9th August 2005, 7:43 PM
Yunno how when you play most platformers (or any game really) how the character moves in the environment can be vastly different from game to game? It's how a character or object feels to have weight and mass and even the surfaces of the level will interact with your character.
In SMS, in the programing, Mario always knew and understood where he is and how should act and react depending on
What he's standing on
The angle of the object he is standing on
What direction he's facing
Now introduce a Jump:
The angle of the jump, how long you pressed the button, the surface you were standing on and what direction you were facing when you performed the jump were all taken in to consideration at the moment you pressed the button. You'll jump higher on a stone floor than you will on wet grass, etc.
Now add a movement. Ever tried a backwards long jump in Mario 64? The game didn't care what direction you were facing it only cared about what direction you were pressing, so if you executed a long jump and then held back on the stick Mario would long jump backwards at the same speed and height he would if moving forward, but the distance would get cut short until you could move the camera in front of Mario.
Then it would make sense to the physics engine that Mario is moving forward so you would achieve full momentum. Pulling back on the control stick the game think's you're trying to aim a jump by over compensating before landing so it hinders your movement range.
Now in SMS perform a simple jump and then move in any direction. You dont have to wait for momentum, it imeadiately catches up to you and the character moves as you would want it to,
Now try running in a circle, if you did this Mario 64 he does just that, runs in a circle. Do it in SMS and you can actually see his body shift as weight is displaced. The animation isn't moving his body, it's the physics engine that says there's X mass under Y weight under Z stress (in movement) and Mario starts to lean in to his turns. Notice the different in the control? It becomes faster to turn because his weight and center of gravity is now towards his head and not his middle. Jump and let go of the control stick, and you cancel the weight displacement but you still have all the momentum. So when you jump you will move at the same speed in the direction your were last in before the jump happened.
Try falling in Mario 64. He never speeds up. In SMS the speed of which you fall is doubled every 3 seconds unless you perform another action (a 'recovery move') or butt-stomping which causes you to descend at a constant rate.
If you jump at full sprint and hit a fall after performing a jump Mario will grab the wall and begin to slide. The slide is a canceling move that destroys any momentum you recieved while running but it's possible to run at full sprint and jump kick the wall and retain all momentum while in the air, land, and continue your full sprint without having to recover any momentum. The inverse of that applies to, if you fall from a high place and land on a slope you can continue the rate of speed you gained while falling (which is based on mass and weight) so that you're running faster than what the game normally allows
Now apply these physics to every ground, wall, prop, enemy etc. that Mario can interact with and the world you traverse in SMS becomes an awesome experience. Couple that with the water cannon that has similar effects but work on completely fabricated truths. In a standing position activate the hover nozzle, you'll slowly ascend (the pressure of the water strinking the surface beneath you could in theory, given enough psi from the cannon, lift you off the ground, but now move towards a bottomless pit and you retain the same amount of lift which would mean the water cannon is propelling water at a rate that is greater than Mario's mass and weight times gravity but that makes sense because if it didn't do that you would fail in your hover everytime you got too far from the ground. There are occasions where Mario could be falling down at an extreme rate where the water cannon can no longer hold up the pressure of Mario's descent, when this happens you slow your fall but eventualy hit the ground and sustain the same amount of damage you would have recieved had you not slowed down. The game says you failed to recover in your fall so plop you get hurt. But if you do recover to a dead zone where you no longer have movement in mass then it cancels your previous fall and starts recording your current position as the new height.
In Mario 64 you could fall from any height and but stomp before hitting the ground and the game will record the height of your butt stomp as the height from which you fell.
I mean Mario 64 had a cheating way of pulling it off but SMS is using the 'real' computing power to pull it off in-game. It's really amazing and there's no game out there that gives you that kind of expression of physics.
In SMS, in the programing, Mario always knew and understood where he is and how should act and react depending on
What he's standing on
The angle of the object he is standing on
What direction he's facing
Now introduce a Jump:
The angle of the jump, how long you pressed the button, the surface you were standing on and what direction you were facing when you performed the jump were all taken in to consideration at the moment you pressed the button. You'll jump higher on a stone floor than you will on wet grass, etc.
Now add a movement. Ever tried a backwards long jump in Mario 64? The game didn't care what direction you were facing it only cared about what direction you were pressing, so if you executed a long jump and then held back on the stick Mario would long jump backwards at the same speed and height he would if moving forward, but the distance would get cut short until you could move the camera in front of Mario.
Then it would make sense to the physics engine that Mario is moving forward so you would achieve full momentum. Pulling back on the control stick the game think's you're trying to aim a jump by over compensating before landing so it hinders your movement range.
Now in SMS perform a simple jump and then move in any direction. You dont have to wait for momentum, it imeadiately catches up to you and the character moves as you would want it to,
Now try running in a circle, if you did this Mario 64 he does just that, runs in a circle. Do it in SMS and you can actually see his body shift as weight is displaced. The animation isn't moving his body, it's the physics engine that says there's X mass under Y weight under Z stress (in movement) and Mario starts to lean in to his turns. Notice the different in the control? It becomes faster to turn because his weight and center of gravity is now towards his head and not his middle. Jump and let go of the control stick, and you cancel the weight displacement but you still have all the momentum. So when you jump you will move at the same speed in the direction your were last in before the jump happened.
Try falling in Mario 64. He never speeds up. In SMS the speed of which you fall is doubled every 3 seconds unless you perform another action (a 'recovery move') or butt-stomping which causes you to descend at a constant rate.
If you jump at full sprint and hit a fall after performing a jump Mario will grab the wall and begin to slide. The slide is a canceling move that destroys any momentum you recieved while running but it's possible to run at full sprint and jump kick the wall and retain all momentum while in the air, land, and continue your full sprint without having to recover any momentum. The inverse of that applies to, if you fall from a high place and land on a slope you can continue the rate of speed you gained while falling (which is based on mass and weight) so that you're running faster than what the game normally allows
Now apply these physics to every ground, wall, prop, enemy etc. that Mario can interact with and the world you traverse in SMS becomes an awesome experience. Couple that with the water cannon that has similar effects but work on completely fabricated truths. In a standing position activate the hover nozzle, you'll slowly ascend (the pressure of the water strinking the surface beneath you could in theory, given enough psi from the cannon, lift you off the ground, but now move towards a bottomless pit and you retain the same amount of lift which would mean the water cannon is propelling water at a rate that is greater than Mario's mass and weight times gravity but that makes sense because if it didn't do that you would fail in your hover everytime you got too far from the ground. There are occasions where Mario could be falling down at an extreme rate where the water cannon can no longer hold up the pressure of Mario's descent, when this happens you slow your fall but eventualy hit the ground and sustain the same amount of damage you would have recieved had you not slowed down. The game says you failed to recover in your fall so plop you get hurt. But if you do recover to a dead zone where you no longer have movement in mass then it cancels your previous fall and starts recording your current position as the new height.
In Mario 64 you could fall from any height and but stomp before hitting the ground and the game will record the height of your butt stomp as the height from which you fell.
I mean Mario 64 had a cheating way of pulling it off but SMS is using the 'real' computing power to pull it off in-game. It's really amazing and there's no game out there that gives you that kind of expression of physics.