Whoa... what the hell happened??
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Talking about romhacks!
- Thread starter SilentSnake
- Start date
Whoa... what the hell happened??
He also posted about it on Cohost:
cohost.org
RIP RHDN
Hey all, I know I don't post on cohost much, but RHDN imploding is seismic, so, resharing. This is largely copy/pasted from other socials, so it won't contain anything you may not have already seen. Post follows. So by now you've probably seen that romhacking.net is effectively dead. In the...
cohost.org
Any chance you or someone else could post the entire thread here? I'm at work for the next eight hours and can't go to this site (or use twitter to read it there). If it's too much of a pain, don't worry about it.He also posted about it on Cohost:
RIP RHDN
Hey all, I know I don't post on cohost much, but RHDN imploding is seismic, so, resharing. This is largely copy/pasted from other socials, so it won't contain anything you may not have already seen. Post follows. So by now you've probably seen that romhacking.net is effectively dead. In the...
Thank you, Vaeran. Aw, geez, it's a big old clusterfuck. I hope a successor site comes around soon... I need to go check my download and see if the site archive finished downloading last night.
This sucks. I used the site a lot, and I'm not even that big into romhacks, really. Mainly translations. It was an easy place to go to find fantranslations all in once place and try and keep up with new ones coming out. There were plenty that I heard about just by perusing the main page randomly. Damn.
This sucks. I used the site a lot, and I'm not even that big into romhacks, really. Mainly translations. It was an easy place to go to find fantranslations all in once place and try and keep up with new ones coming out. There were plenty that I heard about just by perusing the main page randomly. Damn.
Played this for the past hour, an ENORMOUS mod of Super Mario Sunshine called Super Mario Eclipse, the full version of which just released today. It works on real hardware! You will need to update your Swiss for it to launch, though, I was stuck on a black screen on revision 1400 but updating it fixed it. Anyway...
They've changed Mario's moveset, giving him the long jump from 64, and each FLUDD nozzle got new abilities as well (hover has basically a double jump, now, which I've already made heavy use of - it feels like a natural extension of FLUDD's mechanics. Feels great). Vanilla Mario Sunshine is still there, but they've made blue coins either autosave or not save at all per your choice, only saving when you choose to, which is lovely. According to a Pianta I spoke to in a new area, there are apparently 240 shines in the game - double the original. I've already found areas not present in the original game, and you appear to be able to walk around the entire island, entering levels by foot, should you want to (you can still warp there using the usual entrances).
I'm going to really dive into this tomorrow after work, I think. Check it out!
They've changed Mario's moveset, giving him the long jump from 64, and each FLUDD nozzle got new abilities as well (hover has basically a double jump, now, which I've already made heavy use of - it feels like a natural extension of FLUDD's mechanics. Feels great). Vanilla Mario Sunshine is still there, but they've made blue coins either autosave or not save at all per your choice, only saving when you choose to, which is lovely. According to a Pianta I spoke to in a new area, there are apparently 240 shines in the game - double the original. I've already found areas not present in the original game, and you appear to be able to walk around the entire island, entering levels by foot, should you want to (you can still warp there using the usual entrances).
I'm going to really dive into this tomorrow after work, I think. Check it out!
@FelixSH I'm 12 shines in, having played some more before work. I'm having a blast - I already like vanilla Super Mario Sunshine, so I don't think this will convince you if you already hated the game, but if you like it... Assuming they don't drop the ball and have everything new be SUPER difficult (which isn't the case, so far), this might be the definitive version of Sunshine for me. I'm really enjoying exploring around and just playing it like its version 1.5 of Mario Sunshine lol. The QoL improvements are great, I've pretty much already mastered the hover nozzle double jump (which really does feel like it belongs there, I can't imagine not having it now, already, this early on). I've already found two brand new areas, and you can just walk to other areas of the island - I beat the first shine of Pianta Village (the final level of the vanilla game), having just... walked there from Bianco Hills. It rules.
