Super Mario World NES: The Complete Improvement Project

[Lusofonia]

As for Mario's magenta palette, it's like he said, it only looks good when shaded. When not shaded, stick to the red one.

I just noticed... That floor looks a little too bright. Maybe make it darker, perhaps the same tone as Koopa's skin color? I think it'd look better.

[SMLFan1234]

Hey, I'm working on an edited SMW NES sprite sheet using the SNES Graphics, could I possibly join the team?

[Somari the Adventurer]

Just a quick little response to some things and a very small progress update,
First off, to SMLFan1234, I much appreciate your offer to lend a hand and you showing interest in the project however I'm not currently looking for any graphical help, but you are welcome to show me what you've done as I'd be interested to see, always worth a look at someone else's take on things I say.
As for the fire flower sprite, it looks a little weird because it's design doesn't work too well with the palettes so I modified it, basically the red part on the original design goes down far enough that it ends up in the same tiles as the stem so either the bottom goes green or the leaves go red. The altered design with the light shading was to get around this issue as the head was made smaller and light colour used as shading is shared in both. However this design has since been updated again and the fire flower is now using it's original sprite but it's tan instead of red.
In regard to the HUD placement, it uses the same interrupt drawing trick as Mario 3 which I'm not sure yet if that could be done at the top of the screen or not, but assuming it can we might try out the idea when we get to that stage of the project.
Also, I did consider a darker colour for the floor palette, but in the end it was made quite light as a darker colour looked a bit weird when paired with the green dots on the ground, but I'll make a mock up of it for my next post to see what you guys make of it though.

As for progress, we haven't much to report, I've been fairly busy with other things last week so haven't had the chance to do more than a few sprites and PalaceSwitcher is just fixing some slight errors with the previously disassembled banks. But I have managed to make a good sounding 2A03 and MMC5 music track for the game just as a little test, so that's something at least, I'll probably post that on the Discord server later. I *might* also look at creating a mock up art ROM of one of the stages using a tool that someone on the server pointed me towards if I can get everything working, all being well I could load that onto a flash cart and show off how the game could look (minus the HUD) on a few different clone systems I have, but no promises on that one.

Anyway, I hope to have a bit more news to share soon, as ever, take care everyone and thanks for reading

[Lusofonia]

Good Luck with the project. If I were you, as you're short on time I would have accepted SMLFan1234's graphic help, but I ain't you so I can't decide for you. I once tried to draw SMW's NES GFX, but I'm no artist so I deleted it, not that it was that all important either way. The only thing I can tell you is that you don't give up in the project, everything is coming along nicely and I'd like to see how it comes out when finished. Looking toward to see those updates.

[PalaceSwitcher]

This. This is perfect. I wonder if moving the HUD to the top is possible? SMW and SMB1 both used HUDs at the top, not sure why Hummer moved it to the bottom.

They actually moved it there to mask garbage tiles. We're changing the level format anyway so it won't need to be there.

[thewindowsandbootleghacke]

Link?

[sics]

Hello, about your search for material to support your designs, although there is little to reuse and honestly they are not very good designs, perhaps I can rescue some idea from here, if something helps you you can have it as you see fit.

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Those sprites look sick,fantastic job Sics!

[Supergamerguy]

Hello, about your search for material to support your designs, although there is little to reuse and honestly they are not very good designs, perhaps I can rescue some idea from here, if something helps you you can have it as you see fit.

Truly amazing Sprite work.

[Lusofonia]

Don't want to disencourage @sics from making sprites, but I think these sprites don't match those of Super Mario World, althrough I really do admit these NES sprites (of the current project) could make use of some extra shading as a replacement for the lower color amount.

[sics]

Don't worry, I know, these graphics are more than 6 years old, but as I said before, only a few things could be salvageable here, what happens is that I didn't have anything specific prepared for the case

For example, I know that unless they manage to implement Reznor using the background layer, it will be necessary to look for other solutions.

Erinchos is also quite difficult to portray, not forgetting that the official Rex design from SMW could use fewer sprites with a few small tweaks, something that is beneficial for the NES architecture...

[Lusofonia]

Ah, I see. Fortunately with the new mapper there should be more space for CHR, so maybe the sprites could be bigger, even if just by a little. Some of these sprites in that sprite sheet are horribly crushed, like the Erinchos.

[sics]

The NES is only capable of displaying 64 8×8 sprite tiles on screen at once, and only 8 sprite tiles in the same horizontal line with one another. Once those numbers are reached, any further sprite tiles will not be rendered on screen.

