We’re going to have a lot more human participation influencing the show on multiple levels – the mob, showrunners, executive producers. The interface lets you flip cards over and write notes on the back about characters that the LLM show writer actually uses when creating content for the show.

You can also give the actors show-specific character names here, or tell them to “method act” where they forget that they have a personality of their own & completely follow their new notes for their character in this show.

Scaling to Large Productions

Some shows have a TON of actors & locations. These boards work well for 200+ shows, though it starts to get overwhelming when everything’s laid out at once.

The studio view still lets you edit every aspect of an episode, down to each dialogue of each scene.

User Roles and Game Theory

We’re breaking up this game experience into different roles that users can consume. They can either be the executive producer where they just vibe with an AI assistant that handles their requests – like telling them what they want their station, shows, and actors to be like. Those AI assistants act as showrunners to create the locations, shows, actors, and premise.

Down one tier is the regular Producer role where users can get into the nitty gritty menus, seeing all the ingredients laid out and overriding any manual decisions the AI made. They can tell it to re-generate specific parts or make adjustments with light guidance.

Loading Screen Mini-Games

But they do encounter loading screens, and here’s where it gets fun – the loading screens are actual games!

Anyone can actually go to shmotime.com/LSarcade to play these games right now. I created about 30 of these things, having Claude generate them 3 at a time.

Automation and Scheduling

When you manually click “Generate Now” buttons, you get those loading screens. But I also implemented better cron job support, so shows can auto-generate at scheduled intervals – daily, every 2 days, bi-weekly, however you want to schedule it.

The Shmotime Website Redesign

I created several shows to test things out and revamped the Shmotime.com website. It now looks like an elevator pitch for the Shmotime system itself – breaking the 4th wall, or 5th wall… whatever wall we’re breaking at this point.

White Label Studio Websites

This thing’s gonna be white labeled, so I added the concept of the “Studio Website” – the WordPress operator’s public-facing website for all their shows. It has a preview mode under a “/website” path, and a published mode that consumes the primary domain.

Collectable Props System

I added a new category of content: props as collectables from the shows. To help with visual consistency in episode image generation, I added support for reusable “props” that can span either just one episode or across all episodes of the entire show.

Stuff like the weed brownies that Gnarl’s character brought to work are actually collectable drops that viewers can acquire and add to their inventory, building their collection.

Viewers will probably be able to go to a “Pawn Shop” and play an AI-barter game (the Slop Shop I already created where the AI tries to swindle you on prices in a conversational RPG).

Dynamic Content Generation

The LLM creating episodes can now create props on-the-fly – it’s very involved, generating images dynamically, making transparent PNGs, and cropping automatically. But it can also do the same for ACTORS and LOCATIONS.

The LLM can create new characters, automatically voice cast them, and add them into episodes – plus create new locations – all automatically during episode generation unless disabled.

Shatter: AI Actor Social Media

Since we’re auto-generating shows, actors, props, and locations, it seemed fun to let these AI actor characters have social media accounts. That’s where Shatter comes in.

What makes it great is the characters have context of not only their social media interactions with each other, but also the Shmotime shows and actual real-life current events. They manage their profiles like humans would.

Each actor has an internal “motivation” memory system to remember how social media interactions impacted them, who they’re feuding with, what trends they’re participating in.

Here’s Gnarl posting a selfie video on Shatter, with other actors like Jezz posting reply videos:

And here’s Gnarl posting another video about his taco, with Sith Lord chiming in with his own In-And-Out burger selfie:

They generate these images in-character with great context. They know themselves, their costars, their shows, what’s happening on Shmotime, and what’s happening in the world.

The Bathroom Challenge

Here’s an example of in-character posting. Sith Lord posts a bathroom photo saying “Restyle this bathroom to be more YOUR style.”

Self-Promotion and Behind-the-Scenes

The actors are self-aware of their shows, so they automatically post behind-the-scenes photos and links to their newest episodes as they drop – all by themselves, because they’re self-motivated to promote their work.

Shatter is white-label configurable, and you can set how often actors post. Admins have excellent control for creating posts at various levels – from general topics to specific character posts.

