The Definitive M:PN Modding Guide (INCOMPLETE)

The Definitive M:PN Modding Guide (INCOMPLETE)

The Simple Tools - All Good Craftsmen Need 'em, After All...

SO,you want to start modding M:PN. Fortunately for you, there's only one (well, ok, two if you count the custom uploader) thing you need to get started, and that's...

The MadCard Maker![drive.google.com] Made by disciple of John Carmack and possible Vortigaunt in human form Darksignal, with support from the archon of suffering in relations to MPN modding known as TheSwain. (remember kids, it's always a-ok to blame the Swain when something goes wrong in your modding escapades!)

MCM is the core of all modding. Almost everything you do in terms of modding will relate to MCM one way or another. Custom weapon? You'll need to define it's stats in MCM first. Custom armor? You'll need to define it in MCM. Custom animations? MCM. Completely custom stages? Not yet, but that's the spirit! We'll get to MCM more in-depth later.

Now, if you're looking for others to enjoy your mods, don't fret, because we have...

The Workshop Uploader![github.com] This'll allow you to upload your mods so that others may enjoy, whether it's your friends or everyone*! We'll get to uploading our mods after we're done with MCM.

*everyone on the beta branch of MPN at this time.

The Basics Of MCM: Part 1 - Everyone's Gotta Start Somewhere, After All...


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SO, when you open up MCM, you'll be greeted by a load bar, and once that's done loading, you'll be greeted with this.This is your workspace, and a place you'll frequent in terms of modding M:PN.

To briefly go over what each button does:

The green plus sign allows you to make mods.

The red minus sign deletes mods.

The yellow gear allows you to edit your mods.

The two yellow a(s) allow you to rename and/or change the description and/or the tags and etc.

And finally, the purple magnifying glass allows you to look into other's mods and madcards.With that out of the way, it's time to make a mod. Upon clicking the green plus sign, you'll see this:

This is where you get to make the bare essences of your mod. From top to bottom:

The Folder Name is the name of the folder it will be placed in. For all intents and purposes, I recommend you keep the same name between the Folder Name and...

...the Mod Name. It's the name of your mod. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Author list is where the names of everyone who worked on your mod go, whether it's just you or a group, or whether you want to go by a mod pen name (which doesn't work, since the author will show up as your steam name, thanks swain).

The tags allow you to align your mod with multiple things, whether it's a simple character mod or a whole modpack adding weapons, characters, and arenas.

The description is basically self-explanatory. It's where you describe your mod and/or add credit to others.Below everything, you'll see a button that says "Mod it up!" in the middle. Clicking this will create your mod. Clicking the yellow gear will bring you to the mod suite, pictured below:

To once again go briefly over what each button does:

The green deck icon allows you to make a deck, allowing you to either separate things or keep 'em together. You WILL have to click this first.

The green plus sign, when a deck is selected, brings you into the main Madcard Creation UI, which we'll go over later.

The red minus sign, which will remove either a card from a deck or the entire deck. This will also prompt you to either move it to a new deck or delete it outright.

The yellow gear, which will allow you to edit your madcards.

The two yellow a(s), which will allow you to rename a card's "improper" name (we'll get to those later)

The up and down arrows allow you to move cards/decks up and down.

The large up and down arrows allow you to move something all the way down to the top or bottom.

The left and right arrows allow you to decrease or increase the load priority of something (madcards that have another madcard as a root will push the madcard forward in the load priority by 1).

The purple save button saves.

And finally, the purple arrow allows you to go back to MCM's main menu.Now with all that outta the way, it's time for...

The Basics Of MCM, Part 2 - Gotta Get The Ball Rolling, Sometime...


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SO,once you've clicked the green plus sign after selecting a deck, you enter the main part of MCM, being the card editor, which looks like this.

This is your main workspace for you to make your mods. It's where you'll make weapons, characters, origins, corpus, among other things. First things first, you'll need to select a root card in order to get making. The full list is pictured below.

If I were to go over the nuances of each and every one of the card types, we'd be here for hours. So instead, we'll go through each of them very quickly.

Armor is what your characters are wearing. Here you can make new armors from ones ingame, or (if you're blender-savvy) your own.

Melee and Ranged weapons are what your characters utilize against enemies. Here you make new weapons of any size (except ranged weapons, blame the swain for that one) and shape.

Thrown weapons are what your characters throw at enemies. Here you can make new things to throw at your enemies.

Addons are what go on your ranged weapons. Here you can make new weapon addons to change the stats of the thing it's equipped on, or even the ammo it fires!

