Jan 12, 2024 at 6:25 PM
Junior Member
"Wow! The more I drink of this magical beverage, the more games I can play! Wheee!"
Join Date: Jun 18, 2021
Location: Earth, Mars, or somewhere in between...
Posts: 24
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This mod is the result of Christmas Modfest #37.
Normally, I would add this to my portfolio of small modfest mods, write a short blurb about it, and call it a day, but with this mod, I've decided to do something different. I'm putting it in a separate thread because the mod itself is moddable. It's the first mod I finished using the d-rs engine, which means I can share that precious source code anywhere I dang well please, and you'll bet your sweet pearly whites I'm going all in on that route. (You can find the releases Here)
Ok, with that out of the way, what's the meat? What's the mod about?
It's Guitar Hero. In Cave Story. Quotar Hero, if you will.
This follows the trends of my other mods in that it takes the Cave Story engine and runs it through Willy Wonka's Taffy Puller. When it comes out, not only is it a physically mutated freakazoid, but it also... um... I guess that's it? Either way, it's a not Cave Story game that's been crammed into Cave Story, for better or worse (usually for my own education).
The game makes heavy use of the enhanced graphic features of the Rust engine to really crank the mod presentation to the next level. OpenGL allows for drawing surfaces with projective interpolation (like the note highway), and the preexisting light api allows me to put in all sorts of flashing, pretty lights. The mod also supports layers (d-rs doesn't do this out of the box, but it's 80% of the way there, so adding support wasn't too difficult) and adds proper support for org3 music (it would previously crash due to a bug with d-rs).
I had to put a lot of work getting this mod to run with Glutin instead of SDL because SDL has a problem when moving or resizing the window that locks the window thread (but not the audio) on Windows. There was no way without going deep into the framework I could even pass off a notice to the audio callback when the video thread stopped so that it could stop too. Glutin fixed all these problems, but it was only included by the devs as a way to get d-rs running on Android, so it had to be tweaked to support desktop OSes.
As for the note highway and ingame event scheduling, The game runs a second ORG tracker alongside the first ORG (or OGG) music player. You can use this file to add notes on the highway and TSC events to be run in time with the music. If used correctly, it can create some pretty cool ingame effects.
New songs can be added by adding new maps to the stage.tbl file without needing to recompile the binary. Stages can be hidden if the corresponding boss number is not 0. This is handy for multi-map productions or test rooms that you don't want to show up ingame.
All this drivel is great and all, but why am I telling you? Because you can edit it.
I've gone into some more detail documenting what the various user-end tweaks do and how to use them in this API document. It should go a long way to help any newcomers create their own songs for this mod.
If anyone desires to create more music for this thing and shares it, there's a good chance I'll add it to the main mod (with their credits and permission, of course).
Normally, I would add this to my portfolio of small modfest mods, write a short blurb about it, and call it a day, but with this mod, I've decided to do something different. I'm putting it in a separate thread because the mod itself is moddable. It's the first mod I finished using the d-rs engine, which means I can share that precious source code anywhere I dang well please, and you'll bet your sweet pearly whites I'm going all in on that route. (You can find the releases Here)
Ok, with that out of the way, what's the meat? What's the mod about?
It's Guitar Hero. In Cave Story. Quotar Hero, if you will.
This follows the trends of my other mods in that it takes the Cave Story engine and runs it through Willy Wonka's Taffy Puller. When it comes out, not only is it a physically mutated freakazoid, but it also... um... I guess that's it? Either way, it's a not Cave Story game that's been crammed into Cave Story, for better or worse (usually for my own education).
The game makes heavy use of the enhanced graphic features of the Rust engine to really crank the mod presentation to the next level. OpenGL allows for drawing surfaces with projective interpolation (like the note highway), and the preexisting light api allows me to put in all sorts of flashing, pretty lights. The mod also supports layers (d-rs doesn't do this out of the box, but it's 80% of the way there, so adding support wasn't too difficult) and adds proper support for org3 music (it would previously crash due to a bug with d-rs).
I had to put a lot of work getting this mod to run with Glutin instead of SDL because SDL has a problem when moving or resizing the window that locks the window thread (but not the audio) on Windows. There was no way without going deep into the framework I could even pass off a notice to the audio callback when the video thread stopped so that it could stop too. Glutin fixed all these problems, but it was only included by the devs as a way to get d-rs running on Android, so it had to be tweaked to support desktop OSes.
As for the note highway and ingame event scheduling, The game runs a second ORG tracker alongside the first ORG (or OGG) music player. You can use this file to add notes on the highway and TSC events to be run in time with the music. If used correctly, it can create some pretty cool ingame effects.
New songs can be added by adding new maps to the stage.tbl file without needing to recompile the binary. Stages can be hidden if the corresponding boss number is not 0. This is handy for multi-map productions or test rooms that you don't want to show up ingame.
All this drivel is great and all, but why am I telling you? Because you can edit it.
I've gone into some more detail documenting what the various user-end tweaks do and how to use them in this API document. It should go a long way to help any newcomers create their own songs for this mod.
If anyone desires to create more music for this thing and shares it, there's a good chance I'll add it to the main mod (with their credits and permission, of course).
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