Project Melee 64

[Sudoi]

Hello, my name is Sudoi, or on other places, I'm commonly known as Kaisogen.

Today I'm here to discuss about a SSBM Mod I am making. Melee 64.

Melee 64 is a faithful rendition of Super Smash Brothers, in the Melee toolset and environment. The primary goal of this mod is to create a 64 like Melee Mod.

"So, what can we expect from this mod?"

Well, multiple things!

First, Animations!*

64 had some rather interesting animations, and Melee smoothed them out. This made the obvious changes to hitboxes, as since it was more fluid, it was more often for the hitboxes to fluctuate. In Melee 64, the animations will be changed to be more "jerky", like 64. They will also retain similar hitboxes and timings to the original attacks. So don't worry!

*as of the time of writing, custom animations are impossible. The way I will create these animations is by manipulating timings in Frame Speed Modifiers to make the move look, and thus, "feel" different.

Second, Attacks!

Melee had updated attacks, as to balance the game, obviously. Melee 64 will have updated attacks, with hitboxes, damages, and VFX similar to 64's attacks. This is will, again, achieve that feeling of nostalgia that 64 had. Damages and knockback will be retained from 64, exactly the same.

Third, Skins!

Melee introduced some new skins that weren't in the original 64 game. I'll do my best to re-texture the skins, ala 64 style. The physical models won't be changed, only the colors.

Fourth, Stages!

I have found quite a lot of Smash 64 stages uploaded in a melee format. I will include as many of these as possible in Melee 64, and this will allow for a similar stage-set to 64. I'll keep most Melee Stages though, as we don't want this to be an exact replica of the game.

Fifth, Music! (And SFX)

Melee 64 will include tracks from the Original 64 game, in their old glory! They will hopefully be attributed to the right stages. And not to mention, I will attempt to add my own SFX too (if possible) from - you guessed it, 64. Woo hoo for old Mario voices!

Sixth, Custom CSS (if possible)

Custom CSS mods have been done before, but they are quite difficult. If possible, I want to build a CSS with only the Original 64 characters on it, with the same look of the original game.


"This seems kind of cool... When, and where can we get it?"

The Mod is still in development, and probably will be for quite a while, so there is no dedicated time. Although - I can tell you how I will distribute it.

You aren't allowed to distribute ISO's of GCN games, even with replaced files, not to mention it's against the rules here. Instead, I will link to the files of the game, and the user themself will have to use GC Rebuilder to rebuild the files into an ISO. This is how the mod will be distributed.


"Can I do anything to support this mod?"

Actually, yes! I want to build promotional material, but I am absolutely horrible at photoshop and other photo editing tools. If anyone could build some sort of logo, that be appreciated! :D

Oh, and if you know anything about how to go about some of this, specifically the CSS stuff, help me out, would ya?


That's about it, although I cannot guarantee a release date. I'm still a student, so schoolwork can get in the way of my work. It could be delayed, days, months, or even a year if I'm still busy. I hope to have the project done by end of next summer, or Christmas 2016.

So, a rough outline of the work I need to do:

1. 8 Characters Work of animation manipulation and changing attacks
2. Add in custom music, and SFX
3. A custom CSS
4. Custom Stages
5. Custom Character Skins



*tweet tweet*
I've also got a twitter! Go check me out! I'll occasionally post about Melee 64 over there, but only occasionally. (It's an adfly link, just click skip ad at the top right)
http://adf.ly/1WreB8

 

[Myougi]

Seems to me like people really want a Smash 64-inspired Melee mod. I noticed this a long time ago after talking with a bunch of others on Smashboards, Slack, and Anther's Ladder. The general consensus was pretty skewed toward wanting a mod like this, so over the course of eight months or so, I gave it a shot.

I started working on 'Melee 64' with a small group of people who've had previous experience in modding the game. Our project was going to be dubbed 'Operation Revival', or simply 'O.R.' for short, since it sought to bring back Smash 64 elements in a slightly updated form. It was going to be as if Nintendo made a Smash game between Smash 64 in Melee.

A lot of people don't know this, but in the early days of Melee, the game had a substantial amount of hitlag, much more than what ended up in the final game. Not only that, Smooth Landing, or Z-Cancelling (Not to be confused with L-Cancelling) was set to return (Smooth Landing completely removed the landing lag from aerials, albeit 4 frames. L-Cancelling doubles the speed of the aerial's landing animation, speeding up the recovery-time of it when a character lands). This can be seen in early versions and footage of the game, such as Melee's E3 2001 reveal video. I actually found pre-1.0 Melee build I was able to salvage from an E3 GC kiosk disk. I started using that to translate code over to 1.2 for O.R. for awhile.

