20th Anniversary of Trescom Community Level

[TrespasserGuy]

Hey everyone, I was mulling over this idea for a while after I found out that Trescom was created in 2002. I don't know when exactly the site was created but it looks like some of its most senior members joined the forums on July 22, 2002. I was wondering if we could do another community-driven level like we did for Trespasser's 20th anniversary back in 2018.

Since then we've gotten some new members that have shown their modding capabilities, and some of our older members have returned back to modding some neat levels.

I understand that a July release for this community level might not seem wise, since Trespasser modding dies down in the summer time. So I was thinking if we were to do another community level, we could release it sometime next year in November, as that's when the majority of TresCom's elders joined and began posting to the forum.

That would give us, if we start development of this level within the coming weeks, about 15 months to develop it. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping create this level!


EDIT: MODDING RULES
When you decide to download the level to start editing, make sure you announce it so someone doesn't take the level at the same time you do and we get two different versions at the same time. That would be troublesome
We're a small enough community that this shouldn't be a problem, but better safe than sorry.

Here, just follow what Drac said during the first community level:

Each time a new version of the level is posted by a collaborating member, the first person to post a reply to that post & say that they will work on it, becomes the editor. They remain the editor until either they post a link to a new version download, or 7 days passes, whichever comes first. If the 7 days passes without a new version posted by the editor, you must post to let us know that you will become the new editor. And so on.

THE LATEST VERSION TO DOWNLOAD IS AVAILABLE ON PAGE 24: https://www.trescomforum.org/viewtopic. ... 67#p138667

[TheIdiot]

I'm down for this, so long as more people are also on-board. The 20th Anniversary level is probably the project I enjoyed the most when everyone was passing the level around.

[Draconisaurus]

: O
Hey this is great! 15 months ought to give us plenty of preparation... Now that you mention it, I think all the contests I started were in want of more advanced notice. And the 20th anniv level. This also allows for some feeling of safety in taking time to plan the level before working on it.

Has anyone got a paper and pencil? Hehe.

[tatu]

I like the idea.

I don't know if we really need to plan the level. One thing people seemed to enjoy with the 20th Tres level was that you just picked it up and made what you felt like.
Planing it might end up being restricted to what people personally wanna do and avoid contribute to this!

[TrespasserGuy]

Great! I'm glad you guys are interested in this! I was actually thinking of separating the level into individual "lots" on a sprawling flat surface. Everyone gets the same amount of space to build their terrain and add their assets. Sort of like a mod showcase in one big level. The space given won't be too big as to keep the modder in a controlled space so they don't get overwhelmed. I feel some mods that never get completed are due to how much free space they're given. A finite space will allow people to create a realistic environment within the time we have.

Each modder's area would be accessed from a main hub where the player can take various modes of "transport" (boat, helicopter, plane, monorail, hot air balloon, etc) to teleport to that area and explore. Kind of like those Lego Star Wars games. We're a small enough community that the level can be passed around once a week or two after the person has worked on their area, without any sort of overlap.

If this idea seems too daunting to you all, we can just do it like the other community level and just build up someone else's work where they left off in the same area.

[tatu]

I like the idea. It reminds me a bit of the old TresCom Town concept.

And in a way you don't really need to pass around the level. Make a base level with objects, assign the plots and in the end someone could just combine all levels.

[TrespasserGuy]

I like the idea. It reminds me a bit of the old TresCom Town concept.

And in a way you don't really need to pass around the level. Make a base level with objects, assign the plots and in the end someone could just combine all levels.

I thought about doing it that way, and the only problem would be some instances overlapping when being imported into the final level. I know it can be bypassed by renaming the instanced objects to something like Pobject00-908901 so it won't be replaced by another person's instance, but I think it would be harder with models with multiple physics and magnets.

[Nick3069]

I like the idea. It reminds me a bit of the old TresCom Town concept.

It's funny how everybody seemed interested in the TC Town idea, but never got very far.

