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Showing posts from December, 2019

Wanna go out to see the crowd, but I can't

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You know, I kinda feel jealous to my bro and my sis that they have a lot of friends, more than I can expect to be. You see, everything around me are friends in Steam and Naruto/Boruto action figures, which those figures can be a company to play with when I'm alone. Boruto is the one I wanted for my collection right now, and even though I still love Naruto as a whole (yes, I love Naruto in all three series of that ninja-themed anime series), Boruto and friends are the preferred ones today. My next birthday gift when it comes later 2020 (May 26) is another set of Boruto action figure. Found myself some that are the fanciest one I can find on the online shops, costs around 700k Rupiahs (US$ 50.42), however it's identical to what I own right now. The cheapest one is around 100k Rupiahs (US$ 7.20). Guess what, I found one Google Images I downloaded last 2016 (forgot what keyword I put in there), and judging by shape and drawing, I'm really assure that it's an action fig...

The next video on my channel

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So, it's almost time for New Year. Good gracious for all of us who will enjoy this new year, although... to be honest, some folks have their own opinions about YouTube being strict here and there, like the case of a "Content Cop" video that was taken down due to the violation of Community Guidelines. I have a lot of works to be sifted in, and I'm moving my home PC to the apartment downtown after New Year 2020. Apparently, one Japanese video about Ace Combat 7 below interested me in doing this project. So, I was wondering, this Japanese dude really has a lot of inspirations coming out from this Japanese game I loved since I first own PS1, which is Ace Combat 2 . And his work is not really easy to begin with. Lots of tweaking here and there... you know what I mean? To start with this project just like his, raw materials are what I need. Apparently I remembered about one guy lying around on my "Recommendations" search a while back, goes by the chan...

Recreating MREC from scratch

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I've tried applying MREC from another skin set (e.g. Erusea skin) on an F-15E in Ace Combat 7 (which original image or base UBULK is a DXT5 DDS) but turns out, after tried importing in PSD from DDS in Photoshop, turns out that the plane's texture when in takeoff/landing/refueling scene is covered in shiny bluish white color, typically not good for your eyes. Apparently, PSD seems glitching the MREC when it's saved from DDS, as alpha channel that is applied is covering the whole aircraft, as opposed with alpha channel that is covering only a part of the aircraft. Previously I tried importing in PSD as it is, and it took 15 to 30 seconds to load or change properties. What went wrong in MREC when copied from one to another is that the PSD is glitching the MREC texture, mistaking the formation light as a diffuse while others are not, so you have to modify the MREC texture by hand to have the texture mapped as exactly as original. This is equivalent to making a blan...

Serialization Error when applying Instance Edits

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You'll never know when this error will show up when you mod skins in Ace Combat 7 in regards to this handy tutorial by superostrich . A Normal/MREC splitting guide by Dantofu there was used since I pulled out several skins from slots other than Osea skin (which could be Erusea, Special, or one I made on my own with custom MREC set). However, this caught me off guard that it can cause Serialization Error (with message saying corrupt game data, please blah blah blah ) even though if you follow the guide thoroughly. Why? Content of f16c_01_MREC.uasset before it was renamed f16c_x0_MREC.uasset I grabbed the MREC's UASSET, UBULK, and UEXP files from Erusea skin and then renamed them as f16c_01_MREC, and Serialization Error popped up out of nowhere when selecting skin (5 and 6) after packing and testing. The UASSET is encrypted, but UBULK and UEXP are not. Pulling out from the original asset and rename them as other like previously said will invite this error. So, the on...

How deep can you go in modding Ace Combat 7 skins?

I've returned back to watch some of the new videos by PandoTech (the one who uploaded some videos about removing MEMZ, Petya, 000.exe, etc. and also I subscribed maybe a few years back) while figuring out how does a skin mod can be further modified to have its own instance for flyable planes, in Ace Combat 7 . Like how you do with "Campaign Conversion" skin mods. Turns out, it's practically easy, but tend to get awkwardly difficult when it comes to hex editing. Yes, hex editing. This isn't a joke. A mistake (typo) can lead to loading default UE4 grey checkerboard OR the worst, CTD (game crashed to desktop - Win7 will pop up "xxxx has stopped working" window). A guide made by superostrich helped me a ton, and the fact that I'm using HxD Hex Editor (best regards to Tormunds for sharing UNS4 tools for modding , which I can use it on Ace Combat 7 as well) made my life easier when it comes to modding. Sadly, UNS4 model modding is a real pain in the *...

