itch.io

A few days ago, I got a notice from Google that this zip file "allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others." The zip with the 3dn file has been flagged--I don't know what that means--but it might not be downloadable in the interim. There's a chance Lumen will similarly flag the 3dn files for the other games I've worked with.

I've submitted a counter-claim of course, but we all know how long these things take, and the skewed chances working against smaller google accounts. There's a chance all three files will be permanently unavailable, and at worst my account entirely could be terminated because of this misunderstanding.

Just a heads-up.

Here's a showcase video:

Second game:

Mega Man 2 on 3DNes

Here's a promo video for the first game

Mega Man on 3DNes

Mega Man 3 v1.0 for 3DNes 1.1b3

General thoughts:

Mega Man 3 improves over the second game in many ways: particularly, it's faster. Climbing, screen transitions, and health pickups occur more hastily. There is now a slide maneuver that makes your character faster.

The game has some of my favorite music, bosses, and stages of the entire series. Particularly, the Wily 1 boss is now at a reasonable difficulty rather than being more difficult than any of the bosses that follow it (unlike the first two games).

Protoman is introduced here, but I don't really like him. He just becomes a boring obstacle and doesn't add much to gameplay. I suspect he was supposed to make the player curious about who he was. I think the game would be an improvement without all excessive fights against him. Not sure why he puts on a mask and calls himself Break Man.

Mega Man's dog Rush also first appears in this game, and it was a clever way to unify the platforming weapons you got from the robot masters.

One thing I noticed during this playthrough is how very hard enemies hit you, and how easy it is to get swarmed. I felt myself getting harassed and getting my ass kicked constantly. The Energy Tank capacity is raised to 9, but I would have preferred they left it at 4 and made enemies deal less damage.

Design notes:

I need to start by addressing how messy Mega Man 3 is as a game. There are a lot of objects used haphazardly and this results in a sometimes flickery/glitchy screen thanks to how 3DNes negotiates these objects. In particular, text is required to be in the foreground and background at so many different points that you're left with a very jagged mess, even at the title screen.

Opening the menu is a real disaster, since it doesn't wipe the screen first. As a result, the menu tends to take properties from objects that are on screen at the time. I did not finish the menu fully, because I couldn't reasonably do so. There are far too many places where it will glitch out. If you change the menu at any point, be prepared to see something elsewhere in the game fall out of sync. It's better to learn to live with it.

While I wrapped up my work on this game and did a playthrough of it on my Twitch channel, geod showed up and gave me some great advice on how to use the Delete feature. In Hard Man's stage, many many objects were loading and re-loading as new objects thanks to ladders and surfaces melding with surrounding objects. When this happens, there may be a separate object for e.g. the ladder, and one for the ladder with a bit of ground attached to it. This is going to run up your filesize and drive you crazy. If a ladder (or anything) starts to glitch out after you've already set it, delete the new glitched sprite of it. It may revert back to the correct version.

From here it would just be better to talk about each stage that has peculiarities.

Magnet Man: Early in the stage, you'll see the ceiling "glitching" out, as the ceiling can't decide how to define itself as an object. You may have luck with the Delete button, but it doesn't hurt much to leave it alone.

Gemini Man: As of v1.1b3, there is a graphical glitch during the "outside" portion of the stage where the surface of the ground doesn't render properly, and follows you through the stage.

Hard Man: I had to go with "Char" rendering on nearly every rock surface because of how glitchy the level was, since it re-generated terrain constantly.

Top Man: Unfortunately, like with Crash Man in MM2, most of this stage is on the same layer and looks flat. This is because the background is an object and portions of it are shared with other levels.

Spark Man: I love how this stage turned out. Everthing rendered pretty much the way I wanted, and I had some fun with the background Van de Graaff generators, especially during the Doc Robot revisit.

Shadow Man: The whole "plunged into darkness" concept is ruined because of how objects still render light diffusion and shadows. Think "Quick Man" in MM2.

