Reasons why the editor was not present in Trials 2 retail version:
- The editor was not working with the Steam version of the game. All the content (including all levels) in the Steam version was distributed with Valve Steam network using their own patch system.
- It was not optimized to work properly on any other computer setups than we had at work. And it was not tested to work with any other computer setups. The retail version was tested with over 20 different computer setups (CPU & GPU & OS combinations). It's very likely that it would not even start on majority of computers out there.
- It required minimum 2 GB of memory to start, and a very high end graphics card (only highest end graphics settings worked on the editor, and it didn't even start with other settings).
- The user interface of the editor was simply horrible. It looked really bad, didn't work correctly on all cases, crashed if you did some action sequence slightly wrong, etc. Also most of the features were only available as keyboard shortcuts (with only Finnish keyboard mapping).
- There was no help text or documentation present. And many features were impossible to use correctly without knowing exactly how.
Reasons why the editor was not released as a stand alone unsupported tool:
- It's very easy to cheat in the track high score lists using the editor. Editor release would ruin the game for most of the hardcore players as all track high score lists would be filled with cheaters.
- The editor has no kind of serial key protection and can load and run all game levels. With a completely free editor that could run all tracks (built in and user created), there would be no reason to buy the game anymore.
- All tracks made with Trials 2 SE editor have automatic online high score lists at our server, and each score has a replay and ghost stored with it. The game does not support levels without online high score lists & replays & ghosts. This means that the editor public release would easily 10x the storage space requirement of our server and increase the bandwidth to our server by same amount. Our server is currently running at it's limit on peak hours, so it would not handle a traffic increase like that and likely stop working all together. Also Trials 2 does not have support for running multiple servers, so we could not simply add server capacity. The whole server architecture would need to be restructured to handle the load.
These are the main reasons why we decided to design the next Trials sequel with level editor functionality from the start. Fixing all these problems to Trials 2 was too late at the release time.