#Mod VT

[the-harvester]

When your giant BF does the thing with his hands against the wall

[equinoxts2]

Quick, Simple Mod Edit: Midge's Develop Feelings

For my good friend @esotheria-sims who recently asked me if I had this available for download, and for anyone else who might be wary of SimPE, here's a minor string edit edit of @midgethetree's Develop Feelings mods.

I didn't touch the code at all, but did change the text strings (in English only, but feel free to translate!) to say "Develop Feelings.../Crush (or Love)" instead of "Develop Crush (or Love)" - this should reduce the chances of them being clicked by accident and derailing your plans. :)

DOWNLOAD (SFS)

Fully re-compressorized. Includes the following mods: Develop Crush (as well as the childhood crush variant that allows children to crush on each other), and Develop Love. Please check Midge's post linked above for the details. Remove the original mods before adding these to your game; mine have _QuinEdit added, so you'll know which is which.

Credits: MidgeTheTree for the original mod (and full credit to her for the code; if she ever returns and requests that I take my edit down, I'll do so), the anon who requested the mod on her blog, and Esotheria for asking if my edit was up for download.

[10yearsofventuriantale]

Today is the Ten-Year Anniversary of “SCARY GHOST CHILDREN! - Gmod Five Nights At Freddy's 3 Horror Mod (Garry's Mod)”

[gmod-gravityfalls-dipper-mod]

My Venturiantale Oc That I made For @lunadreamscaper 's Shatterverse-

its a Creature Made from The Peatland's Mire- and since its Made Of Negative Emotions It Feeds on them Aswell- So It Causes Problems on Purpose- :3

[taleblr-zine]

Zine Artist/Writer Application

Hey folks! The Taleblr Zine applications are live! Artist/Writer/Merch Artist form can be found here. Applicants will be hearing back from us by October 25th about whether they made it in (though I don't expect to give many rejections!) The mod applications are also still live, which are important! Presently we only have two mods, and the zine may take a bit longer to coordinate without as many hands to help. Consider applying if you'd like the leadership experience! Super excited to see yalls' submissions!

Our FAQ: here! -Mod Sav

[maddiefriendlovesbilly]

It’s time for my bi-annual VT post lol, this time in meme form. The full art drawings are below the cut btw! Also happy 2024 everyone!!! I wish you all a great new year!!

[ID: A picture of a man’s hands holding two pieces of paper. Edited onto each piece of paper is a simplistic crayon drawing of two characters: Jose Jose Jose Jose on the left, Jimmy Casket on the right. Below Jose it says it white font with a black border, “A Dead Mexican Guy,” and above jimmy in the same style it says in all capital letters, “A Serial Killer.” Text at the bottom says, “Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture.” The text is a caption of the man holding the paper.

Below this is a second frame, with a woman in frame. In the same text as above, she’s labelled “Gertrude Acachalla.” The woman is captioned as saying “They’re the same picture.” /END ID.]

This is genuinely my first time making a full drawing of Jose Jose Jose Jose, and honestly im super proud of this design! colors will change though I just threw some down as I’m sure you can tell lol

[lonepower]

do you trust her?

□ yes!

□ definitely!

□ absolutely!

[dinodogs]

man at this point Oscar fans just dni lmao. Yall are annoying as hell.

[osakanone]

The steel battalion controller could fix me. Some company needs to make specialty mech controllers so i dont have to spend £350 on 2003 hardware (so i can spend £350 on 2025 hardware).

Mech game Controllers: Solving the unsolvable

I have put so much time into thinking about this and you've basically asked the perfect question.

I think there are really complex and important questions that nobody really has a good robust answer to but also that nobody is really asking those big questions in the first place either, so we're stuck on this issue.

My take is I genuinely think if we want big mecha controllers we have to think about this stuff deeply and profoundly. Like, why we need them and what they're for.

So… This has been tried many times.

NOK or NextOfKin Creatives did try this.

The Mek-Fu lopped horribly, and I was absoloutely fascinated by this at the time and wanted to understand exactly why it had failed. I think we must learn from this failure, so we don't make the same mistakes again.

