Due to requests from Nintendo, this project is no longer available. Head over to the Mario 64 HD page to read more. The original blog post is unaltered below. Below is a video of the mod being featured on cobanermani456‘s channel.
Bob-ombs are my favourite Mario character, closely followed by the loyal Bob-omb Buddies
Given the amount of time this took to build, I’m going to do away with the usual preamble typically accompanying these posts (or is it too late already?). For the time being, I’m finished working on both the Super Character Controller as well as the demo for it, Mario 64’s Bob-Omb Battlefield. Since the Super Character Controller is (was?) the primary focus of this project, I’m planning to post a write-up and retrospective on it, including what could be done to improve it in the future. Both projects include a PDF fully documenting them. In addition to the using the Super Character Controller library (written by me, but adapted from code by fholm), Mario 64 HD also uses a couple other libraries from the community. All references to these (as well as sources for any art and sound assets I did not make myself) can be found on the downloads page, but since some people may never make the pilgrimage there from this post I figured it would be nice to include them here. Pixelplacement’s iTween was used to help animate the rolling metal balls as they path around the mountain. Since Unity doesn’t expose the InputManager to be modified at runtime (another one of it’s lovable quirks), a heavily modified version of cInput v1.4 was used. Past version 2 cInput is no longer free, but since it looks like the author has been working on it for awhile I suspect there are tremendous improvements from 1.4, which wasn’t all that difficult to integrate anyways. Probably worth the $30 on the asset store!
Most of the art assets that were not constructed by me are from Mario Galaxy, but I did all the animations for them. Sound assets likewise were primarily ripped from different Mario games, or acquired from freesound.org, a very useful (and free, in case you didn’t pick up on that from the name) online sound library. If anyone sees (or hears!) any assets in the project that they themselves made, please contact me so I can give the proper credit. I imported the project to Unity 5 and fixed all the errors that cropped up, but none of this project was developed using any of the new tools available, like Global Illumination or Render To Texture. For anyone wondering what tools I used, they were as follows: Unity (duh), Photoshop, 3ds Max, and Adobe Audition. I used Adobe Premier and Fraps to make the trailer above, as well as the capture videos from the original Mario 64 to use as reference for animations. I used the N64 emulator Project64 for this, which I also used to capture sounds directly from the game. All of the mesh files are currently in the .max format, so while you will be able to open the project without issue, unless you have 3ds Max you’ll be unable to edit the files.
get rekt m8
I probably am not going to expand on this project any further, since it would be insanely time consuming to continue any further, and my primary motivation to build this was to drive development on the Super Character Controller and provide a demo project for it. That said, if anyone wants to continue working on this, feel free! The project is open source and can be used for anything you like, short of selling it. If anyone is interested in playing the original (and superior) version of Mario 64, it’s available on the Nintendo 64 as well as the Wii’s Virtual Console.
Roystan Ross 