Rockman Basics - WIP and walkthrough (test encode v1)

In 2005 I began creating a Rockman hack; that is, a custom game based on NES Mega Man's engine. Back then, I was among the few foremost experts on Mega Man game glitches in the world. (Well, I still am, but there now are a few people who know even more about them than I do.)
The basic principle of this hack was: Create a game that is impossible to complete without intrinsic knowledge about Mega Man glitches, but as much as possible in a teaching-learning manner, i.e. it should be fun and insightful to play. And it should be beautiful, as well, following the original style of art where possible.
Turns out those goals were rather difficult to implement. The hack is still unfinished; in fact, just three and half stages are done.

When I recorded this video, it had been more than a year since I last touched this game. I wanted to show an intuitive "first experience" to the game, with a voiceover narration explaining some concepts, while also making sure to walk through all existing content so far.
But turns out that unlike some people like Transgenic86, I am awfully bad at doing voiceovers, so here you will only see the playing part, but you will not get the voiceover part. I will try to add some relevant things as subtitles/annotations later.

Technical bits: Background art (trees, windows, electric wires etc.) were generated procedurally. Foreground art was also generated procedurally; in the level editor, platforms and overall layout of the levels are sketched entirely IN TEXT. Items, enemies are placed manually (as text).

Oh, and the video here is rendered in POV-Ray, versions 3.7.0 beta41..RC2. I almost forgot to mention it.
Apologies about the low resolution. The number of frames was high (59643), and even with 17 CPU cores at disposal, it still took two weeks to do the 3D rendering. Using a higher resolution would have made it even slower.
Antialias and radiosity were used. I also tried photons (for the glasses), but for some reasons POV-Ray would not honor my "photons { pass_through }" declaration. I wanted a pass_through without noshadow, but POV-Ray was no-go instead. The NES screen was processed with Blargg's NTSC filter, and I used tinterlace to halve the FPS rate for Youtube.

More information:
-- http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/rockmanbasics/ (Web page of the hack)
-- http://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/rockedit.html (Source code of the level editor used; most surprisingly it is entirely ungraphical).

My recording of this video was originally 16:40 long, but thanks to the 15-minute limit Youtube recently reintroduced into my account, I had to cut the video short.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• rockman
• mega man
• nes
• famicom
• hack
• homebrew
• custom level
• romhack
• rom
• povray
• video
• rendering
• video game
• gaming

[son1cgu1tar]

wow it seems awesome and really well made

Nice idea, and how did you make this video?

The controller moving by itself, really nice

And the scenery was edited ?

[Bisqwit]

@son1cgu1tar I created one such video as this many years ago. Only it was a Famtasia movie back then. For this video, I played in FCEUX, and dumped it into AVI. I wrote a POV-Ray scene (or rather, used the same scene I used for Famtasia back then); and rendered it about 50000 times, once for each frame. An image_map declaration was used to include a frame from the video to appear in the .pov scene. The controller input was also converted procedurally to a POV-Ray script.

[Xkeeper0]

The constant twitching of the video gives me a headache. It is annoying to watch...

[OmnipotentEntity]

I really liked how you remixed ElecMan's theme into a minor key.