I played some more of this and found the first fully new level - Erto Rock. It's a sort of small village built into the side of a pretty steep cliff, but it's not like a total wall, there's plenty of space to run around. It's a very vertical level. The first shine is a timed one, in which you have to find and clean 10 Piantas before 5 minutes and 20 seconds are up. I ran out of time four or five times before I found them all and figured out a good path to get them all. I had fun doing this - the time flew by each time, and I found different paths and ways to climb around the level. It fits in both thematically and designwise to the original Sunshine - exactly what I wanted. It doesn't feel or look amateurish like some mods like this sometimes do. I found some blue coins in it and a secret shine while doing the second shine.
I am having a blast. If you like Sunshine at all, do not sleep on this.
I am having a blast. If you like Sunshine at all, do not sleep on this.
They made a trailer and I'm dumb for not posting it:
Still very enthused about this mod and cannot wait for work and my stupid treadmill run to be over to play more. I beat all but one shine in the new level I found last night, and having unlocked the nozzles, I should be able to get the shine I'm missing from there now (I know where it is, but I need the rocket nozzle to get to it).
Still very enthused about this mod and cannot wait for work and my stupid treadmill run to be over to play more. I beat all but one shine in the new level I found last night, and having unlocked the nozzles, I should be able to get the shine I'm missing from there now (I know where it is, but I need the rocket nozzle to get to it).
I know it's just post after post of me raving about Super Mario Eclipse but I'm loving it. I found another new level, and found the first new FLUDD-less shine designed by these folks. I swear it felt like Nintendo made it - it was on the hard end, but every time I attempted it and failed, I was like "one more time. I can do this." And after like twenty more tries, getting that shine was a relief and a joy, just like in the original. Then I got the red coins in it, and had a blast doing that as well.
The recent hotfix patch added an unlimited lives option, by the way, so Game Overs no longer boot you out to the title screen. This is how Sunshine always should have been anyway - you cannot lose any progress, you just are forced to load the game back up and run over to the shine again to attempt it a few more times. Those FLUDD-less levels with a lives system suck, so not having to worry about it while I honed in on the new FLUDD-less level was nice.
The recent hotfix patch added an unlimited lives option, by the way, so Game Overs no longer boot you out to the title screen. This is how Sunshine always should have been anyway - you cannot lose any progress, you just are forced to load the game back up and run over to the shine again to attempt it a few more times. Those FLUDD-less levels with a lives system suck, so not having to worry about it while I honed in on the new FLUDD-less level was nice.
I haven't had anything to say, but I'm enjoying reading these posts. Sometime in the future when I have a device set up to run stuff like this I will check it out.
To be clear, this can run on Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, and Dolphin, and it appears Dolphin is the preferred way to run it, because you can play at 60fps and there is no slowdown if your hardware is up to snuff. I'm just playing it on Gamecube hardware because I'm a weirdo lol
I do have a hacked Wii in a box somewhere, but man I'm not planning to set that up anytime soon. It's more likely that I'll play this once I get a retro handheld capable of playing Gamecube games. Right now those are a bit more pricey than the PS1 and prior capable devices, but they keep getting better and cheaper.
Well, you've encouraged me to keep posting about it, then lmao
I do have some thoughts on how the new moveset has affected vanilla Sunshine. Being able to long jump and "double jump"* changes a lot of the approach to existing shines, particularly Nintendo's FLUDD-less levels. They are much easier with the long jump in many cases - the level with the blocks that disappear and reappear over time is a gimme with the long jump, you just fly past it, basically. The double jump as a sort of "get out of jail free" card is a blessing, I think. Being able to correct a jump you just barely missed is not only useful, it fits in with what I think the intended mechanic of FLUDD always was anyway, all the way back in 2002 - being able to fine tune your jumps in 3D space, something many people struggled with in Mario 64, for example.
Meanwhile, the new Turbo Nozzle mechanics make some of the existing shines more difficult, not less. They've made it so the R button essentially is your throttle - push R down all the way and it's faster than the vanilla Sunshine nozzle ever was, where as just barely touching the R button is much, much slower. For making a series of jumps over gaps, like the shine you get into from the east side of Delfino plaza using the hover nozzle, you have to really watch how fast you go. I died several times completing it, whereas in vanilla that shine is, to me, a gimme. Hold R and jump at the correct time, basically. I'm not sure how I feel about this one! The increased speed while not needing to be precise is nice, but it will remain to be seen how it affects the rest of the game.
