Obscure crap EVERY mugen newb needs to know.

[zigg4d]

when it came to mugen creation, it looks fun... but then your morale gets bogged down by weird, obscure issues that NOBODY seemed to have or talk about...
so I decided to make this thread to archive the "obscure crap EVERY mugen newb needs to know" (as well as being a psuedo-one-stop support thread)

Be sure to check this out too

the greatest hits of character feedback

It's detailed, & it has a LOT of resources for MUGEN (Both newb & novice) creators- no seriously, go check this out.

This is assuming the Creator is using fighter Factory

credits

• Ironcommando - (helping me with the special attack command issue)
• Cyanide - (for listing a lot of notable glitches, misc. stuff various notes, and a couple things that I knew but didn't have the sense to put in)
• TamerZack - For reminding me about the position of the transparency
• Vegeta20XX - For contributing an obscure glitch
• LadyKiki - for the "truth list" which I'm using for the "important" section
• Rednavi - for contributing some fighter factory glitches & a coding tip
• Seravy  - for some contributing some tips & glitches
• Xgargoyle - for contributing an important note
• Fallen_Angel - for contributing some misc. tips & an important note
• Hadoabuser - for contributing a note in regards to adding collisions via text a tip for editing/adding "quick" CNS states, & a glitch regard binded frames on a looping animation

List history (from 12/20/08 & onward)

• list history added
• added some notes/tips by cyanide
• removed "gluing standard collisions" glitch, as I need more information to figure this out.
• (12/22/08)
• added Vegeta20XX's, TamerZack's tips & reduced title font size to 16- it obscured the actual notes themselves
• did a few misc. changes to the list.
• added an "Important" section, thanks to ladykiki
• (1/2/09)
• Added some glitches courtesy of rednavi, added some markers for organization, and emphasized key parts in the "important" section
• (1/4/09)
• added another "important" piece to the list courtesy of TamerZack
• (2/6/09)
• added Seravy & Xgargoyle's tips & added a new section: Code tips, notes, & glitches
• (3/24/09)
• Added Red Navi's tag code note & Fallen angel's Misc tips, I'm not sure about the afterimages so I left that out.
• (3/27/09)
• Added a some info in regards to GIMP & palettes.
• added the problems with audacity & fighter factory
• (4/07/09)
• added the problems in regards to command case & Fighter factory's crappy grab maker
• changed coding tips to creation tips & added an unconfirmed glitch in regards to the CNS & FF freezing.
• (4/16/09)
• been fooling around with hitsparks & explodes, so I'll add what I know in regards to that.
• added Hadoabuser's collision via text tip as support to the multiple collision support. correction; CNS "quick"
• changed a few bits and pieces in the post.
• (6/03/09)
• added hadoabuser's tip with loops & bind states
• added a glitch with envcolor & envshake not functioningly properly with a time trigger
• added a note for using multiple hits with one hitdef & helper
• added an important note for required sprites

IMPORTANT!

• Making an original character is hard work.
  
• Making a character is hard work. Not an overnight thing.
• Making a game is near impossible unless you devote all spare time to it.
• Making a game is impossible unless the people you work with are within murder range.
• You will not become the next Capcom/SNK/Playmore/Sammy and others.
• You will need dedication and be open to criticism in order to advance and learn.
• Learning pixel art won't hurt, and/or 3D modelling to convert to sprites.
• Never make a forum after you release something. You can't possibly be that famous, not for a while.
• Its better making just one good char, than a hundred crappy chars that everyone will hate
• Always keep a backup of your character and workfiles on a CD/DVD (or external hard drive/flash drive). Too many "ultimate mugen projects" have been lost due to an HD crash- or corrupted files.
• USE THE BORING ASS REQUIRED SPRITES! seriously, do it, people will likely call your char retarded even if there's like a few missing sprites

Commands

- set ALL special commands and supers ABOVE the normal attacks, this could possibly fix specials that don't even work at all.

- Commands are CASE SENSITIVE meaning that command itself (the "D, DB, B, z" code) & the command state (the -2 state used to control the state in the CMD) MUST BE THE EXACT SAME

Sprites & Sprite Alignment

- when importing sprites, set the alignment to Center, Bottom for the character itself. Uses Center, Center for explodes & projectiles.