AddonGroups are to put addons in special groups (an example would be the addons for the pistol axe and others of those specific type, since they're only for pistol use). Here you can make groups of addons that are used specifically for certain weapons.

Ammo is used by thrown weapons and ranged weapons. Here you can make it fire ANYTHING, from dissonance bolts to shurikens and even (last time i checked, which was in NEM) the fireballs that Gestalt pukes at you during his 2nd phase during the final boss .

Damage Over Times (or DOTs for short) inflict damage over an amount of time, an example being the multiple fire-based effects. Here you can make more of them.

Explosions are just that. You can also make an explosion inflict a DOT. Here you can make more using the variety of explosions the game provides you.

Soundpacks are used for melee weapons. Unless you're dealing with custom sounds, you probably won't need to use these, since ranged weapons have the firing sound right there in the card.

Swatches are a selection of 2 colors (that or 1 color that is used for glows) that you can buy at the Fence when you unlock it. Here you can make more of them, but make sure not to buy too many! (Swain pls we need a page system like yesterday)

Characters are self-explainatory. Here you can make them do and be just about ANYTHING your mind desires. You can even change the effect of their landing!

Animations and AnimationProfiles are for custom animations, which is more complicated stuff. There's hundreds of individual animation clips in MCM, and AnimationProfiles compile them into coherent movesets.

Chatters are what your characters say during levels in M:PN. You've probably seen them in action already, either through the Bandits of the Outskirts or the MERCs of the Foundry.

Collectables have no use in MCM as of currently. Don't pay any mind to them.

Corpus are what your characters use. Here you can choose many things (except actual corpus icons).

Executions are for how your characters execute a dizzied/distracted enemy. Here you can make new ones.

SkillGroups are a group of Skills, like the A.A.H.W. Agent, the Nexus Agent, or even Hank and Jebus's skills.

Skins are for usage inside the Loft of Arena Mode. Noting much to note here, but they pair well with custom textures and AltParts, explained later.

VisualStockpiles are... uh... um... ok I'm gonna be real here I have no clue what these do. They aren't used in the creation of custom textures, for that matter.

VoiceSets are used by characters to make the actual voice lines you hear in M:PN play. For more information, please see the Custom Sounds part of this guide.

Stage_Arena are the current backbone of custom levels. You can add your custom characters, music (for how to make custom music, please see the Custom Music part of this guide), and even custom bosses! (Granted, they don't have any patterns as of right now, thanks a lot, swain.)

Stage_Story is basically deprecated at this point. Only thing you can really do now is replace levels in the Story with Arena stages and vice versa.

Loadouts and Wardrobes are similar in function. Loadouts are used to give your characters a randomized weapon, and wardrobes are the same thing, except for clothes for story characters, so in other words wardrobes are useless at the current moment.

Origins are used to make custom imprinted characters, because variety is the spice of life. You can do many things, and it connects back to Characters, which themselves are connected to AnimationProfiles, Chatters, and Corpus.Anyways, now that we have ALL of the card types described in laconic form, feel free to scroll down to the next part at your leisure.

The Basics Of MCM, Part 3 - Time To Finish Up And Post.


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The Definitive M:PN Modding Guide (INCOMPLETE) image 67

SO,now that you've got your mod all ready to go, now's time to post it on the Steam Workshop! Unfortunately, it's not as simple as you'd think. You've got to use...

The Workshop Uploader![github.com] This uploader will post the mod you made to steam. It's fairly straightfoward, so I'll be brief and focus on things that might trip you up. The first thing that might trip you up is the Icon Path.

First off, it's gotta be small. Too big and it won't accept. 512x512 is pretty much the golden standard for mod images. They also have to be a PNG, or GIF (it REALLY doesn't like JPGs). Now for the actual path itself. It will probably come in this format, provided you save to pictures:

C:\User\(Your Username Goes Here)\Pictures\(Insert picture here).png

For the content path, it almost always goes this way, if you named your mod's folder the same as your mod:

C:\Users\(Your User goes here)\AppData\LocalLow\Gibbing Tree\Madness Project Nexus\Mods\(Your Mod Goes Here)

After that, the hard part is over. Just apply tags, press Y, and it should be done after a few seconds, like below.

Advanced Tools - The COOL Part Of The Guide.

