Its rambling time. I never really followed up on my overhaul blog. While I don't intend to go into any deep details at this point the transfer to SE went really well for me. There were problems to overcome, but now that I got it running it works infinitely better that my busted copy of Skyrim LE. My current playthrough rarely crashes: as opposed to my copy of LE which had an 'out of memory' crash about every 10 minutes of play by the time I gave up on it.

For fun I thought I'd upload a gallery of many of the various replacement costumes I put in the game. At this point I've replaced most of the vanilla, non-expansion clothing and armor with new stuff.

Most of them come from various user-made custom outfit mods. Some are mash-ups and/or use custom made textures I created. Divine Elegance saw a lot of usage. There are four different guard outfits, giving the hold more variety.

I took advantage of Sexlab Survival's Bikini Armor system, applying it to the skimpy outfits which also have inferior protection. But the bikini license is much cheaper than the standard armor license along with the bikini armor training system making skimpy costumes become better for the player to wear in the long run.

But anyways, on to the gallery:

I finally concluded that only path forward was to scrap my old work and start over. Since I'm doing that I might as well move on up to the 64 bit edition so at least the damn thing has all my PC's available RAM to work with. And thus making my person edition of the Special Edition has begun. For fun I decided to blog my setting the game up for the two people on the planet that actually care.

CHAPTER 1: Getting this buggy POS to work:

To confess I purchased the Special Edition years ago but never touched it due to its significantly inferior mod support at the time. So it rotted in my Steam list as I continued to build upon Oldrim. So a week ago I reinstalled it onto my PC only to find I was stuck with a version that doesn't even properly support RaceMenu. Thankfully I found a tool that can downgrade my version from the cashshop edition... *cough* I mean "Anniversary Edition" to the last Special Edition version. So that's the version I will be building on. Maybe I'll upgrade when Bethesda has stopped with its cash shop upgrades and we get a final version all the modders can update to.

In my previous version (circa 2015) I wanted to mod vanilla Skyrim beyond recognition. So I installed Tropical Skyrim, the SkyRe overhaul patch, and a ton of item/costume replacements. For my new version I just want an adjusted version of Skyrim. So I installed a summer weather mod, scrapped any interest in SkyRe, and my costume replacements will be different but closer to vanillla Skyrim.

So I downgraded. I know how to hack mods that have no master files to at least include Skyrim.esm so SkyrimSE doesn't just forget you included those mods every time you load up the game. All kind of things bashed into working order because I am stubborn enough to make them work. So annoying, no wonder why modding is often closed off to those hardheaded enough to work through all the BS. TLDR: If you have a mod that SkyrimSE keeps disabling make sure it has Skyrim.esm as a master link.

The next step will be replacing various costumes. Still kind of leaning Skyrim style but different. And I'm making them with Sexlab Survival in mind so they will be a mixup between 'cute' sexy and 'shameless bikini armor' sexy mixed in. As well as the males looking a bit better because I like the Conan look and after a while they start to fall too far behind on the attractive scale.

In conclusion I continue to understand why so many 'normies' do little, if any, modding of these games. All the things I only got through because I'm stubborn and skilled despite it all just being the basic infastructure makes me wonder how anyone new could stand to try to set this shit up. I had to mod the EXE itself to get a bunch of the most basic mods to work for cripes sake.

COMING UP: New weapons and a ton of costume replacements. Stuff worth actually screenshotting. 

EDIT: And then 3dRealms turned out to be woke douchebags who bent over backwards for the vermin at ResetEra as well as censoring any dissenting opinions on any forums under their control. So scratch modding this game. But I'll leave this blog up showcasing my 90s modding of Duke anyways.

Thing is while I'm not familiar with the newer builds of EDuke I actually did a great deal of modding of Duke Nukem. Especially in the context of porting enemies from other games, programming them in with the limited scripting system Duke provided for modders to use. Sadly I never uploaded my work, due to having a dial-up modem potato internet at the time (Uploading a 50 meg+ mod on a 56K would take nearly a day, as well as time up the phone line the entire time).