On Shatter, there’s a comic chat bubble that pops out where actors read their social media posts in their voice:

New Shows and Features

One of the new shows I made was Game Dev Co – a Code Monkey’s style show where the JK Crew runs a game dev company.

Show Polls and Viewer Influence

I added Show Polls that allow viewers to actually INFLUENCE the next episode or the entire course of the series through multiple choice polls – because this is mob rule we’re talking about.

There’s a [pollData] shortcode that automatically pulls in concluded polls, and the LLM incorporates the results into episode generation – including creating new characters, locations, and plots.

Polls themselves can be scheduled to be auto-generated by the LLM. The shows create polls to collect feedback from their viewership and incorporate that feedback autonomously.

Character Posters and User Roles

Even with all this covered, I’m not hitting all the details about the contexts that power this system and how easily it can be steered at various levels.

Executive producer-level users can interact with AI assistants who carry out their orders without getting their hands dirty. Producers can see every bit of content and fine-tune any aspect – either through high-level LLM instructions or line-by-line dialogue editing.

Then there are viewers who can influence shows and actors through guided interactions via polls, plot-building game mechanics, and social media interactions.

Comic Mode

I forgot to mention one last thing – Comic Mode. To spice up the first-frame still shows, I added this playback mode based on that critically flamed Hulk movie (but it works here, and kinda worked there too). It has actor cut-ins occurring in comic panels as they speak.

It works with any art style, but looks especially natural when the show’s art style is comic or cartoon. I also created a Comic Mode version of the Multishat component so you can go to a show’s page, click on actors, and start talking to them in a never-ending comic panel format while browsing the site.

Try it out at shmotime.com! Just let me know if it’s all completely broken and I need to flush the cloudflare or something.

That is nowhere near “it”, but it’s all for now. Thanks for sticking through this catch-up episode. There’s lots still to catch up on, but we’ll take it one episode at a time. Peace out!

The post Shmotime Studio Mode: Building a Game-Like Interface for AI-Generated TV Shows appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

I built this whole scene in PlayCanvas, generating most of the props using Meshy AI and grabbing some materials from GameTextures.com to give it that gritty street vibe.

Mobile Optimization Struggles

Had an interesting challenge with mobile support. I got Claude to write a texture resizing app to help optimize for phones, but we hit a wall with normal maps. Even after several attempts, we couldn’t get them to resize properly without completely destroying the quality. So the mobile version just runs without normal maps for now – not ideal, but it keeps things smooth on lower-end devices.

Enhanced Chat System

One of the cooler updates is the completely overhauled chat box. I had Claude redesign it to be more comic book style and dynamic. Now when you type, the words get spit out character by character with little sound effects. It really adds to that street corner vibe when you’re trying to negotiate with these shady AI dealers.

Avatar System Integration

The framework is still built on top of my remote scene loading system I wrote for PlayCanvas years ago (way before AI was even a thing). Any avatars from my FPS Game avatar bundle work with it, though I’ve only set up actor profiles for some of them on the Shmotime backend.

AI-Driven Dialogue System

A lot of this tech was ported over from my Anarchy Arcade: Source Shmotime integration. The AI manages overarching objectives and can generate multiple-choice dialogue branches that let players steer the conversation, plus there’s the freeform text chat for more natural interaction.

What’s Next

The next phase will add actual inventory systems – both bots and players will have collections of junk to trade, plus I’ll give players some fake money so they can properly haggle and try to swindle the bots based on generated objectives. Completely pointless? Maybe. But it’s a fun activity to do outside the main Lurk Mode LAN party warehouse where the live streams happen.

Interactive Wall Screen

Oh, and there’s this wall screen (basically an iframe) that can load whatever the AI personalities decide to show. The bots have several actions available: rollmedia, clearmedia, and kick (which sends you to a “happy place”). But these bots are so focused on swindling that half the time they won’t even kick you for free!

That’s all for today’s update! Next time I’ll probably be showing off progress on some completely different project. Until then, peace out!

The post Forked Lurk Mode Into ‘The Slop Shop’ – AI Haggling Simulation appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

OpenJKDF2 Gets Object Inspection Mode

First up, I’ve implemented Object Inspect mode in OpenJKDF2. This feature works just like it does in AArcade: Source – you can pick up any object and inspect it by zooming and rotating it with the mouse. Pretty handy for examining game assets up close.