Now that we have the basics of MCM and the Workshop uploader out of the way, it's time to get more complicated, and new tools to go with it. From here, you can spec into multiple different classes of modder, such as:

The ModelerUtilizes Blender, specifically Blender version 2.79 to make models to put into M:PN. Also stars as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Guide, and also mained by Lurk and Bluecop, among others!

The AudiobringerUtilizes a specific version of FMOD (being version 1.10.11, and requiring an FMOD account to log in to download (just make a throwaway, you'll be fine) and who's link will also star as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Guide the 2nd) and an even more specific project on FMOD to add sounds and/or songs into M:PN, which will star as Sir Appearing-In-This-Guide.[drive.google.com]

the model adderOne of the easiest classes of M:PN custom things. It's so easy even I multiclass into it. Currently THE most multi-classed class of M:PN modding. Also the main class of Zepumpkineater, and many others!

The Texture-makerMakes custom textures for M:PN. Once the most multiclassed class, until the biggest nerf came to 'em. We will (not) get to that later.

The Font AdderOnce thought impossible, now real thanks to the efforts of Diggy! All you need is a font, and...

The Verboten One, Unity

Yeah, you're gonna need unity in order to put them fancy-schmancy models you made into M:PN. The fonts, too. And the textures, as well (this was the previously mentioned nerf, if you're wondering).

Unity 2019.2.6f is REQUIRED for all of this (except the FMOD stuff) and it's download will be starring as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Guide the 3rd (It's project will, on the contrary, star as Sir Kinda-Appearing-In-This-Guide-In-This-Section-Only-For-Good-Reason, Esq.[drive.google.com] ). You're on your own with this one, because I cannot hope to explain the amount of hoops you'll have to go through in order to even download the version (You won't have to pirate anything, just make a Unity throwaway account and download Unity Hub, and (try to) activate whatever the hell a license is somehow.).

(did you know they were founded in Denmark? that being said their founding spot is close enough to England for one to think they were bri'ish at first)

Advanced M:PN Modding - FMOD - Sounds


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So, presuming you've downloaded FMOD and the sample project, here's where things get interesting. All you need are the sounds you need, and FMOD to become an audio guy.

First off, open the project. Don't be alarmed if it has an error, just click recover, it'll be fine. Now, when you enter, you'll likely be greeted with this:

This is your main workspace for sounds. It's also where you'll make soundbanks and GUIDS.

When you import a sound, this will show up:

For a brief explanation of what a "2D Event" and a "3D Event" is, in short:

A 2D event is played at the same volume in a stage, no matter where. This is most commonly used for things like music, which we'll explain further in an interview with the individual behind the ULTRAKILL Soundtrack mod, infernalthing.

A 3D event is played at different volumes, depending where your character is. For instance, if your character is close to a sound, it will be played louder, and if your character is far from a sound, then it will be played slightly quieter. This is most commonly used for things like sounds and voicelines, which we'll explain later.It kinda doesn't matter if you do what's supposed to be a 3D event as a 2D event, but not vice versa.

Anyways, put your sound in, select 3D event, and click create. It should look something like this now.

(And yes, this guide also doubles as a sneak peak into the next update to Abbey Cleanup)

It doesn't matter if you put things in a folder or not. I do it just to keep things (somewhat) sorted.

Anyways, it's time to change the volume of the sound until you deem it fit. A good rule of thumb (In my opinion) is to go until the thin line that appears when the sound is played (not the bar on the bottom) becomes yellow, like below.

If you want something to play MULTIPLE sounds (like in voicelines), then don't worry, FMOD has you covered with the multi-instrument, which can be made by selecting the middle option in this menu below. From there it's playing the sound over and over until the thin line is yellow.

Once you're done with all the sounds you need, now's the time to make a soundbank for your sound/sounds. You can choose to make multiple or just one, I don't think it matters much. Either way, right click one of your sounds, move your mouse to Assign to Bank, click New Bank, and you'll be greeted by this.

Just type any name you want for the sound/sounds, and make sure they match up with the audio files you're trying to put into M:PN.

Once all that's done, make your way to the top of the screen, click File, and from here you can click on these three things in different orders:

Save (You'll need these sounds in FMOD in order for them to show up in-game, so what better way to keep these then to save the sample file?)

Export GUIDs (This will give you GUIDs to work with the soundbanks utilizing MCM. You CAN choose not to use these, but good luck.)

Build... (This will give you the soundbanks themselves to use in MCM. Required for the sounds.)

And after all that, you're still not out of the woods just yet.

