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SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

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ft029
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by ft029 »

Yes @strongbadman this hack is a gigantic time commitment.

Also, counting tiles to see how high you can feasibly jump is an important skill. The secret exit's intended camera strategy for example.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Super Maks 64 »

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That feel when raocow 1st tries the final obstacle
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by This Eye o' Mine »

Yeah, so if the Yoshi's Island background and gimmick in this level didn't give it away, this level is a huge reference to the level "Hit That Switch!!" from that game. The proper name for this level should've been ' "Hit That Switch!!"-esque', but we totally missed it. Oops.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Sebby19 »

Yeah, I was totally reminded about the bonus level in Yoshi's Island.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Arctangent »

I still don't think I've ever heard the technical deets on how old BlockTool managed to program blocks without corners.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Nimono »

This Eye o' Mine wrote: 5 years ago Yeah, so if the Yoshi's Island background and gimmick in this level didn't give it away, this level is a huge reference to the level "Hit That Switch!!" from that game. The proper name for this level should've been ' "Hit That Switch!!"-esque', but we totally missed it. Oops.
I'm surprised you guys translated it as "Exciting Switch", considering the Japanese name for that level in YI has "Dokidoki" in it, which people typically translate as "heart-pounding". Given it's supposed to be a stressful run, I'd probably translate it as either "Stressful Switch" or "Panic Switch", but not "Exciting", since that implies joy to me- this is not a joyful run!


also that level... On the one hand, I hate it because it's so utterly precise and one mistake means you die, period. On the other, that is 100% accurate to Hit That Switch!!, and I ADORE that level in spite of its toughness. Then again, it doesn't really have any of those utter precision points like the final jumps before the Red Switch, or that fall before that, the level was basically "RUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN". This one's more, ah, platforming.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Lazy_ »

I wonder why wagokoro opted to use buggy custom blocks when regular brown blocks/timed ?-blocks would've worked just as well. I guess they're only there for looks? Such Vanity
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by This Eye o' Mine »

Nimono wrote: 5 years ago I'm surprised you guys translated it as "Exciting Switch", considering the Japanese name for that level in YI has "Dokidoki" in it, which people typically translate as "heart-pounding". Given it's supposed to be a stressful run, I'd probably translate it as either "Stressful Switch" or "Panic Switch", but not "Exciting", since that implies joy to me- this is not a joyful run!
That's a good assessment for the level name, and it probably would've made more sense in terms of what the player is experiencing.
The wordage used could go either way as to translation, and I think my idea about it at the time (this was quite a while ago) was that the rest of the hack's text set a very mock-enthusiastic tone (like the one about the hammer brothers in the first stage and the one about incinerating garbage), so I was fully willing to believe that this was another case where the hack author was being a little bit facetious about how 'fun' and 'exciting' the stage was really going to be, possibly leaning on the multiple use cases of 'dokidoki' for the impact of it.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by KobaBeach »

I'd still be down to go and update this just to like, fix the Exciting Switch translation.

Lazy_ wrote: I wonder why wagokoro opted to use buggy custom blocks when regular brown blocks/timed ?-blocks would've worked just as well. I guess they're only there for looks? Such Vanity
To avoid bonking on the ? blocks? Fuck if I know

Arctangent wrote: I still don't think I've ever heard the technical deets on how old BlockTool managed to program blocks without corners.
The top corners are still a separate thing in GPS and what not, the only difference is that people know to code their blocks so TopCorner and MarioAbove lead to the same place

If I had to guess, it's either a dumb detail on how SMW is coded, or just GPS building on BlockTool as a base? shrug

はるかぜ on YT comments wrote:this level is a yoshi's island reference to the point you hold jump on the switches to boost from them

on a side note, the german name for that level (extra 2) is called "Fluttering Nightmare" instead of anything about switches, which implies Moyse beat that level ignoring the switches gimmick
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by ft029 »

It's not just raocow-- I've phased through the block's corner many, many times in this level, and it's definitely the old blocktool. That makes the penultimate jump ridiculously precise.

Wasn't a big fan of this level, but it gets better. (In terms of fun. Not in terms of difficulty!!)
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Ryrir »

Yeah, the second half of this level has some pretty severe sprite spawning issues, which is actually the second thing (besides the missed SMW2 reference) that we might try and fix in an eventual update.

Our best bet is that the exploding Yoshi's Island platforms don't get cleared in memory if you do not fully explode them and essentially hog up spriteslots further down the level.

Someone else might correct me if I'm totally wrong here, but from my understanding you need to manually include a "despawning routine" every time you code a custom sprite, which can easily be left forgotten.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by This Eye o' Mine »

So this level was home to an interesting (and somewhat baffling) emulator compatibility bug, which involved the dual platforms that spin in circles. This is going to be a fairly length and maybe somewhat technical explanation, so strap in. Or just skip past the spoilered part if you want the short version.

Normally, the two platforms are supposed to be on opposite ends of the circle, but when I was testing on BSNES they'd sometimes spawn overlapped on each other, resulting in Mario being pushed to one side when standing on them, like so:

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These platforms are actually two separate sprites that overlap each other, placed in the center of the circle that is their trajectory. Their code is almost identical (and, though I haven't checked, probably based on the vanilla game's own implementation of spinning objects), in that they each essentially keep track of one platform, and calculate its position next frame using trigonometry. The catch is that SMW's sine value lookup table only accounts for half of a circle. Those who know maths might reason that this is to save space, as the second half of a full sine wave is basically only an inversion of the first half. So, in order to determine which side of the circle the sprite should place the platform (AKA whether to invert the result of the lookup), it keeps track of an additional variable, whose evenness is checked and which switches between 0 and 1 whenever the platform reaches the end of the sine table. I'll call this the 'side-variable'.