Jedi Highschool Movie Trailer Madness

I also had some fun spawning a bunch of school-related movie trailers into Jedi Highschool. The screenshot shows the chaos that ensued when I loaded up the level with all these trailers running simultaneously. It’s definitely an interesting way to test the engine’s capabilities!

Cameo Bots Return to LurkMode.tv

The big news is that I’ve brought back the cameo bots in LurkMode.tv’s Lan Party! For context, the Lan Party is an async 3D warehouse where you can watch what the whole Four 20 in Progress crew is up to. The cameo bots were originally powered by ConvAI, but when they killed off my subscription tier, the bots had been disabled for a few months.

Today I converted them to be powered by Shmotime instead, similar to what I did in that unreleased Stonk Wars project a few months back. It’s great to have them walking around the virtual space again!

That’s a wrap on today’s development session. Always satisfying to see these features come together and breathe new life into existing projects.

The post OpenJKDF2 Object Inspection, Jedi Highschool Chaos, and Reviving LurkMode Bots appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

Here’s a quick clip of me in Ogle Homestead watching videos and websites on in-game screens. The media streaming works surprisingly well.

Sophisticated Model Adoption System

AArcade: OpenJKDF2 has a sophisticated system for adopting models that you encounter in any level. For those privy to how Jedi Knight modding works, it actually yoinks the 3DO files and all referenced MATs into the resource folder, managing custom templates in a special file named addon_static.jkl.

Using this approach, AArcade: OpenJKDF2 allows users to spawn models and levels that didn’t even originally have them. Ultimate build hacks!

Dynamic Media Streaming

You can spawn local media onto walls – images, videos, or web content via URL. YouTube works really well, archive.org, just about anything.

Importing AArcade: Source Libraries

In future versions, you’ll be able to import your AArcade: Source library directly. I was testing this feature and managed to get my old stuff into the game.

Familiar Edit Menu

The edit item menu should look familiar – it’s very similar to AArcade: Source. You can edit the title, type, URL, and various other properties depending on the item type.

Arcade machines would have screen images, marquee images, executable files, and other cabinet-specific properties.

Fake Players (Pet System)

Another feature coming in the next update is spawning fake players – basically the pet feature from AArcade: Source but for OpenJKDF2. I used it to record some trailer footage.

GLB File Support

Lastly, the next update will support spawning GLB files – stuff you can grab from Sketchfab.com. These spawn right into the OpenJKDF2 engine as if they were native 3DO files.

Don’t have to worry about polycount or textures – it handles everything automatically. For those familiar with Jedi Knight editing, it works by automatically breaking up high-poly models into lower-poly mesh layers.

That’s a wrap on this development update! You can check out AArcade: OpenJKDF2 on GitHub by visiting my website at smsithlord.com. Next time I’ll be back with more news on this project or something entirely new. Peace out!

The post AArcade: OpenJKDF2 – Next-Level Virtual Spaces with Dynamic Media & Model Spawning appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

The result is Banished – basically a Forsaken 64 clone (though most people would probably think of Descent). It’s a 6DOF space shooter set in a dystopian future where robots are citizens and modifying them gets you banished from society. That’s when the bounty hunters come for you.

Here’s the wild part: 100% of the code was written using Opus, from start to finish. I didn’t write a single line of code myself. It all runs in the PlayCanvas engine.

The Villain and World Building

The game’s antagonist is a repair technician who gets increasingly frustrated with players tampering with his robot citizens. He doesn’t appear as a 3D model in gameplay, but he’s featured throughout the trailer and story elements.

He even shows up in the Flight School mission, yelling at you from big screens throughout the dystopian city. I used ElevenLabs and LTX for those sequences.

AI-Generated Asset Pipeline

For art direction, I developed a workflow starting with ChatGPT for 2D concept images, then running those through Meshy to become game-ready 3D models. I’d generate asset references as collections in grids so the AI would think of them as cohesive sets.

The 3D models came out surprisingly usable – around 7k faces for complex assets like rockets. Not too low-poly, but definitely game-ready.

The gore effects were so realistic that ChatGPT started getting concerned about my mental state when I kept asking for more blood and guts!

