About ME3Tweaks

ME3Tweaks

ME3Tweaks started as Mass Effect 3 Tweaks on May 31, 2012, as a single post on a Blogspot site. It served as a basic (and barely understandable) guide to editing files. Many years later I renamed it to ME3Tweaks so I could have my own branding.

I loved Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, for it being co-op teamwork. It was fun, it was fresh, and it lasted quite a while. But it got stale after a few hundred hours.

During a mission on Operation White (the old one!), I found that only husks were spawning - a glitch, as other players called it - and I was bombarded by thousands of husks. I learned my laptop cannot handle one thousand husks as it crashed.

I was intrigued and tried to find mods where it was only husks (known as Zombie Mod), but found it was banned by BioWare. I forgot about it for a few months and I kept hearing complaints of people thinking gold was too easy. I agreed.

I eventually learned about Coalesced through the tiny modding articles and discovered how to modify wavelists through a small post that has long since been erased.

I worked entirely by myself with nobody else at this point, and eventually made a site where I posted my original research notes, ME3Tweaks. I used the psuedonym FemShep because it would be nearly impossible to trace on the web if BioWare was unhappy. I doubt that would keep them at bay for long though. It makes finding my modding alias on the internet also very difficult, which kind of sucks.

After I designed the original post, I started to make mods, only Coalesced.bin files at the time. I eventually started playing my mods on public servers - very slight modifications, maybe an extra shot, an extra enemy - to see if people would notice. I found a player who was interested with it and they led me to a gaming group where I enlisted them to help me test my mods. I won't name anyone here, but they supported me after I begged for them constantly to help test mods. Thanks guys - I owe you a lot!

Mod Manager

Mod Manager was created after I grew frustrated manually moving and installing mods. It was cumbersome, easy to mess up, and very time consuming. I created a tool for myself to manage mods, which I eventually released after I cleaned it up. The code for the original release was really bad and used a ton of code hacks to work properly.

I updated it a few times with bug fixes and new features. After searching ages for how to edit DLC, I modified ME3Explorer to have an automated way of installing files. It was a very poor job as I didn't know C# very well. Once I wrote the tool, I obtained a patch for the Coalesce tool from Gibbed to let it work with DLC (it had bugs). Putting these together allowed me to create Mod Manager 2, which was a complete rewrite of Mod Manager 1.

Mod Manager 3 was originally going to have a Mod Sync tool where all parties could join a mod session, but the idea was scrapped as I lost interest in Mass Effect 3 (over 1000 hours!) For a web development class, I rebuilt the site, and made ModMaker, which requires Mod Manager in order to parse. Mod Manager 3 was a significant rewrite of Mod Manager 2 and the ModMaker compiler is incredibly complex. Most of the code for the rest of Mod Manager up until 6.0 was based on this version.

In 2019, when I attended a .NET Conf, I started working on remaking Mod Manager in C# now that I had some skills with it. I rewrote the application entirely, maintaing backward compatiblity while expanding it to work on more games. I'm pretty proud of the code I write for them now, along with my work on ALOT Installer and ME3Explorer.

ModMaker

ModMaker was developed for my Web Development class in college. It sucked up literally all my time, and easily crushed all the other sites (sorry I had to go first guys) that were demoed. After the initial proof of concept I expanded it to make it easy to create mods on and eventually added MixIns and then Dynamic MixIns so users could do lots of file patching without having to know anything.

Special Thanks

I'd like to thank specific people for making things on this site possible.

First, I would like to thank Gibbed and "Wench" for writing the original Coalesced tools. I originally used Wenchy's, but switched to Gibbed's after I found it had much more flexability.

I would also like to thank the people in the gaming group I was in for helping test. I won't name you here, but if you come across this page, you know who you are. Without you guys, I probably would have given up.

A big round of applause goes to the ME3Explorer team, specifically WarrantyVoider. Thanks for putting up with my endless questions. You do work that makes mine look like amateur hour. Literally 3/4th of the stuff you showed me was way over my head at the time.

I'd also like to thank TankMaster who developed a superior Coalesced compiler that made ModMaker's initial version possible. I worked with him and he put in quite a bit of work to fix the issues it had at the time.

One more person I would like to thank is Kinkojiro. Pushing the boundries and writing the tools for him has led me to learn a great deal about the Mass Effect engine (fork of UE3). Thanks to him I have fixed many bugs and witnessed many things I would never have thought possible, including some of my mods like Rejection and Redemption.

I'd also like to thank you, the reader, for supporting my site. I never checked the stats on my original site for months, where I found I was getting a lot of views, which made me have renewed interest in modding DLC, which had me release Mod Manager 2. Without you guys, nobody would have the fun we had!

Thank you.