Once I finish playing through Ion I'd love to create an enemy asset pack from DOOM and/or Wolfenstein for the modding community to use as they wish. For the time being I decided to dust off some of my ancient Duke mods just to have a look at them. They'd make a great starting point afterall, being I already programmed the rosters of both those games. Haven't really touched them since the turn of the century too, so was a nice chance to take a scroll down memory lane and get a glimpse of my early programming days.

(From this point on when I refer to "Vanilla" I'm referring to Duke Nukem 3D with the Atomic Expansion, which was far more limited in what could be mod coded in than EDuke32).

And well, there was some good news and some bad news. The good news is I was able to get both my Wolfenstein and DOOM conversion packs working with the modern version of EDuke32. Bad news is they are much rougher than I remember, lol. Among other things Vanilla had a lot of hardcoded features that could barely be edited, if at all. Weapons and projectiles in specific were limited to only being able to alter their damage, ammo qualities, and the way enemies/players reacted when struck by them. Another problem was it was only possible to spawn new objects in the direct center of the object spawning them, causing all manner of ugly alignment issues. Scaling was a little clunky too, causing monsters to often start out huge and only becoming their proper scale after they began to pursue the player.

Duke's palette isn't exactly well matched to DOOM or Wolfenstein either: part the joys of being limited to only 256 colors in a game. Though I've actually gotten good at manually converting palettes so anything I bring over to Ion should at least get a quality color conversion.

But anyways I created some videos showcasing both my Wolfenstein and DOOM asset pack for Duke Nukem. Keep in mind they are really just demonstration videos of the enemies in action, rather than fleshed out stages.

Here's a glimpse of my Wolfenstein port. And yes I'm playing with God Mode on, only making a minimum effort to hide it. Just wanted to show the enemies in action:

One thing that was impressive about this asset pack is the amount of optimization I put into the enemies. Vanilla have a very small hard cap on the amount of custom code your allowed to add, only allowing room for about 20 enemy scripts. I managed to create a roster of over 40 enemies by making them clone a couple of basic scripts, using exceptions scripts for their unique behaviors. I actually ended up running out of art space, another of Vanilla's limitations.

An actual demo stage I create. Well by created I mean its a ported DOOM2 stage I heavily modified. WARNING: Lots of explosions and enemies yelling. Apparently 90s me just wanted to create an insane showdown stage:

And here's a demo of my DOOM mod. This one is much more of a mess. Partially because I adapted it to a very early build of EDuke. One that is stuck in that Windows 98 era limbo in that it won't run on a Windows 7/8/10 PC yet also cannot be emulated in DosBox. So I had to port it to modern version of EDuke32, which runs it but with in a rather buggy matter. It also shows just how little you could do with weapons/projectiles in Vanilla, with all the DOOM weapons and enemy projectiles being clunky sprite swaps (The Manacubus fireballs are particularly cringe worthy). The early build of EDuke I built it with hadn't covered that yet. One interesting thing of note is I created a custom palette for this set that is much closer to DOOM's palette:

Honestly I cringed a bit when I was playing through this. It shows a lot of my lack of programming experience back then, so many rough edges, such as the monster animations being too slow/fast. Guess I'm being self conscious about it. Part of it could just be the newer version of EDuke I ported it too (I'm pretty such the RNG system was changed). But it will at least make a good point of reference for porting the DOOM cast to Ion, will just need a lot of cleaning up. And I won't be bothering to port the player weapons, which will save some headache (As much as I like the DOOM shotgun Shelly wouldn't look right with DOOMGuys big, hairy arms, lol).

Just for fun I uploaded a video of a tech demo stage that shows some of the more surreal stage effects you can make with the Build Engine. Build has no issues with multiple rooms occupying the same physical space, which can create some trippy situations:

For now I'm going to enjoy playing through Ion. Poked around in its files a bit already, it is open scripted which is good news (Blood and Shadow Warrior were not, making modding in new AIs impossible for those games in their vanilla form). I've also started on making a some conversion palettes for converting DOOM assets to Ion's palette. Its mostly a clean conversion, but shades of blues and flesh tone red/pink had to go through some adjustments:

Here some early tests. In the case of the Caco and SS (just to showcase shades of blue) the left image is the DOOM original, the middle is what happens if you try to auto convert them to Ion's palette with an art tool and the right is my test manual conversion. Still experimenting around to get the best effect, but as you can see the loss of shading is much less in my version.