The lesson I took from Mek-Fu was this: it didn't take because players had nothing to use it in where it was the best fit.

What does this mean?

1) For other games in the real world, it was inferior to keyboard and mouse in games which do not simulate a vehicle. 2) The design wasn't trying to meet some sort of pre-existing need from other games. 3) Steel Battalion emulation did not exist meaningfully yet, and in turn no equivalent game existed on the PC platform which would need it.

Therefor: There was no special environment where its employment made the best sense.

It had nowhere to excel and thrive.

So where have specialty controllers existed, and thrived?

Digital Combat Sim (DCS)

Star Citizen

Euro Truck Simulator

Farming Simulator

What do they all have in common?

They all have robust modding tools for user-created content

They all have some form of social experience or multiplayer

They all are highly accessible (PC, and are controller agnostic*)

They are all sandboxes in some capacity and let users find their own fun.

No mech game which exists at time of writing meets all these terms that I know of.

So what do these controllers look like?

In the case of real vehicles, you can simply ape the real vehicle 1:1, but for fictional vehicles, something special happens -- you see people approach and try to solve the problem in many different ways.

You see, control design in any area exists to solve a problem. The Mek Fu (a response to the VT controller) was a solution looking for a problem, and no problem existed.

From this, we learn that for specialty mech controllers to exist, you first need specialty mech games. Steel Battallion is limited, because it won't run on general hardware and doesn't network or mod easily so it isn't a good fit for this because it makes the game inaccessible and limited.

Let's actually think about the SB controller for a bit:

Steel Battalion approaches its problem from the standpoint of a robot. You might not realize this but a VT or Vertical Tank intentionally controls very similarly to a tractor.

It is influenced by a real thing. I know that sounds absurd, but let me show you what a modern tractor's task control console looks like:

Yeah, not what any of us would have expected.

If you wanna be a mech pilot in 2025, go drive a tractor. I'm not kidding.

Once you're on the field, your hands aren't on the wheel, they're on this thing:

The big stick controls the course in the computer, the little one controls your tool, the many buttons toggle states (or what the little stick is currently triggering) and through these inputs you drive the tractor.

Steel Battalion is very fun, but it won't hold your attention for more than around 100 hours unless you're a real freak about tractors and just don't know it yet.

What's more, Steel Batallion isn't playable to anybody without the controller which limits how many people will be playing it and it isn't social or moddable like the successful games we talked about earlier.

Okay, so what can we do about this?

I think the one feature here that nobody talks about is that of input-agnosticism: The ability to bind your own inputs to something in the game (directly or indirectly through some middle thing) and get good results… But not in some hugely "okay bind 100 things using our controller, or use a keyboard and mouse" binary.

The binary is still not input-agnosticism, and it still will not work.

It has to be granular.

Input agnosticism results in controller agnosticism:

You can bind as much or as little as you want, and you can pass features you don't want to bind directly to a helper subsystem middle-man like an assistant or instructor which will perform limited tasks for you - while you provide the helpers context by telling them which of a limited set of goals you want to achieve.

Say, face a target, or a direction, or aim at a thing. It saves you mental time, though if you did it manually you might get better results (incentivising you towards experimenting in that direction).

Let's touch on why controller agnostic design is really what's needed here, and why its important:

This is the omnithrottle, and and this is the Sublight Dynamics 6dof joystick.

The Omnithrottle tries to solve 6dof throttle management by adding an extra piece to a joystick at the bottom, turning the yaw z-axis-twist of the stick into a sort of vertical axis for direct up and down movement, ascending and descending.

The Sublight Dynamics 6dof joystick combines all six axis into a single device, and is an interesting experiment. I particularly like the puck switches ahead of the user's fingers, inspired likely by Evangelion which in turn was inspired by Sol Bianca's use of them.

We got great lessons in human factors for space dogfighting from both:

The omnithrottle produces huge fatigue if you use it in coupled mode (software assisted flight), because you have to hold the joystick base forward, fighting the springs. This is fine in decoupled mode (where you coast under newtonian force) but not everybody uses it. Likewise, if you remove that spring, you lose fine movement because you can no longer feel where the middle is anymore.

