A love letter to THUG2

I write software for a living, and I built this with AI assistance. Both are true, and I would rather say so than have you wonder.

This is a project of one person. The reverse engineering, the decisions about what to build, and the testing on real hardware are mine. AI helped me cover ground I could not have covered alone in this time: reading undocumented file formats, building the tooling around them, and grinding through the parts that are more tedious than they are difficult. That is not a claim that it is better. It is what happened.

What it does not mean is that anything ships because a model said it worked. The script compiler round-trips 398 of the game’s 399 script files byte for byte, and that is checked by running it, not by asking. Every mod is boot-tested against the real game. The claims on this site were checked against the source before they were written, and the ones that turned out to be wrong were removed rather than softened.

On the art: the pictures of Violet Vandal here are the game’s own model, captured in-engine. None of it is generated. The one place a model touches an image is the skater extractor, which can run Real-ESRGAN to upscale the game’s own 64 to 128 pixel textures.

If you use AI to troubleshoot your own install, that is your business. If you use it to write a patch, say so in the pull request. Not as a confession, and it will not count against you, because I did the same. It just tells me where to read hardest. If you would rather not use it at all, that is equally fine and nothing here asks you to. Either way the bar is the same: does it work, is it tested, does it fit.