Urrrg, why did you go public with this Panda? This is going to cause more harm than good; already people are having emotional reactions to this and demanding various changes to their characters of choice.
After talking to you at WTON, I wrote up a journal in notepad of how I would change each character. I posted the intro online and sat on the rest to prevent fueling speculation. Guess I'll post the rest now...
Regardless, there are a few issues that need to be kept in mind if such is ever to be considered realistic.
1.
Distribution must be streamlined; I already nagged leeharris a bit about details, I assume we'd create a simple custom Smash bootloader channel. I'm going to try to make a primitive test build tomorrow.
2. Changes to gameplay must be such that transition to and from the alternate standard is transparent as possible. Nothing will be adopted if there is any major conflict in timing or spacing that players learn between vanilla and modified.
Ideally, *all* changes would be to damage.
Changes to knockback or character weight would only be made if changes to damage can not properly create the desired effect.
Changes to startup and ending lag times should be used rarely, only when absolutely needed.
Changes to move duration, hitbox size, and character movement should never be used.
If players cannot freely move between vanilla and modified, the project is an immediate and unquestionable failure.
3. There is a limit to how much we can change at once, due to only being able to load a finite amount of code. Currently that's 256 lines... There are 39 characters in the game, so that's about 6 lines of code for each. And that's BEFORE any major global changes, stuff like no tripping takes a few lines too! The wavedashing codes (obviously we'd never use such, but as an example) are over 80 lines!
We need to make as few changes to as few characters as possible. I want Ganondorf's Up-B uppercut to kill at 40% and Jigglypuff's down-throw to do more damage, but there are bigger fish to fry. "Global" changes like weight are going to be more efficient code-wise than tweaking an array of attacks. One day we might be able to make hundreds of changes at once, but
for the time being, any discussion on hacking characters must be focused on patching them rather than reinventing them.
4. The discussion of any modified standard would have to be... controlled. I'm still shocked that this thread exists; the reaction to this alone is going to be a potential nightmare... We simply can't have hundreds of individual, personal modification proposals flooding the boards, nor can we let the sub-forums go from discussing characters in vanilla brawl to modification demands. Community input is one thing, spam is another. The law will have to be laid down, stickies created, and rules enforced. Handled poorly, this could create a situation that makes "Melee vs. Brawl" look like a tea party.
The last lines of that journal I mentioned contained the following:
- The only sane approach would be casual: "The SBR has created this; it has no impact on the current SBR ruleset, and is provided only as an experiemental curiosity."
- Side-tournaments using the hacked standard would be widely observed and carefully evaluated.
- TOs and the SBR would use data collected from side tourneys to make decisions as to the future of the community and tourneys.
There is an ancedote I would like to conclude with. You may be familar with Bethesda's TES RPG "Oblivion". Out of the box, Oblivion was one of the poorest examples of game balance of all time. Every enemy was automatically set to the same level as the player, all items were also scaled by level, and many other issues. The mod community rushed en mass to balance the game themselves, and ended up tripping over each other; mods fixing one thing were incompatible with mods fixing another, modders weren't sure what others were changing, things were overbuffed and overnerfed, it was mass chaos that resulted in a game typically being worse than the original. One day however, a community member named Oscuro came and established a single massive mod called "OOO". It was developed continuously with input from a large number of testers and mod creators, all according to Oscuro's single, unified design. What resulted was Oblivion becoming one of the greatest RPGs of all time.
Brawl may not need fixing like Oblivion did, but the SBR as an entity is still capable of playing the role of Oscuro if they so choose. My opinion? There's no reason against working on a secret, experiemental version of Brawl in the SBR dungeon laboratories. Just, for the love of Brawl General Discussion, don't let anyone forget the "secret" part.
Looks like secret is out the window. Well... guess I've got a blog to go post.