How to Customize the Game COMPLETE GUIDE!

This guide will teach you how to mod Jet Lancer to your liking!

July 4, 2020: No updates for a while, i might go through the dialouge and find out what each of the codes do. @ me on the discord or message me if you have new info that would benefit the guide, show off your work, or want to mod something that this guide dosen't cover.'

Feb 9, 2022: its been a long time, i wont finish it cause the things i did/want todo require access to the source code or the original .blend files that only WhyNot has and hes been busy. Currently, I and a select few have access to the hangar.blend but unfortunatly i don't have permission rn to release that to the public. IF YOU DM ME OR OTHERS FOR ACCESS YOU WILL NOT GET IT! But you can see that i have used it in my previous YT videos and for my outro. That is all, if i get any updates regarding .blends i will let you know. Again, pls dont pester us.

Oct 4, 2022: on the discord [[[ https://discord.gg/GbQn6vZ]]] search for file. the blend file is there to download. that or check the pinned messages in #jet-lancer. HAVE FUN!!!! ALSO CREDIT!!!

Dec 3, 2022: I should be doing a english essay rn but ♥♥♥♥ it. I finished the tutorial!

How To Add Your Own Lance Replacement Sprite

This section will teach you how to add your own texture that replaces the in-fight sprite.

1. Creating the Sprite:
   The in-game sprite is represented as part of a image, the visible sprite is 32x32px and there are 16 frames of animation in the image. This means that the source image is 512x32px, your replacement sprite will need to match this.
   
   
   
   Start by opening up MS paint or any drawing program of your preference and create a 512x64px image, this is so we have room for the template.
   
   Copy or Download this image:
   and place it at the bottom of the new image, this image is the texture for the Lance and we will be using it as a guide for our image.
   
   Count out 32 pixels from the left, this is the edge of the horizontal area for the right side view of whatever you will be replacing the Lance with. You don't have to start from the left, you can start where ever you want or where your reference image matches the angle of the template but stay within the 32px areas that the template reflects.
   
   Begin drawing, you can try to scale down an image, put it in and try to go from there but I bet you'll be most happy drawing it from scratch. If you want to copy a 3D model than start from the right side view and copy what you see into the 32spx area. Looking at the model from the front, roll it 22.5 degrees counter clockwise, return to the original viewing position and copy what you see into the next area, repeat this until your image is filled in.
   
   Here is a picture from developer WhyNot on how far to draw the wingtips:
   
   Congratulations! You've just done some simple art, don't forget to add proper shading to the image but don't post process it to look like its at a different time of day or anything from the template, the game will do that for you. Go ahead and crop out the bottom 32px from the image and start deleting the background, if you are using paint than make the background pixels something that stands out from the image and would be easy to identify as the background, next you can probably go online and find a website that will take those non transparent background pixels and make them transparent or you can ask a friend with a better image editor to help you out. Alternatively you can download Krita, its a free illustration program for use with a drawing pad but it works just fine with a mouse, it can do a lot of the stuff that Adobe Illustrator can do and it shouldn't take too long to get the hang of.
   
   Finally, export the image as a .png, this is so it retains its transparency, and name it "player_custom"
   
   
2. Getting The Sprite In The Game:
   Now that you have your image, locate it in your computers file browser and copy it to your clipboard, go into your steam library and right click on Jet Lancer, click properties, click on the LOCAL FILES tab at the top of the properties window and click BROWSE LOCAL FILES...
   
   Finally, paste the image into the list of files you see before you.

HURRAY! you're done, boot up Jet Lancer, start an operation and laugh in amazement as you watch Pickle Rick fly along and blow up Sky Pirates!

How To Replace The Music With Your Own

This section will teach you how to add your own music into Jet Lancer

Jet Lancers soundtrack is very interesting as it uses multiple tracks and plays them on top of each other, example: On the overworld map, the music contains guitar, drums and some 8-bit tunes but when you go into the load out or navigation menu the guitar and drums fade out and 8-bit drums fade in. This means we must create separate music tracks to fit the situation.