CHPower; ah, yes

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Mods possibility are endless with the existence of Battlefield 2 Editor application, and this Chinese mod is no exception. CHPower Mod. One that's released in 2011 and didn't saw any continuation on that project. Where's the developer making it, then? Cool vehicles, made by hand by Chinese mod developers. I'll leave the modpage button below. Apparently, I've tested what have in store for only 4 maps in SP mode, and I found interesting weapon sets, vehicles, and of course, balances. Planes performed very well and nicely balanced, but sad that they can't go more than 600 km/h as in original Battlefield 2 game, or more than 800/900 km/h in afterburners. What questions me much is J23. This plane is strangely similar to J-15 I flew recently in Lions Roar, however the mobility is crazy af, but stability is oddly low, meaning you can do sharp maneuvers like "Ace Combat series can go f*** yourself", or I'll say, "physics on fleek" as i...

Lions Roar - J-15's maneuverability is crazy af

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Other than the fact that majority of Battlefield 2 default planes are stable and steadily maneuverable, one that I don't like about Lions Roar mod , a Chinese modpack for Battlefield 2 that focuses you on a war between China and the Allied states, is, new planes maneuverability. PLA Navy J-15 and PLA Air Force Q-5 (?) (or maybe FC-1, as it's called for a Chinese fighter jet that's almost identical to MiG Project 1.44) have crazy maneuverabilities, as what I recall on Swiss001's videos, "physics on fleek". Literally killed the plane physics as a whole with J-15 and Q-5 (or maybe FC-1) in game, as it turned out to be practically imbalance with other fighter jets original Battlefield 2 has to offer - this is also a honorable mention for F-2A too, the addition of plane from Japan for its new coalition set (Japan). I've seen the Q-5's (FC-1's) crazy maneuverability when an AI is flying it (ofc I play this game in SP; never have a chance to taste...

There IS actually a debug mode

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I never thought that this game doesn't have one. That's why crashes dumped to Event Viewer show the same error code that pointed to the game executable itself: 0x80000003. So I searched yesterday and today about "how to enable debug mode in battlefield 2", and this link is making me go through shortcut editing to insert additional commands before running the game. Next to a "+modpack blahblahblah" command line, there's something more that can help me do "stack traceback", figuring out what's wrong after doing sh*tty modifications on almost whole things for my own SP experience, if I ever be able to figure out how to fix the AI that randomly crashes the game (unfortunately, Google Search provides limited results on what I want). Unfortunately, debugging is only possible (with an addition of output logs to show which object is conflicting, which geometry is missing, or which texture is missing) if you install BF2Editor and run BF2_r.exe ...

Into the Skin Modding

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So, since I haven't yet going back to do the project again, and the license for ZM3 was bought but not used, I'm going down into a skin modding. A lot of people, including SkylineGTRFreak (SkylineGTRR34Freak on YouTube), have been designing skin mods for Ace Combat 7 , and turns out, this is an image manipulation modding that have been practiced since this game was built, but only a handful of people know that before it was shared worldwide. superostrich is one of the modding pioneers of Ace Combat 7 (he's also sharing tutorials with some folks like Dantofu), and currently it supports only skin (cosmetic) modding, which is an image manipulation by swapping one image with another and then forcing the game to prioritize loading it first after it's packed (usually in *.pak, where a game engine like Unreal Engine can load). Tell you what, a lot of folks have published skin mods, which some I like to have it on, some don't. Ever wonder why Trigger's Mage, Spare...

So I end up customizing my VM via DeskAnime

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Other than a friend of mine referenced a website called DeskAnime.net , where this Brazilian guy still making themes and keeping almost all download links alive, everything offered on Google are dead links, so yeah, this website is where I end up customizing my Windows XP "Black Elegant" installed in a virtual machine to its old-school glory, the day where Naruto made its first debut to the world as one of the most favorable anime in the world. I wonder if anyone that do scambaiting use this neat anime theme that even I can't describe how "fancy" it is to have a weeb desktop on your computer. This 24 GB virtual machine will be my test bed for some virus stuffs and things as I travel across the Internet and do a safe execution inside this confined space of virtual machine. I've seen those do Petya, WannaCry, MEMZ, any crazy virus/malware/ransomware experiment using this confined space of virtual machine to see how destructive/damaging those experimen...