I haven't really used the Rocket Nozzle dive thing at all, yet, outside the tutorial area. It basically allows you to rocket up but also move quite far horizontally by diving at the correct moment, but I haven't found use for it yet (I'm sure later new levels will force me to use it a lot, which I'm kinda dreading because it was by far the hardest move to pull off in the tutorial).
*I believe they call the move "hover burst" but for clarity's sake while I write for those who haven't played this, it's essentially a double jump lol. Although you can only execute it just after beginning to hover - you can't just pop off the burst/double jump at any time. If you hover too long - like more than half a second, if I had to guess - you're locked into hovering until you let go of the button or land and jump again.
I do have some thoughts on how the new moveset has affected vanilla Sunshine. Being able to long jump and "double jump"* changes a lot of the approach to existing shines, particularly Nintendo's FLUDD-less levels. They are much easier with the long jump in many cases - the level with the blocks that disappear and reappear over time is a gimme with the long jump, you just fly past it, basically. The double jump as a sort of "get out of jail free" card is a blessing, I think. Being able to correct a jump you just barely missed is not only useful, it fits in with what I think the intended mechanic of FLUDD always was anyway, all the way back in 2002 - being able to fine tune your jumps in 3D space, something many people struggled with in Mario 64, for example.
Meanwhile, the new Turbo Nozzle mechanics make some of the existing shines more difficult, not less. They've made it so the R button essentially is your throttle - push R down all the way and it's faster than the vanilla Sunshine nozzle ever was, where as just barely touching the R button is much, much slower. For making a series of jumps over gaps, like the shine you get into from the east side of Delfino plaza using the hover nozzle, you have to really watch how fast you go. I died several times completing it, whereas in vanilla that shine is, to me, a gimme. Hold R and jump at the correct time, basically. I'm not sure how I feel about this one! The increased speed while not needing to be precise is nice, but it will remain to be seen how it affects the rest of the game.
I haven't really used the Rocket Nozzle dive thing at all, yet, outside the tutorial area. It basically allows you to rocket up but also move quite far horizontally by diving at the correct moment, but I haven't found use for it yet (I'm sure later new levels will force me to use it a lot, which I'm kinda dreading because it was by far the hardest move to pull off in the tutorial).
*I believe they call the move "hover burst" but for clarity's sake while I write for those who haven't played this, it's essentially a double jump lol. Although you can only execute it just after beginning to hover - you can't just pop off the burst/double jump at any time. If you hover too long - like more than half a second, if I had to guess - you're locked into hovering until you let go of the button or land and jump again.
Putting the long jump back in is defintely a plus, in my books. I always found the FLUDD-less sections miserable to play, which I think makes me something of an outlier. Using the FLUDD is weird at first, but once you get the hang of it, it makes level traversal much easier. On the other hand, FLUDD-less Mario's controls are super twitchy and I constantly find myself flinging him off ledges in directions that I never thought I even touched.
I don't think you are an outlier, actually - while I admittedly enjoy those levels (besides the one where Pianta's throw you, which might be the worst level in the game, besides maybe the pinball/pachinko level which is just busted, mechanically), you die constantly in them, and with vanilla Sunshine's design constantly throwing Game Overs at you, forcing you to reload, walk to the stupid door where those levels are, and retry, I can't blame people for hating them.
FelixSH
(He/Him)
When I first played Sunshine, they were my favourite parts. I didn't really like that many of the levels, and having Mario 3D Land like levels for the first time was great. I enjoyed the challenge a lot (aside from the mentioned one, where Piantas throw you). It helped a lot, that there is a relatively easy to get 1-up at the beginning of each, so you have somewhat like infinite tries. It was really fun, making it through these pure plattforming challenges, without the help of FLUDD, which always felt a bit half-baked to me.
The last time I played it, which is already forever ago, I didn't enjoy them quite that much, but still found them fun. But then, I also appreciated Sunshine more for what it was.
