BUTTCRACK PALACE

[Skawo]

I'm sorry, but LM isn't that good. It was the first editor to come in the range of "good", but it's a really very tedious editor to use.

Reggie and (nowadays) NSMBe5 have outclassed it on almost every front.

[enixd]

I'm sorry, but LM isn't that good. It was the first editor to come in the range of "good", but it's a really very tedious editor to use.

Reggie and (nowadays) NSMBe5 have outclassed it on almost every front.

Fusoya should have made it to work with SMB All Stars and SMW, that way all those patches and graphic inserting could have been easily skipped. SMW is an awesome game, but the tilesets could have been a bit better, hence all the insertion of All Stars graphics. Same thing with sprites, SMW just doesn't have enough variation leading to vanilla hacks not being interesting enough and hence all the insertion of sprites as well.

As for being tedious, yes, if you want anything more than a vanilla hack; otherwise, after a couple of hours playing with it, you get the hang of it. But the best thing about LM and Reggie is the simple fact that they're finished, or at least are being regularly updated. Also, the makers don't have a problem asking for help or sharing information, etc, etc, unlike some other coders that don't finish their editors but will not share the info they have, so the project doesn't go anywhere. It really says something about people like Fusoya, Treeki, and Tempus; their editors are awesome and most importantly do what they're supposed to do and that's why I say thanks.

PS: I just received Component cables for my Wii and it looks FANTASTIC. It's not true HD, but the graphics are sooo much crisper. You even notice the differences in the Nintendo tilesets, such as the castle ones being more blurry, while the grass and coin boxes for example look HD. The colors just pop out at you. I know it's off topic, but I urge anyone with a component capable TV to buy them. I got mine for $8 brand new and of good quality.

[Tempus]

This question goes to the coders. When NSMBW first came out, how did you figure out how the game works in order to hack it? For example, how did you manage to design Reggie! and infer how the World Maps functioned in order to create a map engine/ editor. Did you rumage around the ISO to discover the files which do what you are looking for, then edit them to your liking and design a program around editing what you need. I'm finding it difficult to explain what I'm asking, however an answer back, that doesn't get TOO technical will be greatly appreciated! Thanks. ^_^

You need to use your head. A lot.

First, use the internet to search. Find a way to dump the game, unpack it. Anything you can’t find, you need to figure out yourself.

Next, examine the assets. There are lots of clues and maybe some existing resources that can help you out. Use a hex editor, look at file magics and file names, read up on what the developer has used in past games from what other people have found, and maybe grab a few tools.

Doing great so far, you’re like, 5% there. Everything else, you need to use your head. Figure it out, change it, test it, poke and prod and use your head. I cannot stress that enough. Games are created by people for a purpose, and people organize things and follow patterns of behaviour and common techniques and those are all hints. You need to be a Sherlock Holmes of hex, and deduce what things are using your giant brain.

Okay, lots of the above later, you’ve got some assets. Maybe you want to change the behaviour a bit, or maybe there are not enough hints to figure the assets out. Time to reverse engineer.

Decrypt the binary - you’ll need a tool for this, if you’re in a position where there isn’t a tool, just give up. Making a tool to decrypt a binary is a serious task that is roughly equivalent to breaking all the security of a console. It’s not something you do as a precursor to something, it’s a major project on it’s own.

Learn some ASM for your game. Open the game up in a disassembler. If there are decrypted binaries, someone has made a plugin to disassemble them, so that should be taken care of too.

Next step: use that giant brain of yours more. Lots more. Find other games with similar bits and symbols, and steal those with pattern matching. Infer control structures from loose strings lying around. Run the game with debug outputs and watch and see what things do what from where. And use your head to figure it out.

Great. Now you’ve got assets and reverse engineering and you hopefully know tons about this game. Time to start making changes, yeah? And expect to require lots more of the above every time you make a change and run up against something new.




tl:dr;

Search the internet for every clue or tool you can find, and for everything else, USE YOUR BRAIN to figure it out. There will be lots of figuring stuff out.