Development was going great for the most part with all of us bouncing ideas and patches between each other via our Slack channel, but we ran into some serious issues with it. If you are serious about making Melee 64, I'd advise you to read this post in it's entirety. There's a lot of work that goes into Melee mods, especially ones that hope to be 'professional' and have a following like Project M.

Operation Revival started off relatively basic, and we were actually moving pretty fast in terms of development. We were able to mirror Smash 64's hitstun/hitlag within the first weeks of development, which was one of the most important attributes Smash 64 is known for.

Animations:
Animations right now are impossible, but work is being done on figuring them out. There's a thread about it here if you'd like to lend a hand. During development of O.R., we mainly messed with FSM timings to skip parts of animations and make them look like others. Here's an example:

Believe it or not, this is YL's CliffJumpSlow2 animation, reassigned to YL's Fair with FSMs attached so that it looks like he's doing Falcon's signature Fair. This was nothing more than a silly test and wouldn't be in the final build.

Attacks:
Operation Revival aimed to do the same thing here. We were in the process of updating attack hitboxes using Crazy Hand and other such tools. For the most part, we were able to make attacks fill just as good as they did on Smash 64 when paired with our new hit-lag formula. There was some serious issues that came up pretty quick though...

Problems that arose:
We ended up putting the project on standstill (where it currently is now) until we could come up with a more efficient way of using Magus' FSM Engine. There's simply not enough free space in the Start.DOL to add FSM entries to all of the 26 characters right now. Magus' FSM engine uses a limited amount of free space in the Start.DOL - There's only room for 152 individual FSM entries. If we could, say figure out how to load data from custom DAT files filled with FSM entries, this limitation would be a thing of the past.

Skins:
Retexturing skins is a silly idea. For O.R., we were attempting to use the low-poly models the game uses in the hourglass when a character is far offstage. We never really did figure out how to use them, but the ideas are still there and maybe one day we'll crack it. Here's what a low-poly Mario looks like. Every character has low-poly model variants.

Stages:
Zankyou and many others are developing ways to import brawl stages into Melee. Since many of Smash 64's stages are already on Brawlvault, we can import them straight into Melee. Zankyou was able to import Metal Cavern as one of his first imports. He imported Smash 64's Hyrule Castle (Smash 4's updated version) too!

SFX/Music:
I've already done the work ripping and converting most if not all of the music and SFX from Smash 64. Even though the project is technically on standstill I've been converting the soundtrack to HPS as well as put the SFX in Melee's SSM files. I actually started using 'enhanced' versions of Smash 64's music since it was in stereo and sounded miles better. Here's an example of that:

Distribution:
Giving the end user modified files to tinker with themselves forces them to take unnecessary extra steps in building their ISOs for the game. xDelta is currently the best way to distribute Melee mods. I did this with SD Remix as well as the Community Build. This was going to be the plan for Operation Revival as well.

If you're serious about making 'Melee 64', I may be able to lend a hand if I can fix some of the problems we ran into with O.R., such as too many FSM entries. Better yet, our two projects could be combined. It would be nice to have more people look into Smash 64 and extract data from it so that O.R. is as true to the original as it can be. If you're interested, contact me on my Twitter (@Myougi_SSBM) or here on Smashboards.

My last bit of advice is that I suggest you wait before posting a thread if your mod is only in the idea state. Wait until you have something you can release before posting about it. That was the plan with O.R., and is why there wasn't ever a thread for it. I don't want to make any promises then let people down with a big project like this, so I've always been working on it behind the scenes with select others.

Lastly.... why on earth did you adfly link your Twitter? That's just silly.

 

[Sudoi]

As for the FSMs, I realized that yes, there were too many things to modify to make it a reasonable size. This is why I'm limiting it to the original eight characters. And it will be relatively simple, nothing too complicated. I messed around with this quite a lot, and I found that the animations can be "warped" like crazy when you speed up the animation a lot. I made Marth's Fair a lot faster, and now it's a fast horizontal swipe instead of the vertical slash that we know and love, with only one FSM. I could theoretically use this "warping" to create weird positions that mimic original moves.

As for the skins, I know it seems silly, but hey, why not? It's just a simple idea to add to it.

To fix the original Z-Cancel to be more like 64, I figured that it would make more sense to just make every move about 8 frames of lag. Most people playing would most likely being L-Canceling anyways.

I made a thread mainly to get ideas. If anyone had any suggestions, I would love to incorporate that. It's not really still in the idea state, it's in development. Kinda. Right now I'm compiling data and objects from the original game, so they can translate easily. Like I'm adding in a ton of C libraries to an application, I'm just gathering what I need.