In the case of the Pinky demon it becomes more of an issue. The top is the original version, the bottom are three different conversion tests I've done. The one on the left looks probably the closest, but may not hold up well to Ion's light mapping. Welcome to the joys of the days before 32 bit palettes ....

I also created a Star Wars themed asset pack (You play as vanilla Duke, not a Jedi through) as well as a "Hey that enemy is cool. Let's port them!" pack too. I can upload demo videos of them as well on request.

At the most I'm experimenting with a project I think I might finally be able to follow up to completion. Its will be a simple platformer game with an 80s "Sword and Sandals" style fantasy type theme while the play mechanics will very similar to the NES cult classic: Power Blade. I don't have much to show at the moment, but I am making progress so stay tuned. Just a warning though the art style will be a bit experimental but more on that later...

For now I thought I'd show up a number of alpha test engines I built in Unity, both to figure the engine out and because I have an ADD style problem drifting from project idea to project idea, lol. The main reason I chose Unity was because the development kit of the other major option, the Unreal Engine, simply refused to run on my PC at the time I decided to choose one. A great way to get started, I know ?. But anyways, on to showing my work.

DISCLAIMER: These are all early alpha tests, so expect very little content, a lack of sound/music, lots of place holder public domain assests, etc. I am also hiding all the youtube videos of my works under spoiler tags for the sanity of those trying to browse this blog with a cellphone/potato/atari 2600/etc.

I don't plan to follow though on any of these projects, so if you want the source code to any of them drop me a PM. Don't mind others building off them.

SCI-FI PLATFORMER:

This game was modeled off the platformers off early era computers, such as Pitfall, Bruce Lee C64, Montazuma's Revenge, etc. It recreates the static screen effect as the player explores about, avoiding obstacles, goons, and low level puzzle solving to access further into the fortress:

One interesting note is the game uses a manually coded collision system I created by heavily modding the collision system taught in the tutorials of a fellow Unity Creator. It allows greater flexibility for a platformer game than Unity's default collision system. As well as being less memory intensive since doesn't require a "rigid body" or other fancy 3d collision checks. All my platformer projects were built out of this custom collision system.

Also the sound effect made when the player fires her gun is a custom effect made by me. Can anyone guess how I made it?

Mega Man Engine:

Me recreating the basic frame work of Megaman, cause why not?:

There are two major accomplishments of this project: one being that the palette swapping effects are handled by a shader. In other words all the color swapping is created via code instead of having a ton of duplicate spritesets for every color Mega Man assumes. As is the case for most modern Mega Man fan games being modern machines don't handle palette swapping as easily as the old world consoles.

The being that it uses a custom coded animation system, as Unity's 2d animation is a clunky, shoehorned adaption of its 3d animation system. It also includes some fancy features like being able set custom loop points, start mid-animation, frame events (like shooting a bullet), etc.

GAUNTLET CLONE:

Yep, its a Gauntlet clone. Just a warning to anyone who would request this engine's source code... it's a mess:

Fantasy Platformer Attempts:

Two attempts at creating a fantasy platformer. To most people my ideas for a such project would most closely resemble Castlevania. Though actually I would be taking a lot of influence from a number of more obscure games I'm quite fond of, such as Rygar, Black Tiger, Rastan, and Legendary Axe 2. At the time I was planning to use 3d as it would be easier to find artists and resources to get started with. But at this point I would go 2d, even if it means converting 3d assests into 2d sprites:

In the project in the second video I did manage to recreate the layered background effect from the PS Vita port of Castlevania X. In which there are platforms actually further in the background than others to help with the sense of depth issues. The player and enemies are subtly automatically adjusted to these platforms when they step on them.

But anyways that's all for now. I'll update this blog when I have more to talk about. Maybe sometime I'll do one on my Mugen characters.