The Wily stages generally look good, and there are plenty of recycled ground assets, which made my life easier. The "Cube" rendering glitch that causes surfaces to look like shelves happens here sometimes, but that's about it for the whole game.

Wily 3 has a couple screens with moving platforms. The Gemini Man ground glitch appears here too, which makes for some increased difficulty in the platforming, since you need to get used to ignoring the parts of the ground that are illusions. Or you could take Rush Jet through.

Finally:

This game was a bit stressful and I have to get busier with my academic work. I don't know how long until I get into Mega Man 4.

Previous games:

Mega Man

Mega Man 2

I loaded Mega Man 2 and saw this at the password screen:

http://i.imgur.com/bYWTqKm.png

I deleted the 3dn file, but the Password screen still looked like that. It didn't look like that in V1.1b1.

It occurs later on, in Wily 3:

http://i.imgur.com/v6rtvvO.png

I like the H and V cylinders perfectly as they are.

Maybe you can make the AS checkbox also apply to cube somehow? But then there would need to be a way to distinguish between the two versions I described. I don't know a simple way to do it without adding patterns.

If you had something like V Cube, it would wrap the face around the front, left, right, and back; but the top and bottom would be the same as though you had done Char.

Same with H Cube: the face would be displayed on the front, top, back, and bottom; but left and right would be Char.

I think 1 and 4 might be better. Sometimes you need to fine-tune an animation, and sometimes, you need to carefully, but more hastily, move through it.

How about a version of cube wrap that leaves the top and bottom of the object as "char" type? Or one that leaves left/right side as "char" type?

When you use the hot key for advance frames (Ctrl+Up), the game still registers up. When I'm trying to climb down a ladder, I have to click the "advance frame" button or else I'll go back up the ladder.

This is happening in Gemini Man's stage in Mega Man 3:

http://i.imgur.com/HXm9dz1.png

The top of the ground follows Mega Man around. I checked the rom in a different emulator and it didn't have that problem.

Mega Man 2 v1.0 for 3DNes 1.1b1

I did this from scratch. It's unrelated to the previous versions in this thread, but it looks like geod wants us not to make multiple threads for the same game.

General thoughts:

Mega Man 2 is the first MM game I ever beat. I was dropped off at a friend's house early in the morning, waiting for the bus to school. It was still dark out. We busted out MM2 and played it through to the end. The very emotional and melancholy tone of the ending will stick with me forever. We were on top of the world that day.

MM2 is a huge improvement over MM in that the platforming is sturdier (falling off of moving platforms didn't make you plummet, and you had better control in mid-air to land on ledges), and the bosses are for the most part much more fair. The music is some of the best in the series, too. MM2 was far from perfect and it suffered from some odd design choices, but it's little wonder that this game launched the series into popularity where the first entry had failed to.

I worked on this over the course of multiple days, and actually had to start from scratch a total of three times due to the 3dn save bug. These start-overs, combined with my need to backup and check after every level, made this project take as long as it did. Hopefully the bug will be less frequent in future releases of 3DNes.

The less deleterious bug where "Cube" and "FullCube" patterning leaves huge gaps in walls/floors/ceilings is still present here, but I decided that when it looks good, it more than makes up for the times it does not due to the bug.

Design notes:

One of the first things you might notice is that unlike my MM1 work, the energy bars are prisms instead of cylinders. This was necessary due to the way MM2 displays energy bars in the main menu. The flattened look has kind of grown on me. We'll see what the other games allow for.

You might also notice that the clouds in Air Man's stage are in the foreground, but do not obscure Mega Man. I really wanted them to be able to, but the interior of the clouds share their data with the background of the menu. To make the clouds obstructive would mean to make the main menu illegible.

Furthermore, that cloud data is actually shared by the sky portion of Wood Man's stage, and the entirety of Crash Man's stage. As a result, I sadly had to make those sections flat. The same thing had to happen with the first portion of Wily stage 1. The only way I could see these being satisfactorily resolved is if a future version of 3DNes allows you to change fore/background properties of an individual color in a palette. I don't see this ever happening, so those stages will remain as flat as they are in the meantime.

