Starting with info about the featured stages:
First one:
FOURSIDEAs it couldn't be in another way, Fourside is one of the stages in the pack. Fourside is a stage that comes from melee, as you may know. I started it at the beginning of this year (2010) and the first public pictures were shown in
my original thread at smashboards.
This is the first picture I showed to people, if I'm not wrong
And this is the stage now
After doing a few stages like Dead Rayquaza's Lake or Falcon Flyer, I thought that having a stage with lots of stage builder blocks emulating the custom stages over normal stages would be interesting. Then, I saw a Fourside hack in stacksmash, which was a simple city texture for one of the stage builders. I decided using that one as a base to test if making a stage with blocks was really possible, so I started placing blocks in a normal stage based on wifi room. Progress came quickly and it started to get shape. Then, I figured how to change the textures used by the blocks, and started doing something different to an adaptation of a stage builder stage. I textured each building with different textures, and imported a different model to improve the shape of the main building. Finally, I made the UFO with two spheres. And everybody was amazed with the stage.
Then, I abandoned the stage some time because of how difficult and time consuming was making an accurate version of the stage from melee. You must know that in those days, brawlbox had not the useful collision editor yet, and I was doing collisions by hexing, just following some basics that Phantom Wings revealed in a post. So the only way to see how was the stage going, and how were the collisions working, was playing on the wii. And that was frustating sometimes.
Well, after a few other stages, some day I decided to continue the stage, and set a release date. Having a release date, I couldn't get lazy anymore. So, I finished the first beta, and many people loved it.
After the first release, I made some versions of Fourside featuring the daytime, with different textures for the background buildings. I made it sunny, dusk and rainy. Then I left the stage quiet some more time.
After some research, I found interesting the idea of flooding Fourside, and I released a new daytime version, with water. Using my acquired knowledge while doing other stages, I succeeded at resizing it to the melee size in no time, using a 3D model from melee as a reference.
Now the original stage and the melee one coexist, and they're in different brawlvault entries. I'm keeping the old one updated according to the melee one. The melee sized is the one in the stage pack.
Some additional info of this stage:
- First stage made with the stage builder blocks method
- Mushroom Kingdom 64 was started later to Fourside, and was released before, making it the first stage builder block stage available to everyone.
- Originally, the way the UFO was dissapearing was a trick, it flew far far away into the background once each 2 frames, giving the illusion of dissapearing, while it was still there, with the same size, and same collisions. The dissapearing sequence is now made differently. The way to completely dissapear is just a resize to 0, that has not changed yet. That will be improved soon.
- Custom made stages weren't usually edited by other hackers until this stage appeared. Moonside was made from Fourside twice.
- This stage was the first one I sent instructions with to change some options. An alternate background from the first betas can be triggered inside the file. There's also an alternate moon.
Info for other stages will be coming shortly
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