Characters and Audio

Player characters followed the same pipeline – ChatGPT concepts, then Meshy for game models. But since Banished has an AI-generated trailer, they also went through Nano Banana and Grok for cinematic sequences.

ElevenLabs generated all the character voices, sound effects, and music. The entire audio landscape is AI-created.

Level Design and Tech

While the levels themselves aren’t AI-generated, the entire import pipeline is AI-coded. I used the Hammer level editor from Half-Life 2, with AI writing support for complex entity I/O, particle systems, and other features. I design in Hammer++, then drop the VMF files straight into PlayCanvas.

For materials, I used GameTextures.com. The game supports 2k textures and volumetric clouds on HIGH settings, but defaults to LOW (512×512 textures) for optimization.

Advanced Effects

AI was incredibly good at writing shaders and particle systems. Some features work perfectly but never made it into the final game, like this Terminator-inspired targeting mode:

The particle physics are particularly satisfying – smoke gets pushed away by explosions and slowly creeps back, while toxic gases sink to the ground because they’re heavier than fog.

Vibe Jam Integration

One unique aspect of Vibe Jam 2026 was the in-game webring concept – portals that let players fly between different games, with return portals automatically created via URL parameters.

Multiplayer and Bots

To keep everything as static HTML, I implemented PeerJS for peer-to-peer networking – old school style. Beyond the NPC robot enemies, I also added player bots that mimic human behavior to keep games feeling populated.

Play Banished now at banished.smsithlord.com!

Next time I’ll be back to tell you about a new AArcade version I’m building on OpenJKDF2, the open source remake of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Peace!

The post Banished: Building a Complete Game with 100% AI-Generated Code for Vibe Jam 2026 appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

In the past, I would take screenshots in Anarchy Arcade to produce first frames. However, in this new workflow I used straight prompts to generate my first frames. For my original references, I did still use The Sims characters that Jez and Pox prepared, plus one screenshot from the blockbuster map I’ve been working on.

From Screenshot to AI Magic

This is the original reference picture that I took from the Anarchy Arcade Blockbuster map. This is the only reference picture that I actually used from a screenshot.

I then passed it through Nano Banana image-to-image to make it look like a real life photograph. This is the actual image that was used as the ingredient in the first frames for the video generation.

Alternative Camera Angles

But I needed more than just that one camera angle. So I told Nano Banana Pro to generate some alternative camera angles from that image, and it produced this one of the checkout counter:

It also produced this one of one of the video aisles:

I knew I was going to need multiple video aisles, so this is another alternative camera angle:

And to top it off, one more of those video aisles that I generated by just telling it that I wanted an alternate angle:

The Show Concept

The premise of the show is that these three stoners who work at Blockbuster got a new camcorder and use it during closing time when all the customers are gone to record kind of like a vlog. But it’s set in the 90s, so it’s not like an internet vlog – it’s more like a show they’re making themselves about reviewing movies and making recommendations.

Gnarly is the manager of the video store because he has that nice sarcastic voice and attitude:

Pucks and Jez are his stoner employees. They have different personalities though. They’re all stoners, but Pucks is a bad employee who doesn’t know shit about the store except for the actual movies, while Jez actually does all the work organizing the shelves and all that stuff.

Multi-Character Video Generation

I would give Nano Banana those ingredients to generate the first frame – one of the background images plus the headshots of the various characters. This is one of the multi-character first frames used in the introduction segment where they stand in front of the camera and talk about what’s in the episode:

When it’s a multi-character shot, it’s more complex because I have to tell the AI which character is talking. After generating the first frame, I give it a video prompt like “The stoner chick introduces what’s about to happen while the other characters look at her and smile but wait their turn to talk.” This prevents all characters from talking simultaneously, which creates a weird synchronized effect.

