Smile Hero recently released a community patch for NESmaker 4.5.9. I’d suggest every to download and apply this patch since it will save you a lot of time and potential headaches. Whether you’re a new user or a seasoned NESmaker, this patched version of the base script will solve a lot of typical problems developers run into.
Introduction
While the base scripts and modules of NESmaker cover a lot of ground for games – both scrolling and non-scrolling, both platforming and top-down action – there’s quite some room for improvement. Over the course of the last few years, the NESmaker community has written and released a lot of patches to the base scripts, optimizing and improving upon them. NESmaker user Smile Hero has taken it upon themselves to collect and combine these patches into an unofficial update.
Where’s the patch?
You can find and download the patch on the NESmakers forum. Here’s the link: NESMaker 4.5.9 – COMMUNITY PATCH. Make sure you apply this patch to a fresh, unmodified version of NESmaker 4.5.9. Luckily, since NESmaker is portable, you can simply re-download it and run it from a different folder without any hassle.
What does this patch solve exactly?
There’s a lot of stuff this patch has improved upon! The patch consists of bug fixes, optimizations and minor additions to the core. Here’s the list of things that have changed:
- The scrolling/camera system is no longer dependent on the player object, but is able to scroll independently. This solves a lot of scrolling bugs.
- Problems with the camera seam, causing corrupted background tiles and object misbewhaving on the screen borders, have been solved.
- By default, objects cannot move up or down in platforming modules. This has been fixed as well.
- The issue where there’s a column of black tiles sometimes in the Metrovania module, is fixed.
- Player objects tend to lose all momentum when jumping against the ceiling. This has been resolved.
- Sometimes the player gets damaged by a seemingly invisible entity. With this patch, this is no longer an issue.
- The ladder mechanics are a bit wonky by default; these have been improved on multiple fronts in the community patch.
- A bug that might occur when spawning projecties, has been squashed.
- Textboxes tend to softlock the game when the player is button-mashing. This problem belongs to the past now.
- The background color is now applied through the initialized background palette, instead of the sprite palette.
- By default, NESmaker did not support end animation actions for 8-frame animations – this version, however, does.
- Funky things may have happened when textboxes meet paths. This patch contains a cancellation fix for this issue.
- The prize tile does not always disappear correctly when touched; this has also been fixed.
- There are some issues with the warp tile, having the player object act up while moving. This fix applies the correct action step to players.
- In line with this fix, the player does no longer walk in place after a warp.
- Tile glitches in scrolling modules have been reduced.
- Multiple HUD elements can now be updated at once.
- Monster weapon functionality has been improved.
- The convoluted randomizer has been replaced with a different version that’s lightweight, not dependent on user input, and more “industry standard.”
- Some scripts have been moved around banks, saving a whopping 17 percent of the static bank.
- Unused constants and RAM bytes have been removed.
- This patch features new macros, like UntriggerScreen (untriggers triggered screens), CountObjectType (how many objects of a certain type are active right now), ChangeTileAtPosition (change a metatile’s appearance and collision type on an arbitrary position on screen) and FlashScreen (has the screen flash one or two times).
- Inputs have been pre-set for all modules, saving you the time to import or set them.
- The adventure module now supports diagonal movement.
- There’s an added variable to limit the maximum number of projectiles on screen, preventing button mashing cheese and slowdown.
- Hardcoded values have been moved to the UI, which allow the user to modify certain options (like physics, camera settings, sprite hud settings, et cetera) more easily.
How to apply the patch
Just visit the post on the forum and follow the steps: NESMaker 4.5.9 – COMMUNITY PATCH
Here’s a mirror in case the forum goes down for whatever reason: NESMaker PATCH
Credits
Big thanks to Smile Hero for both writing optimization scripts and applying all these fixes and collecting them in one single handy zipped patch! This patch would not have been possible without the contributions of the following community members (in no specific order): SciNEStist, TakuikaNinja, Dale Coop, Board-B, Jonny, CluckFox, m8si, Nightmusic and JamesNES.