• Keep in mind, that this does not always keep the animations truely aligned, this is meant to make aligning easier.

- always align sprites in the sprite dialog, rather than the anim dialogue to save yourself the time of realigning them every single freaking time.

- if you changed/added sprites that aren't cropped. go to the sprites tab, and select crop all to crop respective sprites.

- keep the sprites in separate folders indicating what those sprites are for, either name the folders respectively or set them to thier respective state numbers.

-if your character looks weird when they jump, set the character's axis (the white cross) in the center of thier torso.

- always auto-crop the sprites when importing them... but if they're set up so that all the aligning can be done on a single axis because of a large transparency, THEN DON'T CROP IT! (because it saves alignment time)

Sprites and disappearing states

- If the state does not show up, then the sprites are designated to the wrong state or animation.

- Explod/hitspark support

• if your hitspark isn't showing up, check to see if the animation has frames set at 0 time, & delete those frames, or set it to something like 1
• If you've got no "0 time" frames, add an extended time frame with one of the sprites from your "idle" group (group 0) or a sprite that you know works, if the sprite works, then the sprites used for the hitspark are invalid, thus they need to be deleted & readded or replaced
• however... if the hitspark STILL doesn't show, then delete the anim & remake the spark
• and if THAT didn't work, then check your code, there might be some little out of place value that makes your hitspark disappear.

Palettes

- fiddle with other palettes to get an idea of how they work.

- The transparency color of the palette is ALWAYS the one one the bottom right corner (the last one).

when using photoshop, the best way to do it would be to set forced colors to none, and use selective (local).

- GIMP (the Gnu Image Manipulation program) is an open source alternative to photoshop, and has good palette support.

• Take note however, when doing palettes with GIMP, the color order is reversed, meaning the transparency (which is normally absolute bottom right in fighter factory) is on the absolute top left in GIMP

General Creation notes & Glitches

-Never think something will work just because it works under different conditions. Example : For lifebars with the default small portrait (9000,0), the image has to be shared with your palettes, and will appear using the colors from the selected .act files. For lifebars that use a different sprite number, however, individual palette works fine. Another example : P2Stateno attacks hit the enemy through a hitoverride from projectiles, but miss him from a hitdef (known bug, listed in the documents)

-You can edit the code that shows up when you click a state controller in Fighter Factory by, clicking the name then the red notepad icon.

• With this you can make your own state controllers even

-When doing multiple versions of the same collisions in a state, you can work faster in "Edit Action in Text" mode, copy the information from the original frame and paste it in the respective copy frames. be careful not to overwrite the I.D. beneath or delete the action caller [State #, Action].

- While playing the animation of a loop, changing to a different state might cause an infinite "index list out of bounds" loop that keeps displaying errors, often forcing you to Ctrl-alt-del fighter factory (although in my experience with Fighter Factory being glitchy as hell, I've never actually had it genuinely crash- quite ironic).

- Comments inserted in the middle of animations are deleted.

- If you set up all the details of a frame of an animation and then click + it will reset the last parameter you set to 0 unless you cycle back a sprite first.

- Fighter factory screws up sprites when "optimizing" the sprites, so don't touch that function, even if you got an eight-year old computer that lags like hell when using potekmin, arcueid, or duck dodgers' supers.

- sometimes fighter factory will assign sprites to the small portrait group (9000, 1)

- Avoid using "link to" function on the SFF, most of the time it will fuck up those sprite's axis, this happens frequently when modding .SFF files (example, adding a portrait)

- Dont use default CLSN on the air file because they sometimes dont come out in the whole animation in-game (so for example the CLSN 1 will be on the first frame of the animation but wont be in the next ones)

- fighter factory hates audacity, I'm not sure why.

- Fighter factory's throw creator is crappy, it works alright for getting a base throw started, but it will require quite a bit of tweaking to get a proper throw down

- Fighter factory freezes if an action caller in the CNS is deleted, (not totally confirmed, but I don't risk bombing my creations)

Coding tips, & Glitches

-When coding tag mode in a character you must get control of your character during roundstate = 3 for atleast 1 tick to be able to go to your winpose (assuming that you get the control when the enemy is officially "dead" and you are in the correct moment to go to your winpose). A similar behavior happens in roundstate 1 to 2 where you always change state to stateno 0 at the very start of the round.

