My Dat Life?

Ive been dat modding for how long? I guess off and on for something like 6 years maybe? Maybe even longer actually. I remember my first 'dat mod' was swapping the Lilac Corsage onto my male taru. I thought that was so amazing and game breaking having a female item on my male character.

(Shits even a bmp, thats how noob I was!)

Then I read I think it was Phabin's tutorial on recoloring. I was a Taru PLD at the time (Still named Elfkin back then on Kujata) and for some reason I instantly started coloring the PLD AF gray instead of white? Like I dont know why I would do that since Relic is gray but whatever. It was hideous.

(Christ)

I then started stretching my Taru's head in Meta which also looked horrible. (I guess these things back then were pretty amazing to me). Oh wait I have pics one sec. Yeah back then the big thing was wings. Everyone wanted Wings and nobody knew of a way to get them. I stretched out the back parts of the shoulder guards..lol.. just lol.

But this was all before VRS was around to my knowledge so I... no, no forgiving that.

I went on to make other stuff by just using meta to move stuff around and recolor. My first real actual full set of original equipment was the Taru suit (which at the time I was totally proud of)

(I mean.. .its not horrible?)

That was around the time I started getting more attention. I was still posting mods on the FFXI Windower site since this was before FFXIDats existed. I started getting the hang of Meta and at the time I was really into snowboarding clothes so I had made this set of snowboard clothes for Taru. I remember the UV mapping for the feet really ticking me off (since I didnt know how to UV map in meta.. didnt know it was possible)

(I love my Jeuno Mog House, even to this day!)

Around this time I started experimenting with weird stuff (in the game) and also joined an actual HNMLS (of which I never attended a single event ^^ ) But at the time I had a friend named Tsai (who helped me get in the linkshell). Some of them had caught wind of my Dat modding and when I bought a Byrnie and was wearing it around Tsai had told me "You're so moosh!" I was like "Huh!? What does that mean?" and he explained it was another term for cute.

(Made out of a Durandal)

Not thinking much about it I continued on making some random dats here and there, but ultimately losing interest in the game. It was around this time I started POS hacking. Not for personal gain or anything, I was just super curious to see areas nobody should ever see. I remember POSing into the lookout tower in Yuhtungunlunga Jungle and it was pretty fun. Anyways I got suspended for like a week so I went out and got a job at WalMart (You'd be amazed at the crazy shit you do without FFXI!)

Anyways my suspension ended and I ultimately got bored with the game and as any (at the time) emo teenager would do I said my goodbyes, didnt give ANYTHING away, and deleted my character with like 4mil gil on him (back in the day when that was quite a bit).

I took a short break (like all first time quits are) and came back as a Galka named Elfkin. I came back a Galka because I had played a Taru Paladin before and was quite frankly sick and tired of dying in 3 hits. Also I had spent so much time modding and playing Taru that I started to notice disproportions in them and all kinds of things that just frustrated me at the time.

That didnt take long at all. I was disgusted at how slow it felt playing a galka. It was like you were perma gravitied coming from a Taru, so I quit again. This break was quite a bit longer as I think that was around the time my brothers made me play World of Warcraft. It was ok, but the fact that the graphics were balls really bugged me. Also Im not a big fan of neon green or purple so I think it was fail to begin with.

(I like all kinds of Bears... can you tell? lol)

So I came back but this time I think Elfkin was taken or something. Maybe I wanted to distance myself from that name as it wasnt horribly original or catchy. I remember googling Moosh out of curiosity and found that it was some flying blue thing from Zelda? Being a Taru I did the Taru saying of Moosh which ended up Mooshywooshy. I did a google search for that and I think there was about 5 results. Someone was describing some soggy food and I think some russian tank game came up.

Now there are almost 5000 results most of them pertaining to me?wtf

(Yesh bright colors!)

Anyways I came back as Mooshywooshy, I made my first comeback mod which was this Megaman outfit for taru (which was later remade by someone that was good at texturing, I was secretly pissed) and also made my first 'sig' ever for the windower forum of my Taru questioning the name Mooshywooshy and myself apologizing.

It was around this time I was approached by Zenith who had made FFXIDats.com to come and join the community. I did a virtual kind of smile and nod but I was secretly reluctant in joining. I thought that maybe I was selling out or something, I wanted to be this like uber dat modder that was totally solo and like being a badass. (I was retarded) So I lurked around FFXIDats a bit and thought it was alright and joined.

Unlike today there was no like fanfare of me doing something I was still pretty unknown but I was getting there. Then VRS came along. It was untranslated but I had heard that you could actually delete and add stuff in VRS, so nothing was going to stop me from learning that program even if it was all just random webdings because my computer couldnt do japanese.

