KTB's tweet still rings in my mind a bit. I wasn't thinking in going back to SMWC outside of recovering my account in a few years to upload stuff to the site for people to use but. I dunno I'm just a bit out of it? SMW hacking feels a bit aimless for me right now. Not depressed or going through another episode wrt SMWC, I don't know if idol's still mad at me or not and it's out of my control right now despite my apology so Whatever. But I just feel a bit lost in terms of my craft. The pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement is my raison d'être, and bebn would probably encourage me to continue but... It all feels a bit ambivalent.
this sucks man
LethalBrownies wrote: ↑3 years ago
TiKi wrote: ↑3 years ago
as an enjoyer of the bosses in kirby super star and sonic 3 amd/or knuckles it has been a very hard pill for me to swallow that smw hacks will almost never be good eatin' when it comes to bosses
Is this true or is this just stinkin' thinkin' ?
It's technically true like um... It's mostly due to two factors: Mario's moveset, and the architecture of the platform, 65C816 Assembly.
Assembly as it is, is mostly instructions, or opcodes paired with numbers, serving as values and addresses, controlled by registers in memory. Addresses contain values and are usually used as routines as boolean flags, table pointers, coordinates and so on and so forth. It's a much more simplified (but not streamlined, the complete opposite of streamlined) way of coding than say C# or Lua, being considered basically readable machine code, each of the instructions corresponding to a byte in hex, not sure how many instructions x86-64 has but it should be in the hundreds, especially with all the permutations of opcodes. Because of that, it's much harder to learn for the common non-programmer than trying to pick up Ruby or JavaScript in RPG Maker (JavaScript is apparently garbo though one of my exes used to code in that, probably because he worked at Apple, I hope he's doing okay).
SNES uses a WDC 65C816 variant called the Ricoh 5A22, a hybrid 8-bit/16-bit microprocessor, thus using the 65C816 architecture for its ASM. Of the consoles of the time it's definitely one of the hardest ASM architectures to learn to code for, with the MegaDrive and Neo Geo using the more flexible Motorola 68000 chip, PC Engine using a variant of the WDC 65C02 chip and the Game Boy and Game Gear both using the Zilog Z80.
Due to this, coding basic sprites is seen as a struggle for beginning coders in the SMW hacking front. A complex sprite with a more thought out pattern than just walk back and forth and poop out a fireball? That's just too much for most people who just began reading Ersanio's tutorials a week ago.
As for Mario's moveset, it is extremely simplistic. As he has no weapon or any special moves other than:
- Spin Jump
- Jump
- Cape Thwack (with a powerup)
- Fireball (with a powerup)
- Throwing things
It's a hassle to code a fun boss. You have to come up with one or more attack patterns that's fun to dodge, depending on how many phases you want to code, possibly custom sprites that spawn if you want custom projectiles or even sort of "Assists" or "Strikers", in fighting game terms, and whatnot. And on top of that you have to come up with a way where you can damage it in a fun way. A lot of people are heavily critical of early, Japanese made custom bosses due to their Kirby and Doki Doki Panic style methods of fighting back through items they provide as attacks. Heck just bosses that only let you attack by giving you an opening. A lot of the times, they just give you one opening to toss a block or jump on them after cycling through three or so long attack patterns to counter the fact that all Mario can do without relying on power ups is jumping and throwing.
Most people in the Mario hacking community focus more on the level building side of the art of game making, rather than the boss or enemy designing. The enemies that get made are usually designed to add to the level or be recreations of encounters from other games. A lot of the times, people just don't know how to make a fun boss, or it's too much effort for someone doing it as a hobby, or they fear the end result of people spamming their PM box with "pls relaese bos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ur hakc loko good pls giv dmemo :( :( :(".
As you can see, these are the reasons why custom bosses are very rare in the Super Mario World hacking scene. It's a shame, but without expanding Mario's moveset, which is very hard with a patch based coding environment - I think lx5 refuses to do anything with his powerups other than maintain stability updates - just coming up with bosses is just out of a lot of people's wheelhouses. Even carol had to expand Mario's moveset with some of their bosses, like Meta Knight (Sword Kirby), Ludwig (Ring Boomerang), even the Seven Koopalings (SaGa style techs and magic).
#1 mega cd enjoyer AND "making fun of"-er 
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