iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Great art!! I think I'm getting one of the ideas...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Happy 11th, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

He was a true patriot o7

Metal Gear Solid 4 screenshot, a tombstone behind The Boss's grave that says "LEEROY BAINES **NKINS"

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Here's the original game. Night and day, I know! But if I can try to bridge the difference between games through the limited ways I'm allowed, I'll try it.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

For reference, here's how the mod's cutscene looked before I fixed the issue. This really stumped me since the location is supposed to have this turned down by default. I'd been spending the last few days adjusting the events to make it look accurate to the original game.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Updated with no ugly bright blue directional light all over the ending cutscenes

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

I've recently been rediscovering how good the original Metal Gear feels to play. I love how fast you can recognize the room Snake is in. Beautiful work, man

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Snake in 1974/5 wears the FOX emblem on that same shoulder, the unit he's no longer part of. In 1984, Venom Snake wears the Old Mother Base emblem - his former unit, or the player's emblem - a symbol of their former identity.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

The artwork is based on this TGS 2014 live demo screenshot. Before a January 2015 tweet, the custom emblem had not been seen on Snake's shoulder in any public pre-release footage. www.metalgearinformer.com/snake-hangs-...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

According to a tweet by Ludvig Forssell, the track "Regret and Acceptance" from the MGSV Extended Soundtrack is made from excerpts of music that didn't make it into Episode 43, "SHINING LIGHTS, EVEN IN DEATH". www.youtube.com/watch?v=RizF...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

On page 043 of the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain issue of CGWORLD, a screenshot of the cutscene event editor is shown on a frame of the opening cutscene of Episode 11: HELLBOUND. As opposed to the final game, the spotlight behind Skull Face here is red, and not white.

Page 043 of CGWORLD magazine issue covering Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Close-up on the screenshot of the cutscene editor, the spotlight on Skull Face is red

Screenshot from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the spotlight on Skull Face is white

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

And a happy new year!!! www.nexusmods.com/metalgearsol...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

The scale animation was very minimal, so I didn't ruminate much on the excision. The alternative to supporting it would have required specific .exe hooking as confirmed by Joey and unknown321, which I'm not powerful enough for, and would have crashed if it failed anyway

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Another animation that's been broken for 5 years is the windsock. Unlike all other similar animations, this had Quaternion/Vector3/Vector3 tracks, as opposed to Quaternion/Vector3 tracks. It was scale, which TPP gimmicks don't support.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

It works on the "stepladder" as well. Notice how it gets faster when it's rainy!

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

This same kind of wave animation also appears in GZ on the admin building tarps, called "stepladder" in the files. However, this time, the animation files did not contain any shader tracks. So I made them myself, based on the tent ones. The diagonal scroll was tricky.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Since the loops weren't seamless and the blending was too intense, I hex-edited the values and even subdivided them further in places to make these animations more smooth. Since they had to loop with the skeletal animation, the scrolling speed had to be rigid.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Mind you, there are 3 model variations of the tent, and all of them have different material instance names, as they used different color textures. To make this work, I had to unify those names. I didn't realize what this meant just yet.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

When the missing shaders from GZ didn't fix the issue, I got curious. I saw that the animation files for the tent in both GZ and MGO have 3 shader tracks, but they use material instance name hashes that don't match the model. When I fixed them, it didn't look right!

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

In my port of the map to The Phantom Pain, the shader part wasn't working for 5 years, which I passively blamed on the lack of ported shaders. It was basically a detail lost among many other issues I had to fix.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Aside from regular skeletal animation, the tents in the map of Ground Zeroes use shader sub-normal animation to simulate waves of wind blowing on cloth. Basically a second bump-map scrolling across the model.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Annual reminder that the Third Child in MGSV was almost named after St Nick: caplag.tumblr.com/post/7084617...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Some really good examples on that stream of how some flare effects and color scales in cutscenes and weather tags bypassed the LUT:

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

I uploaded it as a miscellaneous file on this page: www.nexusmods.com/metalgearsol...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Inspired by Super Bunnyhop's MGS Delta monochrome video, I completely desaturated all the color lookup tables in MGSV, and the effects turned out pretty interesting. Things like UI, including 3D world UI, chromatic aberration and an overall color mood tint go over that rendering layer.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Spending an unhealthy amount of time on GZ makes me notice things. The two soldiers using searchlights in the opening use special routes that give hints to players paying attention - pointing out the red door on the warehouse armory, and the other at the cliff you can climb to bypass the locked door

Searchlight pointing at the warehouse armory

Searchlight pointing at the climbable cliff

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

www.4gamer.net/games/220/G0...

MGSV is an open world, so there are a lot of things you can do. On the other hand, Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo has said that he worries that "people who like games will use their own ingenuity and progress through the game. However, people who don't like games find the game difficult because they don't use ingenuity."

Director Hideo Kojima:
　I agree with what Mr. Miyamoto says, but actually, in MGSV, we have eliminated game design .

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

And then I notice that the TppAtmosphere daySkyAmbientScale weather parameter can be tamed down to make the difference between light probes and no light probes negligible in the background. It's not perfect, but it's far, far better!

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Only problem that really remains is that there's a hardcoded limit to how many light probes can be rendered at once, so using freecam up in the sky can disable distant ones. The solution would likely remain in syncing the spherical harmonics in the light probes themselves to the atmosphere.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

I've also added sound sources to the 5 extra small falls that were disabled in Ground Zeroes proper. I'm also making those vfx that were originally disabled in GZ optional to keep the default state more like vanilla GZ, and also because some of those hidden vfx are old or on breakable gimmicks.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Here's how ugly those holes looked like before. This is at 6:00, where the light probes' spherical harmonics are much darker than what TPP's resident atmosphere, and the contrast makes them the most obvious. Atmosphere SH and light probe SH need to match in the first place.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Turns out the entire messages table un the Guantanamo randomizer wasn't working in the current release because I was checking if some table was empty in a way that Lua doesn't even alert me about before not even executing the rest of the function 😭It's okay now, I can hear his voice again...

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I've been plugging up holes in between light probes all day too, finally after all these years after doing it in select spaces, like the boiler room. Was anxious with how many of them there were, but I just had to commit.

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caplag @caplag.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Ported the skybox vfx to see how it looks with 24h and weathers. I think I can make them work as an optional feature at certain times of day.

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