I Hacked Iron Lung Again To Create The Ultimate Exploration Mod

Last summer I hacked iron lung to create an ocean of beans show off a bird’s eye view of the entire map and of course replace the monster with a poorly mapped photo of Shrek skip ahead to a week or two ago and it’s already iron lung’s first anniversary

Yeah I know it feels like the game came out much more recently than that I actually have a theory about that though you see even though the game came out in March it had a huge Resurgence over the summer right around the time I was working on my big iron lung video there

Were a handful of much larger streamers and content creators picking up the game for the very first time I honestly have no idea why everyone decided to collectively pick up the game around June but it made it shoot way up the charts at the time somehow amidst this

Flurry of iron lung content that video I made became one of my most viewed of all time anyways I’ve always loved how effective the game is within such a limited scope sure there isn’t much visual stimulation but that only enhances the horror I think the only

Complaint I had when the game came out was that it was slightly too long but that’s a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things in the end I think the game is an excellent short form horror exactly exactly the way it is and I wouldn’t change a thing about it but

What if I could well if the game is perfectly fine right now then I’d take a completely different angle with any changes like putting in a screen hooked up to a camera so you can see outside the sub yes this completely ruins the intentional experience but it’s pretty

Fun to play around with and with that Concept in mind I set out to make the first Iron long mod available to the public but that spiraled out into becoming a much much bigger project than I ever expected over the course of a few weeks I somehow went from this

To all of this but before I get to that roller coaster development story let’s talk about what the mod actually does starting from the most obvious feature you now have a five monitor gaming PC setup RGB not included each monitor is hooked up to an external camera on the invisible sub that moves

Around the map I even added in some minor touches like recreating the particles and CRT screen effects that the original sub camera uses to create a semi-distorted image oh and you can switch the terminals on and off manually try playing with them on for a little

While and then turn them off it’s a real trip and just for fun I think the terminal is up to the intro sequence of the game we all know by now that the sub doesn’t really descend in the beginning but the monitors won’t spoil that illusion for you instead they stay off

Until The Descent completes before powering on sequentially just a little touch to help retain a bit of immersion I also threw in a bonus screen in the back of the sub as expected it’s a a rear view camera to help see what’s behind you it isn’t really practical to

Use while you’re driving around but it is interesting to see what’s actually behind the sub during some key events most notably the final segment with the monster it’s never physically behind the fake sub that moves around the map so you can’t see it on the screen in the

Final moments of the game another big change I really wanted to include in this mod was adding the subs position as a marker on the map if we’re already streamlining the game by being able to see outside we might as well know exactly where we are at any point too

Speaking of streamlining things I also tweaked a lot of the sub controls to help facilitate easier exploration you can now move accelerate and turn much faster and the sub also drifts a lot less when you release any of the buttons since you can see out the front there

Isn’t much of a risk of colliding with walls so the increased speeds just help move things along much more smoothly the last small Improvement I made is in regards to how the a point of Interest logic Works normally you have to be very precise in the exact position and

Rotation of the sub to take a valid photo of most objects on the map but since you can now see the objects you’re supposed to be photographing I made that code much more permissive in checking for valid photos as long as you’re in the general vicinity of the map marker

And looking towards the point of Interest the game should count your photo as valid aside from that I simply added a bit of text to the title screen to show that the mod loaded and is working correctly and that’s it notice how I didn’t mention anything about the

World lore audio or anything else like that that’s completely intentional you see I didn’t want to change anything about the game other than facilitating easier exploration of the world that the dev created so you get to experience everything just as it was designed even if it’s from a radically different

Perspective so now comes the part where I try to explain how I managed to Wrangle all these parts into one coherent mod I’ll include a little bit of Tech talk for those who are interested but I’ll try to keep everything light enough for non-programmers to understand like I

Explained in my last iron lung video the game doesn’t officially support mods and it doesn’t have an unofficial way of loading them either so the only real way to get arbitrary code running inside the game is to exploit a security issue that’s present in most Unity games in

Simpler terms we first hack the game so that we can mod it instead of just making a mod and loading it with an in-game menu like you’d see in Skyrim or something this isn’t really a tutorial video but there’s a handful of great tools already out there to help this

Process along like DNS by ramp and ex Unity Explorer and lots more the point is I can write a bit of c-sharp code compile it and get it running in the game so now what my first task was trying to create this camera screen idea

I had in its most basic form so I created a new camera and a basic flat plane object to use as a screen I set up the camera to render out to a texture and then connected that texture to the plane after that I attached the camera

To the player and voila our screen object was showing what the camera saw producing a sort of infinite mirror effect this setup is very similar to how the actual in-game camera Works since the sub urine doesn’t physically move the game uses a camera attached to the

Fake sub to take pictures after a bit of struggling I managed to get my new camera connected to the fake sub projecting to a plane inside of the physical sub sure it looked terrible but it actually worked proof of concept and all I now knew my idea was possible in

An effort to make it look slightly less terrible I researched the effects the regular camera uses to create those grungy pictures I tweaked a bunch of settings endlessly and implemented the CRT screen Shader that the in-game camera uses to make things look a bit spookier I think around this point I was

