The story of "Mesozoic Revolution" news

I've have had my share of JP:OG since 2005. Back then, my copy of the game was unstable and went haywire after a few months. I wasn't able to get a stable copy until 2010. That is when I started modding.

My first attempts at modding, well, sucked, which was understandable as I was very new to modding the game back then. It was almost nothing but dinosaur clones lacking even their distinct skins, differing only in stats. The stats weren't good either. When I first tried to skin, I failed horribly.

My first decent modding attempts came out in 2012. By that time, I was capable of the more advanced (non-FSM) modding techniques such as multiskinning. I created two mods featuring multiskinned dinosaurs, the Jurassic and Cretaceous Expansions. The mods can still be downloaded here.

I had a Triassic one in the works, but soon lost interest in JPOG and abandoned it.

In 2014, while randomly googling for dinosaur images for reference and inspiration for palaeoart, I stumbled across a few screenshots from JPOG. But those ones, unlike what I've seen before, had something I never seen in the game before - edited models. They weren't simply reskinned clones, they actually had their own models, with their own sizes and proportions.

But I still wasn't interested enough. Until early 2015, that is. That was when I found an excellently-done mod by EchoGreen, the Forgotten. It practically overhauled the game's graphics and utilized HD skinning, model editing, and multiskinned dinosaurs all together to make a great-looking JPOG experience.

But alas, the Forgotten didn't satisfy me. I wanted more palaeontologically accurate dinosaurs. Thus, I set out to do my own mod on a similar scale as the Forgotten. I started prying into the Forgotten's files and learning what made it tick. I also started practicing model editing, which was done via a hex editor, not an actual modelling program. In the middle of 2015, inspired by the Forgotten, this mod, Mesozoic Revolution, first saw the light of day.

I was alone in this project, and progress was slow. But the results were good, certainly worth the wait to me.

I wanted the mod to be as accurate as I can get it within modding limitations, so I looked into scientific references, such as Scott Hartman's skeletal reconstructions, while making and redoing every single dinosaur in the game. I also made sure to avoid overly flamboyant colors while still making the dinosaurs look vibrant and colorful.

I worked my way digsite by digsite, and at times going back to redo earlier work. After the dinosaurs, I worked on the trees.

Next, the buildings. This was the second longest phase in the development of the mod due to the large amount of skins in the structures' TML file.

After that, I worked on the vehicles, loading screens, the dinopedia, and even the visitors' faces. I needed to keep the graphical consistency, after all.

All in all, it took more than a year. But it leads to success.

The most palaeontologically-accurate high-quality mod for JPOG.

And it's mine XD