Resident Nintendoholic Jonathan tipped me off to this video of two-player co-op in Super Mario World. Why Rex instead of Luigi? Why not? Upon further digging, my big takeaway was that tinkering with roms is effing difficult. So the choice was likely based on lessening the amount of work.
I clicked creator Noobish Noobsicle's download link (great name, by the way) to see what all you'd have to do to get this co-op sprite up and running in your emulated Super Mario World. It ain't easy, folks. Strange numbers and instructions that didn't sound like they were formed with real words ensued.
My hope is that one day someone will go about implementing four-person co-op with elements from New Super Mario Bros. Wii into one of these Super Mario games without "New" in the title -- y'know, respawning in a bubble upon death. Stuff like that. Hell, even a new game using existing sprites would be incredible.
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I'm curious as to why he didn't just use the luigi sprites. It was clear from that video that Rex doesn't have spin jump or ducking animations. That seems to take away from the functionality, despite the coolness of the mod.
Because he'd have to hack all that functionality in. It's not a simple matter of copying over some magic code to make Luigi with all the multitude of moves and powerups from SMW playable alongside Mario. Just hacking in a 2nd player character running and jumping around with proper collision detection is probably hard enough.
Wait, this doesn't make any sense. Luigi was already in the game anyway. When two players were playing, player two was Luigi when it was their turn. So I don't understand how that would be so difficult to do compared to this, and Luigi already had all of the same moves as Mario so I don't see how that would be so difficult to do compared to this. Sounds like people are just making excuses.
@ Trevor
Notice how in this stage, there were already Rex enemies around? My guess is that he was able to have a playable Rex here because Rex enemies were already loaded into the memory.
Of course, I guess he could have just had two Marios, with one of the palette swapped, but I dunno. Like Jordan said, I'm sure the choice was made because hacking ROMs ain't easy - I'd imagine hacking a single-player game into having Co-op is especially taxing.
Adding a second Mario was probably the sticking point. It certainly seems easier to use an existing object and apply character control. Think about it this way; the screen follows Mario. That is, part of the condition of the "Mario" object is that the screen follows him. Not possible for the screen to follow two Marios. Also, two Mario objects never exist in the same level.
Would it have been possible to skin Luigi over Rex? Likely, but then ALL instances of Rex would have pulled Luigi's sprite instead.
Well, I didn't mean to make it sound like it was easy to hack a game, but really it doesn't make much sense in this case to not have Luigi.
Let's go with the scenario you put forth the7k. You theorized that using the Rex sprite was most logical because there were already Rex sprites in the level and thus already loaded. However, notice that the playable Rex is recolored and every non-playable Rex is the same color as one another and non are colored the same as playable Rex. Despite simple being a palette swap, the playable Rex counts as a separate sprite.
But, lets say it still counts as the same sprite for argument sake, why couldn't he have simply used Luigi? After all Luigi is simply a recolored Mario sprite and Mario as with the Rex (how do you pluralize "Rex"?) in the level are already loaded into memory.
Still, the possibility of future full co-op Mario World excites me to no end. My fave Mario title is but a small retroengineering job away from rebirth.
As for your theory TheStripe, well, I can't say much about it since I can't say for sure if the camera is set to follow the Mario sprite specifically. But I would assume it just naturally follows whomever is the main player. Since it is naturally meant to be played single player, with two players simply taking turns, player one as Mario and player two as Luigi, I assume it just follows whomever's turn it is. So if player one was meant to be the one playing the camera would follow them, and vice versa.
@Hades: It appears that the actual moveset is there, though. You'll notice that at 0:20 of the video, the Rex character spin jumps (you can hear the sound it makes, and he one-hit-KOs an enemy Rex rather than requiring two hits), and at 0:51 Rex goes unscathed underneath a Banzai Bill. Either the collision detection is actually awful, or the player controlling Rex was ducking, but there is no sprite/animation for that.
@Trevor: All of mario's animation may get swapped out at times, and therefore not be completely available. I don't know the SNES as well as the NES, but with the NES, you had a finite number of sprites (8x8 pixels) that could be in memory at a time. It was a fairly small ammount. Some games (like megaman) would have run out of space with the main character's animations if all moves were in memory all the time. So megaman's walking animation sprites get swapped into the sprite sheet when he starts moving, and the standing sprites get swapped out. At least, this is something I noticed when running that rom in nesticle back in the day (that emulator would let you peer into a lot of the nes' graphical memory.
So it's very possible that two mario characters could exist, but if one was moving, the other would look like he's walking in place, because the walking art exists where the standing art used to.
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Contest:
9:00 PM on 11.21.2009
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Notice how in this stage, there were already Rex enemies around? My guess is that he was able to have a playable Rex here because Rex enemies were already loaded into the memory.
Of course, I guess he could have just had two Marios, with one of the palette swapped, but I dunno. Like Jordan said, I'm sure the choice was made because hacking ROMs ain't easy - I'd imagine hacking a single-player game into having Co-op is especially taxing.
Would it have been possible to skin Luigi over Rex? Likely, but then ALL instances of Rex would have pulled Luigi's sprite instead.
Let's go with the scenario you put forth the7k. You theorized that using the Rex sprite was most logical because there were already Rex sprites in the level and thus already loaded. However, notice that the playable Rex is recolored and every non-playable Rex is the same color as one another and non are colored the same as playable Rex. Despite simple being a palette swap, the playable Rex counts as a separate sprite.
But, lets say it still counts as the same sprite for argument sake, why couldn't he have simply used Luigi? After all Luigi is simply a recolored Mario sprite and Mario as with the Rex (how do you pluralize "Rex"?) in the level are already loaded into memory.
So it's very possible that two mario characters could exist, but if one was moving, the other would look like he's walking in place, because the walking art exists where the standing art used to.
I'm not sure if that even made sense to me. eh?
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