier levels! (And you left this ambiguous, and I would agree that it's a good ideal for both level and tileset creators.) To this I would add only that foreground layers are also nice, as long as they're either unobtrusive (Labrat, Diamondus, Tubelectric, Castle once they removed the giant pillar) or only appear in select parts of the level where visibility isn't at such a premium anyway.

[minmay]

Are there even any JJ2 level makers who can both draw and compose music?

[Seren]

Are there even any JJ2 level makers who can both draw and compose music?
The only active ones I know of are Toni and Zoro. Oh, and Sean, according to what he says.

[cooba]

TSF breaks 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16

[Violet CLM]

also 17 if you count Carrotus --> Easter

[cooba]

Good one! Now it's over half of the items listed.

[DennisKainz]

Thank you all for the feedback.
8 posts. And they're all being somehow useful to me.

[DoubleGJ]

Are there even any JJ2 level makers who can both draw and compose music?
oh hey
13) Using musics longer than 2:30 (like DreamsOfHope2) or shorter than 1:30 (like alarm or tralala bim boum)
what seems to be the problem here?

<s>sugar rush theme breaks this rule and it can be used by any level that contains food</s>

[FireSworD]

Are there even any JJ2 level makers who can both draw and compose music?

I can draw, I just don't have the motivation, here's proof (http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/showpost.php?p=466107&postcount=3639). Music, hmm, not sure, I think I could learn to compose some "nice" sounding tracks, but I've never done it.

There is FawFul who can make levels and compose music. Snooze can do all 3.

[Sean]

Are there even any JJ2 level makers who can both draw and compose music?

Yes, I can draw, make levels, and compose music. Totally. SE doesn't quite believe me, I think :p The JJ2 community is very talented indeed, it just doesn't seem like many want to showcase what they can do.

[Ragnarok!]

Yes, I can draw, make levels, and compose music. Totally. SE doesn't quite believe me, I think :p The JJ2 community is very talented indeed, it just doesn't seem like many want to showcase what they can do.

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!

[Sean]

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!

Hey, I'm showing off just as much as you are! Give me some credit!

[DennisKainz]

Someone here talked about "versatility". Well ... The tilesets versatility is the LAST versatility problem about JJ2.

I mean ... Talk about the events. If JJ2 was even just a little little bit versatile, it should AT LEAST allow to include custom events, that is, attach customized animation libraries and functions to a custom level.

All of the greatest levels (Devan's Resurrection, Tomb Rabbit, The Episode) have been ruined by the fact that NO CUSTOM ENEMIES, FUNCTIONS, ITEMS, WHATNOT WERE EVEN ATTACHABLE!!!

Believe me: JCS has NEVER been versatile enough! And if I don't mistake, even J1E IS versatile enough to allow custom enemies in. And just MOST of the editable videogames allow to customize these SIMPLE things!

[Obi1mcd]

If JJ2 was even just a little little bit versatile, it would let you make custom levels. Oh wait.
The fact that JJ2 does not allow you to make custom enemies doesn't mean it isn't versatile. Sure, it can't be customized as much as other games, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And I don't see why you're saying packs like Tomb Rabbit or devres are 'ruined' due to this.

[Violet CLM]

...well, okay, everything you say is true, but I'm not sure what it has to do with any of your other points? Yes, JJ1 and JJ2 (or J1E and JCS, in your terms, but it's really a matter of the games themselves) are designed that way; what does that have to do with J2O uploads?

[EvilMike]

1) Using someone else's tileset all times
2) Using someone else's music in large levelpacks
3) Never making a 10x7 (or 20x15) picture for layer 8 in tilesets
4) Always using 640x480 instead of 320x200
5) Forgetting one or more of the background layers
6) Using layer 5 as sprite background (like Swamps by Agama)
7) Using a textured background WHILE using layer 5 as sprite background (same as above)
8) Making a background of composable parts instead of a whole looping picture (like the households in Megatropolis and Palmtree Plaza)
9) Using a drawing style too much different from the sprites style (like Blade's crayon style or Disguise's texture made parts)
10) Leaving Jazz too much room to jump and run all over the map
11) Forgetting to apply eyecandy to tilesets or to use it in levels
12) Making levels larger or smaller than 16384 tiles (256x64 or 128x128)
13) Using musics longer than 2:30 (like DreamsOfHope2) or shorter than 1:30 (like alarm or tralala bim boum)
14) Using musics that don't have a looping part, so that they fade and restart (like AWS_FIRE or Mayhem)
15) Making tileset night version from halfing luminance instead of completely changing the colors (like ET's fungi swamps)
16) Being too lazy to make new levels (VERY guilty)
17) Using tiles from other videogames (like Kejero with Donkey Kong)

This is probably the most ridiculous post I've read in the JCS forum. Other people have done a better job replying, so I'll just say that all of this is wrong except for point 15.

