VIP 5 2019 - To everyone there is a boon, and a time to every rom hack under heaven

[Falky]

Lastly, Daddy Cool is throwing mahjong tiles, not diplomas. Him being stupidly good at mahjong and winning in the most absurd ways possible is a huge meme on 2ch.

Bloody hell. Thanks Koba, can't believe I didn't realise that. I got quite into Japanese mahjong when I played Yakuza and yeah, looking at Daddy Cool now, I can clearly see it's one of the betting stick things that you use when you call riichi.

[Alice]

raocow, is it really necessary to specify that the VIPs were made by edgy super nerds? Personally I thought it was fairly obvious that anyone who made a SMW romhack was one. (A super nerd, not edgy in case that's not clear, lol.)

[Ashan]

Did you read this and just forget about it or something, it's almost word for word!

Is it really necessary to clarify that a romhack of a home console game that was at the time 20 years old is made by super nerds?

[Alice]

Did you read this and just forget about it or something, it's almost word for word!

Is it really necessary to clarify that a romhack of a home console game that was at the time 20 years old is made by super nerds?

Apparently I just somehow didn't see it despite reading all the new posts before posting, lol. Whoops!

[Ashan]

Tell it to the judge!

[Zummorr]

In today's racoow is like "Yeah the VIPs never ask you do any weird stunts like shell jumping."

Seems you've completely forgotten about this level.

Jump 1/2 used alot of gimmicks but was there ever any other level that utilized this glitch? I think this is like the only hack I've seen use it.

[Ryrir]

I understand why it's done, but the removal of all the allcaps feels like such a tragedy.

Since this might not be obvious to anyone watching, maybe it'd be a good idea to explain our reasoning behind this.
Basically, the reason why we removed any instances of allcaps in pretty much all of our translations is that the alphabet graphics in any Japanese hack out there is invariably going to look like this:



Now compare this to what that graphic looks like in the original SMW:



As you can see, in the Japanese version all the lowercase letters of the latin alphabet had to me removed to make space for the Japanese characters! This means that whenever an author would want to write out something in English, they'd be forced to use allcaps simply out of necessity, not necessarily because they wanted to make the text stand out in any way.

This is basically why we decided to follow a self-imposed rule to remove the allcaps in any instance, even if I agree that there are certainly edge cases out there where you could argue that the allcaps might be more fitting.

[Super Maks 64]

[KobaBeach]

thank u so much for posting that

[morsel/morceau]

Since smw itself always uses capitals, I've always thought small letters in level names looked hacky. Those crazy Japanese kids with their fuck-off big letters were the only ones doing it right.

[This Eye o' Mine]

As you can see, in the Japanese version all the lowercase letters of the latin alphabet had to me removed to make space for the Japanese characters! This means that whenever an author would want to write out something in English, they'd be forced to use allcaps simply out of necessity, not necessarily because they wanted to make the text stand out in any way.

It's also because raocow and his nostalgia for the Japanese versions of these hacks isn't the only one we're making the translations for. Since the all-caps isn't by intent originally anyway, it'd be kind of weird for somebody who's playing this for the first time to have levels randomly in all-caps when the rest of the translated hack uses capitalization properly.

Anyway, guess I'll talk about the other thing that was causing the overworld to glitch out, which is the custom water animations.

There's a couple of concepts in programming known as compile-time computation and run-time computation. Basically, when you have some kind of data set that requires processing in some way, and that data is going to be included in a piece of software that you're writing, you would in most cases (space permitting) want the processing to happen as much as possible while the code is being compiled into executable software, and be essentially cooked into it before the software actually runs, to save it the time of doing so at run-time where processing time is typically more precious. Naturally, this is only possible if everything about the relevant data is constant and known at compile-time.

The implementation of the custom overworld animations in this hack decides to do a lot at run-time that could've been done at compile-time. The gist of it is that each submap has a list in ROM of possible tiles that could be getting uploaded to VRAM, and each frame during the NMI routine the code scans through the entire list and for each tile checks whether it's set to be uploaded on that particular frame. The tile list for the main submap is quite large, so the game ends up doing a large amount of checks that come up negative for stuff that is completely predetermined to be negative, which wastes a lot of time in which nothing is really accomplished. This entire routine on the main submap (and YI, which is the same tileset) ends up taking a good quarter of the available time in the NMI routine.

If a bunch of other rendering stuff lined up badly with this, then you'd get stuff like black flashes on the screen whenever walking to another level tile (as it loads the new level name) or whenever level events happen (as it loads new tiles on the OW). Or, if you happened to be particularly unlucky when doing freelook, you got this:


(Thanks to Ryrir for the image)

Fixing this involved writing a script to determine for each of the possible 256 frames which tiles would be getting uploaded, comparing the frames to see which ones produced identical results, finding the pattern in it (every submap repeats its animation loop every eight frames at most, it turns out), using this information to create lists of tiles to upload for each of the eight frames, and then refactoring the entire animation routine to use those lists from the frame number out rather than going over the complete list of tiles. This quadrupled the speed of the routine on the main submap, and got rid of every related glitch except for a single occasional black flash when exiting freelook (which you may have noticed in the LP in the third part).

