April update

Welcome to the monthly recap, almost half a month late as always!

In Chaos news, most of my larger chaos mods have seen updates this past month, and they're fairly big updates too. Firstly, there are difficulty settings now! If you think the mod is too hard, you can simply turn down the difficulty and still enjoy the less harmful effects, while if you think the mod is too easy, you can crank it up to Ultra-Nightmare and see how that works out for you.

Secondly, there's achievements and stat tracking! You can get achievements for getting specific effect combos (e.g. Portrait Mode + Anti-Portrait Mode) or doing something cool with specific effects (e.g. reach 1000km/h with Big Rigs Handling active) These achievements are saved permanently and you can do multiple runs to attempt to get them all (although I wouldn't recommend it as some of them are very hard to complete) Stat tracking is quite simple as well; the mod now tracks your total playtime, and some game-specific stats e.g. missions passed and deaths in GTA. Some achievements are tied to these.

I've also added a Quick Setup menu that guides you through the configuration process for the mod, since the options were getting too complicated with how many features ZChaos has.

There's a lot of new effects across the board, too. You can now play Pong, Tetris and Guitar Hero as self-contained chaos minigames, granting you rewards if you play them well. Pong is quite simple and just requires you to win once, Tetris is a fairly authentic recreation of the game and you can go as high as your skills will allow (it even has a leaderboard with some runners' best times if you want to compete!) and Guitar Hero is an even more authentic recreation, with an almost 1:1 set of mechanics from the actual games, in which you'll have to complete one song on the hardest difficulty to continue. There's also controller support, so if you've played Guitar Hero before, you'll have a really easy time getting the maximum rewards whenever the minigame comes up.

NFS Chaos has a few more minigames as well, namely Distribution and Taxi Driver, both based on the GTA side-missions. Speaking of NFS Chaos, Most Wanted and Carbon now have separate ZChaos builds! You don't have to get the entirety of ZMenu anymore to play Chaos.

In non-Chaos news, ZPatch for GTA IV has been updated for the first time in a while, adding a fix to the notorious speedup bug that can randomly occur and make the entire game run faster than it should, even on a low framerate.

I've also released a new mod for San Andreas (though this has been in ZMenu for a while) modernizing the keyboard & mouse control layout, making it much more like GTA IV, with separate binds for planes, helis and cars, tons of more specific keybinds, and quality-of-life features like being able to zoom the radar out.

FlatOut 2 has had some updates too, FO2MapLoader now has almost the same features and format as NFS Map Loader, though you'll still have to compile collisions manually. This means the entire San Andreas map is now technically possible in FlatOut 2 as well.

That's about it for this month, thank you to all patrons for your support as always!

March update

Welcome to another monthly recap! Almost on time, too! Let's get into it.

Firstly, most of my Chaos mods now have an option to trigger a random effect whenever someone subcribes on Twitch! If you have a large audience, this can lead to a LOT of chaos, especially if they're ready to drop tons of giftsubs.

In more specific Chaos news, I've pushed major updates to ZChaos III and VC, backporting almost all of the effects from my SA chaos mod into those games. Say hi to Griefer Jesus, Pepega World, Low Res Gaming, Forced Geoguessr and a lot more.

ZMenu has also had a few changes recently, ZMenu V has been updated with a few quality of life improvements, such as a Search menu that makes it way easier to find menu options, IV Handling no longer causing all vehicles to get deleted, tons of small fixes, and even a wireframe toggle.

And lastly, thank you to DeSinc for making a video on ZHalfLife for GTA V! Can't say I expected that one.

February update

Thank you for all your support, and welcome to another "monthly" recap. This one is gonna be pretty huge so let's just get into it.

First off, I've created a game! Kind of! It's basically just ZMenu features shoved together with a DX9-based engine I wrote, but it does have planes, cars, helicopters and bunnyhopping, and that's all that matters.

Secondly, Chaos has received a ton of new updates for a variety of games! Need for Speed finally has Griefer Jesus, and tons of the usual spawning effects like TABLE, Spawn 24/7, and Spawn Swingset. A lot more effects have been ported over from GTA as well, like the drunk cam, Definitive Edition and more.