The problem is in the way these two almost-identical sprites differ. As you might guess from the explanation so far, in order to get one platform to start opposite the other, you'd need to have one of their side-variables initialized with an even value at spawn-time, and the other with an odd value. And yes, one of the platforms does the sensible thing and has that variable initialized with an immediate value of 0... but the other one initializes it with a value read from memory at $160. That's uninitialized RAM.

So the thing is, most emulators do not emulate the state of uninitialized RAM 'properly' at all. If a certain RAM address hasn't been used by the game yet, emulators like ZSNES and Snes9x will just return a fixed and known value for any reads from it. This value (I don't remember what it is just off the top of my head) just so happens to be odd, so the sprite works fine on those emulators. In real life (and BSNES), however, the contents of all RAM addresses when you turn the console on are completely random, subject to atmospheric stuff and whatnot (don't quote me on that, I'm not a physicist). So, if you read from uninitialized RAM, you don't know what you're going to get, and the value could be either even or odd.
What it comes down to is that, on a real SNES console, the second platform could be spawning opposite the other one as intended, or it could be spawned on top of the other one, with the chances of either happening being 50-50, determined the moment you power the console on. All because of a really thing where it reads from uninitialized RAM when it could've just directly loaded a value of 1. It was fixed in this version to do the latter instead.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by strongbadman »

Setting up a pattern of switch blocks being helpful to you and THEN throwing them up as an obstacle is so much better than the switch palaces being just straight traps. I am super excited to see how wild this game gets with traps.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Arctangent »

strongbadman wrote: 5 years ago Setting up a pattern of switch blocks being helpful to you and THEN throwing them up as an obstacle is so much better than the switch palaces being just straight traps. I am super excited to see how wild this game gets with traps.
it's actually amazing how in the span of three screen the switch blocks go from "unambiguously helpful" to "helpful but can screw you up if you're not paying attention" to "unambiguously antagonistic"
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Nimono »

This Eye o' Mine wrote: 5 years ago That's a good assessment for the level name, and it probably would've made more sense in terms of what the player is experiencing.
The wordage used could go either way as to translation, and I think my idea about it at the time (this was quite a while ago) was that the rest of the hack's text set a very mock-enthusiastic tone (like the one about the hammer brothers in the first stage and the one about incinerating garbage), so I was fully willing to believe that this was another case where the hack author was being a little bit facetious about how 'fun' and 'exciting' the stage was really going to be, possibly leaning on the multiple use cases of 'dokidoki' for the impact of it.
Oh, that's a good point, I didn't consider the possibility that it was meant sarcastically.


You know, this level had a pretty interesting feature- the level only scrolled vertically if you stood on ground, so if you fell into a hole, and there was ground far below, oops, you just lost a life anyway. very interesting!
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by KobaBeach »

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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Mandew »

This Eye o' Mine wrote: 5 years ago This value (I don't remember what it is just off the top of my head) just so happens to be odd
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Kilgamayan »

That Thwomp trap made my entire year. What a hilariously shitty thing to do.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by FourteenthOrder »

That Thwomp was probably the most malicious trap in the game so far, like, wow.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by MonkeyShrapnel »

The effect of the big smiley tree moving over on the OW was actually pretty cool looking.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Lockirby2 »

Woah, tutorials that teach you in some way other than killing you? This isn't even the same game anymore.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by ft029 »

@that eye of mine: I must say I really appreciate the explanation. Feels good to see math actually come in handy.

Forest = Bog: I enjoy the controlled "sprite spam" in these types of levels. It must be a very satisfying feeling for raocow to avoid all the projectiles in the second half on the first try. At nearly all times there's a way to avoid everything; it's just a matter of thinking fast enough.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Alice »

FourteenthOrder wrote: 5 years agoThat Thwomp was probably the most malicious trap in the game so far, like, wow.
I think it being malicious is offset by the fact raocow inexplicably managed to forget about it though, lol.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by morsel/morceau »

Arctangent wrote: 5 years ago I still don't think I've ever heard the technical deets on how old BlockTool managed to program blocks without corners.
We always blame the old block tool, but corners were not supported by lunar magic when that program was made.
Version 1.64 September 24, 2009 (9 year Anniversary of Lunar Magic!)
...
-fixed sprite interaction with custom block ASM in vertical levels. I
actually fixed this years ago and temporarily released the fix as a
patch, intending to later integrate it into LM for version 1.62. But
mysteriously the fix never made it into the program... I suspect I
was waiting till I had time to check/adjust the fix for the Japanese
ROM as well, and forgot about it.
-implemented the "Mario touched top corner of block", "Mario within
block (body)", and "Mario within block (head)" custom block ASM
hooks. Two of these were used in a few of DW:TLC's blocks. Should
of been done before, but likely wasn't for the same reason as the
sprite fix.
So let's gratefully blame fusoya. We could also blame wa, but I think there was a japanese version of block tool that fixed slowdown issues (and wasn't updated to use corner offsets) that he was probably using.

Also, I am flabbergasted that raocow is playing kaizo hacks now. Looking forward to the kouhai replays.
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Re: SUPER - Mario and Detteiu's Trap Tower

Post by Ryrir »

Is this level a weird outlier?
Yes. There are levels further down the line, especially at the very end of the game that are just as hard, but are a lot more fun to play.
So even if you'll have to resort to savestates at screen transitions the way you did for today's level, I believe you'll still have a lot more fun actually playing those levels if that makes sense.

Collection of Scrapped Ideas is by far the worst level of the game, glad that's done. (Guess there was a good reason for the ideas to be scrapped in the first place, huh?) Tomorrow should be better!
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