The last time I played it, which is already forever ago, I didn't enjoy them quite that much, but still found them fun. But then, I also appreciated Sunshine more for what it was.
I've always been a big fan of Sunshine, warts and all, so I've been sitting in the Eclipse discord waiting for that "it's out!" message forever lol. But yeah, I dunno if they were my favorite parts (I really like exploring the big levels and enjoy using FLUDD), but the platformer challenges were great. Only bad one is the Pianta throwing one, iirc.
Noki Bay is trash, though. There are a few shines I like there, but it's not a well designed level. The mechanics with the breathing helmet thing on have always felt undercooked to me, like something from an early design made it into the game (yes, I did just do that boss last night lol). I dread trying to 100% it in Eclipse, though at least there is a blue coin tracker in each level now, so I'll know when I've found them all.
Noki Bay is trash, though. There are a few shines I like there, but it's not a well designed level. The mechanics with the breathing helmet thing on have always felt undercooked to me, like something from an early design made it into the game (yes, I did just do that boss last night lol). I dread trying to 100% it in Eclipse, though at least there is a blue coin tracker in each level now, so I'll know when I've found them all.
As far as performance, on original Gamecube hardware at least, so far it's some of the original stages (and in some places, Delfino Plaza) that suffer the most slowdown. Ricco Harbor slows to an absolute crawl in places. It's not unplayable, at least - I've got all the shines besides the last one - but it's... odd. The new levels, at least the ones I've found so far, run fine, generally. I'm hoping some future iteration of Eclipse includes the option to tone down some of whatever the patch is doing in the background to "enhance" the graphics, to maybe ease some of the slowdown issues in some levels. Dunno how possible that is, though.
There was another change they made that I missed noticing until last night - Yoshi. You no longer need to bring a fruit to Yoshi to hatch his egg - now when you approach the egg, a standard green Yoshi just hatches for free with an empty belly. Even once you eat a fruit and Yoshi's color changes, there is no longer a "timer" to using Yoshi, which is a pretty fundamental change - one I'm not sorry to see, to be honest. Yoshi was always kind of annoying in vanilla Sunshine because of this. Bad enough touching water kills him (which is still the case), but being on a strict timer made the last shine in Ricco Harbor a pain, for example. I haven't completed that one yet, though, because I can't remember which fruit causes which color Yoshi to turn enemies into platforms that move horizontally - something you need to access the platforms in the distance where the shine is. In vanilla Sunshine, the only fruit that hatches the Yoshi egg in that level is the one you need, but here you can get the "wrong" Yoshi. I'll look it up at some point so it's no big deal, but it does fundamentally change that shine haha.
I was unable to find another new level last night, so I completed some more vanilla shines. I'm not sure at what point Corona Mountain unlocks in Eclipse - I've already attained 68 shines and it's not open yet. The only thing I know about at least one of the new levels is that there is at least one that is locked to having beaten Corona Mountain. Maybe at 70? Dunno.
There was another change they made that I missed noticing until last night - Yoshi. You no longer need to bring a fruit to Yoshi to hatch his egg - now when you approach the egg, a standard green Yoshi just hatches for free with an empty belly. Even once you eat a fruit and Yoshi's color changes, there is no longer a "timer" to using Yoshi, which is a pretty fundamental change - one I'm not sorry to see, to be honest. Yoshi was always kind of annoying in vanilla Sunshine because of this. Bad enough touching water kills him (which is still the case), but being on a strict timer made the last shine in Ricco Harbor a pain, for example. I haven't completed that one yet, though, because I can't remember which fruit causes which color Yoshi to turn enemies into platforms that move horizontally - something you need to access the platforms in the distance where the shine is. In vanilla Sunshine, the only fruit that hatches the Yoshi egg in that level is the one you need, but here you can get the "wrong" Yoshi. I'll look it up at some point so it's no big deal, but it does fundamentally change that shine haha.
I was unable to find another new level last night, so I completed some more vanilla shines. I'm not sure at what point Corona Mountain unlocks in Eclipse - I've already attained 68 shines and it's not open yet. The only thing I know about at least one of the new levels is that there is at least one that is locked to having beaten Corona Mountain. Maybe at 70? Dunno.