I thought about doing it that way, and the only problem would be some instances overlapping when being imported into the final level.

One way to avoid that issue would be to require every participant to rename every single object in their project to start with their name. For example, machf's RaptorA would be called "machf_RaptorA" and tatu's RaptorA would be called "tatu_RaptorA", etc. It would be tedious, but that way you know everything can be merged at the end without having to recreate entire areas.

[Draconisaurus]

Hmmm. I like this plot idea a fair bit. It's also hard for me to visualize. I am worried about restrictiveness but I love the idea of hub levels as MikeTheRaptor made. Or hub areas.

[tatu]

What about aiming to do this as the "TresCom Town" level but with bigger plots? That they won't be restricted to a house but rather a bigger plot where you can do whatever, but it is part of a "Town"?

I'd happily do something like the sidewalks models for it to work good. And a way to travel could be bus (or boat if we have smaller island), and you look at a map and "point" where you wanna do?

[TheIdiot]

Hmm, it seems I have the unpopular opinion then, as I'd rather do the level the way we did the Anniversary level. Making a bunch of plots would take away the dynamic feeling of the previous community level; one thing I really enjoyed about that level was seeing what each person brought to the table and then building off of that. One could do as much work as they wanted in the level, whether it was adding a big chunk of the map, or just an object or two. With plots, each person would be essentially restricted to filling their plot(s), which I feel would also cause problems if someone didn't finish their work.
I think the TresCom Town idea is a good one still, but I belive it should be saved for another time.

[tatu]

While I never did any work on the Anniversary level, I think that is a great way to go. Specially as people could pick it up as they had time.
If it would be that a person gets the level and have 1-2 weeks to work on it, it would mean it could take months before some people might be able to do anything.

So overall, I am for the Anniversary style. The level did end up pretty great and more was probably done to it than most fan mods in the past!

[TrespasserGuy]

Actually, now that I think about it. Building off of another one's work as we pass the level along is a much better and more fun idea than the individual areas connected by a hub idea. Tatu and TI are right, it's way more fun to build off another's work after looking at what they made. What I do still believe is that we have a finite amount of terrain to work with. Not some giant 4096*4096 .wtd file.

I feel part of the reason some of the parts of the last community level was never actually finished was because we expanded too much and didn't have enough time to flesh out the new areas. I think if we had a set area with which to build off of, we won't get out of hand and not be able to finish the level in time. I think having the area be the size of a vanilla Tres level would be good. Maybe an area as big as PH or even IJ would be good for us.

[tatu]

I feel part of the reason some of the parts of the last community level was never actually finished was because we expanded too much and didn't have enough time to flesh out the new areas. I think if we had a set area with which to build off of, we won't get out of hand and not be able to finish the level in time. I think having the area be the size of a vanilla Tres level would be good. Maybe an area as big as PH or even IJ would be good for us.

I can agree on that. Having a limit area might also result in a fully playable level (working puzzles with ending etc). What about it being an island? Similar to TC~Isle. It could create some beautiful views.

[TrespasserGuy]

I feel part of the reason some of the parts of the last community level was never actually finished was because we expanded too much and didn't have enough time to flesh out the new areas. I think if we had a set area with which to build off of, we won't get out of hand and not be able to finish the level in time. I think having the area be the size of a vanilla Tres level would be good. Maybe an area as big as PH or even IJ would be good for us.

I can agree on that. Having a limit area might also result in a fully playable level (working puzzles with ending etc). What about it being an island? Similar to TC~Isle. It could create some beautiful views.

Yeah, having an island to terraform and transform sounds fun I particularly like creating areas where you can see a part of the level in the distance before you actually get to that point, helps to create intrigue while playing. If we're gonna use an existing island terrain, I'd suggest TI's Sorna terrain from his unfinished Trespasser Reborn mod. There might need to be some preliminary terrain editing so that we can have a blank slate when editing the level, while still having the general outline of the movie canon Sorna's outline.