Topic: Super Mario Maker - OT

@Megumi: Smash Bros. accesses SD card for images, so it's perfectly possible to make it work. They probably wouldn't do that anyway though. LittleBigPlanet ended up not being nearly as good as it could have been when they decided not to let you add images stored on your hard drive despite talking about the feature numerous times. This decision was presumably made to avoid people using copyrighted images or other inappropriate material (though you could still take pictures with your camera and use them in game). I'm surprised they're letting you record audio at all, but I am all for it despite it most likely getting abused. It would have been cool if they let you make custom sprites. That was something I was hoping for as you could do this in Mario Paint and this game references it a lot. I was also hoping for the music maker from that game as well to create custom tracks, but I guess we get a more convoluted in-game version similar to LittleBigPlanet. Unfortunately the editor doesn't look like it will be that rich, but I'm still excited for it.

Ah well, I just have sensitive hearing, so...hearing music/sound from a mic bothers my ears.

Figured I would bring this up, but you think they'll allow sharing via QR codes?

@Megumi: I think stage data would be too large to fit into a QR code. I think the max possible amount is a couple of megabytes, which more complex stages would most likely exceed.

Not to derail the thread at all, but I've been thinking about the 9-day thing, and well... I gotta admit, it is a bit weird. I know I'll use the system to learn the ropes, but the number of tools at launch seems limiting. Well, it's only nine days, so no big deal.
But then again, I agree with those who say if all the tools were available at launch, it will be overwhelming. I would just want to try everything and probably make the worst stage I could ever make. Heck, my first game in WarioWare DIY was just pure garbage and an embarrassment because I just wanted to see if I could plug in everything, as well as options THAT ARE NOT even in the game (which meant that I tried to substitute these nonexistent options with other options that do exist, which is very difficult)! Thus, limiting tools at launch, at the very least, makes some sense. Less rubbish stages and more simplistic stages for players to learn from and be inspired.
But that's just my two cents. Again, not to derail the thread....

I dunno how QR codes work exactly, just thought it would be possible...

Basically the black and white squares sort of act like 1s and 0s in programming. So there is a limit to what you can do in a single square. You can increase the limit by decreasing square size within the main square, but only to a certain point. I mean you could use multiple QR codes to get around it, but it would make things more complicated.

As far as the 9-day limit, instead of unlocking daily it should have just have been based on time within the editor if anything. Limiting everyone that first week or so is unnecessary I think. Like when I worked in WarioWare D.I.Y. I made some pretty decent games pretty quick since I'm familiar with art design and programming in general, but doing the lessons beforehand made perfect sense. So yeah have tutorials that you have to complete first, but being forced to wait 24 hours for next unlock makes little sense. Things like Splatoon's shop system I find extremely annoying.

The first person to recreate this in Super Mario Maker wins a cookie.

Doubt that will be possible, since the only "warping" or whatever you wanna call it are doors and pipes. Still hoping for a way to mute sound effects so we can do something like this. lol

Well lets do some maths. A single screen in Super Mario Maker looks like it's about 14x24 blocks or "locations" that an item can be placed. From what I remember the stages can be two screens high and about ten screens long. Which means we're at 24x240 blocks. But you can also create an under-world which pushes that up to 2x 24x240. Or in other words 11,520 blocks/squares.

But obviously a square can be more than just empty or land. You can have a whole set of different items or enemies in a square. From the trailers it looks like there are about 60 different things ignoring the fact that you can shake some items. I could say that there are 64 possibilities (6bits) per square or 128 (7bits). Lets just put it as 128. So effectively we've come up with a size of how many bits the biggest and most complex Super Mario Maker level could be.

7x 2x 24x240. ~81k bits. 10kilobytes. Maxiumum

The biggest QR codes hold about 1kilobyte of information. A bit less actually. So could you share levels with QR codes? Well in theory sure. But there'd be a limit to how complicated they could be. I suspect that most of the levels people will create will be simple enough.

...It's too late for me to think about this, never mind...let's stick with interwebz. lol (thought it would be cool if you could grab the level's file(s) and move it to the PC and share it like that. (ugh, I think my "m" key is messed up, lol)

Smash's Miiverse is actually fun to me just to see the art and creativity people have. You just need to sift through the garbage troll posts that people spam. The Miiverse stage itself sucks though. So bland looking, the pictures that show up are completely random and not based on ratings, and the stage doesn't even work online which to me, defeats the entire purpose of why it exists. It's a shame too because I actually love the Tomadachi Life and Mii Plaza tracks for the stage but they should not have been wasted on it.

Well, GameXplain actually was pushing for them a bit in a few of their videos talking about the games but as I said before, it will not make a huge impact on the game, it's just fan service. It's not like anyone would be pushing for someone like Wii Fit Trainer or Villager to be part of this game, but they're going to be there anyway even though they have nothing to do with the Mario universe while the kids were staple characters in 3 of the 4 Mario titles used in Mario Maker.

At the end of the day, the game is going to be awesome anyways. Just let me have my moment... and if Nintendo does decide to add them in later through a patch or DLC, I apologize in advance because I will probably have another freak out moment somewhere on the forum.

@skywake: Would it not be larger than that depending on what Mario game the levels based on?Surely a level from NSMBU would be much larger than 10kilobytes? Or does the QR code just need the info of what's in the level rather than the whole level itself to read it?I don't really know what I'm talking about here,you'll know much more than me.

You just have to save the objects and where there are to fully determine the level. Nevertheless, the information is too big to fit into a single QR-Code.
But it would be possible to save the URL of the level in a QR code and then one could exchanges level.

No. You can say all that in 2 bits. Think about it.

00 -> SMB
01 -> SMB 3
10 -> SMW
11 -> New SMB

2 bits

And at risk of giving a lecture in this thread on data compression you can do far more than that. You don't need to describe what item is in each square unless the level is incredibly complex. You can do things like assume a square is blank or has ground unless something outside of a standard level template is placed in it. Or do things like describe 50 brick blocks in a row as "50x brick block from 20,20" rather than "brick block at 20, 20, brick block at 20,21 etc".

That's actually what the difference between file types like png and bmp is, or wav and flac. A bmp is a list of what colour each particular square is. A png describes the pattern. So a png can be just as big as a bmp if the pattern is ridiculous but if it's something like a white background with a simple drawing? It can be very small. Without any loss of information.

Yeah it's really dependent on how complex you get with the level. I had assumed levels could be larger than 2 x 10 screens. With proper compression as you stated, most levels will probably have a range of objects that are the same decreasing file size significantly. If anything though I guess (like gaming_24_7 stated), you could just store a download link to the level in one rather easily.

So is the limit confirmed 2 x 10? I thought I heard that you can add underground levels on top of this limit.

I can't think of many tunes that would be banned. Is that even a thing? I guess Wagner wouldn't be particularly popular in Germany or Israel. Though even that I'm not sure if it's actually banned. I think there are far more likely to be maybe some issues with the sorts of symbols you can draw more than what sort of music you can make.

Yeah there's a much higher chance of offensive block formations. It's pretty obvious that there's going to be a need for moderation. Hopefully Nintendo is better prepared than they were for the Miiverse stage in Smash Bros. Course I guess with the music feature now you can do swastikas along with the Nazi anthem etc. Again there's going to be offensive stuff, so best practice is just to moderate instead of trying to limit the editor in general as it just hurts the game.

That are many compositions and lyrics that are banned in Germany since the German constitution doesn't allow unconditional freedom of speech except for teaching, science and art.

But I don't think it is a big problem since this is a well-known problem in times of youtube and online forums.