notes for DOA 6++ Optional stage mods
Thanks again to AlexXsWx, the .g1co blender import/export is indispensable for to this process. Memorial and Throwdown would not have been possible without it, all those tree hitboxes were horrible before I edited them, and on and on.
Use/technical stuff:
These stage mods require vagonumero13's REDELBE tool, you're probably already using it for costumes/ui/loading screens.
Because some people aren't using redelbe i've created a pair of .bat scripts to toggle all the mechanical swaps on or off, and included an unaltered copy of each stage file ("O_" prefix) so that toggling will work without restarting the game. You may want to leave a lobby if you were in one and adjust your random filter, can't change that on the fly so easily because of how the menu is loaded.
Toggling will only take effect if you go through a screen that causes stages to reload, e.g character select, return to lobby, exit to main menu, or if you use the script while the game wasn't on.
Turn off DOA 6++ and these stage mods before queuing for ranked or joining a vanilla lobby. If you're using my auto toggle script then you can close the game, double click on the 6++StagesOFF.bat in the DOA6 game folder and then launch the normal game from steam after the black (usually) cmd windows close themselves.
There are several known issues listed after chamber of potential's changes. The stuff that makes the stages selectable in the menu, show up in random, and have names on the replays is part of the regular 6++ gameplay mod files and I decided to release visually rough "playable alpha" stages rather than hold up everything over some fine-tuning. You can always toggle them off and I'd ask players who don't mind the jank to respect the preference of people who do.
Keep an eye out for involuntary soft-locks and wall clipping issues. Blender is kinda rough and typing coordinates into database files is disconnected form the in-game scene so it wouldn't surprise me if there are some gaps you can wedge into or collision alignment issues we didn't notice in testing.
Sorry about the stage order being weird on the select screen. look for the white / divider to tell new stages from regular ones. Hopefully we can redirect the picture and names from that screen eventually but for now we're stuck with duplicates of the default ones.
motivation:
There's some consensus that DOA6's stages are over-gimmicked (compare "The Crimson" to "Chinese Festival", or "Throwdown" to its antecedents) so I've reduced a lot of that by direct removal, such as Forbidden Fortune, where most of the gimmicks are gone outright; by expansion such as Throwdown, where all the gimmicks are still there but you have a chance to side-tech toward a simple wall or open space; and by diluting the stage pool with up to eight new stages.
DOA 3's Tao and Iron Hell were chosen for their basic geometry (a T and two octagons) that I could reasonably "measure" and reproduce within various limitations. The "playable alpha" state of all the new stages protects the framerate on the normal stages (minimal extra VRAM usage) and saves me duplicating the work on main menu modification as mentioned. I'll creep up on adding stuff to the new stages but it would defeat the purpose of using the extra substages if I ruin performance on existing stages.
With these mods once the novelty wears off I recommend checking 25/28 stages in random filter: everything except Hidden Garden and the lower parts of Forbidden Fortune and Chinese Festival since those don't loop back to the top. Just remember to uncheck the new ones (except memorial and seafood) if you toggle off.
Stages:
Forbidden Fortune:
upper:
removed the rocking ship trigger from the starboard deck wall, and reassigned the gimmick type of the box stacks.
removed 3 of the 4 kraken barrels from the port side. note the green treasure chest doesn't activate the kraken, only the barrel does.
removed various other invisible boundaries and trigger walls.
lower:
removed all the ceilig hit barrels except the expansion wall into the treasure house
restored explosive wall ceiling hit that I cut in previous versions
removed the normal trash in the armory
removed some inert barrels toward the bow, oops.
repositioned an invisible wall that those barrels were behind, play area is marginally bigger.
might put 1-2 things back in the bottom and/or change the explosive wall hit to something else
new: "The Black Forest"
replaced LOD sprite "cardboard cutout" trees with modded-to-be-interactable equivalents from lost paradise
partially applied textures to the new trees, databases are weird and somehow it matters which characters are loaded, let's just say it was an oil spill and the name is a reference to that rather than hayate being in germany.
added match procedure positions
Lost paradise:
upper/lower:
no change in current build but I might do a break out in the upper area and move the new stage to the lower section since that area is cooler and it would save me fixing the slip stun issue.
new: "Natural"
converted camera colliders into half-wall colliders on 109 rocks and 181 trees
added match procedure positions
Unforgettable:
both:
added custom floor collider to the out of bounds hallway areas
added custom wall colliders to the out of bounds hallway areas
added new (and moved existing) boundary fences
added camera clipping to the character portrait panels
added collision as well but ended up moving the lower one behind the windows because of some misalignment
modified some wall meshes so the columns wouldn't block the camera
added different columns to replace the ones I removed entirely
there's an extra .g1m file in the download if having the gaps out of bounds bothers you, but you're on your own for renaming it and I wonder if anyone would have noticed if i hadn't said anything
retargeted some start positions so we can actually start in the new areas
added replacement "round 2" starts so we don't get sucked back into hotzone etc
the out of bounds benches were normal destructible objects the whole time
rotated dangerzone spawn orientation 90° so one player's back isn't to the zone transition
unfortunately the way the railings, sub-zones, and scripting all works is not friendly to modification but hopefully some of these changes reduce the looping resets a little.
new: "Hangover"
added a start position to the roof
approximated the floor and wall geometry from DOA 3's Iron Hell
the 15 damage wall segments iron hell has aren't implemented yet
added some very placeholder objects so you can see where the colliders are
I have some other plans for the roof area, depending on some level systems I didn't investigate yet (and don't want to get anyone's hopes up about) so i'm holding off on making it look nicer until i know if it's going to be permanent.