The SD6DOF creates a conflict in Fitt's law (speed and precision are enemies of each-other, and to get both you need a tool in the middle to help you) where some precision is lost due to the same muscles needing to drive more axis at once.

These are both many years old now, and over time we've seen many many solutions to this problem flop.

Well, VKB announced the Space Throttle Grip a few days ago, which rethinks the distribution of axis and combines the best features of both.

The key thing is, this is an evolutionary space with competing ideas. A healthy ecosystem.

And its only possible because the game's inputs are controller agnostic.

This doesn't just mean that it'll let you bind any input device directly to things, but that there are multiple ways to achieve your desired outcomes even on the software side with the helper middleman we talked about (in this case, coupling modes).

Does your machine turn to face an arbitrary vector which is the thing you actually steer or select (Warthunder)? Do you have direct input control? Do you haven an autopilot?

Here's a lecture by F22 Raptor test-pilot Randy Gordon talking about some of this stuff, giving you a frame of reference with a real vehicle which exists.

When you can pick between those goals them, you have what's called "a software" in human factors. Your two grips become arbitrary and are now called inceptors.

The software drives the machine, and you drive the software. You can override the software and provide a manual input, but the other elements you are not overriding will try to compensate to maintain a desired state. If you know how to manipulate this, it means you only need a small number of axis to achieve a very complex control action.

A great example is how long you hold the A-button in Mario changes how much power his jump has. The action is a versatile verb.

Imagine a person balancing. If their goal is to stay upright, and I push them, they translate across the ground and try to stay the right way up, turning that push force into horizontal force. They are following an instruction: remain upright.

If I make that person carry a very heavy thing, they compensate their body's balance accordingly. If I then use my finger and tell them to act as if I am pushing them with that gentle motion, they will respond but if they go too far they can say "hey, don't do that, I'll drop the heavy thing!" and ignore my pushing instruction -- because my directive telling them to remain upright superseded it.

We need to think of mecha in terms like these, and to do mecha, we need to make a standard of accessible rules like this which input devices can talk to via axis and buttons, with lots of middlemen.

Absolute (mouse-like) and relative (stick like) and accumiulated (driving a mouse with a stick by having a variable over time) and blended (driving a car with a d-pad with a simulated wheel that wants to return to zero all the time, replicating a stick) inputs must be middle-modes processing and digesting inputs in these ways. Curves matter. Biases and preferences must be accounted for.

This means finally solving "how" the giant robot works in software (even if its a design conceit), and then having systems which poke at the "how" to bias it in a direction toward an outcome.

My favourite version of this is a deliberately clumsy mech-game called Robot Alchemic Drive (RAD for short).

Playable on a regular PS2 controller, the triggers and bumpers drive the legs like a tank. The sticks drive the arms.

The robot's body has physics. You are controlling a thing.

There are no helpers to correct your motions other than when the robot stands up and to keep it upright (its otherwise 100% manual, playing back motion planning which gets fed into the physics) but yes, there is a simulated body here.

With helpers, this could get faster and way, way more fluent.

So how might these "helpers" in software work?

Think for example of how a body in motion continues to move. With a robot in a vacuum like space, you'd continue indefinitely. That's hard to control.

Do you automatically slow down and fake aerodynamic drag axially with your boosters to allow curved trajectories and soft stopping with a motion-control-decoupling-mode (as Star Citizen does), or do you have a breaking system a user can activate on a pedal or trigger, to apply those forces on different axis when they want them?

What are those axis bound to, the pelvis, the thorax, the head, the synthetic vision 3rd person camera?

These are really complicated questions, and this is just about how we make a vehicle come to a stop!

Now this might seem niche, but this exact same kind of thought also applies to how a robot balances, and how it digs its feet into the ground, creating torque or not situationally.

This isn't just fine grained motion like "moving our legs manually", but how and when we apply breaking force on the ground.

Do we apply it when we let go of the left stick?

Does the left stick prescribe a preferred velocity?

Does it prescribe input forces?

Do we change between these situationally, or maybe with a button?

Its important to think about these things.

"You're making this too complex!!"

"But why would we do this? What is the value? People are playing Armored Core 6 with a HOTAS!!"