How much I can jerk around with this 24 GB VM

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My laptop is quite a crap these days, but that doesn't hinder me in jerking around with this 24 GB Windows XP "Black Elegant" installed in a virtual machine. I might gonna move this out to my main PC soon, when the New Year comes, so I can swap the old PC at the apartment with mine at home; no need to go back and do my sh*tshow gaming or homework at home with destinations beyond my reach. The problem is, the printer/scanner device can't be brought; apartments in my country are not like the apartments in US: big, multi-story building with rooms connected to different floors (if I ever saw one). Idk what I'm gonna do with this one, though, although I'm doing this just for fun, as well as preparing for scambaiting after I got a microphone plugged in to my PC. Anyway, moving my PC to the apartment close to where I school can reduce travel outcome, as online transportation services offer an unusually high price for a range of over 20 kilometers. I have Bonzi...

YouTube Downloader HD is getting better

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I've been expecting results from this small legit program that can download YouTube videos without hassle. On version 2.9.9.50, it has problems when downloading particular audio or video that made me have to verify using Savefrom.net. Several that exist do pop up in Savefrom page, which this annoyed me to download a Full HD video with/without 60 FPS framerate, especially when it got stuck when downloading audio file and had me to redownload the whole video. After I saw new version came out few days ago on my old computer, I could expect better results no less than this legit downloader program, and it worked. However, some drawbacks include inability to download some videos, which require using Savefrom.net to download it. Also, switching video resolution and downloading it when no desired higher resolution exist tend to have to restart the download, but not at a point where it's finished downloading video and tried to download audio file to mix it in. Yeah, it's a bit a...

Who's the guy behind NoClip and Angry Planes mod that hid a spyware inside it?

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I'm watching Joel's video on YouTube as I jerk around in VM to try out Bonzi Buddy some users in YouTube are talking about. Seriously, for the last 15 or 20 years of my life, I never heard of it. Okay. Remember this post I'm talking about? So I tried to go back in time and see who's the guy behind the NoClip and Angry Planes mod, using "Wayback Machine" (that web archive website I did talked about), and then check in the actual GTA5-Mods.com to see if that user is banned, using news references and YouTube videos I've watched. Before all this sh*t started to happen, it happened around 2015, on May, as a matter of fact. Newsletters recorded how that happened during that time. Witnesses describe that it has an internal executable named Fade.exe that acted as a keylogger and steals user's account credentials without anyone wiser. Before I can get a glance on the guy who's behind all of this, moderators (and website owners, maybe?) deleted bot...

I discovered what caused BF2 to crash (because of add-ons and data editing)

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So, jerking around with BF2 mods again after I tried to find out "what in the world that caused this sh*t", I found one interesting thing that caused BF2 to stop loading and crashes while loading Objects. This is only one issue I found out, and I'm examining the US kits. BF4 Incendiary grenade. I tried to play around with the item index two weeks ago and changed its position to 8th one to match up with the Real Wars mod released in ModDB. At this point idk what caused the game to refuse loading this grenade even though I set it up at the 8th position and assigned it correctly. Something else is interfering with the loading process, of which I have no idea where to look to. At this point, the grenade is beyond unusable unless if I'm changing something within its code inside the corresponding *.tweak file. Idk if this will gonna work, but if this small change (at the Help section where it was said "bf4_incendiary" instead of "ushgr_m67") ca...

Mod Test with new modding environment

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Okay, the environment is new and the test has already showed its results. It fixed most of the mesh and environment lighting bug contained on Boruto, Sarada, and Mitsuki models, but what intrigued me is the weird facial movement. Again, this is because the customization that was done on the skeleton set. View original Also, I have no idea what went wrong with Mitsuki model. I saw pretty bugged meshes (vertices) that they're pointing out as in the picture above and the next images I'm showcasing to you. Also, the new skeleton set that supposedly can fix "broken hand mesh" glitch broke the Sarada's hand model positioning as well. Seriously, though, every time new skeleton set is made universal, some models tend to get incompatible with that set. View original View original View original The broken facial mesh that caused by the skeleton set is an easy fix by defaulting it to how the original facial skeleton should be. I should have done that ...