I fooled around a bit, at the time Corsair had just come out and I added some feathers to the hat, messed around with swapping Elvaan hair onto Taru, but it all basically culminated in the first major major discovery of mine!

(Major)

The frying pan. I was so amazed that I could take an NPC item that wasnt a weapon, and turn it into a weapon! (and a hat for galka lulz kuz they dum an didn no how to use dem amirite). But after I had done that I had effectively learned how to weight things to other things. I had decided then that nothing would stop me, and so I began the beastman bard outfits.

I was super proud of these and even to this day I think they turned out pretty nice. As you can see I finally got those wings :p But I think the Taru one was one that changed my life really. At the time we had FFXIDats.com and Japan had MMOXoops. I saw someone had posted my Taru bard picture over there on MMOXoops and to me that was like some kind of holy touch from god. I had been noticed (and possibly even praised!) by the Japanese!

Now I am half Japanese, so it was almost some kind of life affirming moment. Growing up in Oklahoma I dont think I could have felt more out of touch with my Japanese heritage aside from uncontrollably gravitating towards more Japanese things and having a Japanese-ish sense of humor.

After that I continued on with trying to get better at VRS. Around this time I started to see people using my dats. And there is a real sense of joy I get when I see that someone is happy with something I did. I think once I started seeing that I really branched out away from making stuff for myself personally and started making things I think more people would enjoy.

(Visor)

I went back to Elfkin for a while but kept Mooshywooshy as my out-of-game moniker for a while. I started making more weird stuff, very out of the box why the fux, kind of stuff because I felt too many people were focusing on recoloring and not enough were putting for the effort in making things in VRS.

Here was my first idea. It was a chocobo space ship. I expanded its body so the legs wouldnt hang, and ripped its legs off. Had I known effects at the time it would have had rockets in the back no doubt.

Also I made the Taru motorcycle (horrible execution, should have been a mount) but it was a learning experience, especially in the brain storming area because I had sat down and planned out what objects to use for what part. It was pretty fun to make, but it was followed by lots of questions of "Its not a mount?" My bad :p

I also made the "Hot Topic Ninja" for mithra around this time, but I think that whole mod eventually gravitated away from my name and now its made by someone else who recolored it? lol Thats fine with me as long as people used it.

I remember taking this picture. I was really happy with this mod as I had learned weighting objects to no weight would make them simply follow you around without animating. I think this mod really showed my mentality at the time. Very innocent and fun! I like it. (I remember hesitating posting this picture on FFXIDats because I wasnt sure if Zenith allowed cussing)

(Oh the summoner glow)

I think this was my first foray (sp?) into Hex editing, it was super simple (compared to now) but it was certainly ground breaking at the time. I think this was where I first started breaking away from the crowd. I wanted to kind of go out there and do what everyone was saying was impossible. Anyways I got a lot of notoriety for this one and I was really pleased with it. The whole thing is actually VRS green'd like 3 times over but for some reason they looked alright. I got a few WoW commends for the shoulder pads which made me secretly mad, but it was all gravy.

I was super proud of this mod as I had put in custom mesh for the first time for the teeth and whiskers. I thought it looked kinda cute overall and was really happy with it. I wanted to use it full time but POL updated and just like that /poof/ it was gone. Lots of people were disgusted by it so it was kinda a bummer.

I took another break here. I moved out of my parents and was working full time, and I started playing Lineage 2 with some friends I was living with. After a while I came back to FFXI and went straight into modding. I wanted to get Lineage 2 into FFXI because I thought L2 was super pretty.

I had been playing on a private server so the donators got uber gear and this was my lol@that. I uhh dont remember the story behind the Hersheys kiss, but I remember someone wanted something made and I made that as a joke. Anyways I made this picture and I think maybe like 10 minutes later it happened. Probably the worst discovery in my book.

Yes it was cool and still is pretty alright, but if I could go back I would have never done it. I figured out HQ textures could be injected into the game through VRS and the ffxi dat world went apeshit. Soon we had all kinds of Lineage coming in and other crazy stuff. All very good mind you. But completely not fitting to the game.

After the Lineage sets I took a break from modding. I just wasnt very inspired by much but I had been promoted to a Moderator of FFXIDats. It was going fairly well just working and mentoring people for a while.

I came back and started working on the "Pretty Pretty" sets as I called them. It was I.M. for Hume F and Darksteel for Elvaan F. I was inspired by robots and valkyries. So the pack on the back and the boots that has feathers was a mixture of a jetpack and feathers lol.

I think on the download page of the Elvaan one I had made an "O woe is me" joke about people complaining how there wasnt a shield for it and one of the members got pretty offended by it apparently.

This is where things went a little ape shit. Drama llama had broken out of the pen and was shitting all over the place. Apparently he said she said that he said that I said that someone sucked and all of the sudden people are accusing me of having god complexes and hating me for things I never did. There was an entire thread devoted to Mooshy hate on Neko-Sentai (which I later necro bumped for lulz, my bad).