Colosseum
added lisa's rope walk interactions to the ropes.
"In Memoriam" aka colosseum lower (sort of, it's weird):
moved the invisible boundary much further out, it cuts across the escalator area
added wall collision to the pillars around the normal play area
added collision and camera clipping to the four trees on the plaza
decreased the height of the flower boxes on the raised area
made a fully custom collision mesh for the ground including:
small elevation change for the ring around the statue, the planters, and the lone trees
detail around the base of the elevators
invisible floor over the little river thing (for now)
steep out of bounds spikes to make the camera try to get out of the way of stuff that would block it
note the main slope is steeper than any other elevation change in the game, i'd make it an old school cliff and jump down if we knew how, same with the water feature.
removed all the dynamic grass and some background geometry/objects for framerate.
added several "round 2" start positions, will add more as I improve the jank in the outlying areas
retargeted the win position to a nicer view
Road Rage
no changes. There's some cool out of bounds stuff but single-level stages don't have the extra substage used for all these new ones. Maybe the area behind the two cars could open up away from the main part.
Chinese Festival
upper:
removed the guys by the scaffolding
removed an invisible wall that was next to those guys
future: investigating ways of making the scaffold transition take two (or three?) hits to activate
lower:
removed the rumble guys
removed a few invisible walls
reduced the size of the ground fireworks area
added collision to a building
moved several fence segments and (separate objects/database entries) their matching firecrackers
expanded the play area "behind" the ground firecrackers, about 5x5 meters, normal ground
adjusted a malformed collider on one of the stalls
added a fence+fircrackers to fix a hole in a wall that was behind that malformed collider.
new: "Damage"
DOA 1-ish stage
outer invisible walls apply 15 damage and a high bounce like the APO servers
floor launches outside of the central safe area
nice views of the city they created for the legit stages.
probably going to put visual walls around it but the original idea was to have the wall be like the exploding one on the bottom part and
Zero:
no changes, let me know if you have a strong preference for "Crash Club"
APO
upper/lower:
added slip stun property to the broken glass
did you know the broken glass was floor colliders? I didn't, but that's how the do the crunchy sound fx
removed some out of bounds geometry to make the new stage work
new: "Network Speed"
sortof the the "upper" area without the normal walls or ceiling, you can see the consoles and servers through some windows in the normal version.
added (slightly messy) collision to that stuff
had to choose between that and not having the damaged model appear on-hit, should be fixable.
added "walls" to the perimeter visual wall
it's a high wall for your 7P sort of moves, I'm not sure why it animates like a half-wall.
there's some mechanism to hide objects in the common substage from the normal stages and if I can figure out how to do that i'll cover the holes in the floor with something, maybe add dynamic lights. If not i might scrap the whole thing or move it out of the way of the regular stage.
Throwdown:
expanded playable area into the street
added collision to all the out-of-bounds dumpsters
moved the out of bounds couch, added collision to it
added three more out of bounds couches, embiggened one of them
added collision to the out of bounds pickup truck
added explosion gimmick to the truck
removed the out-of bounds crowd
moved most of the rumble dangerzone guys
added destruction behavior to some out of bounds fence pieces
added wall collision to some in-bounds fence segments that weren't walls for some reason, despite the story mode stage not having rumble dangerzones
added fully custom wall meshes to the building facades
added several "round 2" start positions
added some dumpsters duplicating one of the story mode variant placeable arrays that need to be there when the rumble dangerzones aren't.
replaced the "gate" section of the fence wall with a breakable segment
changed the properties and dimensions of the trash in front of that part of the fence
watch out for soft-locks there, we haven't found a forced one in testing yet but the gap might need to be wider.
miyabi (and hidden garden):
no changes for now, looking at adding breakouts to Miyabi similar to Throwdown, there's a really cool area behind the main gate. Hidden garden doesn't have much to do, the little footpath in the corner isn't suitable for expansion.
new: "The Zen"
approximated the geometry of DOA 3's Tao, but in Japan
i have a couple ideas for making breakable ground segments, either the mesh for the transition from forbidden fortune or a deforming wall object with floor properties. Not sure that stuff will work but it's worth a shot.
making this look nicer might be affected by the Miyabi out of bounds expansion.
The muscle
No changes, nobody knows how ceilings actually work but I think making it like "hell in a cell" would be fun.
Sweat
no changes. there's an out-of bounds bug in the retail version I could fix but it's pretty hard to set up and the 6++ character collider changes might have already taken care of it.
Seaside Eden
no changes, was going to add more trees but Forbidden Fortune and Lost Paradise out of bounds are doing a good job of reminding people of Forest.
"lower" aka Seafood:
no changes. I'm inclined not to add anything here but I could see retargeting the intro and win/lose to the small islands or finding something to add that makes the "ground" not do that texture buffer freakout.
Chamber of Potential
rotated the floor collision to make a slope.
rotated the floor visual model to look nice
rotated the exterior floor to make the camera behave
rotated the wall collider to make the walls keep working
lowered the walls to match the new "bottom", this might make some visual mods a little weird.
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Known issues:
the camera clipping for the elevators on Douglas Memorial is bigger than the wall hitbox
throws and holds temporarily mess up some of the camera hacks on memorial
cafe furniture on memorial is intangible
lack of perimeter boundaries on lost paradise 3 and forbidden fortune 3
some formerly out of bounds areas don't have camera clipping on everything, it was way worse before.
Iron hell and Tao don't have entry/win positions or scenery, I might be relocating the play geometry.
janky collisions on APO 3
slight floating above the floor on APO 3
slip stuns aren't applied on lost paradise 3
chinese festival 3 doesn't have fx, don't know how those work yet.