Guide An introduction to MUGEN

[Shana Fenix]

Heya and welcome to the introductionary MUGEN thread!
As I've seen the good ol' "How do I start out with Hentai MUGEN?" a fair bit on here (nothing wrong with that, obviously) I thought it might be a good idea to post an up-front introduction to the whole thing. That being said, let's dive right into it!

Starting out
First of all I would recommend grabbing a base game, like @gettagmk2 's Starter edition found in his thread here.
Alternatively you could also grab the very default MUGEN 1.1b and start from scratch. That however is only recommended for people with a bit of experience on how to change screenpacks and everything to their liking. It can be found

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, if desired.

Adding characters and stages
"But the selection is limited! How do I add new things?" you might ask, and you are right to do so. It's a bit of manual work but is fairly easy. Here's how:
Download the desired character and unpack it. You should have a single folder with all the files needed inside of it, among those a .def file. The name of the folder as well as the name of the .def file should optimally be the same just to make things a bit more simple.
Next you will want to take that folder and put it into your "chars" folder located in the MUGEN folder.
Afterwards, go to the data folder and open up select.def. There should be a [Characters] header. Anywhere below this, but above the [ExtraStages] header add "CharacterName, random" without quotation marks, CharacterName being the name of the folder/.def file of the character you downloaded.
This same thing works the same way with stages, just replace the chara folder with the stages folder and put "stages\StageName.def" below the [ExtraStages] header instead.

Where to get additional characters, though?
A good question! And one that has many answers. There's the threads here on ULMF in the download section, then there's

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and for the heavily bored there's also the japanese

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site. Note that the latter is a bit hard to look through and the password for downloading MOST files is ryona2.



Now that should cover the bare minimum to get you started!
Should you have any further questions let me know and I will answer them as best I can!
Any suggestions on how to expand this guide are also appreciated!

 

[billy jones]

Everything here is great but you also should include that If your planning on going to mugenarchive and downloading those +18 edits it's recommended to make a account and hope you get activated since if you find a download you like and it's more then 10MB your gonna get that "Unregistered users may not download files larger than 10 MB. Please register an account." msg
Also know that your download is limited for some reason. You only get to download like 4-5 files a day?
Also know that you can't download 50 MB+ if you are a "lurker". Your status is important there. (hint: Don't spam. If you do your gonna have a bad time and you will get banned for spamming comments on those edits)
You should also add

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. It's a FAQ to help those who are new and are planning to visit mugenarchive.
There is also this tool here called

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. That will GREATLY kill time if you don't like editing those files. It's simple and easy to use. Great for adding new characters you like. There also a tutorial on how to use it too!

 

[Shana Fenix]

Hmm, while I see your point about VSelect I must say that using the program felt very convoluted and overcomplicated for what it was doing compared to just editing the files but that may just be me... x) It was also very slow and crashed a lot on bigger installs.
As for the rest - I feel like adding that to the post would bloat it a bit too much with information that is either easily obtainable by oneself or gets thrown at you the moment you go to that site. Again, this is just how I see things X3
That being said, if anything the info is now available in your post ; )

 

[Ancient Scholar]

I think this might need some more step by step instructions. I've tried doing what this says but its still not working. Looking online gives me different info. The select def has something about adding kfm which isn't mentioned at all in this intro. Luckily VSelect was able to solve the problem.

 

[Shana Fenix]

What more "steps" do you need besides all steps required? KFM is nothing but the stock character which you can ignore in its entirety unless you actually want him in. Reasons of why it might not have worked doing it manually that I can think of right now would be either a mistake on your end or the folder and def file having different names. The latter can be worked with but generally speaking that's pretty bad practice since it complicates things for the average user.