-Never, ever use ChangeState in your -1 and -2 states for Ai or player moves which do not need ctrl. If you add such moves, always use SelfState instead, otherwise, your character will get stuck whenever it tries to execute that command while being thrown. If you don't want the move to work while being thrown, use state -3 instead.

Targetbind doesnt trigger on the first animation element that loops.

EX

• Elem 1 Works
• Elem 2 Works
• Elem 3 Works
• Elem 4 Works
• LoopStart
• Elem 5 Works
• Elem 6 Works

• Loop Happens
• Elem 5 Does not work
• Elem 6 Works

Fighter Factory Glitches

- Many of the sctrls you can add in the .cns have syntax errors. ground.hittime is one of the more obvious ones.

- when using time as a trigger with envshake & Envcolor, it won't function properly, use a different trigger - like animelem
[/list]

Code Select Expand

;Example
Trigger1 = time = 1
Trigger2 = time = 2

;use this instead
Trigger1 = animelem = 1
Trigger2 = animelem = 2



- you can use one hitdef or helper to call multiple hits, just stack multiple triggers.

Code Select Expand

;Example

Trigger1 = animelem = 1
Trigger2 = animelem = 2
Trigger3 = animelem = 3
Trigger4 = animelem = 4
Trigger5 = animelem = 5
Trigger6 = animelem = 6
Trigger7 = animelem = 7


- if you wanna suck a character into an attack ZanRetsuKen Style without making it a throw, add "snap = x,y" and add in the respective coordinates as if you were binding a foe with a throw.

Misc. Crap

- Avoid using the elecbyte template. instead use whatever character you prefer, (like kung fu man) and edit it as necessary, but use your own .sff (and maybe .snd), as swapping the sprites becomes long and tedious.

- BMP is not a recognized mugen format. FF does a rather bad conversion of these and it's very very very strongly recommended you do it properly and use .pcx instead. If this means using another program (like GIMP), tough. Do it anyway.

-Keep in mind that mugen is a beta software, which itself contains many bugs. Before you start coding something you never did before, check if it is working properly, or has some kind of a bug.

-Keep in mind that the documentation itself contains errors, or is simply not detailed enough to let you know what will actually happen for some cases. Best to test it out yourself.

-You can only have 128 unique commands

-Sometimes the hard issues are solved easily....most of the times its an issue with the spelling

-Sprite-swapping is not very well recieved in the community because it does nothing to change the gameplay, & is in general a waste of time & energy - LEARN. TO. CODE.



if anybody's willing to contribute any "quirks" that most mugen sites don't give out, yet the newbs need to know, please contribute, thanks.[/list]

[Cyanide]

when importing sprites, set the alignment to Center, Bottom for the character itself. Uses Center, Center for explodes & projectiles.

You'll still need to align after this. Just cos you've done that it doesn't mean the sprites will be in super position first try

always auto-crop the sprites when importing them

Only do this if you're NOT using prealigned sprites. You can always crop at the end of the sff anyway.

(not sure how to address this one yet, I'll need to do testing if I have time or motivation)

These shouldn't be an issue you can't work out on your own. If your image is correctly set up pallete and format and you've used unique group/image combination the ONLY way a sprite will vanish in game but show up in FF is if you've given the frame a time of 0.

If in the state it doesn't show, it's cos you've assed up and designated the wrong state or animation. Nothing to do with mugen but it is to do with what you've done.

in which case, in fighter factory, set the "false transparency" to something easily distinguishable from the original transparency, and go through manually with figher factory's paint bucket.

Ugh. Honestly? Don't ever tell people to do this. Learn how pallete editing works. Gimp has it (in fact iirc gimp lets you drag/drop colours around the pallete) and do it properly.

using the auto clsn, setting to all frames & standard will "glue" the clsns to the frames of the animation, rendering auto-clsn delete useless, forcing users to manually delete the clsns (which gets ESPECIALLY annoying).

Standard means every frame after this without it's own clsn's defined will use these clsn boxes. If you turn standard off, they're that frame only and you can delete them anyway. Best not to use autoclsn. It overkills and makes rather crappy hitboxes anyway. If you do have too many i almost always use animation>edit action in text to get rid of them. For that matter i use that to create my animations as well. Much easier to type a line than click through boxes that don't save if you click + too soon.