Speaking of Chaos, I've released a brand new Chaos Mod for Half-Life 2! It already has more than 100 effects, many of which are from GTA and/or NFS, but it has a ton of exclusive effects as well. Special thanks to JeepyGMI for being the first person to playtest it live.

And finally a pretty unexpected one, I've created a tool that loads custom maps into NFS games, including Most Wanted, Carbon, ProStreet and World! All maps made with the tool are cross compatible, and they have proper collisions, LOD support, and streaming. As an example, Liberty City and San Andreas from the 3D universe have both been fully ported using this tool and are stable. The framerate might fluctuate on unoptimized maps but if the map is optimized it can be fairly high, i.e. on Liberty City you can easily get above 100FPS.

January update

Thank you to all patrons for your support! Here's this month's recap.

I couldn't write one last month due to a lack of free time and PC issues, so this one is gonna cover everything I've done in the past 2 months.

First off, I've created a new mod for almost all the games I support, a near-identical recreation of Half-Life movement, including bunnyhopping, ABH, surfing, rocketjumping, and even working viewmodels for some games. This has taken up most of my time in the past month, and some actual Half-Life speedrunners have used the mod and have reported that it's pretty damn accurate to HL. You can find these mods on my site, either as part of ZMenu or as a separate mod called ZHalfLife, for Assetto Corsa, GTA III, VC, SA, IV and V, FlatOut 2, RDR2, Saints Row 3, Midtown Madness 2, Re-Volt, as well as NFS Most Wanted, Carbon, ProStreet and Undercover.

Speaking of NFS, I've added tons of new effects to Chaos for all of the NFS games I support, and released ZChaos separately for ProStreet and Undercover, available on GitHub and my site.

On the Rockstar side, I've finally released ZMenu for RDR2! It includes all the usual features, as well as the Half-Life movement option and a full mission creator! It also doesn't require a script hook of any kind, you can drag and drop the mod into your game and it'll just work.

I've also added quite a few new things to the GTA chaos mods, including hundreds of new effects (one of which is the infamous Griefer Jesus, now in ZChaos for San Andreas, and more extreme than ever) and tons of balancing and stability improvements as well as fixes to existing effects.

As for Persona, I've released ZMenu for Persona 4 Golden! This has been in development for a while since the new x64 PC port accidentally released early, so I've had a bit of time to work on it. Nevertheless it's still a WIP, but it does have quite a few of the same features as the Persona 5 Royal one.

And lastly, thank you to everyone who has played my mods and showed them on YouTube and Twitch, including JeepyGMI, PSP1G, Hugo_One, Vargskelethor, ToastedMildly, and many others!

November update

Thank you to all patrons for your support! Here's this month's recap.

GTA has come back into the spotlight this month, with a ton of improvements to Chaos Mod, as well as an entire separate release of ZChaos on my GitHub for GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas! The mod itself behaves identically to ZMenu Chaos, except chaos is the only menu available and the mod is enabled by default instead of having to turn it on every time. There have also been around a hundred new effects added this month across the 3 games, each one more mind-bending than the last.

My chaos mods in general have improved a lot recently, with everything from small quality-of-life updates like being able to automatically reconnect to Twitch, to massive fixes and added customizability, like being able to almost completely change the look of the effect display, the amount of effects available for voters, and the ability to have multiple instances of the same effect run with separate timers. A new global effect has also been added that allows voters to type the names of effects into the chat to trigger them.

All my ZMenus for the Need for Speed games have been updated with some substantial backend improvements and a huge amount of new effects for Chaos as well, including all of the global updates listed above.

ZMenu for Persona 5 has also been updated, with the usual amount of new Chaos effects, and some new features, such as being able to edit extra stats and Jazz Club stats for your Personas, change the behavior of ailments and attacks (e.g. have all moves drain, or have all ailments and ailment chances always inflict a specific ailment, even for bosses) as well as an experimental VR feature that has fully functional roomscale head tracking for any VR headset.

October update

Thank you to all patrons for your support! Here's this month's recap.