Actually, this list isn't just wrong. It's completely insane.

[DoubleGJ]

This is probably the most ridiculous post I've read in the JCS forum. Other people have done a better job replying, so I'll just say that all of this is wrong except for point 15.

Actually, this list isn't just wrong. It's completely insane.
you haven't gotten used to Gus yet have you

[EvilMike]

you haven't gotten used to Gus yet have you

I don't think anyone can.

[PurpleJazz]

While we're on the subject, something I well and truly can't stand:

Having layers that move faster than the ones above them. It breaks the laws of perspective, looks flat out wrong and has been done in more levels than I care to count. Technically JJ2 breaks the laws of physics many times, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it just looks plain ugly. The fact that it's so easy not to do makes it grind my gears even more when someone doesn't notice how awful it looks.

[Violet CLM]

I think that's forgivable if the level <a href="http://www.tachyonlabs.com/sam/Nitrosity.zip">is supposed to look pretty weird anyway</a>, but otherwise, yes, don't mess with depth perception.

[minmay]

Since textured backgrounds take their speeds from layer 5, they nearly always end up with at least some part of them moving faster than something it's behind. This has annoyed me since forever.

[Sean]

Someone here talked about "versatility". Well ... The tilesets versatility is the LAST versatility problem about JJ2.

I mean ... Talk about the events. If JJ2 was even just a little little bit versatile, it should AT LEAST allow to include custom events, that is, attach customized animation libraries and functions to a custom level.

All of the greatest levels (Devan's Resurrection, Tomb Rabbit, The Episode) have been ruined by the fact that NO CUSTOM ENEMIES, FUNCTIONS, ITEMS, WHATNOT WERE EVEN ATTACHABLE!!!

Believe me: JCS has NEVER been versatile enough! And if I don't mistake, even J1E IS versatile enough to allow custom enemies in. And just MOST of the editable videogames allow to customize these SIMPLE things!

I'm going to call dumbest post of the year award on this.

[Blackraptor]

I wouldn't call it that dumb. One of the reasons I've used J1E is cause I was frustrated with the lack of versatility and customization with the event contents in JCS.

[Sean]

Personally I find that the biggest flaw in some of his arguments is that while he keeps calling curses on lack of versatility, all these limits contribute to the motivation to be creative and learn ways to get around these limits. Limits literally bring out creativity. I know I myself am actively working ways around the JJ2 engine for my WIP pack wherever I can and it really forces you to think.

[cooba]

all these limits contribute to the motivation to be creative and learn ways to get around these limits.+1<!>

[Violet CLM]

On the one hand, yes.
On the other hand, if those limits were removed, there'd still be limits, they'd just be a little farther off. People who didn't constantly push limits would work at a higher level, and people who did would have even more complicated things to push. Win-win.

[cooba]

A level with great parallaxing effects using only 8 layers will always be more impressive than a level with great parallaxing effects using 80 layers though!

Not to say I don't want the latter to happen...

[Violet CLM]

Perhaps, but a JJ1 level where you can have a bridge or swinging platform and a lot of other events on screen will always be more interesting than one where you can't.

[PT32]

I think we should just all sit down and have a big ol' confab to decide what's cool and what's not. Iron everything out.

Besides, confabs are fun, no?

[Ragnarok!]

Hate to sound dumb but... What's a confab? D=

[PurpleJazz]

Hate to sound dumb but... What's a confab? D=

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=confab

[Ragnarok!]

Screw, you, sir. >: (

[DennisKainz]

On second thought, maybe I've gone a little too far with this list.
Guess I'm too obsessed with JCS.

@admins: Feel free to delete this topic.

[Grytolle]

Too bad I can't downvote Gus for a while. "Feel free to delete this topic"....