Haven't kept up with Mari0 for 4-5 years - is Mari0 1.6 with mods still the best way to play?

[trustandbust]

Last thing I heard was that Mari0 SE was cancelled and after that I didn't really care for the game anymore. I want to get back in to play online with a couple of my friends and I'd like to make some ridiculous mappacks, I had a lot of fun with that back in the day.

So, as far as I know there's the Mari0 Community Edition and Mari0 SE Extended aiming to fix Mari0 SE, but there's also Alesan99's entities, adding a lot of stuff to Mari0 1.6, including online multiplayer. Which one should I use? Any significant differences between Mari0 SE and Alesan99 entities?

[Villager103]

For making your own mappacks, i'd say Community Edition is the way to go. A lot of the content in A99E isn't very useful beyond "more features yay" and half of it, you likely won't ever use. Community Edition, which is built off of SE, has more in-depth, meaningful features that are more useful to mapmakers. The animations system alone is very good, and can achieve things such as locking or panning the camera, adding dialog boxes, and can perform many other useful functions for making your mappacks stand out more. The interface and UI is much more refined too, with a dropdown menu system for things like portal elements, allowing you to change their directions and functions, an enhanced linking system, and more. The issues with bugs and crashes in SE is being fixed with Community Edition, which also adds some other non-bugfix features, such as cleansing gel, a volume slider for music and SFX, and other changes.

That's not to say A99E isn't good, though, it comes with a plethora of new features, and has some cross-compatibility with SE, such as custom enemies, for example. A99E also has some other features that SE lacks, including custom sound effects, different physics settings, and more. Though, it is built off of 1.6, so it retains some of 1.6's clunky UI and features, such as the older linking system, the lack of a dropdown menu for every testing element, and a clunkier background system.

CE and A99E both have their own advantages and disadvantages, so i'd recommend having both on your computer, and use either of them depending on what you want to use them for. The tools provided in each Mari0 version can be used to make vastly different end products when it comes to mapmaking. A99E is great for multiplayer though, because it has online multiplayer support.

[HugoBDesigner]

There were also updates to vanilla 1.6 to port it to the latest versions of LÖVE, as well as implementations of Better Editor, if you'd like to stay on that version. There have been some other mods for both 1.6 and SE, but the ones that stood out and persevered were Alesan's and Community Edition, as Villager103 already mentioned.

[MagicPillow]

I personally prefer using Community Edition/SE Bugfixes, as a lot of the most recent maps are made for SE. It also has a lot to work with for making maps of your own.

[Montii]

i like 1.6 :3

[Qwerbey]

You're a damb fool then.