First off, I have released ZMenu for Persona 5 Royal less than a week after the game's release! With no compromises either, the P5R ZMenu is quite possibly one of the most feature-packed mods I have created so far, rivaling ZMenu for GTA IV in the amount of options, with everything from a randomizer for enemies, skills and personas, to a chaos mod, playermodel changing, editing your party, items, personas, security level, confidants, social stats, money, flowers, P Medals, stamps, change the date, a mouse & keyboard freecam, an option to disable keyboard/mouse input, warping to any level, the ability to start any encounter or event, disable pausing when window focus is lost, change the BGM, and even VR support with roomscale head tracking. ZMenu isn't the only project I've created during that time either, I have also created P5ScriptHook, a way for people to make .asi plugins that use the game's own script functions as well as some other helpful features such as being able to hook DirectX.

On the topic of large projects, I've created a Chaos Mod for NFS World! It's entirely serverside, meaning if the server host installs the mod, everyone in the server will have chaos effects applied to them at random, making it the least skill-based multiplayer racing game(TM). I'm hosting a server with the mod, add this address to your Soapbox Launcher and you'll be able to try it out: http://158.101.223.186:8080/Engine.svc I've also released a lite version of ZMenu for the game, with all of the useful features such as freecam but none of the ones that can be used to gain an unfair advantage.

Other NFS games have also had their fair share of updates, including tons of new chaos effects for everything from Underground 1 to Undercover, as well as some new options for Most Wanted and Carbon like being able to slide off walls. Menu flickering has also been completely fixed on both ProStreet and Undercover.

FlatOut ZMenus have been improved a lot, ZMenu for FlatOut 1 is now fully on par with 2 and UC in features, except for the ones relating to game mechanics that weren't present in FO1. 2 and UC have been restructured a bit too, with some additional minor features.

GTA has been low on my priority list recently, but there's still been a few updates nonetheless. I've ported over the chaos QoL updates to all of the GTA ZMenus, fixed compatibility with Widescreen Fix on GTA III (it was a bug on Widescreen Fix's end with outlines, but I worked around it anyway), and added spray tag teleports to GTA SA.

September update

There has been a massive surge of support this month, thank you to all patrons as usual! Here's the monthly recap.

Firstly, I've released a full-blown VR mod for Saints Row: The Third and the new Saints Row reboot! Part of ZMenu, complete with motion controls and support for the Rift, Vive, Index and likely every other headset, it brings the entire game into VR with a surprising level of immersion.

Secondly, I made a new ZMenu for Sleeping Dogs! It's got the same options that you'd expect, such as Chaos with over 100 effects including some brand new ones, as well as One-Hit KO, freecam, car spawning, ped spawning, and even explosion spawning.

Speaking of new ZMenus, I've ported ZMenu to NFS Underground, including almost all of the features that the Underground 2 one had, like Chaos, playermodel changing, car scale, and many more, as well as some exclusive options such as being able to force the track ID to any track in any gamemode, including the unused Test Track and being able to roam around on the drag tracks.

And while not exactly a new release, I've also rewritten the entire ZMenu for FlatOut 1, adding Chaos to it as well as almost every feature that was previously missing here but was in the ZMenus for 2 and UC, such as taking opponents' car parts, and a working mouselook for the custom first person camera.

On the GTA front, I've released updates for the GTA V, IV, SA, VC and III ZMenus with tons of fixes and improvements as well as new features and chaos effects. ZMenu for GTA IV has seen a major restructuring of the Misc menu once again, making it easier to navigate and find options in, and a complete rewrite of the Free Camera option, now with support for attaching the camera to entities seamlessly. ZMenu for GTA III & VC has been updated too, bringing the same restructuring of menu options over to those games.

For Chaos, I've separated the mod from ZMenu for GTA SA and V, releasing them separately as ZChaos, which is useful for anyone who doesn't want ZMenu itself as well as for the sake of having a dedicated "Chaos Mod". Chaos is still bundled with ZMenu and will continue to get the same updates, this is just a lighter alternative way to get Chaos.

I've also put out a full list of chaos effects for GTA V, GTA SA, and all NFS games onto my site, with their default lengths, descriptions, notes and image previews. This should help anyone voting for effects in a Twitch stream to know what any particular new effect does.

August update

There has been a massive surge of support this month, thank you to all patrons as usual! Here's the monthly recap.

This month was quite eventful! I have set a new personal record in ZMenu development, having released a fully fledged ZMenu for the new Saints Row reboot within only 2 days of its release, and by the end of the release week, Chaos Mod was already implemented as well as almost every other big feature ZMenu is known for.

