Mario Maker 2 API | Hacker News Reader

Mario Maker 2 API

tgrcode.com

274 pointssoap-61 comments

Linking to Lunar Magic, the community's Super Mario World editor that likely spurred Nintendo to create Mario Maker in the first place.

https://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lm/

Also, go check out the Grand Poo World III videos. Absolutely peak Mario.

Agree, been super fun to watch everyone work through GPW 3. The clip compilations are always fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOpt3DU-16I

LMFAO that video is the gift that keeps on giving... I lost my shit at the shark towards the end

Lololol! I laughed so much watching this. Amazing. The design of that level is the mind of a f*cker. Lol!

The bits where streamers faces show up in the levels are hilarious

I loved playing with this when I was in high school. This is such a great memory. Thanks!

I made a web based level editor that I was hoping would fill in gaps I perceived in Mario Maker: https://smaghetti.com/ I no longer work on it and never really filled those gaps, but it was a fun time nonetheless.

The whole release of Grand Poo World III was one of the best things happening in the Internet last year. The chaos that broke smwcentral, how it beat Super Mario RPG in viewers on Twitch for quite a many days and how much fun every streamer seemed to have with it.

I can't get past the first jump though, but still, thank you barb!

I wish I had the skills.

Agreed, it was a blast to watch people tackle it. In addition to what you mentioned, I'd include Barb's Lunar Magic streams. They were super chill and it was some of my favorite content of the year, getting to watch him in his creative process working on the hack.

For sure. And those kaizo block/fish snipes that barb uses so masterfully. Good stuff.

Barb (creator of Grand Poo World 3) is my favorite level designer and surely one of the best... But I would say peak Mario might have been the 2022 GDQ Super Mario World romhack race. Some of the stuff in that is truly mind boggling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdMR0uMA_2Q

Wow, this outstanding. Thanks for the link. Always amazed at the creativity of these rom hackers.

Is Lunar Magic open source?

No, and it has the single-maintainer problem (buses, lottery, etc.). The tool has a high learning curve and hidden/unexplained features that you have to read years-old forum posts to use correctly. Lunar magic is great, but there is tons of room for improvement. There has been at least one attempt to solve this problem, though progress has been slow: https://github.com/SMW-Editor/smw-editor.

I spent a lot of time with Super Mario Flash back in the day, has great level editor, you can share levels by copy and pasting a level definition: https://funkypotato.com/super-mario-flash/

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20240108181325/https://tgrcode.c...

Followup post: https://web.archive.org/web/20230811134158/https://tgrcode.c...

More and more hacker news needs a way to pin these kinds of comments due to servers getting overwhelmed.

Or just a link for everything at the top which loads from internet archive. It would also help stuff get archived.

Sounds like a job for a userscript, or the IA browser extension.

I think it would benefit everyone

I liked the idea of these games and own the 3DS game and 2 on the Switch. I like making levels, but for the most part I haven’t had a lot of fun playing other people’s levels.

I gave up on the games because it seemed like most of the user submitted content were weird non playable machines where people bend the rules of the engine to hurl Mario along to the goal automatically.

Interesting to see that, but it got to the point where I saw nothing else, and it’s been on the shelf for years.

If you filter levels by a higher difficulty you can get some that require you to actually play.

I still maintain that the Mario Maker series could be absolutely brilliant if Nintendo would invest in better discovery algorithms and searchability. The pool is going to be flooded with garbage, and rightfully so given that kids love to play and make things too. There's nothing wrong with that, but in the end it means you've fallen into a tough situation where the internal discovery tools don't work, and the only way for a level to be "discovered" is for an influencer to find it.

I doubt you can ever build a perfect fix for this, but it could be a lot better than it is right now. Unfortunately it's just an abandoned project at this point, and the inevitable Mario Maker 3 will likely just have the same issues.

It's not a full solution, but there must be lists of good levels out there on the internet. I just found https://www.reddit.com/r/TraditionalMarioMaker/.

For me, couch multiplayer would make it 10x better. I bought the game and was sorely disappointed to see that this wasn't included.

Actually people on social media sites like Twitter solve a similar discoverability issue by following interesting people. Subscribing to interesting level creators inside the game reduces the problem to finding these creators.

Same—unfortunately most of the content that other players produce is either impossible to lose or is specifically designed to be as hard as possible. You can still find levels which are suitable for your skill level, but the “10 mario mode” or whatever is specifically built around selecting the next level FOR you, so that entire game mode is basically a waste.

DumbDog's levels in Mario maker 2 are fantastic if you like fair but hard levels.

Kinda weird, I've found that Mario Maker 2, if you queue up on the next-to-hardest difficulty, is basically good? I've encountered plenty of "top quartile of SMW" difficulty levels.

There's some garbage in there too, but that's the game! There's definitely good sets of levels nowadays IMO.

A few years ago I built a level viewer based on this API: https://www.smm2-viewer.com/

Was quite a fun challenge, some interesting tech at play, and interesting algorithm work to render out the slope tiles.

