Super Paper Mario/Revision Changes

This is a sub-page of Super Paper Mario.

To do: Incorporate this this article and this ("Infinite Experience Easily") Add the differences between the other versions

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Super Paper Mario received two revisions for the North American version and a single revision for the Japanese and European versions.

USA Revision 1

The first North American revision was released a few months after the game's initial April launch. The Wii SDK was updated and the game received minor fixes.

Code

The exact nature of the SDK update isn't known but it did introduce a bug into the wedding intro cutscene. After Peach opens her eyes, the musical track starts in the wrong place, so the opening cue cannot be heard.

Maps

Only the Yold Town present in Chapter 1-2 was patched, and significantly at that.

• A wall in the background near the first bridge was extended vertically.
• In the middle front of the map, a triangular shaped object has been extended.
• The two pipes on the map have been moved farther away from the background wall. This was done to prevent an out of bounds clip using Dottie.
• An object underneath the first pipe was moved to match with the pipe.
• Two meshes were removed.
• Numerous meshes in the background were changed very slightly.
• An out of bounds clip was fixed which can be performed by flipping near the sign in the shop. The patch adds a diagonal wall that aligns with the sign to prevent it.

Map Scripts

A softlock in the Big Blooper fight in Chapter 3-2 was fixed. If Slim is used just as Big Blooper is defeated, the cutscene will not play and the game gets stuck trying to complete the animation. Revision 1 forces the player into the swimming state after defeating Big Blooper to prevent the softlock.

USA Revision 2

Revision 2 is estimated to have been released late 2007 or early 2008. It fixes a lot of minor to medium bugs.

Code

• The wedding cutscene's sound effect bug introduced in Rev 1 is fixed.
• A buffer overflow was fixed when the game copies the digits entered to a keypad to the stack for rendering them on the screen. This fix was done by zeroing some bytes in the stack before copying the string in it. The overflow itself is impossible to exploit because there is no way to have non zero bytes right after the actual digits in the stack.
• A possible crash after taking the elevator to Flipside Tower was fixed, though the circumstances of the crash are unknown.
• When loading a save taken in 5-2, the map with the three stone tablets sockets, it will now use a predetermined spawn position (1735.5, 0, 0) instead of loading the actual position when the save has been performed.
• The black rectangle lifts received several changes to optimize the code and to fix minor calculation errors related to the position and angle of the player when taking multiple rectangle lifts in a row. The updated function is called on each frame that a rectangular lift path is rendered on the current map. These changes are as follows:
  • Each time a new lift is embarked on (either the first one or an intermediate one), the stored rotation of the lift is rounded to the nearest 180 degrees. This gets rid of very minor calculation error when calculating the position (3-4 degrees of error max could be corrected) as the player could be slightly off angle compared to the lift.
  • Likewise, the stored difference of the lift vertical position and the player’s vertical position is rounded to the nearest 25 units. This gets rid of very minor calculation error when calculating the vertical position.
  • As lifts in a set are embarked on, the game will accumulate the ridden lifts to determine how much it should flip the player (ex: one vertical lift should flip you vertically once). Revision 2 now only flips if it is needed instead of always flipping the player even if the flip does nothing (ex: 0 degrees). This saves a relatively expensive operation of doing a rotation transform on a matrix each frame (twice if no rotation is needed on both the X and Y axis).
  • For the first 10 frames of a new lift ride (including transfers), there won't be any checks done to know if the lift has ended while it was previously checked each frame of the ride. It is likely an arbitrary optimization.
• When jumping on Cyrus in Chapter 7-3, the player's momentum and control are removed.
• The actuation of any red or blue spring is now forbidden if the player has lost character control (ex: in a cutscene state) or is going through a gap using Slim. For red springs specifically, it removes character control and kills the player’s momentum. This effect is reversed if the game caused the actuation itself by making the player fall on it when the player touches the ground.
• The interaction with a lock is now forbidden if the player is currently taking damages from any sources or is using Barry’s abilities.
• Removes character control and kills the player’s momentum when hitting the gravity change blocks present in 4-4. This is only reversed when the gravity change is completely done. Interestingly, this has the side effect of having the HUD briefly disappear and having black bars briefly appear on the top and bottom of the screen during the activation of the effect.

Maps

The Flipside 1st Floor Outskirts had the collision modified for the platform that the Pure Heart pillar is on. This was done to fix an out of bounds clip with Carrie.

Map Scripts

• In Chapter 7-2, The Overthere, sector 6 (map with Yebbi), the pane delimiter was moved to a gap between the panes. This prevents a bug when flipping back to 2D on the edge of the rightmost pane as it will snap the Z position to the other pane thus, allowing to go further to the left in 2D, but when flipping to 3D, Mario will change panes again.

• In Chapter 8-4, Castle Bleck Foyer, map with three Cursya outside of the castle, handles a case when flipping while not being entirely on either side of the map (the case where, in 2D, Mario is inside the wall on either side of the map). In that case, it won't snap the Z position to 0 which fixes a clip inside either of the 2D vertical wall of the map. It is possible to mess up the camera and even softlock the game with this clip.

(Source: aldelaro5 - whole page)