Actual glitches.
Elecbyte template. DO NOT USE! DELETE IT NOW!
Many of the sctrls you can add in the .cns have syntax errors. ground.hittime is one of the more obvious ones.
If you set up all the details of a frame of an animation and then click + it will reset the last parameter you set to 0 unless you cycle back a sprite first.
FF's optimise function is a bad plan and can really screw you up.
BMP is not a recognised mugen format. FF does a rather bad conversion of these and it's very very very strongly recommended you do it properly and use .pcx instead. If this means using another program, tough. Do it anyway.
Comments inserted in the middle of animations are deleted.
Entering something new in the def file after creating a new .cns for use doesn't work. You need to set the files up manually and reload.

[zigg4d]

You'll still need to align after this. Just cos you've done that it doesn't mean the sprites will be in super position first try

I forgot to add that in during the time, but thanks for that anyway.

Only do this if you're NOT using prealigned sprites. You can always crop at the end of the sff anyway.

so you can crop after you put the sprites in? enlighten me on this please.

Ugh. Honestly? Don't ever tell people to do this. Learn how pallete editing works. Gimp has it (in fact iirc gimp lets you drag/drop colours around the pallete) and do it properly.

Sorry, about that, I'll change it then

Elecbyte template. DO NOT USE! DELETE IT NOW!

so Winane Ai then? or is there an alternative template around?

Best not to use autoclsn. It overkills and makes rather crappy hitboxes anyway. If you do have too many i almost always use animation>edit action in text to get rid of them. For that matter i use that to create my animations as well. Much easier to type a line than click through boxes that don't save if you click + too soon.

meh, I use autoclsn because I'm really lazy, (and I don't have the experience to figure out the dimensions of every single sprite).

but either way, major thanks there cyanide.

[Cyanide]

so you can crop after you put the sprites in? enlighten me on this please.

Sprites>Crop, or Crop All

so Winane Ai then? or is there an alternative template around?

Any character in your mugen directory is a "template" rename their folder and .def files and load them up. Warp as neccesary. Best not to use their .sff though. Takes too long getting rid of the sprites, start a new one and overwrite.

[The Railgunner]

Prople should also note that sometimes Fighter Factory links sprites to 9000,1 (small portrait). It happened to my CvS Pyron project, and to my Alpha Bison WIP.

[TamerZack]

Palettes

fiddle with other palettes to get an idea of how they work.

when using photoshop, the best way to do it would be to set forced colors to none, and use selective (local).

GIMP (the Gnu Image Manipulation program) is an open source alternative to photoshop, and has good palette support.

You forgot that the background color(the color you don't want visible on your character) for the images has to be in the bottom-fight hand side of the palette.

To this day, I have never been able to use GIMP to make palettes.
Ever.

[zigg4d]

both added in, thanks!

[「ⒻⓊⒸⓀⓎⒺⒶⒽ」]

Add:

Making an original character is hard work.

Making a character is hard work. Not an overnight thing.

Making a game is near impossible unless you devote all spare time to it.

Making a game is impossible unless the people you work with are within murder range.

You will not become the next Capcom/SNK/Playmore/Sammy and others.

You will need dedication and be open to criticism in order to advance and learn.

Learning pixel art won't hurt, and/or 3D modelling to convert to sprites.



EDIT: And no I'm not joking, this is reality and fact, the truth. I was once like this. Infact, I'm still a little like this (wanna-make-a-game-and-be-famous-with-over-1000 original-characters)

[PotS]

You will not become the next Capcom/SNK/Playmore/Sammy and others.

You just broke one thousand hearts haha.

[zigg4d]

Add:

Making an original character is hard work.

Making a character is hard work. Not an overnight thing.

Making a game is near impossible unless you devote all spare time to it.

Making a game is impossible unless the people you work with are within murder range.

You will not become the next Capcom/SNK/Playmore/Sammy and others.

You will need dedication and be open to criticism in order to advance and learn.

Learning pixel art won't hurt, and/or 3D modelling to convert to sprites.