Of course stuff like this never goes right the first time, so here's what happened when the routine I wrote ended up putting in too many tiles:

[raocow]

the zombie navy is invading D:

[SAJewers]

I wanna see someone make a level from that now

[KobaBeach]

Endurance is one of those levels that are literally just made to shitpost. By taking it seriously you're effectively being beaten by it. The only winning move is to laugh at it. That's the kind of audacity I like about VIP.

That and TSC is a sort of idiot savant in that all his levels are really stupid (ABUSE OF ABYSS, Canary Tunnel, Fruitea, So Sadistic/Lunatic, Death Bubbles, Missingno., Shall We Get Serious? etc) but stand-out somehow for better or for worse. I love his stages.

[MR.X]

Oh wow, VIP 5, that's kinda big. Was searching for older raocow stuff, then this appeared. I pretty much stopped following raocow after he played Wario Land 4 in such a depressive style, that it seemed to negatively affect people and make them think that it is "unfair" on Hard (even although it is one of the easiest games ever), which is just unacceptable. Funnily enough, at the same time he played a game called Rex Rocket, i only watched a single part, and it was the same thing, it was raocow dieing and complaining all the time. Is raocow still like this nowadays?

The Dailymotion and first Youtube Vip 1 to Vip 4 Let's Plays were fantastic and made me play and enjoy the VIP series myself. I doubt this would have happened if i had watchted the Third Youtube playthroughs first, starting at 2014 i believe. In the original Let's Plays, raocow said the Vip series were his favorite hack series ever, then in the Third playthroughs, he just complained at how unfair they are. I doubt that i'd have been motivated to play the Vips myself if i had seen raocow's most recent Let's Plays first. I can at least understand that raocow got rid of his amazing random commentary (even although i definitely preferred the randomness), i think his goal was to focus more on the game in his commentary, but when that just consists of constant nagging, then i don't think it adds that much.

Overall, when you watch a video of peak raocow 2007-2010 and then you watch one of his modern vids, you wouldn't even believe it's the same person. If you look at Dailymotion vids, it already starts within the first few seconds... the extremely energetic HEY THERE EVERYONE, THIS IS raocow, is nowadays just a quick Hey'er everywun, 'zis raocow...

[raocow]

I mean you are not wrong. That was a rough period of my personal life when I was working at a job I hated, and the negative energy was being released in the games I was playing. I'm not saying that an excuse, I think that's just what happened, and it did impact my videos a lot.

[Grounder]

...rao only played wario land 4 in the past couple of years and it wasn't depressive in any way

[raocow]

wait that was just two years ago ?!
Why does it feel like it was way more than that...

[Leet]

Overall, when you watch a video of peak raocow 2007-2010 and then you watch one of his modern vids, you wouldn't even believe it's the same person. If you look at Dailymotion vids, it already starts within the first few seconds... the extremely energetic HEY THERE EVERYONE, THIS IS raocow, is nowadays just a quick Hey'er everywun, 'zis raocow...

Well yes he actually talks about the videogame and its design more often instead of just saying random words

[Voltgloss]

Funnily enough, at the same time he played a game called Rex Rocket, i only watched a single part, and it was the same thing, it was raocow dieing and complaining all the time.

that's not a reflection on raocow, that's a reflection on rex rocket

EDIT

wait that was just two years ago ?!
Why does it feel like it was way more than that...

Almost three years now. Wario Land 4 and Rex Rocket LPs were July/August 2016.

[Ivy]

If you look at Superstar Saga right now, raocow is maintaining chipper even in the face of the endless sea of criticism that is only now starting to die down somewhat. I'd say this is some significant morale. If you think he's still being "depressive" these days, I dunno what to say

[Ashan]

raocow i can't understand who you're addressing and what your name is at the beginning of every video. Can you please enunciate more? Thanks.

[raocow]

I mean say a phrase at least once a day for twelve years and sometimes it might slur a bit

[Ashan]

Maybe it needs some modernization.

Proposal:
"YO, WHADDUP GAMERS AND GAMETTES, MY NAME IS raocow AND TODAY WE'RE GONNA BE PLAYING SOME WHACK AS H*CK GAMES THAT YOU'RE SURE TO LOVE. SMASH THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE BUTTON IF YOU LIKE TO PLAY FORTNITE AND MAKE SURE TO SHOP THROUGH MY AMAZON AFFILIATE LINK. THIS VIDEO IS SPONSORED BY FLAMIN HOT CHEETOS! FLAMIN HOT CHEETOS, ONLY FOR BADASSES!"

[Alice]

wait that was just two years ago ?!
Why does it feel like it was way more than that...

Because you've played like 1.6 trillion games on your channel maybe? You've done a lot of series since Wario Land 4.

I mean say a phrase at least once a day for twelve years and sometimes it might slur a bit

Clearly the solution is to occasionally spice it up by introducing yourself as someone else. (Steal DC's "hey there, La-Mulanaites!" intro or maybe Iso's for a day or something. Though I think you did do the former once during your La-Mulana lp, lol.)