Yeah, and that experience is not great, actually?

You're actually less capable than a keyboard and mouse-player, because Armored Core 6 isn't a game which simulates orientation over time (the body turns instantly as if by magic), so you're just driving relative inputs. You are literally disadvantaged.

Armored Core 6 has no "vehicle": This is an action-game's 3rd person control software. Its Elden Ring's horse, with a jetpack, and the roll replaced with a dash. Everything else is animations.

Its visually impressive, but there's something fundamentally missing:

Fahrvergnügen.

It means "driving pleasure" in German.

The feeling you get when you speed up going down hill, or you feel the give of the wheels against the road and the lean of the car when you take a corner.

When you bank against air in an aircraft, or turn faster than your velocity changes and you drift.

That good feeling, that's fahrvergnügen.

A game which really gets this I think is Armored Core: For Answer. I know many of you might have expected Mechwarrior here but the physics of Mechwarrior games are extremely simple, following an interpolative model.

Interpolative here means, a bit of calculus is used to ensure a smooth arching curve is how you go from zero to a high speed at all times, or a rotation, so on and so forth. This "smoothness" is the same smoothness present in Armored Core 6.

Armored Core For Answer on the other hand, is additive in how it calculates velocity per second, meaning your AC's velocity curve is inconsistent. The game has hidden stats calculating aerodynamic drag per part, it has a simplified model of angular momentum, and it has ground friction and its boosting system is different on each axis.

All of your inputs are analogue, including the angle of your boosters on left stick, and two booster-types: Your main booster handling like a motor-cycle throttle curve, and the other not only having many stages of output for flashes of thrust via contexts (combining motion and direction together to produce an intent) but also combos and even cancels. Its VERY sophisticated!

That's a lot of different factors to control. A lot of fahrvergnügen to be experienced when you master them, and feel ownership of them.

Lots of areas for skill expression.

This, combined with a rich weapon balance and a complex combat geometry (the emergent spatial and pressure rules of motion, aspects, angles and motions similar to the aircraft dogfighting) are why people are still playing this game today.

The match I uploaded was from four days ago, as of time of writing. People are still modding a game from 2008, limited to console by hacking the rom file's patches. Yeah.

I know among many game reviewers, "smooth" and "smoothness" is considered a compliment in game design (its easy to control), but interpolative motion really is the opposite of fahrvergnügen:

Interpolative suffers from feeling "zippy" and "hollow" when its fast, which is why lots of players and designers insist on slowing games down so they recover their fahrvergnügen.

You don't have to do things this way. A good mech sandbox should reward both fast and slow movement in its design!

There should be room for everybody to play!

In interpolative movement games, motion is already solved, to sell you the superficial power-fantasy (that you're good, despite not having learned how to be good) instead of giving you the experience.

Interpolation is insisting the burger you got at McDonalds is the same as the burger on the commercial. Like the burger at McDonalds, its also way way easier to make, and in today's market yeah, you take what's easy and known because you have economic pressures to get things done quickly.

You can't make a five star meal in a McDonalds kitchen, and the AAA games industry is the McDonalds kitchen of gaming.

So, what is a three star michelin meal, in terms of inputs, with additive movement?

You incentivise people with the cheaper stuff on the menu. That's robust helper tools which let keyboard and mouse players, or gamepads interact fluently.

Its affordable, and easy and gets people invested in your experience.

Then when people use fancy controllers, you get better response-rate. Because everybody buys into the mecha fantasy when they play, being beaten by someone who is controlling more complex control factors more directly at once (making them a better pilot) feels fairer.

They are negotiating the machine's limits better than you are.

You both know they more "an char" than you are:

It becomes aspirational, rather than annoying, which is how the culture of space-simming, and flight-sims, and other vehicle sims express this. It also fits the mecha fantasy, because those with basic controls are your grunt units.

We see this if we look at cockpit controls in Gundam: A Jegan's control inceptor is way simpler than say, Unicorn's.

It is just part of the fantasy.

So let's talk about these limits we negotiate.

It means, some kind of vehicle must be simulated in software, even if its a very simple abstraction purely enough so it feels good for players.

