cogmonkey - Tumblr blog

[cogmonkey]

Revisiting my Can you beat Crash Bandicoot 1/2/3 if every crate is a Nitro? adventures from a couple of years ago, full playthroughs of each game

[cogmonkey]

I love your channel. Your videos about modding crash are inspiring me to actually commit to learning to code. Rock on.

I forgot to check these messages for like a year, sorry. This is awesome to hear though and I assume you know a lot more about coding by now than I do 🤘

[cogmonkey]

Hey, I wanted to ask, would you be willing to grab the files of the BlasterTech in a blender format? I adore trying to recreate things/do justice to them with fun gimmicks and the like within vrchat, and would be super thankful if I was given the oppurtunity to make him a working avatar that can shoot his lil dust bunnies!

If you have access to the game files or know how to acquire them you can convert the model (BlasterTech.igz) to something useable with either IGZ model converter (without bones) or if you have access to 3DS Max or know how to acquire it you can use this script which will handle the bones too.

[cogmonkey]

Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy mod: Crash 3 super powers in Crash 1 & 2

Super charged body slam, double jump, death tornado spin, fruit bazooka and speed shoes now all available to use in Crash 1 and Crash 2 via this mod I released recently. Versions for both PC and Switch downloadable here: https://thewarproom.com/showthread.php?tid=221.

Here's a couple of videos going over how it works, how to install etc:

[cogmonkey]

LEGO KURASSHU BANDIKUU - March 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0bzxG1a__U

[cogmonkey]

Is interactive music like in LittleBigPlanet possible in NST ? There’s a similar thing in Nitro-Fueled iirc

[cogmonkey]

Screenshot dump of some test levels and concepts from an idea I had to remake the original Crash Bandicoot within the N. Sane Trilogy as more of a "reimagining" than the remaster+ that they actually went with, also taking inspiration from many other Crash games and cut content.

Full playthroughs of a few of these levels here and some commentary from me about them here. Also my latest tweet regarding the current status of the project which hasn't changed much since those videos, yet.

[cogmonkey]

https://twitter.com/COGMONKEY/status/1618559210429771778

[cogmonkey]

N. Sane things about crates in Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

[cogmonkey]

https://twitter.com/COGMONKEY/status/1601788122408185856

[cogmonkey]

For the level editor, would it end up being possible to add in new levels to the games and possibly move existing levels around? Like say adding new buttons in the warp rooms in 3, or placing more level entrances in 1 or something along those lines. Also, is it possible to place secret warps like the ones in 2 anywhere? That would be a lot of fun to mess around with.

The hubs are more fucky than normal levels but in general the level portals etc are just like any other object in the game and you can move them and swap them around however you want, including adding new warps/buttons and changing which levels they go to. Or at least you can do that in the Crash 2/3 warp rooms, adding extra spots on the Crash 1 map would be more difficult.

Adding in entirely new levels to the game is something I've experimented with a bit and in theory it's possible. But it's also complicated, so it's on the list of things I plan to look into more after the level editor is done.

As for the secret warps in Crash 2 and stuff like the Eggipus Rex pterodactyl in Crash 3, they're just normal gameplay objects too. You can move them and modify them and add them into other levels. Changing where they take you normally requires a couple more steps than with the warp room portals but it's doable. There are also some levels like Unbearable that have secret areas accessible by teleport entities and you can change the triggers and destinations of those to be wherever you want.

[cogmonkey]

In the video below as well as your recent video relating to the NST Level Editor Update, I've seen a fully playable Princess Coco mod that looks absolutely amazing that was made for N. Sane Trilogy but I cannot find anywhere to download it. Is it still in development or is it not being released until the level editor is finished?

I only got as far with testing CTR skins and characters to check that the method I was using would work, I haven't finished it yet so those mods are still unstable and crash the game and break other things behind the scenes. At the moment my plan is to leave it until the level editor is released and then finish this stuff off and include this new way of doing CTR model conversion as a feature in 1.1 or whatever. So that's when I should also have working versions of all the skins like Princess Coco.

[cogmonkey]

[cogmonkey]

In your "My Crash Bandicoot level editor" post, there’s a gif showing that one bat file being used to move a crab where coco is, idk if it’s just me but it looks like the game is in 21:9 aspect ratio, if it is, is that that one patch from wsgf.org (https://www.wsgf.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=95&t=32703&start=30) or something else ? Had lots of problem with it for some reasons.

I have no idea my dude that was from 4 years ago

[cogmonkey]

Crash NST level editor when (when) ?

