In pt.2, I will break up the section by features, for easy access to them later if needed. Simply look for the feature desired in the sections tab on the right, and it will take you there.

Getting new maps is pretty straight forward once you have done it a couple times. There are lots of places to get maps from, and most will work, provided that are for source engine games.

Here is a list from the creator of AA:


As you can see the list is quite extensive, and this does not include user made content! If you have any of these installed, AA will automatically search for them and you will be able to use them as maps to build arcades on.

As for getting user made maps, you can get them from any number of places around the web that provide gmod, or source engine maps, such as gamebanana. It needs to be a .bsp file.

If you download a map, you will need to make sure it is in the correct folder for AA to recognize it as a map. This file path is:

X:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Anarchy Arcade\aarcade_user\maps

Your .bsp file will live there from now on. If the site tells you it requires textures from another game, like CSS, you need to make sure you have that game installed for AA to use the textures, otherwise you will end up with "ERROR" and checkered textures.


If you have to download textures or models to add manually, please put them here:
D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Anarchy Arcade\aarcade_user
and allow it to merge the folders.

A feature added recently is uploading your own maps created from Hammer (map creator) from the in-game guide found in the maps tab. This amazing feature allows users to show off their creativity and allow others to see it and join it without having to go download it from a site or discord link. It doesn't even have to be completed, as when you have worked on it some more, you can simply reupload it, and the next time someone goes to it, they will get the updated version. I will not be creating a tutorial on map making, as Hammer is a whole new tool to learn. We call this "hard mode."

Getting new models is pretty much the same as getting maps. As with maps, if you have any of the source games listed above install, you will have access to the models to go with them. If you want to download custom models, you will have to find compatible models. Again, best way is gamebanana or gmod workshop.

Note: anything downloaded from the steam workshop will not inherently work. I have to extract it via an outside program.

once you download a model and its extracted correctly, it will look like this:



I recommend you keeping all files and folders intact, do not hand pick which files to keep!
As long as you have those files in your zip folder, drag and drop them into...

X:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Anarchy Arcade\aarcade_user\custom\new folder

NOTE: you have to have a folder here, or your models will not load in game, and you will get an error when loading AA. You cannot have them in the 'custom' folder itself without being in another folder.

some tips from other users:
Once you start acquiring lots of models, you will actually save space if you put them into one folder. This way, if multiple models use the same texture, they can share. If you were to put them all into separate folders, it may look organized, but you are using more space then needed. Right now, I do a mix of the two. I have separate folders, but they are still mixed. For instance, I have a character model folder, a Japanese model folder, etc.

If you have made a new folder in your aarcade_user folder, you will need to restart AA so it will mount the model. Once that is done, and you are in your arcade, you can either search for it in the menu, or drag and drop in to your arcade from the folder (make sure you are dragging only the .mdl file). If it was done correctly, and it is a workable model, it will spawn in after a little while. After the first time, it will be considerably faster.

If it freezes, crashes, and doesn't spawn your model, it is either incompatible with AA, or you have it installed incorrectly.

Another way to get models WITHOUT having to download them from a workshop is getting them from multiplayer servers. There are 2 basic ways of doing this, and they are as follows:

• Find a model you like and look at it. Press the middle mouse button to bring up it's menu, and there is a heart you can click to favorite it. In this fashion you can hand pick your models
  
• After you have been to a server, if you hit esc, and go to settings - import - models. This will then import all models you have seen and downloaded from other server into your collection

First thing about multiplayer maps:
LET EVERYTHING LOAD WHEN YOU SPAWN IN!! DO NOT JUST BYPASS THE LOADING SCREEN!!!

I cannot stress this enough

MP (multiplayer) consists of either hosting your own map, or join another already hosted. While some might look at the list and think "wow, look how dead this game is" when looking at the server list, this "game" isn't about having a bunch of people on a server. In fact, so far the only reason to do so far has been to share models and ideas on arcades. That does not mean it can't go that way, but 3d desktops are already a niche thing, so chances are in won't ever be that.

As for now, only the host can spawn objects into a mp map. Meaning not hosted a persistent world, and joined as guest. You must be actively hosting to spawn objects. The best way to share links, or to spawn and watch things together is to have a guest post the link in chat. Then you can just click the link and it becomes a link you can spawn. (This also works in twitch chat btw).