The giant gears in Metal Man's stage that make up the floor had to be made flat, since a lot of their sprite is the "transparent" color that greatly factors in to how cylinder shapes are calculated. Late in that stage, there are horizontal gears that I was able to make cylindrical, at least.

Previous games:

Mega Man

Update: I rolled back to the immediately previous 3dn file where I had completed 3 Robot Master stages instead of 4. I re-did Metal Man, and things seemed to be okay.

My new tactic is this:

1. Do not save your work frequently.
2. Finish a stage, or half a stage, depending on how much work it was.
   
3. Save your 3dn
4. Hard reboot (exit 3DNES)
5. Load the game.
   • If the 3dn file was corrupted, roll back to the last version, or even the one before that if you need to.
• If the 3dn file was not corrupted, change one thing and then hard reboot again. It's possible that the 3dn looks correct but is still corrupted.

I'd like the sound volume to save between sessions. When I Twitch stream, I have the volume set to nearly zero, but if I close and re-open, the volume is back to max, and the audience gets an earful.

Conversely, I'd like NOT to have the background depth get saved, or at the very least, I'd like a way to easily restore the default background depth.

Please change "advance frame" to only advance one frame instead of two. Sometimes sprites or object phenomena occur on a single-frame basis. Or at least have a checkbox so switch that hotkey between 1 and 2 frame advancement.

Also, can you allow us to press Tab to change from "Depth" to "Z scale" in the editing menu? That would be a nice feature.

Lastly, can the "Depth" and "ZScale" fields be widened so that I can see more than two characters? When I type in 0.25, I can only see 0.2.

TL;DR: Back up your 3dn files and make multiple successive backups with your progress.

Some of you may have had the misfortune of closing out 3DNes and coming back to find out your 3dn file will no longer load, because it was corrupted somehow.

This has happened to me twice already with Mega Man 2, at some point after setting the 5th Robot Master stage (I did the same five both times but in a different order). The 3dn files both times they failed were somewhere around 13.4 MB, and so I thought this was a file size issue. However, my Mega Man 1 file I uploaded works correctly at over 15 MB.

Moments ago I was in my third attempt to set MM2 from scratch, now using 3DNes 1.1b1. This time I saved a backup after completing each Robot Master by copying the .3dn and .bak files to another folder. I successfully got through the fourth RM (two of the same RMs from before, two new), but any attempt to modify any new objects caused the 3dn and the bak file to fail, so I could not even begin the 5th. My thought is that the 3dn file may become corrupted after a threshold number of objects are modified. It's true that MM1's 3dn file was bigger, but I think I can honestly say I've modified far more objects in one-third of MM2 than in the entirety of MM1.

What this means for you is that you should save unique backups after modest amounts of work so that you can roll back to the last working version just in case. Also make sure that after you witness a corruption, you close out of the program without opening any other roms, just in case the corruption carries over, which I have seen happen.

I've sent geod a link to the working 3dn file for him to look at. Work with caution, everyone.

Hi everyone. I recently finished setting Mega Man. I plan to set all six NES Mega Man games. This is going to wind up being time-consuming and I figured I'd at least share the "love" that is my slow progress.

A couple of hours ago I lost all my Mega Man 2 progress thanks to an auto-save bug in 3DNes (it sounds like this will be addressed in a future version—wait a second after saving!). I figured if I'm going to do this again from scratch, I might as well broadcast it. Maybe people watching can pick up on tricks or offer their own.

https://www.twitch.tv/astrotibs

I don't think it should ever auto-save the 3dn because I think what happened to my file was that it auto-saved while closing (to open the other rom), which corrupted it.

I suspect the program is auto-saving 3dn information and it absolutely should not.

More info: I tried the following:

1. Re-downloaded the community file as Mega Man 2 community.3dn
2. Copied and pasted the rom as Mega Man 2 community.nes
3. Loaded that rom. The community file loads fine.
4. When I load my original work, it is rejected and the game appears to be default, as I described earlier.
5. Then, when I load the same community file again, it too fails and the game reverts to default!

