5D4D495D715D483C0 wrote:
.....and nobody had ever asked me to check my mansions for HD-compatibility, which I found a bit strange, considering how many custom-mansions I had designed.
I'm sorry we didn't contact you and the other designers. It sounds bad, but it was something we had intended, and even talked about it but didn't follow through with for whatever reason. The new game was getting ready to come out, and we wanted players to be able to be able to play as many of the custom mansions as possible.
The majority of the mansions required no changes other than to be
unpacked
using rezycle. We figured that we (the Admins) could do these since no
real
changes to the mansions were needed (and no builder was necessary). It was felt that a few people who knew how could take care of this quickly, and it did go quickly for the most part. Perhaps, too quickly...
Some mansions (the older ones), had descriptions embedded in the resources which (as I mentioned in another post), caused problems in the game. These problems were easy to fix, and also didn't require a Builder, and didn't result in any noticeable change within the game so we also fixed these.
We were extremely reluctant to make any changes within any mansion that required the editor, even though most of the admins had (still have as far as I know) access to an older Mac and the old Builder. We felt this was best left to individual designers, or done with permission.
Due to minor game changes, some mansions were broken. For example:
- Mansions where levers were stylistically lowered one brick below the ground, so that only the top portion of the lever was sticking out. These levers cannot be pulled in the new Game. I believe this was a side effect of Vern 'fixing' it so that levers could not be pulled mid-air. Some mansions were *full* of levers like this.
- Some mansions used portions of the ladder in unusually decorative ways. They ended up not resembling ladders whatsoever. The new game doesn't allow these ladder pieces to work, which broke a few puzzles.
- The behavior of some of the disappearing platforms changed so that if you jumped from a disappearing platform from one screen onto a floating platform in another screen, that platform might not be there to land on.
We noted these issues, and took no action unless we had permission. Once we had done as much as we could, we intended to ask for permission. We should have at least sent a PM (I know that I felt a bit like I was intruding by sending unsolicited email). These issues would have been fairly easy to fix, but required access to an editor. I wrote some scripts that could at least identify some of the issues quickly.
The largest problem was the custom graphics, because the graphics were overhauled for this new version. Jacob completely redid *all* the graphics. Up until today, I thought the changes were limited to being twice the size, and featured new art, but I thought that all the figures in the art were in the same positions as before. I realized I was wrong when I compared the Jack graphic in the Discotheque of doom and the graphic for Jack.
My guess is that those mansions that feature a large amount of custom graphics will probably need to be redone completely (at least the graphics). Simply scaling the graphics larger doesn't look that great. I tried a few experiments with DoD today and the results were mixed. *None* of the admins wished to make fundamental changes to anyone else's mansion. Like I said, I think the intention had always been to contact those designers whose dungeons didn't convert cleanly. After the initial flurry of activity, we all got busy with other things, I guess, and I think it was forgotten. Brell *did* post about conversions, and some of the issues with mansions. There was certainly no disrespect intended.