Also, I say "a software" or "helpers" what do I mean?

I don't just mean the simulated vehicle, but a robust modular middle system in the "player controller" part of the game simulation which interprets desired outcomes from a pilot user or operator and tries to achieve them.

Here's an example, let's talk about Armored Core's lockon system, which uses a software stack to turn your intention into an outcome in exactly this way.

Your robot's simulated sensors (radar, visual, etc) detects a list of potential targets…

Which uses camera orientation of a synthetic vision system to give you comprehensive 3d awareness to determine which target is interesting to you…

After selecting the target, it passes that information to the fire control system which computes a trajectory from its position and velocity…

This then talks to your weapons which know how fast your bullets go…

and this picks where to lead along that trajectory…

then that location is sent to the arms to execute that command…

Which then sends the state of this command chain to your HUD, so you understand what the body of your robot is currently trying to achieve.

Each step is influenced by ingame statistics and simulated mechanical limits -- meaning, how well you can lock up, or even select a target is very important.

You can't instantly put a cursor on something and bot a game, because everybody already has a deliberately limited aimbot, it came with your robot, to negotiate its deliberately limited body.

The key thing is, this is much much faster and more effective than you could as a human select the target manually and hit accurate than you could with round velocities -- with most videogames hiding this with hitscan (instantaneous bullet) weapons meaning whatever you click on is hit right away.

When the round takes time to get there, things are far more difficult. This is why almost nobody uses manual aiming unless they're throwing explosives at big bulky targets in AC.

From limitations like this, booster performance, turn-rate, and so on and so forth -- the negotiation of limits produces a combat geometry and how well you understand that combat geometry, and how well you understand your abilities to your opponents abilities dictates how the fight will go.

We see something somewhat similar in Steel Batallion with the lockon system but we also have a lot of deep manual control over our VT's orientations which change its balance and so on. Steel Batallion is in fact, one of the few games where your robot can fall over and get back up.

This is exactly how DCS and Star Citizen also work, and very similar principles apply in Eurotruck Simulator and Farming Simulator via the fuel, cooling, air, combustion cycle, and transmission, and shock absorbsion systems of your vehicle.

Okay, so now what?

I've been thinking for a while now about writing what I think would be the mech-game equivalent of the paper Tim Berners Lee wrote for the web (Information Management: A proposal) going into what I think the simulation would really need, what the software would need, what the controller would need and some suggested practical strategies for solving these problems based in real research I and others have done.

The system I've already built solves for fire control, fine arm motion, head movement, independent pelvis and foot motion, the operation of boosters and other similar systems in a 6dof environment which accounts for gravity, aerodynamics, balancing, alignment and full motion control -- all on a standard game controller. Its not modular yet, simply because I am not a skilled programmer, and would need real help to do this.

There's also game-design research here, which would ensure the combat geometry would reward skill expression via investing in that agnostic game design, so the control skill aligns with the power-fantasy through skill expression. This means no one strategy becomes overwhelming.

It likewise, also has the "for gamepad and keyboard/mouse" solve which would be needed to ensure its accessible for those who aren't ready yet for custom controllers.

In turn, it also has considerations and proposals for such likely controller designs and probable strategies of employment which of course translate and map to two big sticks, in a HOSAS (Hands on Stick and Stick) layout.

So what's your ideal controller?

Less a controller, and more a principle:

Key to the proposal is you can scale up the amount of control bindings, or scale it down passing automation to helper subsystems which take your intention and act on it in a useful way.

You could have just two plain sticks with foot pedals, or you could go ham and have some complex force feedback device with tons of inputs -- because of this input agnosticism.

The secret sauce I think to the highest end control is the use of software defined force-feedback not only for the two big sticks, but also four smaller ones: one each for your thumb, and one each for your finger on each hand, and an analogue trigger. I've seen this solved in open source projects, so its entirely doable.

What does this actually mean?

Source: KAIST-HCIL/FS-Pad

The purpose of a force-feedback stick is software defined -- driving the camera, pelvis, upper body, boosters, walking etc variably, with the feedback not necessarily telling you about the environment -- but also by providing what amounts to new input devices.