To this day I still dont know what I did to convey that I had a god complex, I think maybe I had said something in a moderator thread that someone had told someone else? I have no idea but it wasnt pretty. All I know is in the end of it Alikona (The person who taught me how to UV map in Metasequoia mind you) hated the living shit out of me and a couple of her friends hated me as well.

I think this was when my demeanor turned less cutesy fun taru bazaar and more "just gonna make whatever, dont really care that much".  I ported a lot of stuff from like Kingdom Hearts and made a few pictures for a while but nothing very inspiring or original.

After a while Wings of the Goddess had just been announced but nothing was really known. It was in that time where everyone was speculating new jobs etc. it was really fun so I made a Taru Scholar set thinking nothing of it (I mean really, FFXI getting scholar? yeah right)

And also around this time I made probably my most famous dat to date, the Goobbue racer. I remember the dat being a completely on a whim thing. It took me about 10 minutes to make and I thought people would just laugh at it and move on. But apparently it caught on fairly well, and lots of people liked it for lulz.

Time went on and I didnt do much modding wise. I ported a few things here, made a few insignificant things there. I think around this time I started smoking so I made this?

Anyways played the game, went to Fan Festival 07' started and quit working at a different Walmart. Moved back home after drama living with friends, transferred from Quetzalcoatl to Carbuncle to be around more FFXIDats people (who never played with me mind you -Taruson -Kiyoshi) And I started becoming completely obsessed with trying to get transparency to work on mesh.

(Guitar was also around this time)

I had noticed if you gray-alpha mapped it would do nothing, but if you switched equipment or went invisible, that moment where you're just transparent, you could see that the transparency was working, it just wasnt showing. It felt so close that I didnt want to give up on it. I spent days trying to figure it out, why wasnt it showing, why would it show at all?

My friendship with my best friend from first Walmart had begun to degrade as we didnt see each other often, it made me sad so I made this video. It is very weird looking back now as that Galka is my current character o. O Maybe he wasnt dead at all, the taru just killed himself at the end and then the Galka was like lolwut and I took control of him.

(While changing equipment the transparency would work?)

Anyways, worked more with Hex. Took the Carbuncle effect off of Carbuncle and successfully got it onto equipment (although sloppily and not knowing what I was doing). It was cool but didnt really think much of what it was or how it worked. Around this time spore came out, winner of biggest disappointment ever.

(LAME)

I came to understand more of the structure of dats, and kinda messed around with taking textures and models out of one dat and putting them in another through HEX. It was pretty cool but meh. Then I remember asking Pixel to swap Princess Caludie with an avatar because I wanted to see why her hair piece thing exploded in VRS. Ends up that was actually fabric in the game? o. O So I worked some on trying to get fabric usable, tried to figure out how it worked (still dont get it to this day)

It was cool but never really caught on. It was super hard to use and entirely not user friendly so nobody used it. Now that I had completely alienated myself from the rest of the modding world by going out and modding with a hex editor, I was determined to get effects to work on weapons. I knew transparencies worked on effects so I kinda wanted to figure effects out to get closer to my goal.

I spent hours and hours and hours just typing away, crashing POL, undoing, rebooting, typing something else, crashing POL, undoing etc until I finally got a basic understanding of how it worked.
I started understanding schedules and blocks so I became fairly knowledgable of how most stuff worked in hex and how it all looked.

At the time I had figured out that if you change skeleton names in VRS before swapping the mesh over to another skeleton you could effectively port a mesh by not changing anything in the envelope. So I had ported the Manthra (which at the time was only in like 1 cutscene in Wotg) to AA Mithra and swapped him in as my pet.

(You know... him)

Everything was going great so I decided to see if I could port a whole motion over through HEX. I wanted to use something not really used throughout the game and I was always enthralled at the hilarity of that Dancer NPC mithra in Upper Jeuno doing the noodle dance, so I thought I could entertain myself by just making him dance while I rested.

Well you probalby already know that he danced.. but at an ALARMING SPEED and he WOULDNT STOP. Resting animations require another animation to 'get up' from resting or 'stop' the resting animation. He didnt have one so he just kept going not stopping (at least the upper body). I laughed for a good long while and decided this would be great as a video to show people.

I had no idea it would become what it did. It spread throughout the FFXI community pretty quickly and I started getting a lot of youtube messages asking for the dat so they could have him as their pet. I had already long since deleted the project like 10 minutes after I made the video so it was a little sad I couldnt give them what they wanted.

But time went on, and I started working with Pixel on Hex. He was picking it up pretty well and it was nice having someone else in my part of the modding world. We tried to get different casting effects going on but they all seemed to fail (since back then I didnt know anything about kill schedules) so none were ever released.