I didn't realize that other people had this idea, although I should have in the first place, haha! If I come across anything that could come in handy for yall, I would be happy to help you.

The only thing I don't know how I would translate would be the CSS. I know that custom CSS' have been made before, but I cannot find much documentation on it. I mainly want it to: 1. Contain only the original eight characters 2. Have the grid like background if possible 3. Have updated portraits for the characters.

Thanks for the reply, I'll definitely take this into consideration.


I just hate long links
EDIT:

I said "quite horizontal swipe"
What

 

[Achilles1515]

All you have to do is modify Magus' code to read the FSM list from a different location with more space. Do not develop anything with the assumption that you are limited with the number of FSMs you can have.

 

[Myougi]

All you have to do is modify Magus' code to read the FSM list from a different location with more space. Do not develop anything with the assumption that you are limited with the number of FSMs you can have.

That's the thing though. There's not really an unlimited amount of free space in the Start.DOL, so even rerouting it we'd potentially run into issues in the future. Aside from that, I have no idea how to reroute it to somewhere that could theoretically have infinite space. If you could help me with that, I'd be eternally grateful.

To fix the original Z-Cancel to be more like 64, I figured that it would make more sense to just make every move about 8 frames of lag. Most people playing would most likely being L-Canceling anyways.

N64 Mode - 4 Frames of Lag for L-Canceled Aerials [Achilles1515]
0408d6a4 FC000032

This doesn't modify any of the Un-L-cancelled landing lag values for any aerial and is one static overwrite.

 

[Sudoi]

That's the thing though. There's not really an unlimited amount of free space in the Start.DOL, so even rerouting it we'd potentially run into issues in the future. Aside from that, I have no idea how to reroute it to somewhere that could theoretically have infinite space. If you could help me with that, I'd be eternally grateful.


N64 Mode - 4 Frames of Lag for L-Canceled Aerials [Achilles1515]
0408d6a4 FC000032

This doesn't modify any of the Un-L-cancelled landing lag values for any aerial and is one static overwrite.

Yeah, we can only use up so much space, and that's a problem for now.

As for the code, I didn't know that existed. Huh.

 

[DRGN]

That's the thing though. There's not really an unlimited amount of free space in the Start.DOL, so even rerouting it we'd potentially run into issues in the future. Aside from that, I have no idea how to reroute it to somewhere that could theoretically have infinite space. If you could help me with that, I'd be eternally grateful.


N64 Mode - 4 Frames of Lag for L-Canceled Aerials [Achilles1515]
0408d6a4 FC000032

This doesn't modify any of the Un-L-cancelled landing lag values for any aerial and is one static overwrite.

How much space do you need?

 

[Sudoi]

How much space do you need?

It depends on what we do. I'm taking into effect only the original 8 characters, and I'm not using any moves or animations that weren't in 64. It would dramatically reduce the amount of space needed, but then again, 8 characters is a lot still.

 

[Myougi]

How much space do you need?

My estimate is we'd need space for around 600 individual FSM entries, which would require about 5888 bytes, give or take. That should be enough FSMs to add at least 2 to all of the perfect attendance crew's basic moves (ex: aerials, smashes). According to Magus and Ripple, the free space that's already being used for FSMs is the largest amount of consecutive free space in the Start.DOL. Writing entries past the allotted space makes the game crash.

 

[Achilles1515]

Take your DOL and zero out 0x18DCC0 to 0x197B2C. Use a code to disable Tournament Mode, such as Debug Menu replaces Tournament Mode.
0x18DCC0 is now where you place your first FSM entry.

Then use this code:

FSM Engine Modified (1.02)
C2073338 0000001C
7F63DB78 8BE3006C
3FA08045 63BD3084
1FFF0E90 7FFDFA14
809F0000 8BFF0008
2C040013 4182001C
2C040012 40A20020
2C1F0001 40A20018
38800013 48000010
2C1F0001 40A20008
38800012 C03E0894
FC20081E D8220000
80A20004 80C30070
80E30074 60E78000
3FE08019 63FF10D8
87BF0008 2C1D0000
41820060 57BC463E
2C1C00FF 41820014
7C1C2000 4182000C
41810048 4BFFFFDC
57BC863E 7C1C2800
41A1FFD0 57BC043E
7C1C3000 4182000C
7C1C3800 4082FFBC
839F0004 2C1CFFFF
41820018 C03F0004
3FE08006 63FFF190
7FE803A6 4E800021
BB610014 00000000

