Quote:
Originally Posted by Obi1mcd
I'm not absolutely certain how I'm doing it, but I'm most likely going to have seperate j2ls for different points in the story. The main concept is that you can go back to other planets even if you've been there already, and they'll probably have different missions or something. I'm going to fine-tune it so it doesn't use too much filespace though. The jungle level is the only thing that's really finished so far, and the ship level is a tad rushed at the moment. The second screenshot is supposed to be zoomed-in on the little control panel in the ship. I'll fix it, though.
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Edit: Most of the stuff in this post is wrong, as proven by violet's example below. So read that instead.
Something like this could work; however you may wind up using a lot of j2l files depending on how complex you want it to be.
For example, let's say you have five planets, and each of those planets has two "missions". Beating a mission makes it so the next time you select the planet, you play the 2nd mission. Beating the 2nd mission locks the planet from being selected (you have cleared the planet). Finally, the episode tracks which missions you have beaten, so once you beat all 10 you win. (Note that I am not assuming this is how your pack works. I am merely presenting this as an example of what the structure of a non-linear SP episode might look like.)
If you wanted to do something like this, you'd either need an insanely complicated trigger system + exploit bugs with warp targets, or you'd need multiple j2l files. The former would be hard (read: nearly impossible) to pull off, and would introduce a bunch of problems you probably don't want to deal with. The latter would be more doable, but you'd require a staggering number of j2l files. You'd need to account for every combination, plus variations of the hub level, so for just those 10 missions, the number of j2l files could be in the range of 200-250 (depending on just how much freedom the player is allowed to have, and some other factors).
I don't mean to discourage you here. However, I do think you should plan very carefully how your level pack is going to be structured, since it would suck if you were to hit a brick wall half way through developing it. There ARE ways to avoid the 200+ file scenario I described, and I am sure you've anticipated this a bit and have your own ideas. I can think of a few ways to solve this problem, myself.
As a side note, I hope this post also illustrates one of the major limitations still present in JJ2, that being the fact that it is very difficult to pass information between levels. Multiple exits are nice, but because very little information is carried between levels (without exploiting warp targets), it is hard to make a non-linear SP pack without having duplicates of levels.
Two things would help with this: (a) A flag on level exit events that, if set to 1, causes the game to pass things like triggers, player health, coins, etc to the next level rather than resetting them; and (b) An "exit ID" field which, if nonzero, sends the player to the corresponding "start ID" in the next level.
The fact that triggers reset on player death is also a bit of a problem, but I don't think this can be solved unless a level setting is added (maybe jj2+ could behave this way if the level is set to "vertical split screen" mode, since no one uses that option).