I've spent considerable time with it today creating a level, an attempt at a multiplayer racer in flying vehicles around a track, and it's been an interesting, fun, yet frustrating job at times. The tools are pretty awkward - very good compared to the usual, and having created a physics editor myself (3D) I understand the difficulties. But the creation of collision geometry posses problems, it appears. You can't edit a mesh once it has been bound to others. This means any design work has to be exact before assembly, you you face a reconstruction rigmarole. Worse than that, you can delete portions of an object drawing with the Triangle button, and yet leave the collision geometry behind. I had a large glass cylinder attached to a background pillar, and chopping off the bottom of it worked in appearance but didn't remove the collision border, and that scuppered placement of objects. I had to delete the whole cylinder and reconstruct. Building nice looking models that aren't a messy hodgepodge of sticking out pieces also requires good forethought. There's a lot of 'best practice' needed to avoid holes, divots, unsightly corners etc. Multiplayer creation could prove very tricky. You'd want everyone to be up to the same standard. A top-tier creator seeing a 'noob' slapping together bits of different width leaving holes in his work might be very annoying!
There's a cap on object complexity that has bit me in the butt. My racecourse is a simple figure-of-8. The curves have to be smoothed out or the vehicles bounce all over the shop. I had a huge glass block and chopped out two cylinders. I then manually tripled the vectex count inside the curves to smooth them out, to something still a bit bumpy but acceptible(ish). In doing this I hit the object complexity limit. This then added an annoying message any time I created an object as the default starting place of placement was on my complex object. And it also means I can't adapt my map to add some starting gates, as I've evolved the design of the game. If the was a tool to slice the object in half, creating two simpler objects, that'd be a problem solved, and maybe one will feature in the final game, but you can't take a little cube and chop out a path to separate two sides, which means that limit is pretty rough. What I should have done assembled a route out of pieces...
There's also a lot of idiosyncracies to learn and work around. I rebuilt my vehicle a couple of times, eventually spending maybe an hour experimenting with materials and weights to see what is needed to attain balance - the size of a Rocket affects it's weight and thrust it seems, but full thrust is substantial even on tiny rockets. Some things proved unattainable - a rocket pack needs a minimum propulsion to overcome gravity, but you can't cap the speed and that same minimum produces crazy speeds on the downhills. In theory, if I could, I could have Sensors affecting maximum thrust depending on where the vehcile is, but you can't add multiple control systems to a device. Where at the moment the engine is always on when a Sackboy is in the driving seat, the whole thing would need a redesign.
It was certainly a fun and engaging experience, and I hope a number of issues have been addressed in the final build, with more advanced tools like Knife and Smoothing and stuff. I'll maybe have another go tomorrow.
