Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months ago)

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Drew Sebastino
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Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months ago)

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I had been following this thread on smwcentral (https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=71532) years ago, but thought the project had been abandoned, but I found today that a plethora of custom levels have been made. It's been possible to modify the visual representation of the stage for a long time now, but the collision format hadn't been figured out until recently. Moving stage elements have also been implemented (along with custom names for SMB2 stages, which is awesome): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyFq3vx3J1I#t=10m42s However, the backgrounds are very rudimentary if they're there at all, which is odd, because I'd have thought they'd be separate from the stage data.

I don't think any real tools have been made for this yet (which would explain the lack of quality in most of these, especially visual), but I'm betting they will be at some point if this has gotten this far. I really need more good Super Monkey Ball seeing I finally beat Master a while back... :lol:

I also found that around the same time custom levels were being introduced, a glitch allowing you to skip different sets of levels (Expert vs Expert Extra vs Master) has been figured out (15+ years later!): If you break the tape on the goal post once the timer reaches 00:00, you'll loose a life, but if you break it again, you'll warp to the next set of levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77MWUsQQ_k

You know, if this has been done, I think we're one step closer to custom F-Zero GX courses! :wink: (Seeing that Nintendo isn't making another F-Zero anytime ever soon...)
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rainwarrior
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by rainwarrior »

I'm a little bit confused as to what platform this is played on. Is this a hacked ROM for an emulator? Mame? Some console version? A PC port? The thread seems to go right into things without explaining context, and also one of your videos says Super Monkey Ball 2... ?
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by mikejmoffitt »

IIRC, Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 are GCN only. Monkey Ball is the Arcade Naomi-based original, while SMB is an updated port of it, and SMB2 is a full sequel. There is a Playstation 2 game that is more or less a combination of SMB 1 and 2 in one game using the SMB2 engine.

In before tepples makes light of the namespacing issue between Super Mario Bros and Super Monkey Ball's initialism "SMB".
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by tepples »

Nope, Windows file sharing protocol as used in small to medium businesses.

At least Sega has tended to be cooler about hacks than some companies.
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pubby
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by pubby »

Espozo wrote:However, the backgrounds are very rudimentary if they're there at all, which is odd, because I'd have thought they'd be separate from the stage data.
There was a stage or two in SMB2 which had bizarrely minor mistakes in their background. This makes me wonder if the background data is duplicated per level.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by Drew Sebastino »

rainwarrior wrote:I'm a little bit confused as to what platform this is played on.
It's a hacked ROM, either being played using Dolphin or a Wii with the Homebrew Channel.
rainwarrior wrote:and also one of your videos says Super Monkey Ball 2... ?
I think the level format is near identical. I've seen custom levels for both Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2.
mikejmoffitt wrote:IIRC, Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 are GCN only. Monkey Ball is the Arcade Naomi-based original, while SMB is an updated port of it, and SMB2 is a full sequel. There is a Playstation 2 game that is more or less a combination of SMB 1 and 2 in one game using the SMB2 engine.
Correct. I heard the PlayStation 2 port runs at 30fps instead of 60fps so it's not as good, but the Xbox port still runs at 60fps.
pubby wrote:There was a stage or two in SMB2 which had bizarrely minor mistakes in their background. This makes me wonder if the background data is duplicated per level.
I never knew that... It wouldn't surprise me, considering the textures for the stages are duplicated.
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by pubby »

I downloaded the Custom Level Pack and played about 80 levels of it on a Wii, and my god does it lag. More than a dozen levels ran at a stuttering framerate that was so slow it was close to impossible to play. The majority of the levels did not lag, mind you, but those that did really dragged the experience down. I'm not sure exactly what is causing it, but it appears to be physics related as the framerate speeds up slightly when the monkey ball leaves the ground. Very bizarre.

The levels were decent, though there were a few big stinkers. What surprised me most was how underutilized narrow bridges were (e.g. Expert 9), and how overused ramps and jumps were. Sadly, levels involving air-time and bouncing are just not my thing.

Here's hoping it gets better in the future.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by Drew Sebastino »

pubby wrote:I downloaded the Custom Level Pack and played about 80 levels of it on a Wii, and my god does it lag.
WTF? I really don't know what to say about that... The levels in the game don't appear to be deliberately designed to avoid any kind of lag... Super Monkey Ball isn't even that CPU intensive from what I can tell if I can run it on my laptop.
pubby wrote:I'm not sure exactly what is causing it, but it appears to be physics related as the framerate speeds up slightly when the monkey ball leaves the ground. Very bizarre.
I mean, how could it be graphics related? (I'm still boggled about how it could be CPU related either...) I sincerely doubt even the most complex stages (custom or not) reach 10,000 triangles, and there's no background in these.

You know what? I do know that the collision data is separate from the visual representation of the stages, so it's possible the collision map in the custom stages is more accurate than the original stages, but I'd have thought the collision map was already about 100% accurate (in that it directly covers every polygon) in the original stages due to the fact I've never noticed any discrepancy. I still can't see how it would be bad enough to slow down something as (relatively) powerful as the 486MHz Power PC processor in the GameCube, unless we had collision planes folded over itself several times over or something? I'm not even going to pretend I know how collision detection in a 3D space works outside of bounding boxes (well, cubes actually), and there's no way something like that is being used in a game like this.
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Re: Super Monkey Ball custom levels finally created (months

Post by pubby »

Others have run the custom levels on their Wii with no problem, apparently, so there might be something wrong on my end.

Dunno what though. I don't understand Wii hacking very well.
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