How to bump the stage-countdown to three minutes

Howdy everyone! Finally, i've got something noteworthy to share.

As we know, the key to creating a memorable showdown is a high level of tension. Stage 8-5 in SORR is a prime example: You have a ticking bomb, three minutes to go, and all hell breaking loose around you as you fight your way out of the building. That freaking stage had me at the edge at my seat, and having to sit through the dreaded "Ending 2"-Scene after failing on my first try was a truly soul-crushing experience. But i digress.

With all the features SORR-Maker provides, the countdown is still limited to 99 Seconds - not enough to create a level of drama worthy of a final stage, if you ask me. However, i just so happened to accidentally stumble over a work-around that will enable us to prolong the player's suffering to agonizing three minutes.

Before i move on to my description, i want to mention i've uploaded two barebones-stages (with butt-ugly placeholder-graphics), which already have the 3-minutes-countdown in place. As long as you don't delete the counter, it won't reset after saving the stage again, so you should be good to build your stage on top of it:

mediafire.com file/c71zqzkfx0j2zqt/stage1x_countdown.7z/file

If you still want to know, let's move on: First of all, backing up our stage file is always a good idea. Even though i haven't corrupted one of my stage-files yet, it's still possible - so do yourself a favor. Once we're done, we open SORR-Maker and bring up the level we wish to have the extended countown for. We place the according event and set the counter to 25 seconds - will make it easier to find it later.

We fire up a hex-editor (my weapon of choice is "HxD") and open the smk-file of our level. Depending on the way the level scrolls, we have to look for the following line in the left column:

000001B0 (stage scrolls left)
000001C0 (stage scrolls right)

The line will consist of zeroes, except for one field. The "03" we see in the screen cap represents the 25 Seconds we entered before.



To my knowledge, the only valid entries range from 00 to 05, but given my limited expertise, there's no way for me to be sure there's more hidden settings available. Now, we can make the following entries:

00 - 01:39 minutes
01 - 01:15 minutes
02 - 00:50 minutes
03 - 00:25 minutes
04 - 02:59 minutes
05 - 02:59 minutes

I don't know about all the other scroll types at this point, but this hack will behave nicely with collision maps, which should cover most occasions. Either way, we change the value to either 04 of 05 and save the smk-file. Upon reopening the level in SORR-Maker, right-clicking the countdown-event will produce the following result:



But worry not. Upon starting the level, it will look like this:



I've only tried it with SorMaker V5.1 so far, but i'm pretty confident that this method also carries over to V5.2 (Update: It does.). I also haven't experienced any crashes or other problems with this yet. There's one detriment, however: I've yet to discover any way to carry over the time limit to a different room. So, if you're courageous enough to explore and stumble over a solution, we'll be happy to see it.


Okay guys, have an awesome rest of your day and a good start into the year 2021.

Nice find! Might be useful for some scenes.

Wow, incredible information, thanks for sharing.

You know, if a SOR4 demake gets made on here, I've often wondered about a countdown for the Mr Y fight. It could be as if the plane starts to dip because Y is fighting you and you have to beat him in 3 minutes. lol