All along going deeper and deeper into HEX figuring out new things byte by byte. It was slow but then the first major breakthrough I had with HEX was finding the trigger byte for auto-booting and repeating. and thus the first ever Effect on Equipment was born.

It was dumb, but it was a test. I remember putting it on and leaving the game running for 5 or so hours, expecting to come back to an overloaded crashed game. But it worked fine so I was pretty excited. By now I had a fairly full understanding of Effect schedules and so on so I had the idea that I could link effects to the engage / disengage schedules of weapons. So I made the Erniegang etc.

I also tested a lot of other stuff which im not sure I ever posted about. like water droplets and other stuff. I was never really content with this though because I wanted the effect to always be showing. I thought for sure there had to be a way to connect it to a weapon, like maybe there was a weight or something and I just had to change it to that in the effect.

Well I was completely wrong. But one day I had this crazy idea. So the famous fire effect that tenzen has on his sword, it didnt work when you used the effect on Hume M, so I thought... well what if I compare Tenzens skeleton to Hume M's skeleton. Low and behold there was only one difference in the entire skeleton dat, and that was the effect weight.

Like a rabid animal I copy and pasted the differing hex into the hume M skeleton and examined it further. I saw that part of the hex was a number that corresponded to the skeleton numbers in the actual skeleton so I changed it to the sword weight and voila! Hex on weapons was born.

Pixel and I edited all of the skeletons to have corresponding hex weights for easy porting and I was set to make all kinds of sweet shit!

Having fully realized my dream and executing it through these shiny staves. I quickly quit the game and dat modding altogether. I was completely burnt out doing hex day in and out. I had lost interest. I say that like it was instant, but there was a time I was toying around with more ideas for more effect weapons.

But ultimately it just didnt seem like the community shared my excitement of seeing my months, maybe years of work and research come to fruition. It was all "Thats really cool!" but no "I want to learn to do that". So I stopped for a while. I watched a lot of Top Chef and Intervention. I also applied to be on the Tester season one on PS3, I made it to the interviews but they didnt like me I guess.

I kept in touch with the community off and on to see how things were going. But by now FFXIDats was winding down to a close. I saw this coming so Pixel and I created the blog magicmortar.blogspot.com to archive my findings. Ultimately it was sad to see FFXIDats go down as it was essentially where I really grew up in life.

But I knew it had to go down eventually, better to go down with style than just stay around and end up a scummy dead website.

I had started a new job at some ghetto grocery store so I wasnt around much at the time of going down, and I am pretty sad I missed it. But I am happy many of us are still connected through the facebook group, so its not totally gone.

After becoming entirely bored of my Grocery Store job I started looking around FFXI again. Pixel had told me that someone had posted my old alpha phase Erniegang video on an FFXIV thread about adding glowing weapons. I was sort of amazed people still even thought of me.

 I got bored and googled Mooshywooshy again to see if it was still just like 5 or 6 entries and I found a lot of people calling out for me, wondering where I went. I felt really bad reading them, I wished I could have just posted on all of them saying "Im still here!" but I would have been necro bumping like a year :(

So I came back. The only dat place left where I knew I could post was BlueGartr, somehow its dat thread hadnt died off so I wouldnt feel bad posting there in fear of necro bumping. I didnt have the computer I have now so I couldnt really make anything because the computer I had could barely run MS Word.

I did my best to make a dat but I wasnt pleased with how it came out because I was very limited so I kinda just backed off for a while, but keeping an eye out if anyone needed me this time.
The official glowing weapons came out and I was kind of disappointed at what they had done. Instead of following my later work (effects on weapons themselves) they had done what the video that was posted had done (not on the weapon). But their version was more intricate with init schedules and what not.

I was pretty interested in this so I came back without having the game and started to study some dats people sent me. Eventually I made the above Alexander club sword dildo thing using the official effects.

Christmas I bought a new computer, and FFXIV. I was super excited, I figured it couldnt possibly be as bad as everyone else was saying cause I am a TRUE fan of Final Fantasy, I even enjoyed Mystic Quest! /foghorn So I went back to FFXI.

I have been expanding my knowledge of Hex and lots of it is very easy to me now. I am documenting it along the way this time as it was very rough getting back into it without any notes.

 By the way Mooshkin was originally Mooshywooshy's Mule. Its a mix of Mooshywooshy and Elfkin. Mooshywooshy still exists hes just not activated. Its more fun making things for Galka because everyone seems to hate on Galka, so if Galka get all the cool shit, best respect! :p

So here we are today! Did you read about all 5 or 6 years of my FFXI life? Thats nuts.
Well thanks either way :) I look forward to talking to you all, I'll do my best not to abandon for a long time again.

Seeya :D

-Mooshy