8-Bit SMB Learning Project (Improved)

Heya folks! I been quiet for quite some time now and wanted to come back after a long break and have another stab at this SMB engine that I was working on before. I know I have another thread for this, but this engine is a complete rewrite which I worked very hard to improve from the last one and since I found the other one was littered with bugs, I wanted to keep this one separate. I'm sorry if I'm beating this SMB to death, but I just can't help it and my attention to detail is overrunning me lol. After play testing my other engine more and more, I was surprised at how much stuff I really messed up on and things I could have done better, so this is a great learning experience for me and possibly others when I release this.

At the moment, I don't have an MFA available as I would like to actually complete the first level with a functional level ending and working point system, etc. I do have to say I am totally excited I managed to get a proper functioning palette cycle going for the invincibility mode and fire flower picking up. I actually found a method from the forums here by schrodinger when he was trying to help someone with cycling palette colors and I managed to incorporate the concept into my work this time instead of using the ink methods I was doing in my other version. I did credit him for the awesome idea!

Anyhow, I'd like to show a bit of a video showcasing where I stand so far. I know it's not much, but believe me, compared to my other platform engine, this is a huge improvement to everything.

I promise, I will eventually get the complete MFA uploaded when I get things in better condition.

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Hey shinbaxter, yeah, I guess I'm just a sucker for those original graphics. I don't know why, but they pull me back in every time lol. Well, once I get the file uploaded, I think the differences will be more obvious. I made a lot of changes to the overall feel of mario's physics. I think with the way I did it before, the controls felt a little too floaty, if that makes sense. I tried to tighten up the controls with this one and match the original physics more closely. There was also a nasty bug in the older one I did where if you were Super Mario, and while you were crouching down and got hit by an enemy, when you got done shrinking, you would be stuck in a skidding loop until you picked up another powerup mushroom. I never could track down the root of that problem, but I know it doesn't exist in this one.

This biggest accomplishment on this one was the inclusion of palette swapping during the invincibility and fire flower pickup. I managed to actually get Mario to flash his proper palette colors during those events, which was something I couldn't get my brain wrapped around last time. That lead me to using ink effects last time for flashing cycles which to me looked really weird, but it was the only method I could come up with last time. The overall project is more complex this time with a lot more lines of stuff compared to the last one.

I tried my best to keep organization in the code even more tighter by practically grouping and subgrouping every little area of the code, just to try and make it easier to track down different things. It's still not user friendly and people won't be just dropping in new stuff and making games out of it, but I guess at least what I've done makes the game work lol. I've been spending days constantly testing things to try and break the engine even harder, which I don't think last time I was aggressive enough in my testing, and that's when the bugs really started popping out of the wood work.

Other changes I made this time as well is I didn't use PMO's for objects like I did last time such as th epowerup mushroom, 1up mushroom, and starman. This time I relied more on fastloops to control just about everything and seems to have yielded less bugs.

Sorry for the longwinded breakdown lol.

Hey vSv! yeah, the palette swapping trick was actually a little more complex than just using replace color. This thread here is where I found out the ideas behind doing it. Please login to see this link.

I had to adapt that concept to my project though, but basically I made an active object with the different colors that would be used for swapping with Marios original colors and had this all set up on timers to cycle through the colors. I honestly can't even explain this since I'm just really bad with explaining things. It would probably just be better if I upload the MFA so you could see how it worked for this particular situation. Here's the MFA for what I have so far.

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Hey Kritter! Good to see you again too! I definitely plan on getting all those elements back in from before and hopefully this time I can push through and go even further than before like swimming, castles, etc.

It's kind of funny how I did the scanlines this time, because last time I was using an addon fx for fusion from looki if I remember correctly to simulate scanlines, but realized I could just make a layer over the whole project with a transparent tiling scanline image. This way no one would have to worry about installing additional fx and it can easily be disabled by simply just hiding it. The rounded edge idea sounds neat too, never really thought about that.

I'm really glad you like so far and I'm really happy with the way things are headed. I know it's not even close to being user friendly but doing something easy enough for everyone to understand isn't really my strong suit. I guess if it's at least working the way I intended, then that's a step forward in the right direction.

Hey folks, just another video update of a couple things added. Got underwater swimming just about done now as well as whirlpool zones (if that's what you want to call them) that suck you back or forward into the bottomless pits. Also got spring boards back in, which I know already were in the other engine I did some time back. Just did some restructuring of the events a bit and ironed out a few minor bugs along the way. Speaking of bugs, apparently there was one I missed and you'll catch it at the end of the video where I re-killed an already squashed goomba LOL. I got a couple more things I want to add in and do a little further testing though before I release the MFA for anyone who is interested. Thank you to anyone for your time checking out my project.

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Actually if you're interested at the moment, I'll just put the file up now. I'm going to exclude the overworld music though just to keep the file size down, but all the other sounds and stuff should work.

If you got any questions, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to explain because I know just looking at things will probably confuse the crap out of some people.

You guys are very welcome and glad to share! The palette swapping code I'm actually finding is a rather CPU intensive thing. I decided to bring out an older laptop I had laying around with an AMD quad core 1.4GHz processor and the game runs silky smooth, but once I go invincible and that palette swapping kicks in, things get a bit choppy. Thing runs perfectly fine on my desktop though with i7-4790 processor at 3.6GHz. I think the way I'm doing things is probably a performance disaster waiting to happen at a later stage lol. So far things are smooth though.

Thanks again everyone for the interest and hopefully when I get more interesting things figured out, I'll release another project.

SHINBAXTER - For the recording part, I used FRAPS, then converted the raw AVI file to MP4 using AVS video converter.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I do have a text file full of notes I've been making that has all the alterable values that I've been using and what they mean as well as some other stuff about the sound and sprites, so I suppose in the next round I'll upload that with the file unless someone wants it sooner. I think next time I'll just put a notes section in the MFA file.