Posted by cosmological

For Polari:
Well right now I wish I could make two really long posts that happened to be my english essay and my history essay. I more serious response would be a response to a story we read in lit class called "Library of Babble" (really good and thought provoking, I'd suggest reading it). The most realistic response happens to be the response to SB's (still want to call him MM) question.


For Staplebutter, and other people who care:
I think there were a lot of problems with the SMG2.5 at the start, problems that could not be fixed with one of my strategies to do stuff. The first thing that SMG2.5 needed to survive was a hacking scene. Newer was successful because NSMBW already had a great tool, Reggie, and a big community. When Glem first created SMG2.5 there was literally no community for SMG/SMG2 and the only tool being Anarchy in the Galaxy. At the start the goal was not too far off, only 42 stars for existing galaxies, very much like a DLC, as the name 2.5 conveys. When MM/SB started work on the tool Whitehole it seemed like a savior, making level creating extremely easy. Fortunately and unfortunately the model converter and importer were completed at approximately the same time. These two amazing things that we had always hoped for were now possible but they did not yield the amazing progress we had hoped for.

The tide of the project turned from a simple DLC type hack to a full blown hack. The goal was set too high, 49 galaxies is quite a lot. People were not motivated because the goal was always so far away. We also had much too high standards, a whole system of making sure nothing could get done, also called the approval system. We wanted our designs to be perfect and our models to be nintendo quality. Not many people in the project could keep up with the new standards and no one wanted to raise their personal bar to reach these new standards. No matter how effective the leadership could be the project kept slowly falling apart. Which leads me to the next problem.

The people we had on the 2.5 Team were anything but a team. Constant arguing (try to blame it on someone else and I'll ban you), fighting made it so no one trusted anyone else to do their part in any system we had "I won't do this because [user=x] is a complete childish derp who can't do anything". Don't get me wrong a lot of people there had the skills to hack galaxy, but all had the fatal flaw of not being able to work as a team and being able to trust others to do work (even I do that sometimes because I, like most, think that I can do something better than someone else).

So enough downing stuff let me get to how it could have succeeded.

First off we need a large SMG hacking community. Problem right now is that our "veteran" members always take the new member to be a derpy noob who will never learn. Being one of the older members on the old forum I can tell you that some of our most experienced people were those "derpy noobs". So to succeed at making a large community we need to be accepting to new members and be able to answer their questions and be supportive no matter how derpy we find them to be. Also to get a large community we need advertising and something to get people interested. I think the most important way to do that would be a trailer and demo combo, like what 2.5 did. This demo would have to be more expansive than the old one, showing everything that SMG hacking can do currently. Unfortunately I do not have as much time as I'd like to head this demo and make it succeed (another problem, time constraints).

Once we get a big community going some of the admins and mods would have to look through the hopefully large member base for people with a lot of talent and an ability to work well together. A good way to test this would be to throw some of those members into a group and have them produce a galaxy all by themselves. If it goes smoothly then they would be potential for a 2.5 team. If they don't work well together than they wouldn't be good for a 2.5 team.

Once we find 3 or four of these teams that can work together to create a galaxy problem free, we could setup a new SMG HAcking project, very much like SMG2.5. All of these teams would work towards a reasonable goal, maybe a 1 or 2 world hack. the teams would hopefully be working in a way that resembled the focus galaxy system and these teams would have to work together a little to make sure they don't overuse certain ideas. Once these groups complete their project it can be released as its own project.

If all this goes to plan we would hopefully have a lot of groups of members who can competently work together. Then maybe we could bring back the original ambitions of the first SMG2.5 and do that.

Well this might be a bit too much for a relaxland post but whatever is needed to answer the question I'll do. I hope I didn't offend anyone more than I needed to make this point. Also if all this post were for my english essay I'd be done with it.

Solo Runs Completed (click to reveal)