Other ZMenus have also had their fair share of updates, all NFS ZMenus now have authentic versions of the GTA 2 top down camera, as well as the Buttsbot and Shoutouts to SimpleFlips text-changing options. Almost every ZMenu from GTA V to NFS and Saints Row now also has an option to switch the vehicle camera to a faithful recreation of the GTA SA camera, as well as a helpful on-screen keyboard to make manual input menus usable with controllers. Most of them have also had some major restructuring done, namely the Misc menu now has more subcategories and is organized a lot better.

ZMenu for Saints Row: The Third has been overhauled, with many new options as well as fixes, for example One-Hit KO now has a Hard Mode toggle, vehicles can now be repainted, and there's an option to change helicopter controls to a control scheme that resembles the GTA games.

ZMenu for FlatOut 2 and UC has been improved a little as well, allowing for mouse camera rotation in the First Person camera.

ZMenu for GTA IV has seen a lot of updates too, although they are mostly ones already listed above. Some game-specific changes include a complete rewrite of Free Camera, now with near-perfect support for attaching to entities, as well as an option in Ped Spawning to spawn attacking enemy peds.

July update

Thank you to all patrons for your continued support!

This month wasn't as eventful as the last one, but there have still been quite a few notable updates and releases.

All ZMenus have been updated to the newest shared features, such as the new UI design, and all the chaos fixes, additions and improvements.

ZMenu for GTA IV has been almost completely restructured, making a ton of previously hard-to-find options be easy to reach, as well as some improvements to car tuning and car model handling which means all of my new car ports from now on will require this ZMenu version or newer.

ZMenu for GTA SA has had a lot of updates, making the first person camera a lot more usable and enjoyable, such as player rotation, a static camera for vehicles, and some minor and major fixes. Chaos has also been updated with more effects and tons of fixes, as well as some minor fixes to IV Style Controls, for example the scrollwheel is now bindable again!

ZMenu for GTA V has been updated with some minor fixes such as compatibility with 2699, as well as some new chaos effects, and some crashes and stutters fixed. Building Scale now also has an option to center the scaling on the player, which results in some quite interesting effects.

ZMenu for FlatOut UC now has options to enable up to 32 opponents, change car paint color, make all cars cycle through a rainbow, as well as some minor fixes.

ZPatch for GTA IV has also been updated which is quite a rare event, this update fixes VRamFix, now rendering commandline obsolete for everything except -windowed.

I have also had some other ventures not directly coding related, specifically in TrackMania, to which I have converted the entirety of San Andreas and Vice City, with GTA IV's Liberty City currently in progress as well.

June update

This month was quite eventful, thank you to all patrons for your support! Let's just get straight into it.

ZMenu IV has of course had quite a few additions and fixes as per usual, this month saw the addition of a color picker, a speedrun timer with automatic splits, Vehicle OHKO and Object OHKO, some chaos effects made into standalone toggles such as Bouncy Cars and One Bullet Mags, as well as the largest update, a massive revisit of SP Co-op with optimizations for usability, simplicity and the gameplay experience, adding proper sync for blips, subtitles, objective text and cutscenes!

I have also created a new ZMenu for Re-Volt (compatible with RVGL) with over 150 chaos effects, car spawning, playermodel changing, object spawning, and many more features that everyone's come to expect from the GTA menus.

ZMenu for GTA III and VC have been updated with major improvements and tons of new chaos effects, increasing the effect count from 150 to over 300! Many new options have been added in general, including an autosave option and toggling the on-mission flag manually.

ZMenu for GTA SA has also had massive updates, bringing the chaos effect count to over 400! Many of these effects are brand new, but lots are returning effects from my chaos for NFS and other games. Scale options have also been cleaned up, and you can now scale buildings, objects and cars as well as peds.

Massive thanks to everyone who has streamed any of the ZMenu chaos mods this month, including Hugo_One, Droosy, KuruHS, ZombiegamingHD7, IrishCoffee and anyone else who I didn't manage to catch live.

May update

Happy Pride Month everyone! Let's recap all of last month's events and updates.