Spoiler: Notes

FSM Engine (1.02) 
injected @ 80073338

mr r3,r27
lbz r31,108(r3)
lis r29,0x8045
ori r29,r29,0x3084
mulli r31,r31,0xE90
add r31,r29,r31
lwz r4,0(r31)
lbz r31,8(r31)
cmpwi r4,19
beq- 0x1C
cmpwi r4,18
bne+ 0x20
cmpwi r31,1
bne+ 0x18
li r4,19
b 0x10
cmpwi r31,1
bne+ 0x08
li r4,18
lfs f1,2196(r30)
fctiwz f1,f1
stfd f1,0(r2)
lwz r5,4(r2)
lwz r6,112(r3)
lwz r7,116(r3)
ori r7,r7,0x8000
lis r31,0x8019    #-----------
ori r31,r31,0x10d8   #------- resultant RAM address in r31 is FSM entry start minus 0x8
lwzu r29,8(r31)
cmpwi r29,0
beq- 0x60
rlwinm r28,r29,8,24,31
cmpwi r28,255
beq- 0x14
cmpw r28,r4
beq- 0x0C
bgt- 0x48
b 0xFFFFFFDC
rlwinm r28,r29,16,24,31
cmpw r28,r5
bgt- 0xFFFFFFD0
rlwinm r28,r29,0,16,31
cmpw r28,r6
beq- 0x0C
cmpw r28,r7
bne+ 0xFFFFFFBC
lwz r28,4(r31)
cmpwi r28,-1
beq- 0x18
lfs f1,4(r31)
lis r31,0x8006
ori r31,r31,0xF190
mtlr r31
blrl
lmw r27,20(r1)

(Don't do any of this with 20XX 4.0 as your base)

5069 FSM entries available.

 

[Sudoi]

God Damn, Achillies, you've done it again! (:
5000 entries. That's really amazing!

 

[Myougi]

FSM Engine Modified.

Clearing out Tournament mode was genius. I don't think we'll run out of FSM entries any time soon.
Thanks again, Achilles. I got this injected and working already, plus I was able to salvage most of the FSMs from old revisions of O.R.! :D

 

[Sudoi]

Clearing out Tournament mode was genius. I don't think we'll run out of FSM entries any time soon.
Thanks again, Achilles. I got this injected and working already, plus I was able to salvage most of the FSMs from old revisions of O.R.! :D

Hey, I guess that since you're already pretty far into a project, are there any FSM's I could knock out for you? It doesn't make much sense to have two ongoing projects. Especially since I'm alone and you have a team.

 

[ThatsBullocks]

Small thing, but if you wanna make the costumes "64-ized", maybe you could take textures from the characters' "Classic" trophies or at least base them off of them? After all, most of those trophies are already more or less based on the type of CG rendering Nintendo used in the 90s, especially the Mario characters.

 

[Myougi]

Hey, I guess that since you're already pretty far into a project, are there any FSM's I could knock out for you? It doesn't make much sense to have two ongoing projects. Especially since I'm alone and you have a team.

There certainly are. I'm going to be gathering everybody who was working on O.R. previously back together in the coming weeks, and you're welcome to join in. We'll need people to research certain 64 characters and investigate all their properties individually.

Before we get back to work, there's a serious need for discussion on improvement to the original cast's move sets (ex: buffing or nerfing certain attributes to a character for the benefits of balance while staying true to Smash 64 the best as possible), various Melee engine attributes that need to be addressed on the topic of their inclusion into O.R. (ex: wavedashing), alternate/clone character customizations (ex: Young Link), and other stuff that has yet to be named. I'll let you know via PM when I've got everything set up. I kinda want to go back to our previous Slack room, but Discord might be a better alternative.

 

[oksas]

I really hope this takes off, would love to see this :D

 

[Sudoi]

There certainly are. I'm going to be gathering everybody who was working on O.R. previously back together in the coming weeks, and you're welcome to join in. We'll need people to research certain 64 characters and investigate all their properties individually.

Before we get back to work, there's a serious need for discussion on improvement to the original cast's move sets (ex: buffing or nerfing certain attributes to a character for the benefits of balance while staying true to Smash 64 the best as possible), various Melee engine attributes that need to be addressed on the topic of their inclusion into O.R. (ex: wavedashing), alternate/clone character customizations (ex: Young Link), and other stuff that has yet to be named. I'll let you know via PM when I've got everything set up. I kinda want to go back to our previous Slack room, but Discord might be a better alternative.

Sounds good. I might just go ahead and merge with you guys instead. I don't really know, though. If you guys are early in development, I'd be glad to jump in. If you guys are pretty far in though, it would feel like I'm going in without any results so far.

 

[Tater]

I would love to help with this project in any way I can-- Just let me know if I can help c: