RobotMonkeyHead

Edit finished. I set it to do 50%. Also got rid of that annoying clone of the opponent that it produced. Uploading... Cartman edit added to first post. Enjoy! Fixed the links to all of Omegapsycho's stuff. It's pretty much obsolete now because he updated all of it to 1.1 himself, but if you want the 1.0 versions, there they are. Yea Mediafire's got a lot more 'fires' to put out than I think they're prepared for :)

Yea that cowboy winpose thing is a pain in the ass. I didn't realize that was a result of the Anime Cartman. Ok, I'll fix that stuff up. As long as I'm doing that I'm going to make the supers Actually use up the special bar, which at this point they don't and I'm going to make that Anime Cartman thing do a lot less damage. Maybe 50% rather than 100%, not sure. Do you Y Man or anyone else have a suggestion for an amount of damage the Anime Cartman should do?

The satellite move is meant as an air counter I think, a play on a satellite shooting something out of flight? The Shun Goku Satsu is actually the Anime Cartman. As for the glitches in it, what exactly do you mean? If you don't want me to fix the spamming projectiles (which I'm kinda ok with), the only thing left is making it so the Kenny Spin can't be blocked once it hits. That alone isn't worth it to me to bother with it. If there's a major glitch in the Anime Cartman, the 2 fixes might be enough but you'll have to be specific about that glitch. That being said, here's a copy of the moves list I whipped up to see what you were talking about it. Anyone who want's it can copy and paste it into a text file and add it to his folder if they want.

Awesome! Glad to see you working with some Red Earth!

Ah, that's cool. It actually looks decent for N64. I wouldn't mind seeing some of those characters in mugen. The select screen is finished already however and is very heavily animated. It starts with that screen minus the logos and no small portraits. The half circles surrounding the central side logo's pop out, and their logos flash / fade in in white, the slots for the comic characters decend in on little latches which release, the dark stalkers map does a reverse burn in, the avp screen flips up and folds out over the KI bg, the dragon in the MK1 starts as a reptile portrait and rotates ala mk3 to reveal the standard stone dragon logo, then the small ports fade in and the music starts (that all takes about a second and a half - 2 seconds) Once the portraits fade in the street fighter airplaine flies across, the pink flower pettles from the samurai shodown 1 intro begin falling over the map / sam shodown section, a swarm of bats occasionally flies over the batman section, a spider very slowly builds a web over the spiderman section, a mario 1 pipe decends from the nintendo section periodically releasing one of 4 differenct color mushrooms which fall, and turn the TV on which has different shit on it from time to time, including moves lists and scrambled porn, when the mushroom falls past the megaman batton (bat robot thing) the batton chases the mushroom for a minute before returning to it's purch, the soul calibur sword has a light burst effect once in a while, the solar eclipse in the back has animated solar flares, the stars have a very subtle twinkle, the avp map is fully animated from the intro to the arcade game, the KI section has it's lightning, the portal behind the MK3 tower swirls, the character selecters are 2 little arcade cabs with flapping wings, and after about 3 minutes the whole screen fades to just the logos and there's a sunrise effect that happens over earth above the player two portrait. It's really anything but simple, but it's got a fuck load of time put into it, and despite how it sounds it actually looks pretty clean in action.

Thanks, yea I thought I had posted it in a random drawing thread. Didn't realize it was yours till afterwards. Sorry about that and thanks for the split.

Looks great, but the links down on the site.

God yes.

None taken. You'd really have to see it in action tho. It moves and changes a lot. In that pic I just opened the gimp file and added the logos over the sections so it would be apparent what they were for request purposes. @Hank: Not that I'm aware of, I just liked the logo for the 'creatures' section. I really didn't even know it belonged to a game, let alone a fighting game, I just snagged it off google images. @Y Man: I do actually have that Cartman in my roster. At some point I had loose plans to make a sound pack for him, but that's still a ways off. I don't have a whole lot of time to put into it right now, but if you can be specific about what bugs / glitches you're talking about I might take a quick look at him.

Here's a look at the select screen I'm working on. There's a limited number of characters per genera / game that I've widdled down through some pretty extensive play testing. Adding characters is really not too likely unless I haven't seen them yet. That being said, what character are you thinking of?

Just added the stage fixes and some other stuff. There's a slim chance with requests. Basically if they're in my roster and there's a glaring bug, yea probably, but otherwise not. That being the case I really should post a pic of my roster, but I'm in the middle of overhauling it right now for a screenpack I'm working on so it's not really possible. Also glad you like the fixes. Yea that one in the Tick drove me nuts for quite a while. Fixing it ws actually one of the things that got me into editing. EDIT: First post overhauled.

A skull study I've been dressing up recently.

A skull study that I've been dressing up recently. Originally I was just trying to draw skulls from memory, learning the names of all the bones in the body. The layout looked kinda cool so I added some detail. 11 x 14 pencil.

What's her source game? She looks a hell of a lot like Slymenstra Hymen form GWAR.

Username: RobotMonkeyHead Forum: MFFA Preferred correspondence for interview: PM Preferred time/date: Between 6pm and midnight any day but Monday. Preferred topics: Any.

Well, kind of an unexpected release today, I was working out a table for the polishing tutorial, and at one point it hit me that it would probably make a good tool for balancing the damage ratios in a full game. So I'm releasing the table, unfilled in, for anyone who wants to use it. It will work with any roster really, but balancing a full game seems like the obvious application. It basically has a bunch of slots where you add in the characters damage values. The characters are grouped into archtypes (e.g. brawler, grappler, technical, powerhouse etc...) and it calculates the average damage value for each attack of each said archtype. It then calculates an overall average damage value for each attack, and allows you to put in a specific characters damage values, and then draws up a quick comparison to the average, so you can make sure your fighter's damage values are balanced. Holds 48 chars total, under 8 different groupings. That's it really, in the polishing tutorial, it will be included, but will already be filled in with a spattering of different characters from different games. The point being to allow you to see what average damage values look like for different character types, so in polishing you can make a characters damage values somewhat more fair, or at least to your liking. Here's a couple screenies: http://i.imgur.com/1TeAU.png http://i.imgur.com/eZHPh.png Download Excel 97 version Download Open Office version Download Training To add a characters data to the table, just find what group you want to put them in (or rename an existing group), and add their name to the list. Then open up mugen and go to vs. mode, pit them against the Training character (press y to call up damage returns), and then just go through and hit with each one of their attacks, and add the damage value you see into the table at the appropriate spot. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes to add a characters data that way.

About that zombie horde, does it still have that infinite loop bug when it wins? If so, I fixed that one in if you want to use the fix.

Ah you made that stage. Nice job. What happened for me was that I got the bonus without the stage first, looked for the stage, couldn't find it so I just whipped up what looked like the same thing. Later on I actually found your stage with no scrolling, which did explain the barrel moving thing, but by that point I had already adapted the bonus to the bigger stage and kind of got to liking it better that way anyways. Now that you mention it tho, I probably should include your version of the stage in the pack for those interested in a more arcade accurate version. It should work fine the way it is. Also no you're not being pissy or snide at all in my opinion. Thanks for pointing that stuff out, and yeah that slow fall bug was kind of a bitch to pin down. There is still one more, the one where they fall just a little too far till you hit them then they go back into place. Whatevs tho. Cheers

Lively crowd. How you guys doin out there?? Double holiday bonus mashups for you! Enjoy! SF2 Car's Revenge Bonus added Snakes on a Plane Bonus added Check 'others' section of first post.

That's fine. I do follow it up with real examples of triggers immediately afterwards. The point of that one is to lay the logical groundwork / understanding without the specifics of any particular trigger getting in the way. Thanks for the advice, but I think I'm going to keep it the way it is. Also, not everyone is looking to learn Everything about creating a character from scratch. Some people just want to dabble a little, and tool around with some basic stuff without "wasting months or years of their time on some video game." The hardest part of getting into it is the first step, bridging the gap from 0 knowledge to a place where you can have some fun, and know enough to teach yourself from there. That's where my tutorial lands. I wouldn't call your tutorial any 'better' than this one. More thorough, and you put more time into it, I'll give you that, but it's geared toward a different audience, for a different purpose. There are plenty of people who would skip you 'encyclopedia' for my 'magazine' while they're taking a dump or killing a little time. On another note, I'll certainly be giving your tutorial a test drive some time in the near future, I'm sort of working myself up to character creation. Looks pretty comprehensive at a glance, and I'm tempted to say 'nice job' without even looking through it. Kinda funny you thought plugging your own tutorial was trolling, but calling parts of mine stupid wasn't, tho. I think you got it backwards. Just a tip, but that kind of stuff can be kind of off putting for newcomers to your forum, so I would try to keep it more constructive, and less offensive. Cheers P.S. I'm not even remotely done with this yet. It's kind of a work in progress that I'll be adding to as my learning progresses, so check back in a few months or so, and there should be a bit more!