To explain, force feedback works by providing input to the stick like a robot arm and is not at all like a rumble feedback device. This means the position the stick "wants to return to" at any given time is not defined by springs like it is in a conventional controller, but by active software which can update in real-time.

This means resistance can be different in different directions, or the stick can even hold a position you give it in one axis but not another, replicating a hat switch or a flight throttle.

I've looked at many different open source projects which achieve these outcomes both on thumb-sticks and main sticks with great outcomes, and I think a prototype could be made if I had a team, or other people to work with.

If interest is expressed, I'll produce a specification proposal for what this input agnostic design in software needs to be (eg, how the robot is controlling) in strictly defined terms which can be implemented.

You can already see it on my Tumblr account as TOMINO, NAGANO, etc where I go into some of this -- all of which works on a standard controller, but adapts extremely well to a large HOSAS.

Likewise, I'd (eventually) also produce a proposal for a controller design which meets this specification.

I've been testing this concept on and off for many years now in Unreal Engine (I'm not a skilled programmer, not skilled with CAD or electronics, depression limits my effective outcome returns -- but I'm still getting very promising outcomes).

Ultimately what I'd really want access to is expertise and help, since my background is mainly thinking about and designing solutions for problems not necessarily implementing them -- and I'm essentially on disability, so I have unlimited time to think about this.

I don't want to ask for money, which I figure is the thing everybody is anticipating: I'd rather get this done than make money from it.

In conclusion?

To solve this what's needed isn't some figure of brilliance in a basement or garage somewhere, but an organic ecosystem of designers and builders responding to pressures, and we've already see that work many times very well.

In our case, nobody has defined the vehicle or the modular helpers in a way robust enough to capture every fantasy effectively.

That's the issue.

tl;dr coming away from this:

For the controller to exist, you first must have something to control.

To be a pilot, you first need a vehicle.

--

Live forever, Apes.

[huggmuffin]

man, i have vt quotes written down but then i didn't write down the video it was from (i remember some tho, its just i wrote it down watching the video)

i have quotes of toast being passive aggressive or, mean(?)

i.e

(forgot the video for this one 😔) Colon: "Hey, just cuz I'm the newest pause sniffle doesn't mean I'm worth nothing. sniffle" Toast: "You're worth nothing."

---------------------

Gmod FUNNY CONFETTI CANNONS!! (Garry's Mod) Toast: sigh "Y'know, I hate everyone.." Ghost: "Johnny Toast just disconnected. He's the reason for this video! Um- I'll take over-" Toast: "I had to take a break!" Ghost: "I'll take over for him."

---------------------

Gmod SCARY & FUNNY HORROR INVESTIGATION Map! (Garry's Mod) Ghost: "It's not doing anything.." Toast: "Psh- Neither are you."

---------------------

OLAF & SVEN IN GMOD! Disney Frozen Mod (Garry's Mod) (same vid different times) Toast: "You guys are making me so mad I can't even remember what I sound like.."

Toast: "I will SHOOT you if you do that one more time, I literally carry shotguns with me.. in my pocket."

---------------------

(forgot the video for this one 😔) Toast: "If you get electrocuted I'm going to laugh. And I'll take you to the hospital Sir."

[vt-wiki-redux]

VT Fun Fact #6

Johnny Ghost canonically has a Tumblr account.

In MURDER IN PRINCESS PEACH'S CASTLE! - Gmod Super Mario Bros. Murder Mystery Mod (Garry's Mod), Johnny Ghost says:

"Oh, there is activity, trust me. There is activity, up on my Tumblr account. I'm getting retweets— on Tumblr, apparently... it doesn't work that way but whatever." (section starts at 4:58)

There isn't a lot that we can glean off of this quote but there is a few things that we may be able to make assumptions about. Firstly, Ghost does use Tumblr. He also seems to have some pride in the recent uptick of notes he's getting. He also gets the terminology wrong but realizes afterwards. We can assess that this might mean that Johnny Ghost has only recently acquired a Tumblr account.

We may also assume based on the topic of conversation, that he posts mainly about things related to Paranormal Activity on his blog, though this is mostly conjecture.

