MUGENext
What’s M.U.G.E.N?
M.U.G.E.N is a 2D fighting game engine, originally released in 1999. M.U.G.E.N was originally designed for users to create games that matched the technology level of 2D fighters from the mid ’90s. However, it quickly evolved to become highly customizable, allowing very fine control over each character’s behavior. In fact, there are custom games for M.U.G.E.N that don’t behave like your typical 2D fighter.
The majority of content created for M.U.G.E.N tend to be distributed as individual characters, stages or motifs (motifs are like themes, that control the look and feel of the game). Assembling a game is as simple as downloading the content of your choice, and configuring M.U.G.E.N to know about it.
M.U.G.E.N is designed to be used by people with little or no programming experience, but with some artistic talent and patience to learn. Of course, having some programming background does give you a bit of a headstart. However, if you are just looking to play with downloaded content, all you need to know is how to unzip files and edit a text file.
What’s MUGENext?
MUGENext is a M.U.G.E.N based replacement engine. It’s designed to perform exactly like the original engine, supporting everything and also adding some new features.
Elecbyte, the creators of M.U.G.E.N have a bad reputation of dropping a new version, then disappearing afterwards, lacking continued support. Another issue is its licensing terms, disallowing commercial usage. MUGENext tries to fix these “issues”, allowing commercial usage of the engine (respecting content copyright, of course) and offering continued support (guaranteed updates over time).
MUGENext is developed in C++ using modern compilers and Allegro 5 (a gaming library). M.U.G.E.N was originally developed in C and Allegro, so we keep the root trend and level it up to modern stardards. Allegro supports multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and more), so we want to distribute it in all platforms we can, not just Windows like the original engine.
Core features
Here’s a sampling of features you can find:
- Customizable title screen, character select screen, life and power
bars, game sound effects, fonts and more. - Characters can have any number of sounds and sprites of any size
limited by your computer’s memory. - Choose from multiple resolutions, ranging from 320×240 up to full
HD at 1920×1080. - Cutscenes, both animated or video playback.
Game Engine:
- Use up to 7 buttons for a character.
- Regular moves, special moves, super moves, etc.
- Projectiles and special effects.
- Move cancels and combos, multi-part moves and throws.
- What your character can do is defined by a scripting language (and
your imagination).