Look, I could care less if you think 2 + 2 = 4 is idiotic or not. It's not changing. The reason it is what it is, is to make the double equal signs less confusing and lay the groundwork for the logic of how a trigger functions to someone who has no idea what one even is. In my opinion it's perfect because it requires no further explanation. Get it? Also that post about Ryon's tutorial that I erased was a joke. It said so in the post. Read them first, then talk about them... (erased because I knew some genius would take it for serious)

Hwoarang edit added. Check first post.

2 + 2 = 4 is an absolutely brilliant trigger, which evaluates to True, and is completely valid. Ryon you should know that. Awesome etiquette btw.

Editing Tutorial gets major update. It's also now posted in the tutorial section of the forum, but there's a link in the first post here. Edit stuff, make it cooler. Enjoy!

So, you're thinking about doing some edits, hey? Got little to no experience whatsoever? Well then, this tutorial should get you from pretty much square 0 to a point where you can make some fun changes to characters you like. The understanding it provides should be enough for you to teach yourself a lot more using the Doc's folder from there. Hope you enjoy, and happy editing! _____/ GETTING STARTED Pick a character you like that you'll really enjoy working on, because it will keep you enthused throughout the learning process. It'll also be helpful if you're familiar with the characters game play before you change it. Ok, so you have your character. Save a backup of their folder and make a duplicate to start messing with. Remember you can always go back and redo the character if you want, so don't even plan on your first shot being something final, it's more like your sketch pad, a learning ground. That being said, all throughout learning you'll need to be referencing files in the 'docs' folder (in the mugen folder), so I usually just a keep it open. It's going to be mostly these 3 files: sctrls.html trigger.html cns.html _____/ MESSING WITH ANIMATIONS This can be a lot of fun. It doesn't require any knowledge of how code works, and you can do a lot to a character just by messing with the animations. If you don't already have Fighter Factory, get it here. You will need it for almost everything. Open it up and Load the character by loading their .def file. Check out the Animations section by clicking on the red movie clip box at the top of the screen. Hover to check. Once you're in it should look like this: Ok we're pretty much going to working with stuff inside the red oval only. See the play button? Click it. You should see the characters standing animation start to loop. Click stop. See the grey bar just underneath the play button? That tells you which animation you're on. It's not the same as the animation number that mugen looks for in the characters coding. That number is right under the 'Name:' field where it says 'Number:'. Don't mess with that or when your characters code goes looking for that animation it won't be able to find it. The 'Name:' can be changed to whatever you want tho, it's just for notes. Now let's mess with some stuff. See where it says 'Time:'? Try changing that to 20 and pressing play again. That is the amount of time (in game tics) that it stays on that particular frame in the animation. Easy enough. Next to that is 'Flip:' which has the options H, V and HV which mean to flip the sprite Horizontally, Vertically or both, respectively. You can also change the Transparency: which makes that sprite only more or less transparent. 0 is totally solid 255 is invisible. You'll notice it has Source: and Dest: options next to it. Those tell it how to figure out the transparency. Source is how present the Sprite itself is, and Dest is how present the background underneath it is. Then we have the X axis and Y axis. Those control the exact position of the sprite on the screen. If you go through each frame of an animation (that grey bar just below Name and Number), you can change these values to get the characters movement to feel more or less natural. You can also just click on the sprite and drag it. Test it out with the play button. That's called 'realigning' an animation. Finally, we have the Group: and Index: fields. ALL of the sprites are organized into numbered Groups (usually all the sprites in the same animation are in a single group), and each group contains numbered sprites, the number being the sprites Index. So let's say the characters walking sprites are all in Group 20 for example, and are Indexed as 0,1,2,3,4. You could then say the 3rd sprite in his walking animation is Group 20, Index 2. (They don't have to be indexed in ordered numbers, but it does help a lot for organization.) If you wanted to change one of the sprites in his walking animation to something else completely, try messing with these numbers. Now let's get down to the collision boxes. When you get to changing frames around you'll need to understand how these work, and it's pretty important to get them right. At the very bottom of the red oval, you'll see some red and blue boxes labeled 'clsn'. Those correspond to the red and blue boxes you see on the characters sprite in the center work window. The blue boxes represent areas of the character that can be hit by an opponent during that animation frame. If your character has a blue box just around his head and none on his body, the opponent will only be able to hit your characters head, everything else will pass right through the body. Now, a common mistake people make here is to have something like 25 or 30 little blue boxes covering their character, to avoid covering blank space. Don't do this. 2 or 3 boxes is fine in most cases. It's a waste of time, and it can actually cause problems to have