I'm in the middle of working on Mega Man 2. I got to a point where I was confused about how to handle the graphics, so I wanted to load the one the community uploaded to see how they handled it.

I did the following:

1. Copied my 3dn file and saved it to the desktop
2. Copied my megaman2 rom to Mega Man 2 - Copy.nes
3. Downloaded the community 3dn file as Mega Man 2 - Copy.3dn
4. Loaded Mega Man 2 - Copy.nes just to see what I was looking for

When I loaded Mega Man 2.nes back up, the program acted as if my 3dn file wasn't working. I pasted my desktop's backup in, but that didn't work either. What's going on?

I've tried your new #3 multiple times and it ultimately results in the same effect. Fixing the floor in one area damages it in another.

I've uploaded the .3dn file in the Repository in case you want to play around and try to reproduce the problem.

1. That would make sense if there was a single absolute max for the sprite, but I see this happening:
   a. I set a sprite to Depth 15, V Cylinder: Example A. Note that this sprite can go up to 18.
   b. I click "adjust," leave the sprite, and then return. It says 14, as you suggested. Example B
   c. I change the sprite entry (say, to H Cylinder), click "adjust," but then change it back to Cylinder. When I leave and return, Depth is changed to 13. Example C
   
   If I keep doing that in order:
   H Cylinder > Adjust > V Cylinder > Adjust > leave sprite > click on sprite
   the Depth goes down by 1 each time. Eventually it went to 0 and then returned "Array index is out of range."
   
   I don't think it's specifically a math effect. When I enter Depth of 100, it will correctly change to 18. Other than that, it always decreases by 1: I think that's a bug. The pattern should only truncate if the number exceeds the maximum; it shouldn't always decrease by 1 after each Adjust.
   
2. Sure. Here's the main sprite with a Char pattern, rendering in full: Char
   Here, I change it to H Cylinder. The sprite's mouth disappears. H Cylinder
   Changing it to V Cylinder, the mouth is still missing. V Cylinder
   
   Notice how his eyes are a separate entity. They have to be, because they use a different palette. This glitch only seems to happen to characters that have eyes as a separate entity. Sometimes parts of a helmet are missing, sometimes a shoulder, etc. In the examples for Part 1 above, you can see the top of his head is missing.
   
3. Unfortunately, your advice does not work. Here's an example:
   The start of Elec Man's stage looks okay.
   I reach a part that has holes in it
   I change pattern to V Cylinder, then back to Full Cube.
   I return to the beginning of the stage. The floor now has holes in it.

Mega Man (1) version 1.0 for 3DNes 1.0

General thoughts:

The Mega Man franchise lends itself well to 3DNes. It's got a very cartoony but intricate style that benefits from 3D projection that makes characters look like pencil toppers. Mega Man (the original) was the first game I ever played from the franchise, and one of the first NES games I ever played, so I reserve a special place for it in my heart.

Scrutinizing and customizing the game for 3D gave me the chance to truly appreciate the detail that went into inconsequential assets I had taken for granted, like the backgrounds and platform textures.

Design notes:

First to note is that the file unzips to 15Mb. I know that 3DNes compiles information you assign to each asset, but I'm surprised that so much memory is required. Does the game store the specific voxel arrangement for each object? Who knows.

On the Robot Master select screen: I really wanted to have the RMs inset within the cursor, but since those objects are the actual bosses and since the blue is used as a background elsewhere, this was impossible. Guts Man and Dr. Wily have custom sprites for the level select so It's impossible to get them to look like the rest.

Because of a graphic glitch (#2 in this post), I had to change certain player/boss sprites to "Char" where I would otherwise have liked to have a cylinder projection. So Mega Man sometimes looks like an eraser. In keeping in the spirit of this style, I've opted not to apply the AS checkbox to any Robot Master sprites, so you'll see the black "outline" on the sprite's left and right. It's a design direction forced by flaws in the current emulator version.