1. Finding A Song
   Jet Lancers soundtrack contains about 12 songs, 2 of those songs do not follow the layering style and those are the credits track and the cut scene track, you can easily throw in any song of your choice to replace those songs, see step 3 on how to do this. the other 10 are made up of 3-4 tracks.
   
   First, boot up the game and browse for the missions, credits and/or cutscene of your choice. Take a good mental note of what the scenes song sounds like, a good way to do this is listen for tune of the guitar.
   
   Go into your steam library and right click on jet lancer, open up the properties window and click the LOCAL FILES tab, click on BROWSE LOCAL FILES. The tracks for the game are right there in the file browser window you just opened. Now remember how I said to take note of the tune of the guitar, the guitar track is always on track layers 3 or 4. The end of each tracks file name has a number, that number is the track layer number. Open up each track that has the number 3 or 4 at the end in Groove Music, Windows Media Player, or another music player of your choice that supports the .OGG file format. Once you find the right track take note of the number to the left of the track layer number, that is the song number.
   
   Copy all the tracks with the song number that you chose into a folder on your computer that is easily accessible, this is so we don't mess with the games files while we're working and so we can easily place them back when we want to hear the original song in-game again.
   
   
2. Making The Music
   Create some tunes to go with the scene you chose, preferably each tune should be more complex than the last. Record and tweak them to your liking, then add them into the folder i mentioned earlier.
   
   
3. Getting The Music Into The Game
   NOTE: I have never replaced any of the songs with my own, if your replacement song is of a file format other that .ogg delete the original song and put in the replacement. If the song doesn't play or the game crashes on launch or something convert the song to .ogg. this can be done through an online file format converter website or in Audacity.
   
   If you have music for a layered scene please skip to the next paragraph. To replace the 2 non layered songs, take your song of choice and rename it "mus_credits" or "mus_cutscene" respectively. Copy and paste it into the same location as the track you are replacing, if prompted for a request of action select replace these files. The next time you activate that scene your replacement song should play instead of the original song.
   
   Now that you have your tracks, rename them to the exact same name as the original songs tracks. Copy the tracks and paste them into the same location as the tracks you are replacing, if prompted for a request of action select replace these files. The next time you activate that scene your replacement song should play instead of the original song.

Congratz! You now have replaced the old music with your own music, now go have a laugh as you listen to someone screaming during the entire mission and hear them fade in and out as you change scenes!

How To Make The Characters Say Whatever You Want

This section will teach you how to replace the dialogue in game with whatever you want

Modding the dialogue is easy.

1. Find The Dialogue
   If you read the previous tutorials you'll know where to find the game files. Once you reach the files you'll find a folder named dialogue and a file named "airshow_pre_mission" in a format labeled "Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File." This format can be easily edited with Notepad, the dialogue folder contains more files of the same format all named according to their place in the game.
   
   
2. Editing The Dialogue
   Here is a photo of what the files look like in Notepad:
   
   
   RED: The character that will be used in the line
   GREEN: The expression or "Emote" that the character will express
   CYAN: The pitch of the sound that the character makes when the line is played
   BLUE: The side of the screen that the character will show up on when the line is played
   BROWN: The line in the corresponding language that will be played
   
   Open the file in Notepad and go crazy. There are different commands that create different effects in the dialogue, place them at the beginning and end of what you want effected:
   
   • [g],[/g]: shaky/glitchy text
     
   • ^: red text
     
   • [c=xx][/c] list:
     01: quote text
     02: Yellow text?
     
   • [t=xx][t=xx] list: idk what these do, try them out and see what you get
     010: idk
     020: idk
     050: idk
     040: idk
     100: idk

Congrats! you did a word, now word that word 40 times in google translate to get funny.

How To Mess With The Textures

This tutorial will teach you how to mess with the textures, not too hard to do.

1. Setup:
   Go into the game files and copy the data.win file and paste it to somewhere secure. Go online to this website: https://yal.cc/r/17/yytextureview/. Its an in-browser texture replacer tool that can unpack and repack .win files. Next you'll want to open up your preferred illustration/photo editing software like MS Paint or Adobe, I use Krita cause its free. Finally you will want to open up an extra tab in your browser that we will use for step 2.
   