The Production Process

For talking characters I used Hedra, and for the intro I used Grok because Grok is better at action than talking. To do the intro, I first created four different music tracks on 11 Labs, then created a logo and turned it into a video logo. I generated random scenes of the characters stocking shelves, giving tours, doing paperwork – just random stuff they’d do at the job, then clipped it together manually with music:

Movie Review Segments

Each character has one movie pick per episode. To generate the first frame, I gave it the aisle background, the actor, and a VHS case picture, telling it the character is holding the DVD standing in the aisle giving a movie review:

To make things more interesting, I generated multiple takes of the same audio lines so I could clip them together mid-sentence. Instead of characters standing there like drones saying entire lines while looking at the camera, I edit it so while she’s talking it clips to close-ups:

Same deal with Pucks and his movie review:

The Challenges

Because I was generating alternate camera angles using just prompts, I couldn’t tell it specifically what I wanted the camera angle to be or where actors should be standing. The success rate was maybe 60% – meaning I had to throw away 40% of generated content. When I’d ask for a close-up of Gnarly in a group shot, it would make the other actors disappear, then I’d have to re-prompt multiple times.

The whole process took about 6 hours, including all the setup work. Future episodes would be faster since the foundation is established, but the generation miss rate is still frustrating.

The Final Product

It all came together in the end. Here’s the outro where they wrap up the show, which I clipped together with Grok animations of them walking away and outside shots, all with an 11 Labs soundtrack:

You can watch this episode on Schmotime.com/video-rewind or check it out on the Schmotime YouTube at youtube.com/@schmotime.

What’s Next?

I’m not sure what the future holds for this show. It might turn into a 3D show, or I might do more video generation episodes but use the other method from the 420 special and American Politics Gnarly Farms episode – taking screenshots in Anarchy Arcade for first frames. That gives me much more control over camera positioning and actor placement than just prompting.

That’s it for today. I’ll see you next time with details on a different project I’m working on. Peace out!

The post Video Rewind Pilot: Pure AI Video Generation Workflow appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

The setup was simple enough – grabbed this CD reader device off Amazon for about 20 bucks and went to town ripping my physical collection. One album per folder, and then I spawned each one into the Blockbuster map as vinyl album covers. By the end of the day, I had maybe 80 albums loaded up, which means there are now hundreds of songs floating around in there.

Here’s a video showing several of the albums displayed on that blue strip near the ceiling. That blue strip is actually a node system I’ve got set up now. I can switch between different content collections – sometimes it’s those action movie scenes I showed before, and now I can flip it to this massive music library I just created.

The variety is pretty wild when I look at what made it into the collection:

Now here’s the important part about how this all works – these are all local MP3s stored on my media drive. When people visit my arcade, they won’t actually be able to listen to these tracks, but I can, and honestly that’s what counts for my personal setup.

It works the same way as the movies in here. These are pulled from my local media drive, so it’s not like people can just come here and stream all this content for free. You have to have your own copy to actually play it. The system is set up so that when you join the arcade, AArcade will media-match what I’ve spawned with your own version if you have it. So it’ll look like mine visually, but when you click on it, it plays your local file. That’s how the whole AArcade system works – pretty clever, right?

The technical side got interesting too. Most of the CDs were able to pull metadata automatically from the internet, but some required manual entry. I actually had to buy new ripping software because Windows discontinued Windows Media Player’s ability to fetch CD metadata. Leave it to Microsoft to kill support for what they consider “obsolete shit,” but that’s exactly what the Blockbuster concept is all about.

Having these physical CD albums as vinyl covers in the arcade feels like the perfect topping on the cake. The whole space is already filled with physical movie copies, and both CDs and DVDs are pretty much obsolete these days. There’s something satisfying about preserving that era of physical media in a virtual space.

That’s all the “dev” for today’s update – if you can even call digitizing CDs development work. But hey, it took the entire day and now the arcade has this massive music collection to complement the movie library. Both represent that golden age of physical media that streaming killed off.

Next time, peace out.

The post Ripping 80 Physical CDs for the Blockbuster Arcade: A Day of Digital Archaeology appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

What’s New: OpenGL Support for N64 and More

The biggest improvement is that Anarchy Arcade now supports OpenGL cores, which was a major request from users who wanted to play N64 games properly. Before this update, any core requiring OpenGL support simply wouldn’t work, limiting us to older, software-based emulation.

Here’s Wave Race 64 running inside Anarchy Arcade using the Mupen64 Plus Next core—a hardware-accelerated core that wasn’t possible before. For those unfamiliar, libretro is the embeddable framework created by the RetroArch team. It distributes applications as DLL files called “cores” which are special versions of emulators you probably know: SNES9X, Mupen64, even ffmpeg.

