The evolution of gravity in Mario games

http://www.scq.ubc.ca/acceleration-due-to-gravity-super-mario-brothers/

by petercooper • 17 years ago

40 16 17 years ago

scq.ubc.ca

chuffwaffle3• 17 years ago

This is an extremely poor analysis. It ignores terminal velocity, which is a huge factor, and it doesn't even acknowledge this in its "Sources of Error" section. The graph they produced is meaningless

petercooper• 17 years ago

Is terminal velocity relevant over a short drop? An explanation would be cool. I thought it wouldn't matter if the subject didn't actually approach that velocity (do you approach 120ish mph on a drop of several meters?).

eru2• 17 years ago

But Mario's terminal velocity might be much lower.

chuffwaffle3• 17 years ago

Yeah, terminal velocity is relevant over a short drop if the acceleration is high and the terminal velocity is low (both true in mario)

Looking at the table they made, most of the falls are about half a second long. I'm too lazy to go test this but a lifetime of experience playing mario games makes me feel like this is far more than enough time to reach terminal velocity

jerf• 17 years ago

You are bringing too much of your real-world common sense into this topic. Video games can do as they damn well please. I've played games where the profile of a jump is straight-line up, straight-line down, with no acceleration concept relevant at all, which also eliminates "terminal velocity" as a concern... it's just velocity, period.

Unfortunately, the same is true of the authors of this paper, who assume with no evidence, or perhaps rather against the evidence, that standard Newtonian formulas hold and therefore they can compute "accelerations" and such. Newtonian formulas do not hold in the Mario-verse, or in platformers in general.

(In some cases the real formulas may be modeled on Newtonian formulas, but the full set almost never holds, "equal-and-opposite force" in particular. Please note that citing a single counter-example is insufficient to disprove "almost never"; I can do that too, but it doesn't change the fact that most games use physics only loosely related to reality.)

markessien• 17 years ago

Does Mario not fall with a constant velocity? That's how I remember it.

delano2• 17 years ago

The stats they have for Super Mario 2 stand out from the ones for 1 and 3. That's interesting because it wasn't originally developed as a Mario Bros game. It was originally released in Japan under the title Doki Doki Panic (I had to look up the name). The North American / European version of SM2 was a rebranded version of DDP. According to the stats in the article, Mario is taller and exposed to higher gravity than the other early games which sounds about right (the gameplay definitely felt different).

As a side note, I don't understand the title Mario Brothers. Are their full names Mario Mario and Luigi Mario? I'm not aware of any other brothers that take their common name from one of the brothers' first names.

eru2• 17 years ago

> Are their full names Mario Mario and Luigi Mario?

According to Wikipedia, yes.

delano2• 17 years ago

Oh yeah, it looks like they mention it on the entry about the movie. I don't see any mention of their full names on any of the game-related pages though.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Re-making old games used to be more common I think:

http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/atari2600.htm

ftse• 17 years ago

This is interesting, if only a bit of fun... I would like to have seen an analysis of how quickly Mario decelerates when he is jumping up, as well as falling. Symmetry would dictate that g was the same in both cases although on the way up terminal velocity would not be a factor.

chuffwaffle3• 17 years ago

I can tell you how it works. You maintain your initial jumping velocity almost all the way up to the top of your jump. The peak of the jump occurs suddenly, and it's when you release the jump button or when the maximum jump-height is reached, whichever comes first. The maximum jump-height increases by a blockheight or two if you were sprinting when you jumped.

The only part that I'm not too sure about is what exactly happens to your velocity when you start to slow down at the peak of your jump. You might linearly decelerate like you'd expect from gravity, but it might be less newtonian than that; it's hard to tell just from the feel of the game.

jncraton• 17 years ago

It seems like this probably would have been more accurate if terminal velocity had been mentioned. I'm not sure if Mario would hit it on the scale they were working at, but if he does, that would certainly skew the results.

Also, it is interesting to note that the characters in SMB2 don't seem to have the same amount of gravity on them. (remember Luigi?)

timdellinger• 17 years ago

No plot of Mario's position vs. time? They need to verify that their equation (x = x0 + v0t + 0.5at^2) accurately describes the fall.

whughes• 17 years ago

They wrote an article about gravity in Mario games and left out Mario Galaxy? That's a serious oversight, although perhaps the article predates it. Also, what's this "96-bit" nonsense? The Wii is a souped-up GameCube, so it should be very similar..

The evolution of gravity in Mario games

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