M.U.G.E.N: Difference between revisions

Nowadays, though, almost all of the M.U.G.E.N sites have either not been updated since 2010, or have been shut down. Because of this, finding certain characters is almost impossible.

 

 

First released on July 17, 1999, ''M.U.G.E.N'' was initially created for MS-DOS. Development of the DOS version ceased when Elecbyte switched to the Linux platform in November 2001. For a time, Elecbyte had posted a request for donations on their site to legally obtain a Windows compiler to make a Windows version of ''M.U.G.E.N''. However, the development group discontinued the project in 2003 and shut down their site. Later speculation pointed at leaks made public of a private Windows-based ''M.U.G.E.N'' beta that was provided to donators.

 

 

 

The private WinM.U.G.E.N beta contained a two-character roster limit, locked game modes, and nag screens. With the beta leaked and Elecbyte gone, a "no limit" hack that removed most of these limitations was made available in 2004 by Rou Hei, followed by subsequent updates to deal with bugs and other issues. This version of ''M.U.G.E.N''. is functionally the same as the last Linux release, though with subtle differences and unique issues, mostly revolving around proper music and music plugin support. Because of the changes between the DOS and Linux versions of ''M.U.G.E.N'' however, many older characters required at least the SFF files to be modified to show palettes correctly (notably on portraits) as well as some changes in how certain CNS script controllers functioned, causing some minor upset and those that could still run the DOS version in some form sticking to that, as well as DOS patches to downgrade characters to be compatible with the older version of the engine.

 

 

 

In mid 2007, Elecbyte's site returned, though not without some controversy as to the legitimacy of it, as it only showed a single logo with Google ads on the side. On July 26, though, a FAQ was added to the site. This FAQ went on to claim that they would release a fixed version of ''WinM.U.G.E.N'' before major format changes in the next version, and noted the formatting changes would remove compatibility in regards to older works: "Do not expect old characters to work. At all."

Despite some widespread agreement that the new site was a fake, things changed roughly two years later, when a new release candidate, ''MUGEN 1.0'', was added to the site, with [[Open GL]] support as well as proper HD display options, victory quotes, improved (and growing) stability as a whole. The claim of widespread incompatibility of old works with this engine turned out to be false, as Elecbyte took steps to ensure that at the very least properly coded characters would not malfunction in the new engine (or would require minimal updates), though screenpacks are not necessarily subject to the same rule. As of January 2011, ''MUGEN 1.0'' is no longer in the "Release Candidate" stage, and ''MUGEN 1.1'' is currently in the alpha testing stage.

 

When development of the ''WinM.U.G.E.N '' engine stopped, [[Follow the Leader|several clone projects started to try and duplicate the functionality of the engine from scratch]], such as ShugenDo, InfinityCat, xnaMugen and Open Source Mugen. Some of them presented online gameplay capabilities, a feature many users have sought after. Some clones currently in development are [http://code.google.com/p/ikemen/ IKEMEN], its cousin [http://code.google.com/p/random-tac/ BIJIN], and [http://sourceforge.net/projects/paintown/ Paintown].

 

* [http://elecbyte.com/ Elecbyte's website.]

* [http://www.mugenguild.com/ The Mugen Fighters Guild] (The basic start point for many MUGEN players. Highly recommended if this is your first time using the engine.)

* http://mugencharacters.ucoz.com/ - One of the larger databases of MUGEN characters available today, it has just about every character ever made, including some that are otherwise all but impossible to find at all (other websites just list them as being "offline," or worse, they're only hosted on Phantom Gs). Unfortunately, as a corollary, [[Sturgeon's Law|it has just about every character ever made.]] Additionally, it hosts its own copies of everything, which annoys no small part of the community; CTRL+F "Warehousing" below.

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For the sake of not turning this article into another list of [[Characters|character tropes]], please avoid adding entries for characters which aren't [[Original Generation|exclusive to Mugen]], as tropes associated with characters from existing series can have theirs listed in their series' page.