a lot of them. For example, say an opponent hurls a haduken at your character who happens to be moving toward it. It's possible the haduken could pass right through if the gaps are too big, or if the movement puts him in front of it one frame and behind it the next. You want to account for your characters motion with the blue boxes to avoid this kind of stuff. As for the red boxes, they represent the area of the screen that your character does damage to, and the same thing applies. On a frame where you're punch connects, you don't want just a little red box on his fist and nothing else. Try to cover the space that his fist moved through as well. Once you got that, and this is good practice, put a blue box, just slightly bigger than the red one, right on top of it. What this does is keeps your attacks from having what's called 'infinite priority', meaning that other characters can't counter it. For great examples of well done collision boxes, download some characters by either Rajaa or PotS. If your collision boxes look like this, you're doing it right. Otherwise people will let you know with feedback when you share it. Here's an example of some decent collision boxes. Notice how the red box is just inside the blue one? A lot of the time, when they're well done, the red and blue will overlap, making the red one hard to spot, so keep an eye out for it. I actually shrunk the red one by 1 pixel for this example. Now, try realigning a few animations, tamper with the sprite numbers, timing and collision boxes, add some frames (the green plus or minus buttons on the left and right of the Frames bar) etc, to get a feel for how an attack or animation moves. When you save the character, everything you do to the animations will be saved in text form in the characters .air file. After toying with the animations for long enough you should get a handle on how they work. _____/ BASICS OF CODING Once you've had your fun with the animations, and you want to start editing their moves, you're going to have to mess with the characters code. Dramatic music. Before you really dig into this, it'll be helpful if you have a basic understanding of how the mugen engine works, so here's a quick explanation. During the fight, mugen has a bunch (and by a bunch I mean like a freaking novel) of text, or code, that it reads over and over and over 60 times a second. That bunch of code is made up of 3 main parts. 1) All of your characters code. 2) All of the opponents code. 3) Mugens own code that you don't have to worry about. The only thing we care about to get started is your characters code. So, it all runs in a loop 60 times a second, and depending on what your character is doing at that specific moment, a certain 'chunk' of their code will be read and most of the rest will be ignored (Same goes for the opponent, obviously). These chunks are called Statedefs, or 'States' (<-the term we'll be using) for short. So whatever 'State' your character is in just keeps looping until it runs into a 'ChangeState' command, then it stops and changes to a new State which takes over. This keeps your character going. Once you get how that works, open up your character in Fighter Factory and check out his States section. It's the blue box icon next to the animations icon at the top of the screen. Look around in there until you find a line like [statedef 180]. It should look like this: This marks the top of the code chunk that makes up that State. The State's code (the loop) ends when you reach the next Statedef. Looks like [statedef 181] but could really be any number. Everything in between is considered State 180. State 180 usually happens to be the characters fight intro. So next up we have to understand how a State works. What goes on in that loop? Here goes: Each State is broken down into smaller pieces still, called 'State Controllers'. Each State Controller is pretty much a small block of code (about 3 to 10 lines or so, maybe more) that tells the character to do something, like move 5 pixels to the right, start running the weak punch animation, or check to see if the opponent got blasted by that flaming car you just threw at him, or whatever it is. For starters, not counting the StateDef, every State Controller has a Type, and a Trigger. The Type says what it does, and the Trigger says whether or not it does it. Everything after that depends on what the Type is. They look something like this: [state 0, Do shit] ;<-- obviously 'do shit' has no significance, it's just a note. Type = changestate Trigger1 = 2 + 2 = 4 value = 95 ;<-- could be any number you want Here we have a State Controller that's Type is a 'ChangeState' which means it will change the characters State to 95, starting up the that block of code (state 95) immediately. This is 'Triggered', meaning it happens, only by 2 + 2 equaling 4. Again that trigger could have been anything, like is the opponent within 100 pixles of your character for example. In that case, instead of Trigger = 2 + 2 = 4 it would have looked like this: Trigger1 = P2Dist X <= 100 Read triggers.html for the list of possible triggers. A quick side not, if Trigger1 = 1 then it triggers every time, if Trigger1 = 0 it will never trigger. To mugen, any number at all means 'yes', and 0 means 'no'. Also, remember, the Type associated with a StateDef is a totally different thing than the Type of a State Controller. Here are some good examples of State Controller Types and Triggers in action: Now, hopefully that doesn't look as much like Chinese to you as it did a little while ago. Well, that's pretty much the basics, so lets recap. Your characters entire code is broken down into chunks called States which loop. Those break down into State Controllers, which do different things according to their Type. They only do those things if they