Interestingly, this video was posted right in the middle of Ghost's retirement arc. The wiki interprets this as Johnny Ghost going out and starting his own independent investigator. It's possible that this Tumblr Account was a way to tie into that, though that wouldn't have lasted for very long as after this video, he became fully retired. He also ended up killing a lot of people here as Jimmy Casket, and maybe that also had some influence on him as to why he might stop ghost hunting altogether.

Is Johnny Ghost a tumblrina? It certainly is a fun headcanon, and I could certainly see it being the case. We know that Ghost likely attended high school around the beginning of Tumblr becoming a thing, and I can totally see it appealing to Ghost's sense of style. Who knows? Maybe that's a major factor in how Ghost became so interested in paranormal investigating as a whole. After all, it would be very similar to ghost stories around a campfire.

Anyway I'm rambling. Hope you enjoy this silly fact.

[the-harvester]

We have decided that november is Harvester Month so we kicked things off with doodling some Hema/Candycanes art >:3c You good there, Red?

Yeah, she's probably good.

[equinoxts2]

Quin's Mini Mod Set

I have made a few little mods for my own game, and I thought other simmers might be interested in them. So here's a description of what they each do:

Equinox_NoBillDelivery prevents bills from being delivered. It also (at least in my testing, with my mod cut) prevents the spawning of an NPC mail carrier unless there's non-bill stuff needing delivery, for example a NL restaurant coupon.

Equinox_NoPaperDelivery is the same but with newspapers and paper carrier NPCs. I don't know if it affects hobby magazines - if it does block sims from receiving hobby magazines, let me know and I'll put a new version up!

Equinox_NoToiletPapers is a mod that prevents sims reading newspapers on the toilet. I got so fed up of this in my prehistoric game, so... modder powers activate!

Equinox_NoYoureCrazyAnims replaces the finger-twirl animations, done when a sim sees someone talking to the Social Bunny or Therapist, going into aspiration failure, or just dancing badly, with the "why me?" looking up animation. The text "You're Crazy!" displayed when hovering over the queue icon has been changed to "Oh wow..."

Equinox_SwimwearInSauna and Equinox_SwimwearInSauna_MermaidUndies make sims change into their swimwear, not a towel, when getting into a sauna. Why? Maybe towels are too modern for your game, or you use bodyshapes and it's a bit weird seeing all your sims revert to Maxis shape in the sauna. Or, you know, just Reasons. The mermaid version has sims with @midgethetree's Mermaid Lifestate change into undies instead. It doesn't require Easy Inventory Check, as I used the global "Is sim mermaid?" from Midge's mod to check for the lifestate.

trait_HighlyEmotional is what will probably be the last TS2 trait name replacement from me, since I no longer play with 3t2 traits. However, I did want to replace the "Over-Emotional" trait in case I ever went back to them - the "over" sounds unnecessarily critical to me. It has been changed to "Highly Emotional" instead. Note, this is the collection-only trait, and - as with all traits - requires trait_MAIN from @hexagonal-bipyramid's Traits Project.

All mods are in one zip file, but you're free to delete what you don't want in your game. I promise I won't come chasing you with a pitchfork.

And now I've said all this: DOWNLOAD (SFS)

[10yearsofventuriantale]

YESTERDAY yesterday was the ten-year anniversary of "STAR WARS WAMPA IN JAIL!? -- Gmod COPS N ROBBERS Mod! 15 (Garry's Mod)"

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[lyinginbedmon]

I know full well that I've got an uphill struggle when it comes to marketing Various Types, because it's 2024 and everyone already uses Origins and thinks it's the bee's knees (and to their credit, Origins is a good mod), so you'll forgive me for harking on about VT but I do earnestly believe that it is more than viable as a competitor of the aging popular mod.

All this was true as well back when what is now Various Types was part of Various Oddities (which itself enjoyed some considerable popularity whilst Origins didn't share space in the same modloader), but I'll try and break it down a bit to drive home why I think it's worth giving a look:

First, it doesn't work like Origins. In Origins, you choose (or are randomly selected) a "origin", of varying levels of "impact" usually between 0 and 3. Depending on server config, you might get another one after dying, but that's it. This means the range of gameplay is only as diverse as the datapack in use, because each player is locked into just one component.