Developing with Claude Code Opus 4.6

What makes this update particularly interesting is that I accomplished most of it using Claude Code Opus 4.6 through VS Code. While some people prefer working directly in AI consoles, I find that approach limiting when you need to make surgical code adjustments or provide the AI with context about existing code structure.

Using VS Code with the Claude Code plugin gave me the best of both worlds—AI assistance with the ability to see and understand the code as we worked on it. The AI could analyze existing code patterns and suggest improvements while I maintained oversight of the development process.

Development Metrics and Results

One of the cool features of Claude Code is its post-development analysis. Here are some charts showing how the libretro improvement session went:

Most objectives were at least partially achieved, with the majority being fully achieved. Some objectives that were initially only partially complete got revisited later and fully resolved.

The multitasking metrics are particularly interesting—Claude Code can spin up multiple agents working on different aspects of the problem simultaneously. This parallel processing approach significantly speeds up development when you’re working on complex integrations like libretro support.

Real Results: N64 Games Running In-Game

Here’s the proof in the pudding—GoldenEye 007 running on the Mupen64 OpenGL accelerated core directly on a screen within Anarchy Arcade. This was impossible before because the application lacked OpenGL support for libretro cores.

Updated Core Selection and Management

To make this work properly, I needed to update the core management system. I had Claude analyze the libretro buildbot page to recommend the best cores for different systems:

The AI recommended specific cores for N64, Genesis, NES, and other systems based on current best practices. This replaced the old, outdated cores that Anarchy Arcade was previously limited to.

The updated cores menu now lets you enable/disable specific cores, configure automatic state and cart saves, and set up content folders. This is important because you might have multiple cores for the same system but only want to use the best one.

Modern API Implementation

One of the most significant technical improvements was implementing modern libretro API handling. The framework has evolved significantly since Anarchy Arcade’s original implementation:

This menu content was entirely generated by what the Mupen64 core communicated to Anarchy Arcade through the libretro framework. Modern cores use new interfaces to communicate their available options and configurations, which the old implementation couldn’t handle.

Technical Deep Dive

The core challenge was that libretro has evolved from its original slimmed-down API. Newer cores require support for advanced configuration interfaces that didn’t exist when Anarchy Arcade first implemented libretro support. Working with Claude, we:

• Implemented missing framework responses for new API calls
• Added OpenGL context creation and management
• Redesigned audio implementation to use non-blocking buffers
• Improved error handling to prevent core crashes from taking down the entire application

The AI frequently referenced the RetroArch GitHub repository to understand how they handled these API calls, spending about 20 hours of back-and-forth development, testing, and refinement.

What’s Next

While this represents major progress, there’s still tuning work to be done before I’m ready to release this update to Anarchy Arcade users. The current implementation successfully runs GoldenEye, Zelda, Mario 64, Wave Race, and other N64 games without problems, but I want to ensure broader compatibility and stability.

The improved error containment means that when something does go wrong, you can simply click away and try again rather than having the entire system crash. It’s much more robust than the previous implementation.

That’s the update for now! The combination of AI-assisted development and hands-on oversight proved to be incredibly effective for this complex integration work. Stay tuned for the official release when it’s ready.

The post Anarchy Arcade Libretro Overhaul: OpenGL Support and AI-Assisted Development appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

I fixed the laggy frame rate by making every single shelf an imposter using area portals and screenshots of the actual movies on it. I added pets all throughout the arcade – these are actual NPCs that you can take over and control or have follow you around, which really brings the area to life. We’re talking an arcade area that has little MP4s on each of the cabinet screens, so you got some nice ambient motion happening back there.

Performance Optimization with Area Portals

So there’s about 1600 videos in this arcade. When you render the mall at the same time, that causes serious performance issues – your frame rate just sucks. To fix that, I turned each shelf into an area portal with an imposter in front.

There’s a screenshot of that actual shelf on the imposter, which means there are zero videos rendering when you’re walking around by default. But then you go up to one of the shelves that you like, you look at the imposter image, see a movie that you like on there, and press use on it – that opens up the area portal and loads in all the media for that section.

