Does anyone know if there have been any efforts to document the programming of all the different baddies in the Mario universe?

Many of us are making Mario Fangames, and we reuse a lot of classic enemies, Koopas, Goombas, Boos, etc. Does everyone just come up with their own implementations of the behaviours we associate with these things?

Having a repository of this kind may be helpful!

Thoughts?

I remember a while back TMK posted this breakdown of SMB: http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb_breakdown.shtml

It doesn't really cover math but it does have enemy locations and some behaviors broken down fairly well.

Considering how simple most Mario enemies' patterns are, I imagine that about 99% of them would be easy to replicate yourself. The most complex maths you're going to need is y = sin(x) for enemies that move in waves like Eeries.

If you want exact numbers, though, you could use a disassembly.

It's pretty easy to recreate the majority of Mario enemies in GM or a Clickteam product (or whatever development environment you're using), but it's hard to get everything "perfect". I think Xander is looking for precise mathematical information on how Mario enemies behave. I believe I've seen information on this topic for Super Mario Bros. 3, but I can't immediately recall where I saw it. I know that the old Djrellik Engine used this kind of data to make its physics more accurate.

Well yeah then you use a disassembly like the ones I linked.

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

I agree that most of the behaviour is self-evident, so I did assume most people come up with their own formulas to represent enemy movement.

As Vinny says, I was curious if the mathematical information had ever been deduced and posted anywhere.

I would love to see a website dedicated to this; breaking down the equations behind video game AI. Why doesn't it exist already??

Probably because video game AI is really hard to make, and the people who are good at it are busy writing it while raking lods of emone.

uh

http://www.gdconf.com/
http://www.gdcvault.com/browse/?track_category=500

I know Super Mario Bros is like, 40KB or something, and it's all asssembly code.
So many hacks have been made of it, there's bound to be some knowledge somewhere.

That's not really what I meant

GDC talks are 30-to-60 minute presentations with about 5 minutes of substance. I'm looking for charts and equations and stuff.

Someone disassembled all of Super Mario Bros into its code.
https://gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722
Good luck finding anything out though!

Charts and equations are still kinda vague, at least to me. Do you mean stuff like state machines, behaviour trees, pathfinding, etc? Or much more game specific AI like goomba, kooopa, or bob-bomb AI, etc?

I think it's code for how enemies work.
Like if Goombas are like
Move Left at X speed,
if hit a wall, move Right at X speed.

You can approximate movements in a fangame, but the real games have their own code.

I notice a chunk of NPCs have programmed behaviours that I've never seen fully documented.
Hasn't anyone really done that already?

This. I'm just approximating, which is fine, but having the original code logic would be useful, I think.

Like a flow chart or something. Something to detail exactly how the AI operates.

I've seen tables of enemy stats from Zelda 2, that was also extremely helpful to read. Stuff like that. I wish it was easy to find.