Hi, I realize its been a long time since I posted here, but I was wondering how difficult it would be to do any/all of the following potential powerups. Ideally I'd have all three of these in my hack, but I'm not particularly used to coding in ASM.

1) SML1 fireball
Fireball does not have the gravity effect that happens with standard fireballs. It shoots diagonally down from where mario is facing and bounces off any solid surface, including walls and ceilings. Can only have one onscreen at a time, and if possible, it also collects coins (or custom blocks that have the same effect if necessary).

2) Double-Jump
Have a "jump counter" somewhere in SMW. Set it naturally to be at 1 whenever Mario touches the ground. If mario has the double-jump (replacing cape) powerup, set the number to naturally be 2. Allow Mario to jump as if he was on the ground whenever the jump counter is 1 or greater and decrement the counter. Additionally, it would be great if there was a custom block to go along with it. The custom block would set the jump counter to 1 when touched then vanish for 10 seconds and be useable again.

3) Reverse the mushroom
Plain and simple, reverse normal sizes. Mario starts big and dies in one hit that way. If Mario touches a mushroom, he shrinks to small size and if hit becomes large.

Ideally these would be combined wtih blocks that always give feathers or always give flowers to avoid the normal-small-fire or whatnot progression.

If anyone has any hints as to how this would be done or any suggestions about it please let me know.

Well the limiting the fireball to one at a time is to help prevent it from being overpowered. SMW naturally limits you to two, so I figured it shouldn't be too hard to change that to only one. The bouncing fireball would at least be slightly harder to use to utterly obliterate everything in front of you.

It's been a while since I was on this site, I didn't realize any double jump setups had been done. Is the code for those available in any form? Additionally how hard would it be to make the block I mentioned, as that would be key to several puzzles I was intending to include.

I didn't think that last one would be too hard but I'm not exactly sure what to go about changing.

Thanks for the info on the spinball I'll have to look into that. Yeah, the things aren't naturally programmed to bounce off walls or ceilings which is where the real difficulty of making that power-up would lie. At least the rest of the base physics are there .

Another thing I thought about for this was that I'd need to change something in how the power-ups are handled. If you collect a mushroom while in fire power, it goes in the item box and can't overwrite the flower. Ideally I would have any of the 3 power-ups (shrink shroom, altered fire flower, double-jump cape) overwrite any other and send your current power to the item box (and as a player, I can only imagine the select juggling people might try to keep one of each powerup available).

For level design, add a mix of the obvious and non-obvious. Don't make all P-switches effects happen right next to the switch, but don't make the player ALWAYS carry it halfway across the level to use it.

Don't punish the player too hard for mistakes or bad guesses. If you're going to have a level that repeats itself with the exit hidden, don't make the player go through 16 screens again, take them back four or five and have them search from there.

Use power-ups in moderation. Many puzzles or ideas can become trivial with a cape, and you don't HAVE to give the player one in the first world.

If you're going to have a pipe maze, at least make it interesting. No more than 3 options at any given time, no huge amount of backtracking for mistakes.

Use sprites in unusual or unintended ways. Creating/Eating sprite? Try just attaching an eating sprite to a string of blocks Mario stands on, slowly forcing him through the level. P Baloon? Have the hidden area be down and around rather than up. Rain of goombas? Wall of turn blocks that can be opened with them.

When possible, avoid forcing the player to lose power-ups. Nobody likes losing their hard-earned cape in a hack where feathers are rare, or being forced to jump off their yoshi as part of a puzzle. There's nothing wrong with this on occasion, but don't abuse it (alternately, apply the counter-break patch so that things don't transfer over between levels - knowing it in advance makes it much less annoying).

Themes are nice but don't let them become too prevalent. There was nothing wrong with having a water level on the star road or a starry sky area in the vanilla dome.

Try to have at least one thing that makes each level unique. It can be some simple puzzle, a slightly less than obvious secret area, or even just an interesting combination of enemies. Being memorable will make more people reccomend the hack to others.

Hi, I'm trying to get back into SMW hacking after a long dry spell, since I finally have a week or two mostly to myself. While I have several ideas that would require ASM (that I am not nearly as fluent with as I would like to be) the most fundamental as far as the level design I would like to make is to allow the player do double jump.

In terms of what I want, I want to have some variable (call it x for the time being). X is naturally set to 0, and always reset to 0 when Mario's feet touch the ground or Mario enters the swimming animation. While x is 0, Mario's jumping is normal. However, if (naturally in the air) Mario touches a specific block (set to turn to next map 16 after being touched), x is set to 1. When x is 1, Mario can press B or A to perform a jump in the air. I'm not too particular to how the jump is done (if it keeps horizontal velocity or if it is primarily vertical, like leaping off Yoshi), but when Mario jumps from the air the value of x immediately drops back to 0.

Additionally, I'd like to have the cape power-up replaced by the automatic ability to double jump, where instead of 0, the value of x is set to 1 when Mario hits the ground or water.

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly fluent with ASM. I plan to read some of the tutorials again right after posting this, but any help that can be given regarding this power-up would be great.

I know at some point someone had created a flutter jump as part of a hack in progress... I saw a video of that somewhere for a Yoshi Island themed game. That's significantly more complicated than what I'm hoping to achieve so I'm hoping someone who might be working on that could give me some pointers or show me how that works.

Thanks in advance

Hmm... I remember something similar happening to me at one point. Try completely taking out the bit of ground under the triangle. Put the triangle (coupled with the "must be under triangle" ground where you want it to go. Test the level as is. If there's no problem, just use something to make it look right for the blocks 2 and more underneath the triangle, and don't have overlapping blocks under the triangle itself.

Also, if the wall is still messed up, try using Exgfx changed cement blocks for it to see if that fixes anything. I have a habit of not using the kind of blocks you're using for the wall, using a corner block where necessary and then normal walls, rather than the ground to top thing you're using. Either way if there's a problem after those changes are made I can't think that there's anything but a bad rom.

sorry for what is probably a stupid question... is it possible to insert custom blocks, then insert more later yet? I have plans for certain ones, but have some ideas that might require adding different ones (that don't exist yet) later... and I wouldn't want to have to transfer over 100+ levels to fix that.

This thread is for simple information requests, not asking anyone to make anything. If you want someone to make a sprite for you, use another topic. If you want someone to help you understand how to make a sprite work, this one's good. I'll do my best to answer the questions of others, and hopefully someone can answer mine as well.

1) What are the default songs in the addmusic folder? I was able to identify a couple of them but was hoping someone could give me a full list.

2) What triggers the problem with blocktool that prevents you from inserting blocks more than once? I've heard from different sources that it won't work and that it's fine and was wondering if something triggered a problem.

3) Are there palette files or something for all of the custom sprites that don't use standard palette? if so, where?

4) Is there any way to get custom backgrounds that come mostly assembled? Background design really isn't my focus but I wanted a bit more variety than the standard SMW backgrounds, but what I've seen has to be pieced together manually bit by bit.

5) Where can I find graphics files for the following sprites:
ptooie
flyguy
walking key
(updated as needed)

6) Is there anything that can be done to fix the small yoshi island platform? SMW warns me that it may corrupt my rom but the big one works fine.

7) How do I set what the starting number is for those YI platforms? Ones generated by other sprites are always 1 and ones I put in the level myself are always 4.

8) Is there a way to have the game run an addmusic song during a P switch and/or star instead of the standard music? How?

9) Is there a way to make a star set Mario to one of the luigi palettes rather than flashing between the four sets? How?

10) How do I edit custom sprite tilesets? I know how to set it to anything in SP1 or SP2, but what do I put to make it use SP3 or SP4?

11) Where do I find some of the sprites that I've seen before but can't find on the website? Specifically I'm looking for SMB3 paratroopas, giant paratroopas, smb3 paragoombas, and (if available to US hackers) chain chomps.

12) How do I make the extra byte work on some custom sprites? I know some of mikeyk's sprites use it now, as do the wild ptooie plant and the egg plant to determine what they shoot.


I actually had another question or two but that got lost with nightfall... if I remember them I'll ask again.

If you can answer any of the questions here, please do so. If you have information based questions of your own, feel free to post them here and I'll do my best to answer those.

Well I'd like to request the "Gerudo Valley" theme from ocarina of time.

http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/n64/z64gerudo.mid

Sadly, I think that's the only one that really does the song justice of the ones there... too bad its so big. It could be made a bit smaller if you cut out an unnecessary instrument (the repeated ticking in the background... not sure what instrument that is but it could be removed without interfering with the song) and made it loop more though. If this is too complicated, just say so and I'll scrap the idea, but I think this song would fit into a niche (desert themes) that the current songlist here on smw central is sorely lacking.

Thanks again for all the songs, I think I'm using at least 4 of yours in my current songlist.

*edit* tyvm kyoseron, no hurry though, my hack's still about 50 or so levels away from its final release

For number 5, I thought I downloaded all the tilesets that were used with those sprites, but didn't find a the specific ones I mentioned. I actually already drew my own crab, YI penguin, and bully sprites, so I suppose that one's relatively unimportant - if push comes to shove I'll make my own.

For 10, I've already made extensive use of YY-CHR. I guess I phrased the question poorly. A few sprites I have (SMB2 Pow block, cannon shyguy, and potentially a few others) are set to use SP2 and block the use of very common enemies, such as koopas. However, it seems that they were designed to be used with SP4, especially given the tilesets that came with them (the SMB2 pow comes with a tileset for smb2 sp4 enemies, and the cannon shyguy matches perfectly with birdo's positioning) but they are stuck on SP2. If I can edit the sprite to make it use SP4 instead I can use them, but as they are they conflict with so much that they're unusable.

Thanks for the responses so far. I'll redownload a few of those custom sprites and check that thread to see if I can find the .bin files I'm missing.

Thank you very much for the help. I guess I need to clarify a few things though.

1) No big deal, that was just for curiousity's sake since I'm not sure what a few of the songs I'm using are called.

2) Well in that case I guess I'll just have to hope for the best.

3) That's fine, I just know that a few of the sprites came with palette files and wasn't sure if there were ones available for the others.

