m.u.g.e.n. 2D Fighting Game Engine
elecbyte.com
elecbyte.com
All I wanted to do was make Dragon Ball Z games. At the time 1998/1999 there were only Japanese versions of DBZ games as illegal roms. I created a few DBZ characters for Mugen, 2d Fighter maker 2nd and made an RPG maker game.
I used to collaborate with other creators over AIM making characters and other things. Some people would rip sprites and edit them and I would code them. The thought of remote work being a thing now is funny as I was doing remote work when I was 12 - 17 years old
I remember liking Mugen over Fighter Maker at the time because a character could be backed up to a floppy disk where as I had to use my dads zip drive to back up a Fighter Maker character.
+1. Companies were surprised that remote work "works". But many of us were basically doing remote work as hobbies during the 90s (or earlier). Not to mention the countless amazing open source projects done entirely remotely.
I feel like the same logic could apply to doing work without meetings. Somehow open source and hobby projects produce amazing work without constant pointless meetings, and yet managers think work would grind to a halt without them.
And what "project management" method is used.
Same here, but I never finished any game. I spent most of my time dissecting other people’s projects and engines. With some creativity you could do impressive stuff despite the limitations.
I discovered it in a game magazine and immediately downloaded it and it was a whole new world. It had its own weird GUI that was rendered in full screen, and there are almost NO youtube videos of some of the impressive demos like the 3D FPS Yeti game and others.
My early teen years were filled daydreaming of games I could make on it and thinking it was easy because well, Basic, I ended up spending most summers just running other peoples code, creating levels that never saw any use.
edit: nope I was wrong! found this old footage, brings me back memories
I remember playing it some time in the early 2000s when DBZ was big here in NZ (a few years behind the states, as normal).
I still remember my very first introduction to programming was setting a variable to flag if a chest had been opened or not.
It was also for me about the same time I was getting into development in a big way.
I miss those days of the web. Looking back on it now, I expect a lot of people that were around before the September that never ended were saying the same of the rest of us in 98/99, but those to me really were the glory days.
I’m relieved that Reddit still exists, as it’s about the closest thing to a collection of those early niche communities that we have left.
This is a continuous stream of CPU vs CPU matches from a massive collection of fan-made MUGEN characters, some of which are deeply weird (Col. Sanders, anyone?) You can pay them for some fake internet points to gamble on the outcome of the matches, but I've found that watching all the strangeness that folks came up with is entertaining enough on its own.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...
My favorite match that I watched live (and glad that someone recorded) was this one. Matches can get crazy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMdFtEwOc0
Last thing, Saltybet helped me discover a lot of random cool music.
Also, I want to use this comment to shout out a creator I looked up to in those days: the late, great Reuben Kee. That guy had creative output that I still don't think anything I've done possibly ever holds a candle to. Not sure what the average character looks like these days but words can't describe how...different - polished - just plain old awesome Dragon Claw was. Even his Evil Ken/Evil Ryu made almost every other character you could download feel like an unfinished rough draft in comparison (save for those made by a few other people who really knew their stuff - Phantom.of.the.Server/PotS comes to front of mind as the premier example).
Someone else in this thread mentioned that 99% of web developers probably wanted to be game developers. Messing with MUGEN files to make the game "what I wanted" was one of the earlier experiences I had that taught me that software was not an impenetrable wall and I didn't have to be afraid to "touch anything" - just cautious where relevant.
Haven't thought about this game in years (probably since the height of SaltyBet's popularity). Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I remember that I was obsessed with Mugen. I would spend hours downloading chars/stages/screen packs and making my own games combinations. Eventually I started messing around with the source code of the chars/stages etc and started to learn on my own. I never really learned how to build chars properly, but I was good with the screen packs and stages.
