Found the problem. Dang router! Sorry, but I can't host any more matches till I figure out what's actually causing the problem. Until then, however, I'm working on the next version...with custom skin support! With this, you can play as whoever you want in multiplayer! Right now I'm only using it to make the four Marios different colors, but I'll expand it so that you can use custom ones. Even on the internet! If whoever you're playing doesn't have the skin, they'll download it before the match starts. Now then, since the format's already figured out, you could go ahead and design a skin now.
This is the template for a skin. It's 144x112, enlarged here so you can see it. It's separated into 16x16 blocks, so it would be a good idea to use a grid in your paint program so you don't overwrite the boundaries. Other than that, just write your own graphics frames over Mario's matching frames in the template. Pure black(RGB 0,0,0) is considered transparent in the image reader, so if you do need black to show up, do as I've done with Mario's outline there and make it very very dark, but not completely black.
Keep in mind that no matter what you design the skin to be, it will still handle exactly like Mario. That means you can pretty much play as anyone or anything you want. Also, it has to be in BMP format for it to work in the game. Not the PNG format that Imageshack converted this to.
Edited by - CashCrazed on 8/7/2005 1:49:13 AM