4) Guess I was just unlucky with my picks then, thanks I'll look into that

5) not a problem

6) For the small YI platform, when I was inserting my sprite list with sprite tool, I got a critical warning saying that it was likely to corrupt my rom and that I could continue or abort, so I aborted and deleted it from the list. It also happened with another sprite that I was testing but hadn't planned to use. Aside from those two the issue never came up. I was inserting them as #50 and #7C if that matters at all. I'll try it again but I was just wondering if there was a simple fix for that.

7) Ah I didn't know how to do the extra property byte thing. That's something that's had me stumped for a while, thanks for the help. Too bad I need to have the sprite inserted 4 seperate times for that though.

8) No big deal then. Star music was the one I cared about, since I was hoping to put in the metal mario theme, change how the graphics work, and use water tiles that act like air if mario has a star to get a "metal mario" effect.

9) Same as 8, was looking for part of that effect.

10) Thanks a ton, can't believe I missed that.

11) Oh well then, as nice as those would be they're not absolutely necessary.

12) I was actually looking for extra byte, not extra bit, but you explained that well enough in 7 that I can figure it out from there.

Thanks a to for your help boingboingsplat, hopefully with this I can finish my sprite insertion stuff and get on to making levels again soon.

to quote MiOr on your first question:
If you want to fix a ROM that has already added custom music, open the ROM by hex editor. Next, search for "1A 09 20 8D FB 1D 9C DA 0D 6B" and change to "1A 09 20 8D FB 1D 8D DA 0D 6B".

Dunno about the colors though, sorry.

For your insertion, you need to set "Extra Info" to either 2 or 3 to use custom sprites. 0 and 1 are for default normal sprites. 2 is the "default" custom sprite behavior that most(all?) custom sprites use, while 3 is the alternate behavior.

Its also generally recommended to put 44 or something in the XY before placing a sprite. That way its not in the absolute upper left corner where it can be hard to move certain ones from.

so 1D, 00, 44, 02 and you should be putting a spike in. It will look wrong in lunar magic but will be right in the game (incidentally, upper left corner of the (usually garbled) sprite you're inserting is where your sprite will be).

Well for something relatively simple, could someone create a sprite that acts like a spiny when its in the air (can't be jumped on/grabbed/anything) but acts like a carryable shyguy when it's on the ground? Preferably it would have one tile in the air and then use the something else for on the ground. Also, could this use the 3 16x16 tiles on the right side of the bottom row in SP4? I'm hoping to use this as the sprite spat by a wild ptooie plant(nondynamic).

Also, for using tweaker, can you save an edited sprite over another sprite (preferably an unused one?) I was hoping to make an alternative "spike top" enemy that was stompable but didn't overwrite the original.

Can we use a level we'd made previously, or does it have to be a level that we made specifically for this contest? I have two levels in one of my hacks that I think would be perfect for this if spliced together, especially since they only use minimal GFX editing that can be removed. Should I try to edit and submit that or just come up with something completely new?

Wow. This challenge is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be, and that's after having designed around 20 levels or so before even having touched YY-CHR or anything. Turns out I have to make quite a few changes to my levels to pull this off... thank goodness for the extended deadline.

Just feels kinda strange to notice how much I've begun to rely on my own custom graphics to make things look right.

Best of luck everyone... seems odd to only have two submissions so far.

Actually DaKing's should be completely legal. Most of those gfx are pulled from the castle destruction sequence (castle 4 mainly) and there's nothing wrong with changing what gfx the chuck has. Clever idea there.

ah here we go. watch the end of this vid to see where he gets it:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8ff7X2vNZb8

Well, my level is about 2/3 done, but I wanted to compliment everyone who's submitted theirs already on their levels. Most are very nice, although a couple clearly could use some tweaking. Good Luck everyone!

Dotsarecool, check your IPS... it wasn't working with my unmodified rom.

my apologies, sorry for asking someone a question about their entry, deleting the post.

Well my submission's almost ready. All I have left to do is tweak a few palettes and have a few friends beta test it. For having started with two of my old levels, making this into something worth showing off here has taken a lot more than I thought it would.

*edit* Ok, just palettes.

*edit2* hate... palette... editing...

Very nice stuff submitted so far though, so I really doubt I'm going to win this thing. Good luck everyone, I'm definitely testing out all the levels people submit here. It gives me a good idea of whose games I should be trying out as well .

Do you think you might be able to alter this to allow any sprite to be generated? IIRC we have the ability to have generators that send the sprites in from the side (similar to eerie generator) and to fling them from the bottom (like the cheep cheep generator) but nothing to cause any sprite of our choosing to rain from the sky like the paragoomba.

I think your problem with the lightning bolt is something that's just natural to SMW - the sprite isn't designed to lose its placement without turning into fire, so if it falls down a pit it just hogs sprite data. No real way around it, same basic effect as putting a springboard somewhere where mario can't reach it, it'll just hog memory until you enter a pipe or door or something. Actually I had some lightning bolts fall into pits in one of my levels just for the look of it... even released the demo before figuring out what problems that was causing.