Steve's Blog

July 28, 2021 Modding with Harmony Monster Train Title: My Monster Train Custom Unit Synthesis Patch By: Steven lilley (Me) Github - Link Description: Link to my github page leading to my patch for adding custom units and syntheses to Monster Train. Overview Monster Train modding suffered from a lot of issues when the latest large DLC was made, the Last Divinity. Trainworks, a modding API created to help with modding Monster Train, was created before this DLC, and its addition broke many of its features. One of the large additions from the DLC itself was unit synthesis, which let you break a character down into a unique upgrade for another character. This however was impossible to implement with Trainworks since it encountered new bugs because of unforeseen interactions with the new content. Originally, it would not even run if using new content, but a few updates to Trainworks at least made using them possible. However, unit syntheses continued to be

July 20, 2021 Software Options Digital Art Title: What’s the best software for a Wacom drawing tablet? By: Bruno Brasil - Drawing Tablet World Drawing Tablet World - Link Description: Gives a list of softwares to use with Wacom tablets, with descriptions of what they offer. Overview I recently received a Wacom One tablet, and wanted to look into which art softwares work with it and work with it best. As far as I can tell it seems that most general digital art tools will translate decently to greatly when working with a tablet in this day and age, so it doesn't seem limited in that aspect at all. Now I just need to figure out which one(s) make the most sense for what I want to use it for, and this resource seems like a decent starting point. After this, I want to work it down to one or two softwares and start to round up some tutorials to get my footing with them. Most likely I will look to start with Adobe Photoshop since I have a little experienc

July 14, 2021 Modding with Harmony Monster Train Title: Harmony ParDeike - Reverse Patch By: Harmony Harmony - Documentation Description: Harmony documentation on patching with the Reverse Patch. Overview I was investigating ways to use Harmony to access private methods and fields from classes within the Unity target game itself, Monster Train in this case. One of the first direct options I came across was using reverse patches. Basics of the Reverse Patch "A reverse patch is a stub method in your own code that 'becomes' the original or part of the original method so you can use that yourself." Typical use cases: easily call private methods no reflection, no delegate, native performance you can cherry-pick part of the original method by using a transpiler can give you the unmodified original will freeze the implementation to the time you reverse patch Implementation After seeing its first use case being calling private

July 7, 2021 Shader Graph Unity Title: Unity VFX & Shader Graph - Black Hole Effect Tutorial By: Gabriel Aguiar Prod. Youtube - Tutorial #1 Description: Tutorial for a black hole VFX using Unity's Shader Graph, particle systems, and Visual Effect graph. Title: { How to CHANGE the SKYBOX in Unity } - HDR Textures in the description By: GameDevTraum Youtube - Tutorial #2 Description: Quick tutorial to use texture as Skybox in Unity. General Notes Fixing Errors I immediately ran into an issue with the Scene Color node. The fix for this was going to the Main Camera and setting the "Opaque Texture" to ON (found under the Rendering section of the Camera). This made the shader and material match the scene color appropriately, giving that transparent look. I found a generic space texture to use for my background to emulate the one used in the tutorial. I turned it into a Cube texture to create a Cubemap material to use a

July 1, 2021 Modding with Harmony Monster Train Title: Getting Started with Trainworks Modding Tools By: KittenAqua Github - Wiki Description: More detailed and in-depth documentation on properly setting up a C# project for modding Monster Train as well as examples for modding various content. Title: Harmony Patching Article By: Harmony Harmony - Article Description: General documentation on Harmony. Overview As of the writing of this blog, the state of the Trainworks modding API with Monster Train after its DLC release is a bit rough. Creating custom cards was a core feature of Trainworks, but the DLC update has broken a lot of the original system. I have been investigating these issues to see if I can identify the problem(s) and potentially fix them. This has led me to learning a lot about using Harmony, a tool for modding Unity games, especially in a way to create logs to help me track bugs and problems when integrated with BepInEx.

July 1, 2021 Doppler Effect and Audio Controller Game Audio Title: Mario Kart and the Doppler Effect By: Scruffy Youtube - Information Description: Explanation of how Mario Kart creates the doppler effect and efficiently distributes audio to multiple players. Overview This video covers how Mario Kart Wii specifically uses the doppler effect, as well as just how some of their audio systems work in general. It is decent coverage of how to implement a basic doppler effect system into a game in general. Fig. 1: Image from "Mario Kart and the Doppler Effect" Video Above by Scruffy Setup of Doppler Effect System The key is the relationship between sound frequency and relative velocity of objects. Their approach to measure this is just by measuring the distance from the audio source to the audio listener each frame, and if there is a difference, that is used for a relative velocity term. This relative velocity term is bound to some negative and