FelixSH
(He/Him)
So Corona Mountain is no longer locked to just doing the evil Mario shines? That would be a great change.
Also, I had forgotten that Yoshi was on a timer. What the hell, why would you ever do that (the timer, not taking it away)? Yoshi feels so wrong in Sunshine, because of stuff like that. He feel so clearly like an enhancement of Mario, instead of a companion.
Also, I had forgotten that Yoshi was on a timer. What the hell, why would you ever do that (the timer, not taking it away)? Yoshi feels so wrong in Sunshine, because of stuff like that. He feel so clearly like an enhancement of Mario, instead of a companion.
It may very well still be locked to that! I've barely touched several of the vanilla levels (Sirena Beach, Pianta Village, second half of Noki Bay), so maybe that's what I have to do to unlock it lol. I forgot that's how it worked. I guess I'll be playing some vanilla Sunshine levels tonight!
So, uh, wow?
I had no idea you could play as other characters in this game. They even gave him a low res Gamecube cutscene intro! Given that the above screen is playing the Mario 2 character select music (remixed in the Super Mario Sunshine style, delightfully), I assume there are other characters you can unlock? Maybe Peach and Luigi? Il Piantissimo is weird - he has no FLUDD, but is extremely fast, can double jump, and throw water balloons (I think that's what they are?). I don't know how much I'll use him, but he's useable everywhere, it seems, and every time you pick a shine in a level, the character select screen comes up now. I unlocked him by presumably beating all the races he has in the vanilla game. Still not to Corona Mountain yet, at 102 shines.
I found two new levels tonight, but have only played one so far. In it, after a pretty unique, dialogue heavy first shine (involving the Pianta mafia, a reference to Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, which had to have been a delight for the devs once the rerelease of that game was announced lol), I found an arcade game that I leapt into, and began grinding Booty Scooting. A huge Mario 64 style slide, which takes about one and a half minutes to complete if you play perfectly, and about 2 minutes on average for me, at least (although, I've only beaten it twice - once to get the inital shine without FLUDD, and once with FLUDD which allowed me to cheat a little bit to get under the 1:40 record time you have to beat to get the bonus shine). The mechanics are wild - a bit janky, but they work. I don't know how many tries it took me (I turned on infinite lives a while ago, no regrets), but outside the very last jump being a bit finicky, it didn't really feel unfair, just difficult. I did it, at least. I don't know if I'll be able to 100% this game, but I'm gonna try.
I had no idea you could play as other characters in this game. They even gave him a low res Gamecube cutscene intro! Given that the above screen is playing the Mario 2 character select music (remixed in the Super Mario Sunshine style, delightfully), I assume there are other characters you can unlock? Maybe Peach and Luigi? Il Piantissimo is weird - he has no FLUDD, but is extremely fast, can double jump, and throw water balloons (I think that's what they are?). I don't know how much I'll use him, but he's useable everywhere, it seems, and every time you pick a shine in a level, the character select screen comes up now. I unlocked him by presumably beating all the races he has in the vanilla game. Still not to Corona Mountain yet, at 102 shines.
I found two new levels tonight, but have only played one so far. In it, after a pretty unique, dialogue heavy first shine (involving the Pianta mafia, a reference to Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, which had to have been a delight for the devs once the rerelease of that game was announced lol), I found an arcade game that I leapt into, and began grinding Booty Scooting. A huge Mario 64 style slide, which takes about one and a half minutes to complete if you play perfectly, and about 2 minutes on average for me, at least (although, I've only beaten it twice - once to get the inital shine without FLUDD, and once with FLUDD which allowed me to cheat a little bit to get under the 1:40 record time you have to beat to get the bonus shine). The mechanics are wild - a bit janky, but they work. I don't know how many tries it took me (I turned on infinite lives a while ago, no regrets), but outside the very last jump being a bit finicky, it didn't really feel unfair, just difficult. I did it, at least. I don't know if I'll be able to 100% this game, but I'm gonna try.
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