[jords123]

well this whole hack was all worth it, wasn't it? especially when newer comes out, i need to research this stuff if i wanna be a level designer

[Mareep]

Thanks for the reply Tempus! It really shows how much effort you, and everyone else who contributed to Newer, really put in. I for one would NEVER be able to do such full scale thing as this, so for that, I give you and everyone else on the Team, as huge congratulations! I want to ask a question though, this is to everyone on the Newer team. Do you think making Newer was worth all the countless hours of time and effort to make? Are you pleased with your (almost) final outcome? Or do you think you could have improved allot of things on what you did and added more?

[Skawo]

As for being tedious, yes, if you want anything more than a vanilla hack; otherwise, after a couple of hours playing with it, you get the hang of it.

No, in my opinion, it has a confusing interface with icons that don't represent what they do at all (Unless the apple button ports the game to IOS, and the mushrooms start emiting hallucination-inducing fumes from your computer's USB port or something), creating terrain and sprites is a pain. And as you say, the tools for custom stuff insertion are a pain to use as well.

Also need to mention the fact the SMW community has accepted nonsense as good level design (SMWCP being all the proof that needs to exist; some levels can last you a good half of an hour IF you don't die a bunch of times), and making an actually good hack is probably impossible, because it will be classified as too easy and boring, as it won't have munchers in every single level.

I watched SMWCP played once, by raocow, it was very frustrating to me, some of the levels even depressed me because of all the helplessness of the player in the giant claustrophobic clusterfuck they claim was good level design.

/semi-regular SMW hacking rant

Thanks for the reply Treeki!

Treeki didn't respond, Tempus did

[Void007]

Thanks for the reply Treeki! It really shows how much effort you, and everyone else who contributed to Newer, really put in. I for one would NEVER be able to do such full scale thing as this, so for that, I give you and everyone else on the Team, as huge congratulations! I want to ask a question though, this is to everyone on the Newer team. Do you think making Newer was worth all the countless hours of time and effort to make? Are you pleased with your (almost) final outcome? Or do you think you could have improved allot of things on what you did and added more?

When you work on something for 3 years even if it turns out shit you're still mega proud and pleased with it. And also, no matter how much work you put into something and improve it, it can always be better.

[Mareep]

Thanks for the reply Treeki!

Treeki didn't respond, Tempus did

I knew that. I was uh, just, um, testing. Yes, testing...

Thanks for the reply Treeki! It really shows how much effort you, and everyone else who contributed to Newer, really put in. I for one would NEVER be able to do such full scale thing as this, so for that, I give you and everyone else on the Team, as huge congratulations! I want to ask a question though, this is to everyone on the Newer team. Do you think making Newer was worth all the countless hours of time and effort to make? Are you pleased with your (almost) final outcome? Or do you think you could have improved allot of things on what you did and added more?

When you work on something for 3 years even if it turns out shit you're still mega proud and pleased with it. And also, no matter how much work you put into something and improve it, it can always be better.

Well I suppose that sums it up.

[Treeki]

I think Newer is great as-is, but if I could change some things about the development...

- I wish I'd have figured out how to create custom sprites earlier - it would have been neat to use more of them in levels/create more, but many of the levels were already complete by the time we got to that point.

- If we had known we wouldn't be able to find anyone to do 3D maps for us, we'd have started work on the 2D maps earlier so that we could have put more time into them.

- And on that same token... I'd love to have had completed 3D maps - they did look better than the 2D ones, and arguably better than Nintendo's - but the person who was working on them had to leave because of real life.


Not much we can do about any of those at this point though. I'd also love to have finished the game quicker, but we wasted so much time on pursuing stuff like 3D maps that went nowhere ...

But overall I'm still pretty happy with the game. It includes a ton of new stuff (not just rehashed NSMBW levels with the same old tilesets and sprites) and it's quite fun to play. Not that I'm biased or anything...

[Void007]

Not that I'm biased or anything...

Not at al.. <.< >.>

[Zambonifofex]

Removing response to trash /Skawo

Will you be able to have Yoshi on the overworld like in SMW? That'd be a pretty cool thing.

This NEEDS to happen! I am 100% behind you on that, that was a feature that I couldn't understand why it wasn't in the original NSMBW anyway. If that's incorperated into Newer, I would be over the Moon in joy.

Because, some levels, you can use Yoshi to Cheat, and, Yoshi cant swin, is not coded on the game...

[dcsquare]

Why Delete My Post ?