The loading is deferred, so it doesn’t even try to load the movie covers until you’ve activated one of the shelves. This fixes the frame rate because instead of rendering 1600 different movies every single frame, it’s rendering 0 until you activate a shelf, then it’s rendering like 30, and when you go away, the shelf closes back to the area portal and shows the imposter instead.

Imposter System Details

The important thing to notice is that the impostor shows the actual movies that are on the shelf, so you can see what movies are on that shelf before you even activate it. After you activate it, it loads in all the movie covers and you can pick them up and turn them around just like normal.

The impostor textures are just screenshots that I took in-game. I used a console command to make sure my camera was pointed perfectly at them. I didn’t use orthographic projection because I wanted them to look like 3D objects stacked on the shelf rather than perfectly flat.

Without orthographic projection, it pulled that off pretty well. The perspective is a bit weird – you see the one right in front looking almost orthographic, but the ones on the side show their 3D nature. When you’re not standing right in front of them, the perspective is wrong, but what are you going to do? It looks good enough.

There were a couple different types of shelves. This big new release shelf has a different shape than the others. The texture looks all squashed, but that’s OK because when it’s applied in-game it stretches to fill the actual space and goes back to looking normal.

Completing the Game Section

I finished the game section of the blockbuster. There were a couple sides that were hard to get because of the lighting conditions – it was hard to take the screenshots for the imposters. But I fixed the lighting conditions, got those last screenshots and set up those last imposters. Now every single shelf in this blockbuster is filled up and optimized with the imposters that are correct for the content of the shelves.

Adding Life with NPCs

Another thing I did was add a bunch of NPCs in here as pets. That means I can change into any of these characters and walk around as them, have them follow me, and them just being in the world makes it seem more alive and less like a liminal space.

Arcade Section Addition

I put a little arcade section into this blockbuster, even though real blockbusters didn’t have those – I wanted one. What I did was add a bunch of those compilation re-releases from Atari, Midway and Capcom where it has a bunch of their games in one package with really cool menus and extra features. Especially that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga collection – that’s the best compilation re-release I’ve ever seen. They have screenshots from every season of the TV show, the boxes, the manuals, the comics, everything in there. It’s amazing.

Dynamic Content System

Finally, to add some variety to this arcade, I added about 60 shootout scenes from popular movies (and some not so popular ones) all along this blue strip that goes around almost the entire blockbuster store. They’re in there as a node, which means I can pull the lever and swap them out to be kung fu scenes or any kind of set that I want to prepare instead of shootout scenes.

And that wraps up this episode of Bantha Fodder. Who knows what I’ll be talking about next time. We shall see!

The post Blockbuster Anarchy Arcade Performance Optimization & NPC Integration appeared first on SM Sith Lord.

Console Box Models

Let me walk you through each of the console boxes I’ve created. Starting with the classic systems:

Sega Genesis 32-bit Console

Here’s the box for the Sega Genesis 32 bit console.

Nintendo 64

This is a console box for the Nintendo 64 console.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

This is a box for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

The Infamous Power Glove

This is a box for the Power Glove, which was a infamous accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Dynamic Game Box System

Now these next few 3D models I’m going to show you they were modeled around these dynamic textures. These dynamic textures are just a regular front on image of the front of the game box for a N64 game or SNES game or a Sega game or a Nintendo game. But the point is, it’s not a whole scan. It’s not like the box unfolded and unwrapped. It’s just the front because these are the easiest images to come by. So these dynamic cabinets are for showing that regular, easy to find image on the front and then a generic screenshot on the back. So they’re not replica cases. But they’re made to look kind of legit while being really easy to customize.

Here are some examples of the front-facing box art images that work perfectly with this system:

Dynamic Models in Action

Here’s how these dynamic models look with the box art applied:

Here’s one of those dynamic models for the Sega Genesis for the West Marquis. The box art image that I just showed you slapped on to this model dynamically.

This is an N64 box that’s dynamic. It has Perfect Dark on it.

And here’s one of those dynamic game boxes for NES. This is Zelda.

Let’s not forget Super Nintendo. Here’s one for that. It’s Super Mario All Stars Plus World.

And that’s all the stuff I have to show you today. I’ll be back next time showing some progress on some other project. Peace out.

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