Something that I find amusing is that some of the screen packs that I ripped from NeoGeo games and adapted for Mugen 20+ years ago are still available and I guess some people still use them :-)
Two cool works I did was ripping the Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 [1] and KOF'96 [2] screen pack. I even found some videos on YouTube. One of those videos the person who uploaded the demo even gave me the credits after all these years. The second one there was no mention but I know for sure this is my version because of the quirks/bugs :-) I never knew how to properly align the numbers with the texts on the combo/hits sprite messages that are shown during combat haha
It's actually an interesting history in terms of copyright ethics and open source. Story time:
Around 2000, the general convention in the US and European MUGEN community was that you could very strictly only use another creator's stuff with their permission. If you were caught using someone else's code (i.e. statemachine descriptions), hitboxes, or anything else, you would most likely be banned from the community forever. This happened to a lot of people, some decided to just leave, around others it caused a huge amount of drama.
Now, the weird part is that MUGEN was a community built entirely around ripping sprites from proprietary fighting games, and using them to build characters. Sure there were original works, but that was a small amount by comparison. But the part about asking for permission also included not using sprites that other people ripped. Ripping sprites in different ways would sometimes cause recognizable patterns, e.g. the way that palettes of PNGs were ordered.
There was a lot of culture built around this "respecting creator's wishes" idea. In particular, if you couldn't get a hold of a creator to ask for permission, you just couldn't use their stuff. Which meant all the work of creators who had moved on from the community, and couldn't be reached, was impossible to built upon. If you wanted to create a character, you were expected to start by ripping the sprites from the game yourself, or get permission to use the sprites from someone who had done so. There were several stories of well-known creators who created amazing characters, but were shunned from the community when someone found out they had reused sprites that someone else had ripped without permission.
At the same time, the original creators of MUGEN - Elecbyte as featured here - had vanished for many years. The latest official version of MUGEN they had left was Linux only, and a version before that for Windows 98. Noone used the Linux version, and it had some slight incompatibilities due to new features, so the community was stuck on the Windows 98 version. When Windows XP became popular, this caused a lot of problems because the Windows 98 version just wouldn't reliably run and DOSBOX hadn't yet been around.
However - Elecbyte had sent a Windows-Build of the newer MUGEN version (that was officially only released on Linux) to a few folks who had donated to them, before they vanished. This version not only worked under Windows XP, but also brought improvements with it, particularly a capability to use higher resolution sprites. But the whole culture of respecting creator's wishes obviously and especially also applied to Elecbyte, and they had specifically asked not to pass the Windows version around.
So obviously, this led to a situation where slowly but surely everyone used the Windows MUGEN and it became the de facto version, but noone could admit to it or talk about it. The Windows version was passed around hush-hush, everyone holding up appearances that they certainly would never disrespect Elecbyte by using it against their wishes.
Crazy times :)
In 2007, things came to a head. Me and a couple other folks decided to completely turn mugenguild.com, then the largest MUGEN community (I don't know if it still is), on its head. We changed our policy to fully accept reusing other people's work, that we wouldn't police creator rights, saying that this was the only way the community could prosper. We also said that WinMugen was now accepted to use, because sticking to the DOS version was stupid and would be the death of the community sooner rather than later.
Some people flipped out over this. There were comics drawn of the involved people (including me) pissing on creators, a new community was created (RandomSelect) as the declared new bastion of creator rights. There were pages and pages and pages of a whole spectrum of reactions, some gloating about their new freedom, others lamenting the downfall of society as we know it.
It was the worst of times, it was the best of times :)
As another HN user has aptly put it: "Thanks for the trip down memory lane", indeed.
(Stripped of has to ip and largely rebuilt from scratch)
However, most game engines are highly extensible, which naturally means that people will build libraries targeting those engines, for doing very specific things.
Another interesting distinction is that engines can often written in one language but offer extensibility in another, like being written in C++ and having programmers write Lua or C#. Notable exceptions exist, however. In frameworks that's quite rare I guess.
This isn't to say that you don't write code which runs at framerate with a web framework, but often this is abstracted behind layout and user interaction concepts.