Project Donut / Donut Mod 1 - Pre-reboot mission billboards

Greetings,

I know I've been absent for quite a long time, almost a year, but now I found an abandoned project of mine I thought was release-worthy.

Well, prior to the 2018 relaunch of Project Donut, there were some differences that were scrapped from the new version. One of these was the presence of these "awesome" custom mission billboards, that showed in the mission loading screen. I have recreated those after seeing them in a bunch of old russian gameplays on YouTube, and since Project Donut is open source, I decided to make it public.

Here is what I mean:

There were also some more scrapped features, like the built-in Autumn Theme and the level 4 skybox, that didn't see the light of day again for unknown reason. Anyway, reimplementing those would need me to rerelease the whole mod, since they might be...a bit too tricky to be released as mod resources.

Anyway, don't want to annoy anyone, so here ya go! ==> DOWNLOAD

Pretty cool to see recreations of these!

The whole reason we had originally created them is because at the time, CustomText sadly wasn't a feature (as well as the whole Launcher). Since a couple of missions were changed drastically, we obviously wanted the mission briefing screen to reflect this. Hence where these came in. They were created a fair bit before I joined, but I think Loren might have been behind them?

I don't think these were ever properly archived once we figured out 'hey we can hex edit SRR2.p3d provided we don't go over the character limit.' One of the earliest names we ever came up knowing we could do this was 'iPhoned' for L2M7 (I think DM1's source still has that name in there?), and then it kinda spiraled from there. As a result I'm not sure if they were ever properly backed up unfortunately? I think the only computer I might have that had a really old release was formatted ages ago.

Dumb Trivia:
Homer Hooligan is the only one I can think of that actually stuck in the release (and is still currently used). A couple were tricky to come up with substitutes for like 'S-M-R-T'. I think 'H-O-M-R' was my suggestion at the time because it sorta felt 'in-character'? I think once CustomText was created we just kinda went to town, which is why all the other Levels have names in place if you check the CustomText.ini. Project Donut had a slightly different mindset at the time and all missions were planning to pretty much follow the vanilla script with minor adjustments here and there. Taking Out the Trash is when we kinda decided to deviate from the script a bit to give some extra flavor in there (while continuing to respect the original story beats).

Again, nice to see these! I have some nostaliga for the way Donut Mod 1/Project Donut made use of vanilla game assets and it's all super nostalgic for me to see. They're a cute little novelty to remind us of how nasty times were before Lucas stepped in. Thank you for sharing!

Hi Kenny, glad you shared your memories. Thank you for the positive feedback!