Modding



Modding (short for Modification, also known as Hacking if unfairly used) is the act of updating Smash Hit's files in order to add new content to the game, fix bugs and add features. While Smash Hit modding is not officially supported by the developers, they have previously expressed that they are okay with modding, so long as it is not giving users anything that would be paid for free.

History

 * This history mainly focuses on the ability and tools used for Smash Hit modding. If you are interested in the history of a mod, please check that mod's respective page.

Early History
It is not known when the first Smash Hit mod was created, though it is likely to guess that it was around Smash Hit's release; however, no mods were known to be published to the internet before 2020.

2019
In June 2020, NZMC published a video which claimed that Custom Hit was the first ever known Smash Hit mod. Also in 2019, Knot126 claims that he had started to work on modding Smash Hit and was able to load the debug menu in December.

2020
The year 2020 was the first known year where many Smash Hit mods were published online. The first major mod, known as Random Room Mix Mod, was created by Megadron and first shown on 1 February 2020. A day later, Knot126 released a clone of the mod titled Random Rooms Mod. The two mods have become known as the Random Rooms Mods.

In May, NZMC first published his Smash Hit mod now titled Custom Hit, which featured some changed rooms for one of the first times. Knot126 had started to experiment with making custom stages, and published videos on his YouTube channel before it was deleted. Megadron had also recently started work on a level editor.

On the 11 September 2020, Megadron left the modding community, releasing the working portion of the editor, which was a segment viewer.

On 21 September 2020, ten days after Megadron had left the modding community, Knot126 released the first version of Smash Hit Blender Tools, a set of tools to create and export segments using Blender.

In December, many new Smash Hit mods were announced and/or released. The first version of MTXBake was released, which would allow creation of custom images' files that could be loaded into Smash Hit, though it did not get the format of the images correct, resulting in the images being corrupt on most devices.

2021
As most Smash Hit modders took a break or temporarily left the community in January 2021, not much happened.

In February, mesh files were fully documented and basic baking tools were created. Many Smash Hit mods had also started to develop greatly during this time period.

In May, a project named mtxconv was created on GitHub, which allowed proper baking of custom image files to MTX images.

After this point, the Modding wiki had become mostly abandoned and the Smash Hit modding scene had moved to videos being published on YouTube with mods being shared as Google Drive links.

2022
In January, the beta versions of Blender Tools leading to 2.0.0 were released, which simplified the experience of exporting boxes with segments.

Motivations
There could be any number of reasons that a mod exists; however, there are some common reasons that they do:


 * Adding new stages
 * Improving the quality of existing game assets
 * Updating the game to include bug fixes
 * Restoring old stages or recreating old versions
 * Creating new functionality for the game

Tooling
Some tools have been created to make modding Smash Hit easier.

Early Tools
Many of the initial mods were simple and created out of curiosity. For example, mods like the Random Rooms mods reused the existing segments and assets to remix the experience and experiment with how Smash Hit works in ways that would be simple to implement. Most of these mods used either a combination of APK Editor Studio with a text editor (with a PC) or Total Commander and Lucky Patcher (without a PC) to edit text files and inject them into the game.

Examples of mods created in this way include early versions of the somewhat simplistic Beehive stages, which created using only a text editor, and test stages created by Megadron were, which were made in the same fashion.

Level Editors
After some time had passed, level editors were being created. The first attempt at creating a proper level editor for Smash Hit was Megadron's Segment Viewer, created in Game Maker Studio 1.4. While it never got far enough into development to edit segments, it was able to completely visualise segments, with textures and the like.

Smash Hit Tools for Blender (also called Blender Tools or Smash Hit Blender Tools) was a segment editor created by Knot126 as an extension to Blender. It was the first tool that allowed exporting working Smash Hit segments. As it is the most complete editor, it is used often by modders to create segments.

Another editor, simply by the name of Smash Hit Editor, was being created by Skinnerpuma737 in addition to other modders and developers, like NZMC and Knot126. Posed as a successor to Blender Tools by its original creator, the editor would be made in Unity and would present the user with a nicer experience. While never officially cancelled, its last update was on 24 October 2020, so it is now thought to be abandoned.

Carambola was an attempt to create an editor in Godot, started in April 2021 by Knot126. While it could present segments in a much cleaner manner than Blender Tools, being more akin to the looks of Megadron's Segment Viewer, it was not as intuitive to edit segments as it still relied on users editing raw values in textboxes. It was officially abandoned in July 2021.

Image Conversion
MTXBake was an initial attempt to convert PNG images to MTX format images, but created images that could not be displayed by most devices.

Mtxconv is the best known image baking project that also documents the MTX image format, released in May 2021 and developed by SamusAranX.

Mesh Baking
Unlike image conversion or level editing, mesh baking is not as straightforward a problem due the the amount of flexibility that can be had, and there could be many desired results that cannot always be supported by every mesh baker. While the format of the files is simple and documented, there are no tools to bake perfect mesh files which produce the same results as Smash Hit would.

The mesh baker that is integrated into new versions of Blender Tools (2.0.0 and later) is currently the closest to original Smash Hit meshes, though it does not replicate the exact behaviour of the exporter.

MeshBake is another, older utility that can produce mesh files, though the output is often distorted or corrupt in unexpected ways. For example, in version 0.2.0 boxes have their textures warped, and in version 0.4.0, there are loose bits of geometry and holes in boxes.

Trivia

 * YouTube has served as the basis for the modding scene. Many of the recent Smash Hit videos past 2020 are of mods.