How I add content to my Mugen

Remember my last post where I rant about the impossibility of playing Mugen single player? Well, I decided to give up on actually playing and would just start watching them. It’s amusing to watch two AI-controlled characters fighting at their best and while finding human playable AIs is nearly impossible to find, the best possible AI either from the characters themselves or from an AI patch that exists for that specific character can be found pretty much everywhere on Mugenarchive.com. I managed to find a bunch of Kamen Rider characters, as well as some Touhou Project characters with AI so I had a fun time watching the battles from them.

But how do I even add content into Mugen, I think I forgot to talk about that aspect during my rant back when I was still trying to play it like an actual game and not a spectator sport. While I remembered looking at tutorials that were so long ago that I pretty much forgot which video guide I looked at. But I’ve gotten the progress of adding new content to Mugen pretty much down after my on-again, off-again time spent with Mugen over the years.

The first thing to know about adding content into Mugen is to know your folders, there is a Chars, Stages, Sound, and a Data folder in the typical modern Mugen setup, I don’t really know about WinMugen but for both 1.0 and 1.1 beta versions of Mugen, those folders are there. The first folder I will cover will be the Chars short for Characters folder for Mugen. Most characters in Mugen come in a folder named after the Character’s “.def” file while others only provide the loose files that would go in a folder named after the “.def” file, I don’t know why it’s called def but I assume it’s short for “definition” or something similar but don’t rename the “.def” I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not and it's possible that the whole “.def” file uses the original name of the “.def” file. I could just be paranoid though. Your character’s folder name must be the same name as the “.def” for the character to work correctly. While it’s entirely possible to add characters into Mugen without external software I highly recommend using VSelect. It's a third-party program that turns adding characters into Mugen a breeze even though it sometimes crashes on me during use. Plus if you renamed the folder after the “.def” file for characters properly they are shown in a character list on the program and let you drag and drop characters into the character selection screen of your screenpack of choice.

But what are Screenpacks? Basically, these are custom User Interfaces made for Mugen. They change the way Mugen looks and/or sounds. They also add more character slots which are important because the default packs don’t have many slots for new characters. There are two types of Screenpacks in my experience, first are the standard ones that can be installed into a vanilla Mugen build by editing the data folder but thankfully it's simply a matter of copying and pasting the data folder of your screenpack into the Mugen build of your choice as long as the screenpack is compatible with your Mugen build it should work fine. Then you have the other kind of screenpacks that pretty much comes packed with a build of Mugen, am a little worried about these kinds of screenpacks but thankfully I never encountered anything wrong or shady using a screenpack like this but I would only recommend using a screenpack prebuild this way if you know that it’s a genuine copy of Mugen which can be done by comparing the two exe files.

So now Mugen both have more characters and more character slots, as well as a visual skin of your choice we can now move on to my favorite part of Mugen, and that is the stages. How stages are the simplest content to import into your Mugen but can be tedious without an external program like the one my current screenpack “micaHD_NTcore_UltraVersion” comes bundled with called “00_StageListCreator” I don’t even know the source of this program but I’ve tested it out and all it does to create a text file listing the stages you currently have in Mugen in the format that Mugen wants in the select file in the data folder at the bottom of the select file’s text. This updating the stage list in this select file is simply a matter of copy and paste.

And that's pretty much all I know about adding content into Mugen, is this a great tutorial? No in fact am pretty sure this article sucks as a tutorial but I gave it my best in a small window of time of my day so I may as well post this on the blog.