Demos modifications

Sometimes I receive requests to modify in some way this or that demo. I'm surprised by these requests because I always explain that one can easily modify the demos himself. For example, it's very easy to change any resource used in the demos (textures, models, sounds etc.). Take for example the latest demo, Mushroom's Ride, posted two days ago and let's change the player's avatar. Since the avatar is a MD2 model (the old Quake2 model format), it's simple to take one's own preferred MD2 model and replace it. In the screenshot below, you can see that I have simply replaced the original fairy with an orc.

Some of the animations are different, of course, but the convention implied in the MD2 format makes coherent the overall behavior. To replace a model with another, or modify textures, sounds etc, one simply opens the "main.dat" file as it was a ZIP file (effectively, it is a ZIP file renamed to DAT).
Other more complex modifications need some knowledge of a programming language. For example, in the screenshot below you can see that the height of the camera over the ground is lower than in the original demo.

To make this kind of changes one can open the "main.lua" file with his text editor of choice. Doing so the complete source of the demo will be available for one's modifications. Usually the sources of the demos are short and quite structured, then downloading the documentation of the engine at the APOCALYX Downloads Page, it's not so difficult to understand the meaning of the variables and functions. In addition, the Lua language is very intuitive for people who already knows another programming language and, being scripted, no recompilation is necessary: one can immediately see his modifications at work.