2. Using YY:
   First, open up the data.win file and in YY, do this by clicking Menu! and clicking Open... In the Menu! each listed function has a description of what it does whenever you hover over the option. What it doesn't tell you are what the Save? and Replace? options at the top of the window do, the Save? option downloads the currently selected texture map to a .png image. Scroll through the
   list of texture maps till you find a map with the texture you would like to replace and click Save?
   
3. Messing the texture:
   In your preferred illustration/photo editing software open up the tex### file you just downloaded and mess with the texture(s) how you want, if you can't find where a texture starts and stops go into YY and click the Show sprites option in the Menu!, from there you can RMB the texture to find out about it and the other textures it has in common with. When you are done save the texture map as a transparent .png like the one you downloaded and look at its file size, the file size must be the exact same or smaller than the original texture, if it is too big than YY will not Replace the texture map. In the Event the texture map is too big than try re-saving it with more compression if your software can do that, in some cases this isn't enough and this is where the extra tab comes in. When you go to replace the TM with a TM that is too big you will get this message: "The file (size of file in bytes) may not be larger than source (size of original file in bytes). Consider using a PNG optimizer like TinyPNG, PNGCrush, or PNGQuant." In the extra tab open up on of these suggested websites and run your new TM through it, KEEP IN MIND THAT THESE SITES MIGHT HAVE THE IDEA TO CRAM THE IMAGE FILE SIZE TO THE LOWEST IT CAN GO, NOT TO A LIMIT. IF YOU USE THESE SITES YOU MAY ENCOUNTER COMPRESSION ARTIFACTS SUCH AS ASH WEARING A POLKA DOT BOMBER JACKET
   
   
4. Finalizing the stuff:
   Once you have all your texture maps replaced to your liking than go to the Menu! and save as data.win, copy the downloaded file and paste it into the JL game files. When prompted with what to do with the old file click the replace option.

Congratz you did a mess, now clean it up jk. when you boot up JL your textures should be the ones you replaced. if you end up with a messy thing of white squares than go into the properties menu of the game in the steam library and verify game files. This will revert any modding you did to JL to vanilla game so make sure you saved your mods to somewhere secure! You can then take the good TM's from the vanilla data.win file and replace them with the TM you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and try again.

Now if you excuse me i must make the next tutorial AND accidentally duplicate Lem

How To Mess With The 3D Models

This tutorial will teach you how to replace the 3D models with your own. FYI THIS TUTORIAL IS A BIT WIP SO HANG ON TIGHT

1. Getting ready:
   The tools you will need are: Blender (Steam). Next import the 3D model of ur choice into Blender by any means necessary, you dont need textures on the model cause the textures are done through the data.win file, learn about the textures in the tutorial above.
   
   use this blender plugin i already extracted from the GMS store to export the model into JL
   
   https://discord.com/channels/540978173991452673/540978173991452677/1048700543540936745
   
   ty nicolai and plugin creator.
   
   
2. YESS NO YES YES NO YEEEESSS FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU:
   Here is the hardest heart breaking part of the tutorial, not all the .dat files in the game are the same, you cant change the lance in the hangar cause its tied to the hangar (but that's ok, we have the hanger.blend file! SEE How To Mess With The 3D Models PART 2!!!!). Good news is we can mess with the lance in the intro sequence and with other smaller bits like Lem's positions in the hangar. The hard bit, doing this is VERY FING HARD AND YOU WILL GET MAD AND TIRED, MAKE SURE TO SAVE EVERY LITTLE CHANGE. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY, but i will now teach you how to do the intro lance replacement.
   First take your model and export it as a .dat, copy the file and paste it into the intro folder in the JL game files, copy the opening_jet_s file and paste it somewhere secure, delete the opening_jet_s file in the intro folder and rename the file you exported to opening_jet_s. Start up JL and watch the intro, if you dont see your model than scale it up to about 1500 on all axis and repeat the process. Keep scaling and moving your model around in blender till you can figure out where it is and VERY SLOWLY FINE TUNE IT into place, this will take a while. you can try and replace other .dat files but i haven't done that yet, you will be in uncharted territory. My best fine tuning has gotten me to here until i lost track of it and gave up, still cool tho.