Running with the concept of glass submarine as in making all the walls transparent and replacing them with camera projections but the further I went down this path the more I realized the idea was just a little too silly I’d have to redesign the sub basically from

The ground up to get a nice 360 View and I’d lose all the pipes and stuff that make it distinguishable in the first place so I created a bunch of cameras and screens facing forward left right up and down to at least get an idea of what

A 360 view might look like and as expected it was ugly disorienting and hard to actually navigate with the screens were way too large and not very useful when you were looking downwards at the control panel I felt like I’d hit a dead end here the mod worked but it

Wasn’t in any sort of playable State and I definitely wouldn’t release something like this to the public so I just kind of Spun my wheels digging through the game’s code for a while Unsure how I could Salvage the countless hours I dumped into this video I was just

Running around in the game of it when I happen to click on the terminal that was added Post Release to expand on the game’s lore a terminal has a screen and I could create planes that functioned like screens so why not merge the two and create a brand new asset but why

Could I not find this terminal anywhere in the scene’s hierarchy I searched for terminal computer screen PC and just about every other word I could think of but nothing came up so I decided to just manually click through the countless objects in the scene to see what happens

When I toggled them on and off I did eventually find it but you’ll never guess what the dev decided to call it go ahead just throw out a name you’d use for a computer in iron lung did you guess Cube parentheses 6 well neither

Did I and I have no idea what kind of madman leaves important objects scattered around the scene with generic names like this but that’s all in good fun I mean every Dev does some ridiculous stuff that they don’t expect anyone else to see so no shade on them

The point is I was able to duplicate the in-game terminal and set it up with a brand new camera projection screen right at the front of the sub and suddenly it all clicked the terminal worked great you could see where you were going without having to look away from the

Controls and since it was already an in-game asset it fit perfectly with the rest of the sub with a few more Terminals and cameras hooked up to the fake sub I had a fully functional window of sorts to the outside world I could have called it done here but if I was

Going to release this to the public I wanted to make it worth their time so I set out to create a working map marker for the sub digging through the code I noticed there were references to a map marker being assigned to the player which leads me to believe that there was

Originally a map marker for the sub while the game was in development but it was removed at some point before the final release regardless I was able to follow a similar path of duplicating an existing marker and modifying the code to sync with the subs current position

So now we had exterior vision and and we knew exactly where we were without checking coordinates it all felt very streamlined but the actual sub movement did not try walking to your bathroom with your eyes closed you’re obviously going to be very slow and careful not to

Bump into things which is totally fine now do it again at the exact same speed but with your eyes open this time feels pretty bad huh the solution here was obvious ramp up the acceleration and top speed reduce the sub drift and improve the handling overall much better but

Taking pictures to complete the game felt way too restrictive with these new changes so I simply modified the margins of error to make taking valid photos a breeze I gave the game a full run through at this point and everything was feeling great but the intro cinematic was significantly worse with the

Terminals giving it all away you basically just sit in the starting position for almost a minute straight even though it’s supposed to feel like you’re descending so I had the terminals turn off if it detected you were in the intro while the screen was still black only flipping on right before the player

Regains control with all the in-game changes complete I decided to add some text to the title screen to show it was all working again I did this by duplicating the existing text and modifying it for my own purposes after a few weeks of ups and downs I had hours

Upon hours of development footage a couple hundred lines of code and one fully functional mod to show for it so that’s my story behind making this one little idea a reality I ended up calling it the last Navigator because it’s essentially an exploration overhaul for the game like I said before I really

Wanted to make this mod to experience the game exactly as it was designed just from a different perspective and if you haven’t played the game before I absolutely recommend giving it a shot sure you’re probably spoiled on most of it by now but honestly it still works I’ve played through the game countless

Times at this point but the atmosphere sound design and creeping dread are still Top Notch as for all of you who’ve already beaten in the game you’re exactly who I made this mod for to make it available to the public I put it up on Nexus mods I even had to create an

Iron-long category on there because there were no mods before this one so I’ll leave a link down below if you want to try it out yourself I will say I’ve only tested it on windows so Mac and Linux users would probably have to do a bit of tweaking to get it working but

That about wraps up this project it was a huge time sync which is why I’ve been pretty quiet lately but it was a fun project to work on it was nice taking a little break from working on my own horror game to make this silly little mod with almost no concern for good

Design oh yeah if you didn’t know I’m a Game Dev outside of this whole YouTube thing my upcoming project ad infernum is a survival horror immersive Sim you end up stranded at a desolate gas station teeming with demons Cults dark rituals and a massive underground structure to

Fight or sneak your way through I’ll leave a link down below if you want to wish list it but it’s still a few months off for me being finished on the other hand if you want to see more videos like this one you can check out some of my

Past game hacking and modding content and if there’s any other games you’d like me to check out or break in the future just let me know in the comments I hope to keep doing more big videos like this in between some smaller projects so I can keep posting more

Regularly but until then I hope to see you all in the next one foreign