This is another idea I had a little while ago and remembered today, just in time for C3.
Sometimes when you play a level in one go (without dying after the midway point), you die of timeout before you reach the end of the level, because the author expected you to restart from the midway point with a fresh timer.
As raocow (among others I'm sure) has pointed out in a couple of his recent videos, that's pretty unfair — it was suggested that midway points should make the timer reset instead. So that's what I did! Now you as a hack author can be sure your playing experience is streamlined, because the timer will be the same no matter where players start.
But hey, this is a simple yet nice idea. I never liked how levels had a timer so low your only alternative was restarting from the midpoint (raocow does complain about that a lot in his videos). Nice one, WYE!
A simple yet brilliant concept! This is a great idea! This should help keep some hacks keep level play consistent when you reach the end. Where I am found.
what a cute little patch. i've timed out a few times in levels where i didn't die until after the midpoint, so that's wig.
Wow, that's really clever! Goes to show that even after 20 years of SMW hacking, there's still very useful and very simple stuff that no one's thought of making yet
I fail to see how useful this is if the level designer knows what they’re doing when it comes to playtesting their level, but I can’t see it being useless either. I’m the type to give a very fair and lenient timer or have no timer at all in my levels, so it’s not for me anyway, but I do appreciate that this exists.
Really cool. I bet it could also be used for race-like levels, where you start with, let's say... 20 seconds, and you have to keep finding midpoint bars to refill your time to 20 as you proceed through the level. (Of course, you couldn't effectively have a standard midpoint in the middle of the level if you use them for that, but something like a checkpoint 1-up could serve that purpose instead.)
This is such a simple yet brilliant idea!
I can really see this going a long way on these levels where you have such a low timer that you'd rather die to restart the timer than keep playing and risking a time out.
Maybe this could even be used for LDCs to compensate for the timer issue a few of the recent LDCs have been trying to avoid.My Youtube Channel
Such a small Quality of Life improvement WYE.
I am sure plenty of level designers will find it very useful.
This could be useful for more than just a fix for lazy design. I'm no level designer, but wouldn't it be possible to make a gimmick out of this, too? One could probably come up with an idea that uses these midway points more creatively than blocks that just change the timer.
Curiously, worldpeace did have timer reset on Midway Point in his levels (for example https://youtu.be/huGH8E0sUjY?t=205), which is really neat, but I don't think worldpeace ever released code that does that (it's not very complicated, but hey).
If vip6 had this midpoint, raocow definitely would've had a better time with several levels.
I hope this becomes a common patch for all these hacks, which are going to have a time limit and not disabling the time out entirely.
While this is a simple patch, it's still really neat! Hopefully, more hacks start using this more. (Would've really helped out in that level in The Crater.)
I can't believe someone already hasn't done this! This could very well become an essential patch in the future!Currently working on:
Super Kekcroc World 4 (lol jk)
A very helpful patch thank you for taking the time to make this
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Simple, useful and a kind of over-watched thing. I mean, how much time did it take for someone to actually have the idea to follow up with a rather simple, albeit useful thing? This is the kind of patch I should have used back then with Mario's Enigmatic Tales, especially in the later castles.