are Triggered. If you understood that, awesome, that's a good mental image to start with. Either way tho, reading as much of the 'cns.html' file as you can stand will give you a more detailed idea of what I just explained, and lot more. You'll be seeing plenty of that file in the future. Also, all of the characters code is stored in their folder as files ending with .CNS .ST or .ST1 (e.g. asskicker.cns). The code in the .CMD file works the same way, but that deals with taking keyboard or joystick input, and that will come later. Check the cmd.html doc for info on how that works if you want. _____/ MESSING WITH MOVES So let's try some simple things to start out with, like see if you can change the damage that the quick punch does. See what other aspects of his quick punch you can change too while your at it. To do that, first your gonna want to open your character up in Fighter Factory and go into his States section. Again, it's the blue box next to the animations one at the top of the screen. Look around in there until you find State 200. The beginning of it will look like [statedef 200] . State 200 is usually the quick punch, then 210 and 220 are medium and fierce respectively. Once you've found that, look for the State Controller that's labeled 'Type = Hitdef'. Look up "hitdef" in 'sctrls.html'. This will explain all values that go along with that State Controller Type. With that you should be able to change the damage and whatever else you want easily. It's a great place to get started. Ok, now that you've earned your yellow belt in coding, let's take your character for a test drive. Fire up your mugen and get them into a fight. Vs mode or training mode will probably be best here. When the fight starts, press ctrl + D to bring up the debug menu in the lower left. Pressing it again will switch it to player 2. There are 2 things on there you will want to pay attention to at first, they are the ActionID and State No. Action ID tells you the number of the Animation that is running at the moment, and State No tells you the number of the State that the character is in. This way you can check on everything you've done so far. Throw a quick punch, and see what happens. You can also press ctrl + C to make the collision boxes visible. _____/ TYING IT TOGETHER Once you've done that, your journey into the world of coding has begun. You've just looked through a few thousand lines, found what you wanted to change, and changed it. Now here's where you'll really take off. Check out State 200 again. Look at all the State Controllers that it has until you find the one of type 'ChangeState'. Pretty much every State has one of these in it, otherwise the character would never come out of that State. Now see what Value that ChangeState has under it. That's what State it changes to. Now go find that State. See where we're going? You could follow this through an entire character if you wanted to, but you would probably come out the other side insane. None the less you now know your way around a characters code. At this point you can see how it helps to have really well labeled code. KFM is great for this. If the char you're using isn't, I sometimes keep KFM open in fighter factory while I also have the character that I'm working on open, just for reference. Mugen has a lot of State numbers which usually correspond to certain actions. Some of them are just general practice, but necessary (200 being quick punch for example) and some of them, States 0-99, 120-199, 5000-5999 to be exact, are reserved by the mugen engine, and really shouldn't be messed with. Check out the cns.html for a list of the standard states at some point. Now your pretty much ready to be turned lose, but really quick a few more pieces of advice for your travels. Try to pay close attention to what you do when you edit, because there is very little room (if any) for error in coding. Labeling is HUGE when you're getting started, so you can find what you did, check it, test it and mess with it. I usually label changes I make with something like "my edit: description" so I can use a search and jump right too them. To label something in the code, add a semicolon ; and everything after that on the line, mugen just skips over when it's running, because it knows those are just your notes. It might end up looking something like this: ; my notes [statedef 0] type = A ; my edit, changes move to Air type. physics = N You'll notice a lot of this stuff if you haven't already. Also, Statedefs -1,-2 and -3 are special. They're all read basically every single loop no matter what, in addition to whatever other State your character is in. Read up on them in the cns.html file. If you get stuck on a problem, read Every Single Line of Code in a state very carefully, and think about what it's doing. If it's not a problem in the State, check State -2. If your really in a pinch and still can't figure it out, try creating a DisplayToClippboard state controller. You can read up on how that works, and you'll see what I mean. Remember to keep checking in with the Docs, because they will teach you how to do Everything. They aren't going to be something you read once and then get, they're constant reference material. _____/ GOOD LUCK! Ok so there's the basics. Once you've been over everything in this tutorial enough times to understand it clearly, you should be well on your way, and totally capable of seeking out advice and understanding more advanced tutorials. Well, that does it for now, I hope you find this helpful, and best of luck to you in your creative endeavors! -RobotMonkeyHead P.S. Don't forget to share your work! Feedback is one of the best ways to learn. If it sounds harsh, trust me, it's probably not personal, and if it seems that way, just sift it for the useful bits, cause that's what counts!