Source: 2D Pixel Perfect: How to set up your Unity project for retro 8-bit games

This has nothing to do with the CHR space, remember that for this game to fulfill its objective, its developers must manage to move many things simultaneously, so the more optimized this everything, the better it will move and the less flickering of sprites will be on the screen.

About what he commented, the aspect ratio is not the same that the player will perceive when the game is executed, and although it is true that there are many alternatives to achieve better graphics, even if they are ideas that end up being discarded, it is better to actively try to help to the projects we like, than just sitting idly by .

Thanks for your comments!

[Lusofonia]

I see, thanks for the correction.

Just ocurred to me something... Since the HUD will be moved to the top, can't we use different BG colors to paint the HUD's elements different colors?

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Hello, about your search for material to support your designs, although there is little to reuse and honestly they are not very good designs, perhaps I can rescue some idea from here, if something helps you you can have it as you see fit.

Whoa! These look wonderful! Where did you find these?!

[real retro kid knuckles]

Any progress??

[spotanjo3]

Any progress??

This:

Anyway, I hope to have a bit more news to share soon, as ever, take care everyone and thanks for reading

[Somari the Adventurer]

Hello again to all,
I'm back with another update to show off some good progress on the project, I guess time slipped me by a bit with posting this, but better late than never ay, so without further ado;
Mario:
[spoiler][/spoiler]
Mario's in level sprite sheet is now 100% completed and all of the 1k sprite banks that will be used for it have been laid out ready for later. His cutscene specific sprites are not yet completed, but I felt like working on some other sprites for a while.
(Also I noticed the shading shown on Fire Mario's arms in that image is a little inconsistent, this image is a few days old and the majority of that shading has since been removed).
Enemies:
Now that Mario himself is finished for the moment, I've resumed work on the enemy sprites and am starting to design their 1K banks as well, here's a few of the things that I've worked on so far:

As you can see, things are looking pretty nice, I might make the blue used by the Eeries and Boo Blocks a lighter shade in game, but this blue works fine too.
Some various other sprites have been tweaked and worked on as well, thanks to PalaceSwitcher making test ROM for me, I can try out some of these sprites on hardware just to see how they look. The composite colour blending works nicely here I think and the palette of this system complements the sprites well:
[spoiler][/spoiler]
Sorry about the slightly blurry nature of these, taking pictures of a CRT screen is hard, they obviously look better in person, but it gets the general appearance across. (The system used to display these was a PAL 'Power Joy' NOAC Famiclone by the way) As expected, the composite video helps to mask some of the small colour issues some of these have so I was glad to see that working.
Technical Progress:
As for the disassembly, PalaceSwitcher has made excellent progress, almost all of the banks containing code have been successfully disassembled and work will soon begin on the data only banks. Here is a list of the bank IDs that have been completed so far: 37, 39, 41, 42, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61 and 63. Thanks again to Cyneprepou4uk for your technical insight and disassembly tool/scripts, your help has saved us a lot of time and made things much easier for PalaceSwitcher.
Also, a special thankyou to QuickCurly (my original partner on the project) for making an MMC5 conversion test ROM of SMW NES and for taking the time to help us out once again. Yup, we now have a working MMC5 build of SMW. Now that doesn't mean that the in game improvements will be starting just yet, the disassembly still needs to be completed first and then the MMC5 conversion redone for the disassembled version, however it is an extremely useful reference ROM for later of how to at least get this working on the MMC5 mapper.

Well that about covers the update, I think things are coming along nicely, so, all that's left for this post is responding to some things. So first off, as promised, here's that mockup of the overworld stage using a darker ground colour
[spoiler][/spoiler] This actually looks quite nice with this palette, however I'll need to test it on hardware later as in FCEUX this colour looks rather ugly with the green dots on the ground, so thanks for the suggestion. And also, nice work on those sprites Sics, I quite like the depth and style they have going on, they wouldn't really fit with the art of this game unfortunately, but I'm taking notes, well done . Not sure why we'd need to implement Reznor on the background layer though, Hummer made it work ok on the sprite layer, the massive amount of flickering that occurs during the fight seems largely unnecessary as they flicker constantly regardless of if there are too many sprites on a scanline or not, so we hope to be able to use sprites for Reznor as well.

Anyway that's it for this update, as ever, thanks for reading and take care everyone!

Links: Discord Server: https://discord.gg/gU9zWThW :: Disassembly: https://github.com/palaceswitcher/SMW-NES-Disassembly

[real retro kid knuckles]

Amazing work there!

[Supergamerguy]

Looks amazing as always! Keep up the amazing sprite work!