Various Types, in stark contrast, actually presents the player with a full-blown character creation system. You choose a species, which is similar to an origin, and are then able to choose templates that modify it. Moreover, those templates can be stacked on top of each-other, in different orders and with different results. So whilst the range of gameplay is still limited by datapack, it is roughly combinatorially massive. The default species and templates that presently ship in the alpha, by itself, theoretically offer up to 286 builds (template conditions permitting). The server has a "power" setting that helps to constrain how drastically overpowered characters can be, but the variations possible without even breaking 5 power are staggering against the dozen or so origins that Origins ships with even today.

This ultimately means that players are always able to be at least a little different to one-another. Even if they share the same species as the foundation of their character, an Insectile player is quite distinct to an Aquatic one.

Even among the less-impactful templates, a Gravekin Orkin (essentially a still-intelligent zombified piglin) has some stark distinction from a Reptilian Orkin (roughly a lizardman). Though personally, I'd rather not get on the bad side of either one of them, especially if they just heard me call them piglins...

Secondly, and by absolutely no means least, the core component of the mod (the character sheet) has intentionally been constructed such that it is incredibly easy for others to expand beyond its current and original confines.

Want to build a magic mod and need to track what spells people have and how much mana? All you need to do is register a couple things to the right registries, and it'll work just fine. Want to build a class system on top of it and player an Othall Ranger or Muckie Druid? Same thing, same ease.

In essence, and with no shred of hyperbole, Various Types has the capacity to be the foundational element of any conceivable per-player customisation mod. Just as long as people give it a chance.

Thirdly, the laborious devotion to clean visual aesthetics. I'm not gonna give Origins much sheet for this one, it's very much a product of its age from when Minecraft didn't really support anything that wasn't a texture rendered on a repeating dirt background.

But Various Types really fits in with the more recent era of Minecraft UI. The character creator screen alone really deserves a look. Each species can be given a distinct background to complement its lore or function, such as the Crioch species being from the End and therefore having an End City as their background, versus the sunny green forest background used by the Overworld-native Linn species.

Every species, template, type, or ability can even be given custom lore text. All of them. The sheer volume of options for RP alone are staggering.

Oh, and did I mention that your avatar is visible in the creator screen? As well as the character sheet display screen?

Which doesn't sound like much on its face, you can see your skin in your inventory screen all the time after all. Except that's not actually a player being rendered in either screen.

It's a custom entity. With a custom model. That can play animations.

Every time you open that screen, your avatar will wave at you to say hi. Stick around on it long enough, and you'll even see them strike a pose right out of a fighting game or casually sit down for a moment.

You can even see what your build will look like in full on the character sheet screen before you finalise it.

And that screen is itself no slouch. It prioritises clean minimalism whilst still giving access to every detail of a given build.

Which is great, but especially so because Various Types has four favourite ability keys (which you can assign activated abilities to quickly and easily from the ability menu, from which you can also just click on any ability to activate it) and absolutely no limit on how many abilities you can have. Passive OR activated.

It's really more comparable to the UI screens of Minecraft Dungeons or Legends than anything on offer by any other mod in the same niche.

Seriously, go check this mod out. It's in alpha right now, but more or less the only thing missing from it is just more abilities, and I've got a list as long as my arm of those to implement.

[preciouslittle-bhaalbabe]

Hi I'm sorry if this is a stupid question but could you explain to me UTav and that VTav thing? I've never touched either because I'm "afraid" of having to redownload all the head presets I have bc I think those need to be for the thing specifically, but what exactly does it give more? Is the stuff it offers worth going through relocating and redownloading all head presets and whatnot and perhaps not being able to use some things anymore if they don't have a version compatible with it, would you say?

I'm not a great person to ask honestly you'd have more luck in the mod comments and discriptions. But, most head presets have a UT patch. And if they don't that just means only the vanilla assets will show up on their face instead of the UT ones.

Unique tav can be removed with no issues and shouldn't break anything. All UT or VT does is give your character assets like makeup scars and body textures, basically cc stuff, that doesn't replace what the NPCs have. Hence the name Unique Tav.