First off is actually putting the sounds in the modfolder (Just the Master Bank, the string for it, and the Bank you made, if you're wondering). It's always located using this filepath:

C:\Users\(Your user goes here)\AppData\LocalLow\Gibbing Tree\Madness Project Nexus\Mods\(Your mod goes here)

Once you're there, just put the sounds in there. You don't even have to put up a folder for them. Now that we have our sounds in the mod, it's time to open up the GUIDs in Notepad for use later.

Once all that's done, you're free to close FMOD and open MCM. Once in MCM, open your mod and either:

A) Make a Soundpack Madcard Type, or

B) Make a Voiceset Madcard Type.

For those making sounds for melee weapons, make a Soundpack. You should be greeted by this:

From here, you can change the sounds for your weapon into ANY sound in the game, even ambiance and the voice of characters, though that's not what we're here for. We're here to use (Read: Copy and Paste) our GUIDs in Notepad to where we need them to be. Once all that's done, all that's left is to save the sounds, give them to a test weapon, and go into M:PN to see if they work or not.

If you're doing voicelines, then make a Voiceset. You should be greeted by this:

From here, you can change the voicelines for your character into ANY sound in the game, even ambiance and the door sounds, though that's not what we're here for. We're here to use (Read: Copy and Paste) our GUIDs in Notepad to where we need them to be. Once all that's done, all that's left is to save the Voicelines, give them to a test unit, and go into M:PN to see if they work or not.

TL;DR,

Open the sample folder provided at the Advanced Tools section in FMOD 1.10.11

Put your sounds in as a 2D Event

If doing voicelines, put them as a multi-instrument Put them in a new soundbank

Open MCM

While MCM is loading, put the Master Bank, it's strings, and the Bank you made into your mod folder

Also open your GUIDs in Notepad Once MCM is open, make a new SoundPack/Voiceset

Ctrl C + Ctrl V your GUIDs into the sounds/voicelines you made said sounds/voicelines for.

Save your madcard, and give it to a test weapon/character

Open MPN and see if it workedSo yeah, putting sounds into M:PN is incredibly simple. Putting music into M:PN, however...

Advanced M:PN Modding - FMOD - Music

(there's nothing here yet, i'm gonna ask infernalthing for a step-by-step guide into adding music into mpn since the guy who made the tutorials for adding sounds was a vague ♥♥♥♥ when asked if music could be added and i cannot figure it out for the life of me)

Advanced M:PN Modding - BLENDER - Melee Weapons

SIKE!We're doing this as well! Blender modding was originally starring as Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Guide, but now it is!

Anyways, Blender's a nightmare to deal with in 2.79, so be glad you only have to deal with the slightly less complicated modern versions. Besides, 2.79 isn't EVEN NEEDED for melee weapons! All you gotta do is make the weapon of your dreams using Blender (I won't tell you how to use it, there's literal hundreds of guides on how to do things in Blender), save it as either a Blender File or FBX, port it into unity, give it some stats in MCM, badda bing badda boom you dun got yourself a new weapon!

Advanced M:PN Modding - BLENDER - Armor

This is more complicated then modding Melees, so listen carefully and you should be ok. Just model whatever you want, then once you're done, be ready to follow my lead.

(SECTION NOT COMPLETE)

Advanced M:PN Modding - Unity - Porting - Weapons - Melee

So, this is presuming you have the M:PN Unity Project AND the Unity version 2019.2.6f, mentioned above. Download them both if you want to port your custom things into M:PN.So, now that you've got your weapons ready to port into M:PN, whether you modeled them or not I.E. just took the closest model you could off of Sketchfab , it's time to port them into M:PN! First off on the list, Melee weapons.

Now, first off, you're gonna have to put your model (either the blender model or the FBX will do, doesn't matter which version of blender in terms of M:PN) into the Unity Project, both in the lil bottom bar and the actual workspace. This will make it show up without textures. Click on the model in the bottom bar, head to the materials section on the far right, and click extract materials. Make sure it's in the Unity Project (It should be) and put your texture into the project.

With your texture in the project, select the blank material, click select texture, find your texture in the tiny box on the top left, and select it. You should see that your model now has it's textures in the proper places (hopefully). With that out of the way, we enter our 2nd half of the porting process.

What you should do is create an empty, (I WILL FINISH THIS LATER AFTER IM DONE MESSING AROUND IN BLENDER)

List Of Things I'll Add To This Guide In The Future

Music Guide!

Font Guide!

Texture Guide!

Custom Armor Guide!

Some other guides I forgot to mention because it's 12 in the middle of the night while I'm typing this!

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3305980802					

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