EDIT: And no I'm not joking, this is reality and fact, the truth. I was once like this. Infact, I'm still a little like this (wanna-make-a-game-and-be-famous-with-over-1000 original-characters)

Added.

and quoted for truth

[rednavi -RETIRED]

Another glitches with FF:

- Avoid using "link to" function on the SFF, most of the time it will fuck up those sprite's axis, it hapenned a lot of times to me when I modify their SFF's (example, adding a portrait)

- Dont use default CLSN on the air file because they sometimes dont come out in the whole animation in-game (so for example the CLSN 1 will be on the first frame of the animation but wont be in the next ones)

[zigg4d]

Another glitches with FF:

- Avoid using "link to" function on the SFF, most of the time it will fuck up those sprite's axis, it hapenned a lot of times to me when I modify their SFF's (example, adding a portrait)

- Dont use default CLSN on the air file because they sometimes dont come out in the whole animation in-game (so for example the CLSN 1 will be on the first frame of the animation but wont be in the next ones)

added in, thanks!

[TamerZack]

Never make a forum after you release something. You can't possibly be that famous, not for a while.

[zigg4d]

Never make a forum after you release something. You can't possibly be that famous, not for a while.

Added, It took me a bit to understand but now I do

[Seravy]

-Never, ever use ChangeState in your -1 and -2 states for Ai or player moves which do not need ctrl. If you add such moves, always use SelfState instead, otherwise, your character will get stuck whenever it tries to execute that command while being thrown. If you don't want the move to work while being thrown, use state -3 instead.

-Keep in mind that mugen is a beta software, which itself contains many bugs. Before you start coding something you never did before, check if it is working properly, or has some kind of a bug.

-Never think something will work just because it works under different conditions. Example : For lifebars with the default small portrait (9000,0), the image has to be shared with your palettes, and will appear using the colors from the selected .act files. For lifebars that use a different sprite number, however, individual palette works fine. Another example : P2Stateno attacks hit the enemy through a hitoverride from projectiles, but miss him from a hitdef (known bug, listed in the documents)

-Keep in mind that the documentation itself contains errors, or is simply not detailed enough to let you know what will actually happen for some cases. Best to test it out yourself.

[XGargoyle]

Also add:

- Always keep a backup of your character and workfiles on a CD/DVD. Too many "ultimate mugen projects" have been lost due to a HD crash.

[zigg4d]

-Never, ever use ChangeState in your -1 and -2 states for Ai or player moves which do not need ctrl. If you add such moves, always use SelfState instead, otherwise, your character will get stuck whenever it tries to execute that command while being thrown. If you don't want the move to work while being thrown, use state -3 instead.

-Keep in mind that mugen is a beta software, which itself contains many bugs. Before you start coding something you never did before, check if it is working properly, or has some kind of a bug.

-Never think something will work just because it works under different conditions. Example : For lifebars with the default small portrait (9000,0), the image has to be shared with your palettes, and will appear using the colors from the selected .act files. For lifebars that use a different sprite number, however, individual palette works fine. Another example : P2Stateno attacks hit the enemy through a hitoverride from projectiles, but miss him from a hitdef (known bug, listed in the documents)

-Keep in mind that the documentation itself contains errors, or is simply not detailed enough to let you know what will actually happen for some cases. Best to test it out yourself.

Also add:

- Always keep a backup of your character and workfiles on a CD/DVD. Too many "ultimate mugen projects" have been lost due to a HD crash.

Added, thanks guys.

[Fallen_angel]

You could also add

-When you code an afterimage in a negative state, you have to trigger it inverse as you would normally do... if you put as trigger stateno =0 , it will activate in every other state except 0

-You can only have 128 unique commands 

-Sometimes the hard issues are solved easily....most of the times its an issue with the spelling

-Its better making just one good char, than a hundred crappy chars that everyone will hate

-Sprite-swapping its not cool

[Cyanide]

-When you code an afterimage in a negative state, you have to trigger it inverse as you would normally do... if you put as trigger stateno =0 , it will activate in every other state except 0

Thats because you're telling the afterimage to start again every single tick. It never gets far enough along to actually display it. You can't have 2 afterimages at once, the reason it shows in state 0 is because it's had enough time to actually begin, although changing state after that point will reset it again.

[Fallen_angel]

Thnx for the info Cyanide