Every time someone asks me that I take a 6 month break

[cogmonkey]

My Crash Bandicoot level editor

Here's a long post about a project that has been consuming my life for the last 4 years! A thing that will let you make custom levels in a Crash Bandicoot game! Let's see if it's worth Tumblring about!

Backstory: I love the Crash Bandicoot games, and the first in the series has always been my favourite game ever. In 2017 the original PS1 trilogy was remade and released on PS4 as the N Sane Trilogy and a year later it went multiplatform - including PC. I've never been a big fan of PC gaming and although I've always been a bit of a tinkerer I didn't have any serious experience with modding at that point. I had even less experience with coding (none). But the PC release of this remake came during an extremely rough period of my life. I had been searching for a while for some kind of distraction from the situation I was in, to help me get back on my feet. So I started to experiment with breaking the game in interesting ways and somehow became the N Sane Trilogy modding guy without really meaning to. And it did turn out to be a big part of my recovery too!

The first thing I figured out was custom music, and once I had the process down I wanted to automate it which lead to my first ever experience of writing "code" in the form of a .bat file. All it really did was insert a few bytes into the start of the right kind of MP3 to make it work in the game but until this point I didn't even know what a byte was so it felt like a major achievement to me.

Not long after that, I worked out how to move objects around within levels. I wanted to try doing the same thing I'd done with the music by creating a tool that would make it easy for anyone to change the positions of things like crates and enemies. I never even considered trying to make a full blown level editor, having only just learned the basics of the Windows command line.

But my quest to avoid having to find a way to create some kind of GUI took me to some strange places. I got as far as having another .bat file that used the Windows debugger to hack into the game's memory while it was running so that you could actually see what objects you were moving where, when I decided that it was getting a little absurd and there was probably a better solution.

Still not knowing what I was doing and just trying to find a simple way to display a set of points in 3D space, I ended up playing around with Unity. It took a lot of googling and trial and error but once I was able to turn a list of coordinates into a visual representation of how objects in a level file were laid out I decided I wasn't going to find anything easier. I didn't fancy trying to create the UI part of the editor from scratch within Unity though so I downloaded Visual Studio and cobbled together a Windows Forms application for the 3D view to live inside. As I was able to use C# (whatever that was?) for both components it seemed to me like a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Hindsight tells me that this was just as ridiculous as the debugger version but it worked well enough initially that it's remained as the basis of my level editor ever since.

I did restart the whole project again after a few months of work on that version. As I spent more time on it I learned a lot more about how the game worked and once I properly understood how the level files were structured I had no real way to implement that with the code I had already written that was based on mostly guesswork. But by now there were a few more people taking an interest in modding the game and new tools like model converters were appearing. So I would have needed to start again anyway if I wanted to ever have something that actually looked like a level editor rather than a swarm of unidentifiable boxes floating around in an empty space, which was still the best I could do at that stage. So that's when I started on the current iteration.

I've now been working on this version for about 3 and a half years. That may be longer than the N Sane Trilogy itself took to develop but it can do a lot more than just move objects around now. A couple of years ago I released an example custom level that I created entirely within the editor, a remake of the first level of a different Crash game:

I also put together some concept levels for an idea I had about a different approach you could take with a Crash Bandicoot remake:

These may give the impression that the level editor used to make them must have already been pretty complete by then but there is a reason why I haven't released or even made any more levels since those ones. The whole development process has been a lot of testing things under one narrow set of circumstances until they work, and then trying to generalise across the ~100 levels in the game. Or at least getting as close as possible before hardcoding in a few exceptions because of how much inconsistency there is in how the levels are put together. But it's only really in between each cycle of replacing that placeholder code that there emerges something that is slightly useable. So it's been a while.

Thankfully I am in the final stage of that now. For version 1 at least - some of what I'm doing now I'm already planning to undo later, because I'm still just aiming for something that works before I even start to worry about trying to make something that's good. I've given up on trying to find new ways to describe how much time I've spent on this. But you can hear me saying stuff like that, and get a better look at the history of this project, in the occasional update videos that I've made over the years.

Maybe I'll squeeze in a another video before it's done, or maybe I'll incorporate a brief progress update into some other more interesting video instead. But either way I'll probably Tumblr about it some more. So please feel free to use my ask page here if you have any questions or anything. I will try to be better at not ignoring them than I am with Twitter replies and YouTube comments! Maybe!

PS if you want to get custom music in your game or you want to make simple custom levels or other mods you can do all of that with this other thing I made called Alchemist.

[cogmonkey]