ZMenu for GTA V has had a ton of new updates again! The Chaos Mod feature has had a massive update, and is now at a respectable effect count of 303 compared to the previous versions which only had around 150. Tons of new features have been added as well, such as editing the phone, crouching, starting scripts, a full weapon data editor, player, ped & car scaling, drunk cam and much more.

GTA IV wasn't forgotten about either, player scale is finally correct! You can make Niko as wide, tall, thin, short or long as you want without him turning into an eldritch monstrosity (though you can reenable the old behavior if you do wish to do that) it now also has a Vehicle OHKO option, making either the player's car or ALL cars explode at the slightest touch (or catch on fire if Easy Mode is enabled) as well as Object OHKO which is likely the hardest and most chaotic challenge ever created for this game, making ALL objects explode upon contact and/or damage, including poles, doors, weapon pickups, money, equipped weapons, dropped hats, dropped food, detached car parts, and too many other things to list them all. Good luck to anyone who tries to finish the game this way.

ZMenu GTA SA was updated this month as well, adding the same player scale fixes as well as tons of chaos improvements and new chaos effects.

Chaos improvements have also been done to ZMenu for GTA III & GTA VC, though these games didn't get too many other updates due to my current lack of interest in them.

As for mod requests, thank you to Internet Rob for requesting continued updates to the GTA IV scenario mod.

April update

Here's the monthly update for April, there were a ton of new events and updates this month!

I have updated ZMenu for FlatOut 2 and FlatOut Ultimate Carnage, adding chaos mods with over 100 effects for each one along with the usual Twitch voting support, as well as modernizing the menu itself along with its UI, fixing tons of bugs that were present in the older versions from 2021.

ZMenu for GTA IV has had a ton of updates as well, increasing the amount of chaos effects from around 250 to over 330! Many chaos effects have been added into the menu itself as regular options as well, such as honk boosting and a toggle for the on-mission flag.

There is now also a ZMenu for Midtown Madness 2 with the usual options including chaos, and a potential new one in progress for Motocross Madness 2 as well.

Almost all of the ZMenu chaos mods have had tons of updates this month, improving and extending them from the feedback and experience from numerous Twitch streamers, such as DustinEden, DoVe_7, KuruHS and Hugo_One. There are a ton of new effects across the board as well as a save/load feature for settings so you don't have to set everything up each restart.

In terms of mod requests, thank you to Armani Diamond for requesting a revamped HUD for GTA V.

March update

Here's the monthly status update as per usual, this month was quite eventful!

Firstly, I now have a website! All of my mods as well as my Discord, Patreon and YouTube can be found here, along with changelogs and descriptions for each mod.

ZMenu for GTA SA, IV, V, NFS Most Wanted, Carbon and ProStreet now have full Twitch voting support for their chaos mods, just connect to a Twitch channel's chat and it will pop up a voting window, after which all votes are read from chat and used to pick each new effect.

Chaos mod has now been implemented into NFS ProStreet, which currently has over 80 effects and Twitch voting support. NFS Most Wanted and NFS Carbon have also had a few more effects added, they now both have over 120 effects implemented.

The chaos mod for my GTA IV ZMenu has had a full rework to port it to the updated chaos system that I've been using for NFS games.

ZMenu itself has expanded at an unprecedented rate to many more games this month. There are now menus for Saints Row: The Third, NFS ProStreet, NFS Undercover and NFS Underground 2. The existing NFS menus have also been highly improved with many more features as well as UI fixes, making the UI have much less bugs and higher compatiblity, for example they display properly on Intel GPUs now.

ZMenu for Saints Row: The Third includes many brand new features for the game, such as first person camera, free camera, chaos mod with Twitch voting and over 70 effects, ped and car spawning, removing map boundaries, removing speed limits from cars, airbreak, and much more.

ZPatch has also seen a few more releases recently, such as a fix for the double finish screen in NFS Carbon and a fix for the crash when hitting large objects with AI cop cars in NFS Most Wanted.

ZMenu for Red Dead Redemption 2 is nearing completion, although it still has some issues to iron out, so stay tuned on that front.

I have released the results of my research and reverse engineering of NFS Carbon onto GitHub as Carbon-SDK, which can be used to make your own mods for the game in a much easier fashion. Both ZMenu and ZPatch for the game have been built off of this project.

In terms of mod requests, thank you to Armani Diamond for requesting a fuel system for GTA V.