Mario running in Unreal Engine 4 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Mario running in Unreal Engine 4 [video]

youtube.com

From the title and the context of this post being on HN, I expected to see someone reverse engineering Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Bros and using that in the context of UE4.

But this is really just a typical game mod. Someone made some models for Mario and coins and put them in various UE4 tech demo scenes.

That's not to say it isn't cool. it just isn't extremely interesting from a technical perspective, besides the amazingness of UE4 in general.

This is mostly about replicating the physics of Super Mario 64. Modeling Mario and coins is obviously not that big of a deal.

The lack of NPC's in this version of the castle reminded me of an eeriness that existed in Super Mario 64, something I haven't felt in Sunshine or Galaxy. The feeling of being thrown into this new world without any allies or clear direction on completing the objective. At the time it felt exciting and scary, maybe I was just young...

I get that feeling playing Dark Souls now. The game offers very little narration and is quite intimidating.

I think Dark Souls is one of those few games that does a perfect job of projecting the emotions of the hero and the atmosphere of the world onto the player's own emotion and perception. It could have used more guidance at the onset, and it doesn't clearly convey the type of game you're about to play (I was expecting something like God of War meets Skyrim), but once I pushed past the first region or two, it became one of my favorite games. Learning more about the lore took it up a few notches.

Incredible:

- all the environment assets were taken from the Unreal marketplace

- all the character actions were scripted using blueprints only

Is something like this particularly challenging in blueprints? If I wanted to make the UE do something like this video, would I typically directly edit the C++?

I've never actually developed for the UE, just read about it.

That was so refreshing to watch. Maybe someone needs to make a movie about Mario leaving his world and visiting others, like Wreck It Ralph. You could do the whole movie inside UR4.

the total uncanniness of survival horror mario is untapped gold

The comparison at the end had a weird effect on me. I remember playing Mario 64 for the first time and thinking the graphics were the tops. But this new one looks so much better. How will I feel in in another 15 years when I see Mario in Unreal 20 or Source Film Maker v15?

One of the first things that stands out is the lack of angle dependence in the floor reflections. In 15 years we can probably expect to see reflections that are sharp for objects that are close to the surface and/or at highly acute angles, with gradually increasing blurriness based on distance. I'm a little surprised this isn't already there, since it could probably be done just with the z-buffer and a single shader.

Out of curiosity, how much work is it to do something like this in UE? I'm not quite sure what everything does UE give you out of the box.

A great demonstration of how graphics does very little for the fun factor of a game.

It reminds me how a good mario game is about the art style, not graphics.

It looks promising. With Steam's success and now Unreal is back in play, Linux gaming's future and gaming on open platforms in general, gets brighter every day.

Why won't Nintendo just remake Mario 64 with better graphics. The new super Mario brothers for Wii was decent but all of us who were kids in the 90s would be happy with a decent remake.

The original DS had a pretty good remake as a launch title with improved graphics and a bunch of new stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_64_DS

This is magnificent. If only I could use .NET with Unreal Engine. Guess I'll have to look into blueprints.

Are you sure you cannot use .NET? This website claims you can use .NET up to 4.5 via mono: https://mono-ue.github.io/ .

Well that changes everything! I was just going by the Unreal Engine site, didn't think to look for anything third party.

I'm in the throes of learning F# and didn't want to muddy that up by learning C++ at the same time, so thanks for alerting me to that.

edit: Hm, looks like it's unsupported as of late. A bit disappointing. May still be usable, but I'll have to dig deeper to make sure it's not a total PITA

edit2: And it seems that they've nuked the download page as well as the git repository. Oh well.

Epic made a change to the EULA requiring that all script bindings be free and open source in case a large part of the community became dependant on the bindings and people couldn't update them themselves as the engine changed. The maintainers of that project couldn't meet those requirements and thus abandoned it

I do believe the phrase is "Shut up and take my money."

Nice.

Though Nintendo won't be happy and will shut down your video as you use their IP as happened many times before. Some months ago, someone did the exact same thing with Unity engine, and his Youtube video and website vanished within two days. [1]

Nintendo's upcoming NX console (successor of Wii U) will hopefully be more powerful than PS4/X1 at the end of 2016. And hopefully we get nice reboots of Super Mario 64, Mario Galaxy, Maria Kart and Zelda.

[1] Edit: I found the HN news from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9276605 -> https://roystanross.wordpress.com/super-mario-64-hd/

-- the website now reads as follows: "The project is no longer playable, or downloadable in any form. I received a copyright infringement notice on both the webplayer as well as the standalone builds. Which is fair enough, really. In light of Nintendo recently making a deal to release some of their IPs on mobile platforms, it’s probably not in their best interests to have a mobile-portable version of Mario 64 sitting around. In any case, I didn’t really expect for this project to get so popular, and was hoping it would function primarily as a educational tool and a novelty. (...)"

> Nintendo's upcoming NX console (successor of Wii U) will hopefully be more powerful than PS4/X1 at the end of 2016.

Yeah, I wouldn't count on that.

HOLY SHIT!

What about trademark? Could the author sell it?

See what happened to Super Mario 64 HD (an attempt at a remake with unity): https://roystanross.wordpress.com/super-mario-64-hd/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com