There's only one place in the whole game where spikes are able to look like the glorious, conical spires they're depicted as. If 3DNes ever gets an option to manually make a sprite color transparent, this might get fixed everywhere.

Lots of backgrounds use black as part of their design, but 3DNes interprets it as "transparent." To counteract Moirée patterns, I reduced some background depths.

Because of glitch #3 in the above post, there are many walls, floors, and ceilings (especially in Elec Man's and Ice Man's stages) that aren't cubed off properly. Whenever I fix them, they just revert back. Oh well.

Surprisingly, the ending took as long to set as the rest of the game. There are hundreds of assets related to partial-rendering of the background that had to be set to the back layer, so I had to manually click through the ending frame-by-frame. I did this three times to try to catch stuff I missed. I seriously can't wait for a save/load feature.

Finally:

I love the NES Megaman series. I plan to set all six.

I've had a bit of a think about point #2. This only seems to happen with objects that use overlaid sprites (Fire Man's body is a separate entity from his face. I also see it on all the other robot masters except Cutman, who does not have a separate face entity).

So that may help guide investigation a bit. I'm not sure if this is a 3DNes flaw, or some inextricable detail about NES sprite display.

I'd like to see an anti-aliasing option for rendering, and a button to "snap" the perspective back to centered.

How about a way to restrict or gradient-fade the background color? When the sky changes during this ending sequence, the whole screen floods with the new color. It's abrupt and jarring.

Hi. I'm getting some weird behavior when I "adjust" object settings in the Editor tab.

1. Frequently, the "depth" value decremented by 1, especially when I use V/H Cylinder (also, "Cylinder" is misspelled.)
2. Applying "Cylinder" to some assets will sometimes completely remove part of the sprite. See this pic, where a chunk of Fire Man's head is missing.
3. Applying "Cube" or "Full Cube" sometimes causes block surfaces to be indented, and sometimes doesn't. See here. I also don't understand the difference between "Cube" and "Full Cube." I've never seen them do different things.

A setting where you can assign a color of an asset to not display shadows. This would make some backgrounds look a bit more like backgrounds rather than backdrops. And/or a setting so that a certain asset doesn't drop shadows.

An option so that a sprite that's rendered with e.g. Cyinder can also be filled rather than just a shell.

Maybe something to colorize or label an asset (red = modified this session, blue = unmodified, etc.). That way if I change a floor pattern in one level that happens to be in another, I can see that via its tag or special color that I've already changed it. that way I'll be warned that changing it here will change it elsewhere.

The problem is that sprites are different from the objects that use them. In my naive understanding, the program assigns properties to objects, and not to sprites.

More control over the light source at all would be good, even if it was just to choose where it's located overhead.

Maybe a new layer type where the object is above the Front? Call it Above or call it Front and change the current Front to Midplane. Have a checkbox that causes an object to be transparent if another object occupies the same space as it (player sprite runs behind a foreground wall or pole)

In the same vein: a value for z offset so the entity doesn't have to be located symmetric about its plane axis?

New Patterns like:
Upward Wedge (useful for the Mega Man title cards)
Downward Wedge
Rightward Wedge
Leftward Wedge (these two might world well for like Legend of Zelda)
Pyramid/Cone (the point would be toward the player)
Inverse Pyramid/Cone (A divot)
Dome (bulges out toward the player; good for giant eyes in the wall)
Inverse Dome (inward; good for giant mouths in the wall)
Bevel
Inverse Bevel

Game Genie support

AutoMap is good for a start, but it would be nice to be able to customize them. I've got a USB controller and I would like to be able to set its D-pad to the NES D-pad, and my start, select, A, B, etc.

Currently my equivalent Start and Select rotate the field through the horizontal axis. I can't un-bind default buttons from A and B, and I can't actually deactivate Input buttons on the 3DNes config screen.

3D is great but I'd like to also play these games comfortably.