Welcome back to the "monthly" recap! I was too busy last month, so this'll cover the past 2 months.
Firstly, ZMenu and ZChaos have seen a lot of global updates, with a fair amount of quality-of-life improvements and more global chaos effects.
ZMenu now has an in-game custom hotkey creator! Say goodbye to having to manually calculate menu option numbers, say hello to enabling Custom Keybind Creator in Trainer Settings and pressing LCtrl + Enter when highlighting an option you want to create a hotkey. Everything can be set up in-game now, so you can change the key it's bound to, the subtitle displayed, and also edit existing hotkeys without exiting the game. Do note that this change also moves the custom hotkeys to a different file, so if you had custom hotkeys before, you're going to have to recreate them using the new system.
On the ZChaos side, Guitar Hero has a scoreboard now! Each song has its own leaderboard, with the notes hit and the highest streak both displayed. I've put a few of my own scores on there, good luck beatin' em.
I've added a new minigame: Plants vs Zombies. This is once again a way too high effort recreation of the actual PvZ game, but with Pepegas protecting your lawn against xdds. It's a regular daytime level with a few basic plants, and is technically endless, but gets next to impossible after enough time, so it can't actually go on forever.
All minigames now have Hardcore variants, with Hardcore Pong having much better AI, Hardcore Tetris starting at Level 10, Hardcore Snake starting at the fastest speed, and Hardcore Plants vs Zombies being a pool level with much more advanced plant and zombie types.
I've also added a fully chat controlled version of Tetris. One line makes one Griefer Jesus/Manny spawn, so have fun with that.
Most ZChaos mods also have a rewards menu after a minigame now, so you can pick between various benefits instead of always getting No Chaos time.
I've also done quite a bit of noteworthy stuff for GTA IV.
ZPatch now automatically downgrades the game for you, completely getting rid of the hassle and just making you able to play the game properly as soon as you get the mod.
Aside from that, ZPatch has also had quite a few fixes and new features. For example, the mouse fix option now fixes the mouse deadzone in all cases, instead of just while aiming as it did previously. This works without changing the mouse sensitivity at all, unlike other mods that claim to fix it. I've also completely removed mouse acceleration from the sniper scope, making snipers just as easy to use as any other weapon.
FastLoading has also been improved in major ways, it no longer reduces the framerate when in-game, and so is now enabled by default. It still has the same drastic effect on loading times, but now without any downsides.
I've also added a new option to the mod, NewFilesCompatibility, which allows the game to load files (script.img, radiohud.dat) from the inferior Steam releases without causing bugs, reducing the amount of extra files required to downgrade the game.
SkipLauncher and LaunchWithPlayGTAIV have been improved, the latter no longer needs to be turned off to launch the game through LaunchGTAIV.exe, and the former now completely gets rid of all anti-piracy checks, no longer activating drunk cam. This means ZPatch no longer has to be configured after installing depending on whether you're using LaunchGTAIV or PlayGTAIV, and the only file required to downgrade the game now is GTAIV.exe.
On the ZMenu side, I've added support for debug widgets, meaning the TLAD debug scripts can finally be used to their full potential with ZMenu, and any widgets left in the retail scripts can be messed with as well.
I've also added support for saving tuned cars in parking spaces, the savegame will now properly keep tuning parts, neons and performance upgrades, even if shared across multiple PCs.
SP Co-op has been updated quite a bit as well, with tons of improvements to TBoGT in particular, fixing crashes and softlocks in various missions.
IV Tweaker has been updated a bit too, with support for loading shaders, as well as quite a few new limits that can be tweaked, including the weapon limit (which has now been removed from ZPatch to keep things consistent) which now no longer introduces issues with ragdolls and projectiles if used. Handling limits can be changed as well, meaning FLA is now no longer required if you're not using custom vehicle sounds.
III/VC/SA have also seen a few minor updates recently, the speedrun timer in ZHalfLife now has splits support across the board, as well as an option for making the timer count RTA time the same way as LiveSplit does.
I've also added Distribution to ZChaos SA, so have fun with that.
I've updated ZChaos V quite a lot too, it now has an option to clear negative effects if they got the game stuck in a mission fail loop, as well as a ton of new effects and improvements all around.
NFS has seen a lot of updates recently, from ZMenu to ZChaos and MapLoader.
ZMenu for Underground 1 and 2 now has Turbo and Superbrake options, MapLoader now runs an order of magnitude faster with zero loss of quality, and ZChaos ProStreet now has most of the effects from the newest versions of ZChaos Most Wanted.
I've updated my FlatOut mods quite a lot as well. ZMenu for FlatOut 1 is now up to par with FlatOut 2 and UC, with the same options, same menu layout, same chaos effects, and the same new features e.g. being able to change car skin while in a race.
ZPatch for FlatOut 1 now has the same widescreen fix feature as the FlatOut 2 one, fixing almost all HUD elements in-game and in the menus without ruining the entire menu layout like other widescreen fixes do. The menu and in-game world scaling has also been updated to be proper HOR+, consistent across all aspect ratios. The borderless windowed option also doesn't require DXVK anymore.
ZMenu Saints Row 3 has also been updated a little, with minor improvements to the VR mod, and cleanups to the menu layout.
My standalone projects have been worked on quite a bit too.
ZHero now has proper chart loading which should be virtually identical to Clone Hero, with various errors in the reader fixed.
ZMenu Minigame Pack now has all of the minigames, including hardcore variants. I've also fixed the issue with HUD scaling if you tabbed out before the game fully loaded in.
I've also released a new standalone project, Pepegas vs Zombies. This is the Plants vs Zombies chaos effect separated into its full standalone game, with 50 campaign levels, progression, endless survival levels, chat control, and even its own Chaos Mod.