This is why i keep asking WhyNot to send the blend. Without a reference you will be running in circles.

There you go, that's how you mess with that. It's very hard but you can do it. payoff is great. now if you excuse me i must go and find a job cause Lauren wont reply to my emails. y u leave me on read after asking to interview me.

How to Mod THE GAME... saves and other stuff

This section will teach you how to change some parts of the games configuration and save data.

Getting Ready: open up your file browser of choice and go to YOUR WINDOWS BOOT DRIVE:\Users\YOUR USER ACCOUNT\AppData\Local\JetLancer
if you own a Mac pls tell me where the equivalent would be so i can update this part.

Here is where you will find all the files you will need for editing the game configs and stuff.

Things you can do:

1. Change the Config:
   
   In the config you can change a bunch of settings, most of them can already be changed in the settings in JL but there are some that can only be changed in the config file. Open up the config file using a text editor such as notepad now you can change the game. Here is a photo of what you can change.
   
   UPDATE: under [custom] you will find a rain_shader option. Remove the - from the -1 and save the file. boot up JL and have fun

How To Mess With The 3D Models Pt. 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WhyNot has provided us with the hangar.blend model for us to use in our next trick, Putting your own aircraft in the hangar!

https://discord.com/channels/540978173991452673/540978173991452677/1019701360083611749

with this we can use the hangar for our own purposes.

step 1: download the blender file and the image

step 2: download the export to gamemaker .dat file plugin for blender. i might have it here somewhere.

https://discord.com/channels/540978173991452673/540978173991452677/1048700543540936745

Step 3: replace whatever you want in the hangar with your model. When dealing with textures, copy the og hangar shaders from the shading tab into the aircraft's shaders. modify and wrap your model into your custom hangar texture then replace texture 55 in the data.win file using this tool

import data.win into here, replace texture with your new one (MUST BE SAME FILE SIZE OR LESS), export it and replace the og one.

https://yal.cc/game-tools/yytextureview/

export the full data.win file, save the og file from the game files, put your new one in.



NOTE: when i did this the sky in the BG broke, idr how it works but it should be wrapped to tex 54. i might look more into this but hey, you got your thing in and that's what matters.

NOTE 2: This will break the Lem random spawns and Lem will appear in all positions in the hangar unless you remove all the other Lems and have one. but why, MULTILEM!

Step 4: export the .dat file and save the old file in the game files.

Step 5: rename the new .dat to the name of the hangar.dat file idk nut it should be similar in name.

Step 6: test it to see if it works, if it crashes on load then it didn't work or you really messed something up. if it crashes when you select the credits (which loads the hangar) then somethings wrong with the export or it didn't work. if your aircraft is missing or the hangar itself is gone entirely then you messed up the textures or it didn't work. trial and error, it will work trust me!

Step 7: brag about it on the discord! you did it! congrats


that concludes this tutorial! i hope you had fun!

[RoboRogue]

shaders can be from 1 to 4 (only whole numbers) and change the weather

[silly lil girl]

The amount of stuff you put out into the JL community is insane

[Palandus]

Finding the correct hex values in a modern game, is a lesson in masochism.

[did353]

You can change the damage values and reloading speed and all that fun stuff with cheat engine, but you'll have to find the correct hex values.

[2theMAX the Stair Fax]

there is no way to do that because it requires access to a devs copy of the game that could be modified using GameMaker Studio.

[Palandus]

How do you do numerical modding? ie The reload speed of weapons, or the damage dealt by a missile?

[MysteriumNebula]

Nah, for me - it's easier to make my own sprites

[2theMAX the Stair Fax]

you could import all the characters

[MysteriumNebula]

It's time... For StarFox mod.
(Or I'll just make airwing sprite... Still counts!)

[2theMAX the Stair Fax]

ive fixed the images