[Void007]

Why Delete My Post ?

Because it was unnecessary and off-topic. Such posts WILL get you BANNED.

[Treeki]

I am annoyed. I just played through W1 and the first level of W2... then I forgot and entered a glitch level and it froze the game. :|


We need to make the map engine pop up the Save window when a tower/castle/whatever is completed ...

[TobiasAmaranth]

Eek! Edit: "Definitely have" Save popups and allow us to save at any point even if the game isn't 'completed'. That would be my request. I always found it weird that Nintendo would limit the ability to save the game to towers/castles/cannons. I mean, they gave a resumable save state feature, but do they really think we'll reset the game after every time we die? *shrugs*

[Skawo]

You don't understand. There needs to be a save popup, because a lot of the time, you will just quit the game without remembering to save.

[hellofahedgehog]

Eek! Save popups and allow us to save at any point even if the game isn't 'completed'. That would be my request. I always found it weird that Nintendo would limit the ability to save the game to towers/castles/cannons. I mean, they gave a resumable save state feature, but do they really think we'll reset the game after every time we die? *shrugs*

I dissagree completly, I like the fact you're required to reach a tower or castle to save. Makes the game more challenging, I mean, if you could save at any point, it'd make game over's completly pointless! and that is happening way to much with modern gaming, the NSMB series is one of the toughest platforms still going. Which is pretty sad since the levels them selfs are not that hard, it's just the fact you're required to beat about 2 or 3 of them in order to save.

[TobiasAmaranth]

You don't understand. There needs to be a save popup, because a lot of the time, you will just quit the game without remembering to save.

No, I get that as well. That thought had already crossed my mind, I just meant in addition, allow us to save the game at any point as though we had beaten the game, as limiting us to Tower/Castle is weird (I never understood Nintendo's choice on not allowing regular saves except under those situations; it's a leftover from SMW design?)

I dissagree completly, I like the fact you're required to reach a tower or castle to save. Makes the game more challenging, I mean, if you could save at any point, it'd make game over's completly pointless! and that is happening way to much with modern gaming, the NSMB series is one of the toughest platforms still going. Which is pretty sad since the levels them selfs are not that hard, it's just the fact you're required to beat about 2 or 3 of them in order to save.

You get Game Overs? And just look at Super Mario 3D Land and NSMB2, they have life counters that reach over 1000. x_x;

[Getlucky12341]

NSMB Team............................Newer Team
-=-=-=-=-...........................-=-=-=-=-
Reusing same........................Using great new
old ideas................................level ideas

Makes game so......................Makes the game
easy it's over..........................challenge the
in an hour...............................player

About 80 levels.......................Over 130 levels

Gets paid.................................Doesn't get paid


.......................F*CK LOGIC

[hellofahedgehog]

You get Game Overs? And just look at Super Mario 3D Land and NSMB2, they have life counters that reach over 1000. x_x;

Okay yeah I dont ever get game overs but still less skilled players would so it added some sort of difficulty, and yes super mario 3d land did, but that follows a different format to nsmb as you can infact save after every level making game overs pointless. And as for nsmb2, that's because they chose to base it around the very thing that gives you lifes which was a stupid move on there part anyway so that really has no excuse and will be deemed extremly easy due to that fact.

EDIT: not that im bashing the newer team as I support they're hard work completly and can not wait to play the finished product but i do think users on this forum are a tiny bit harsh toward nintendo, Yeah they are re-using themes from wii on nmsb2 but honestly, thats more of a distraction untill U comes out and wasn't even intended as a sequal, the name was instead "gold" but was deamed sequal worthy in the end and personally, I think it addes enough new gimmicks and ideas while, yes, re-using others does look a tad lazy, you at least know it will still be good. I mean if it sticks closely to the wii version graphicly, then i can't really complain since the wii version looks fine. No doubt newer team have put more effot in just due to the sheer fact they're a smaller team and didnt have source code like nintendo, but thats not to say nintendo didnt put effot in to their games. They still designed a whole games worth of new levels which as many of you know, takes alot of skill to make a well designed level. The gimmick of nsmb2 looks stupid i'll admit but thats not to say it'll be a bad game! and it's optional, you could ignore the coin thing all together if your not bothered about 100% completion!