You built this? Well done! I’ve used this several times while watching DGR videos!

Thanks!

The original inspiration was a DGR video in late 2021 when he showed the original chinese-language windows-based level viewer. That inspired me (as a Mac user) to seek out the API and level format documentation, then it was a whole load of trial and error to get the rendering working. There are more popular viewers (AFAICT) out there, but I enjoyed the challenge.

Huge appreciation for both this and the API.

I wonder if the API is still running off the developer's personal Nintendo account?

Having a busy animated background is an awful idea if you want people to read your content.

And sadly the reader mode on iOS is also having some trouble :/

I really appreciate this work, thanks to it I was able to recover all my levels I had made for mm2 before I sold my switch years ago. I didn't have any level codes, all I had was a screenshot with one of the level names, so I had to filter the whole dataset by level name and luckily that level popped in there (I was afraid Nintendo would have deleted my stuff since my account was inactive for so long...). Then I was also able to get my uploader id from that single level record, which allowed me to filter all other levels I had made. You guys made my day :)

it sure would be nice to get the repository of mario maker 1 levels before nintendo burns the library down.

I know Nintendo will never allow it to exist in the open but is this a way to archive the actual levels or just a list of names/codes? I'm genuinely sad thinking about the (very real) possibility of them vanishing forever.

Most likely Nintendo (being an extensive AWS user) will just ship the levels to some S3 bucket; never to see the light of day. Even if each level were just 2 MB, that would cost them only $46/mo. to keep 1 million levels.

Just move on. I've realized that Nintendo finds a way to make me suffer in disappointment.

Gaming got a lot better when I ripped the Nintendo bandaid off. (And I stopped buying games that are less than 1 year old)

There's a dataset on huggingface[0] from this API that has the data, and a decoder on github[1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230811134158/https://tgrcode.c... [1] https://github.com/JiXiaomai/SMM2LevelViewer

It includes the levels themselves. However, there's not any current way to play them. https://pretendo.network/ is working on it.

This already exists online — won't link it here but it's easy to find if you know where to search. Players have been unable to upload since March 2021, so any archive that's a year or two old will still be up-to-date.

I think pretendo kinda does this? Someone who's more familiar should probably confirm/give caveats but I believe at the very least there are tools to pull down courses + metadata, but I don't known whether a public repository has been established.

https://archive.org/details/super_mario_maker_courses_202105

Typical archive.org to the rescue again.

Mario is one my favorite platforming series, but I felt that the Mario Maker games never quite reached the level of innovation of LittleBigPlanet. (Both in the tooling and the community.)

It looks like some users did the work to archive LittleBigPlanet, too:

https://archive.org/details/@littlebigarchive

Hopefully it's comprehensive.

People came up with all kinds of hacks to push the engine to its limits. They made FPS games, top down Zelda dungeons, and all kinds of crazy stuff with LBP. It was awesome.

I haven't checked out LBP's spiritual successor Dreams yet (I don't have time to game lately), but I've heard it's phenomenal.

That said, I do enjoy watching others try to clear some of the diabolically difficult levels that Mario Maker creators design.

I looked into Dreams a while ago. Dreams is more a general game engine than a level editor, including a highly unusual rendering engine that is not based on polygons. But apparently all this innovation hasn't translated in much success.

Wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240108181325/https://tgrcode.c...

Here’s the hugging face datasets that have some of this data https://huggingface.co/TheGreatRambler

This is so cool hope to play around with it tonight. I converted the API to a OAS/swagger file and temporarily hosted them here to play around with while the site is hugged to death https://mariomaker2api.apidocumentation.com/

...and its been hugged to death in minutes.

How many connections per minute can result from being on HN frontpage?

I had an app on the frontpage for a whole day last year (Show HN) and the server behaved like a champ... a simple 6US/month, cloud compute instance on Vultr. It was a Rails app as well.

I generally dont understand how some sites go down so quick.

How much traffic was it?

20 GB over 24 hours.

For an unprepared server, a lot.

Nginx 1.18.0 too, oof

I find it puzzling that stuff like this is allowed to continue while Nintendo tries to remove gameplay videos on Youtube.

I'm glad people do it. Just curious about the legal considerations.

I think its a combination of A: they don't know which credentials are being used; B: While figuring it out would be somewhat trivial, it still requires effort to set up tracking for it; and C: We're not doing anything nefarious with it, challenging Nintendo's intellectual property, committing piracy, or using it to upload illegal content. As a reminder, Nintendo does not own the copyright on the courses uploaded to its servers. The creators do. By using SMM2, they grant Nintendo a non-exclusive license to use their courses in the game. Non-exclusive

    Size: 1.45MB zipped, 3.10MB unzipped
    Minimum OS: Win95 (Win98SE if you want to use DirectX 9 option)
    Version: 3.40
    Updated: September 24, 2023.

:))

(2022)

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