Watching things in unison
To watch things with friends at the same time is actually quite simple once you figure it out. To do it all in-game, have the guests 'follow' the host (doesn't have to be this way, anyone can follow anyone, this just makes it easier since the host is the one spawning the videos). To do this, hold tab while in the mp map, and go to the social tab (looks like 3 people) and click follow. Once everyone is following the host, when he starts a video, it will start for everyone at the same time.

Now, everything is technically separate, so if one person changes volume, or skips ahead, this won't happen for everyone, so if your goal is to stay synced, don't touch anything.
The reason for this is if you are following someone, and they start listening to a song you don't like, or watching a movie you don' t have, you can skip or mute on your side without bothering the other people enjoying it.

Notice I said a video you don't have. AA does not share images or videos that are locally saved, only meta links. If it is a youtube link, or a netflix link (and you have your awn account) you will watch it too. That being said, AA is a smart cookie. If I have Jurassic Park as a local file, and you have already told AA you have Jurassic Park as well (by loading it up in another arcade previously) it will match the two and play your file as well. If you have the movie and you haven't played it before, you can tell it where the file is, and it will know from now on that it's there. The more you use it, the smarter it gets.

Getting models to work/load
If you are walking around a mp arcade and you see a screen on the ground with the AA logo in it, it means there should be a model/prop there, and for some reason it isn't loading. There are a few things you can do to force them to load. First, MAKE SURE YOU LET THE ARCADE LOAD EVERYTHING WHEN YOU LOADED IN. Second, give it time and walk around to see the sights. Sometimes things will pop in after you have downloaded the models from the server. If those don't work, next try reconnecting to the server. Sometimes this will kick start the game to load them if you had to download them from the server and they didn't pop in. Also, instead of reloading, if there is another room you can go in (like the theater room in the lobby) try going in and out of the rooms. AA unloads things in another room, so if you leave and come back, it should in theory reload that area.

Signing the Guestbook
There is a guestbook to leave a comment, and a like/dislike. On the server list, this is shown by a rating under the map name, shown here. This help users determine if a map is worth loading in to, as maps with a lot on content can take along time to load. The map creator can also view the comments left, for creative feedback, or just to feel good about themselves (honestly, who doesn't like that?!).

To sign this guestbook and leave your footprint, go to the main menu, and click on the little "i" with a circle around it (signifying information) which is located in the "You are here" section in the middle of the screen. See Below:
Or, if you click on "servers" on the main menu after you've connected to a server, it will bring you to the same interface, but a different tab. You will be in the "server" tab, and you can click on the "connected" tab at the top.
Here you see the information about the server you are connected to, but what we are here for is the rating section (thumbs up/down) and the "show guestbook" button at the bottom. When you click "show guestbook" it allows you to write your comment.

AA has multiple levels of Twitch integration. Let us go over them.

In-game use:
If you are like me and watch twitch a lot, and would like to use them inside your arcade, just watching alone is very simple. Just spawn the stream URL as an object.
Now you can watch Sith Lord's stream in game, and if you press "R" after it is selected, you can click on other things as well without worrying about it turning off. If you want to be able to use twitch chat without leaving the arcade, we can do that to! Press "y" to open chat, and you will see a little plus symbol on the bottom of chat. After you click this, you will have to enter the channel name. For example, for Sith Lords's stream (www.twitch.tv/anarchyarcade), we would enter it like this "#anarchyarcade".
You can have as many twitch chats open as would want, but be warned, you will see chat on screen (if not using dof shaders), and if you have multiple up at once, it can be hard to discern which chat is for which stream. Now, we must enter in our own information for AA to connect to twitch for us, and use our twitch name for chat, and tell it which channels we want, if any, to auto join to.
Go into your settings (talked about in pt.1) and go to the twitch tab. Enable it, and enter in all the information. If you don't stream yourself, you don't need to enter your Twitch token or your channel, nor enable the Twitch bot. In this example, you can see how to enter multiple channels to auto join, using a comma and hashtags. The last option lets you see which chats are joined or exited. I have this off to prevent chat spam, but it is useful to have sometimes.



Streaming Use:
If you are a streamer, you have a few more options. Let me go over some reasons why you would want to use AA while streaming.

• One, to show off AA and your creative power! If people see your arcade between games, they might be like "what the heck is that awesomeness?!" and you can tell them how you created your own personal 3d desktop.
  
• Also, it's easy to create your own custom "welcome to stream, be right back, end stream" room or areas, and can be easily changed each time.
  
• If you have Twitch Bot enabled, and have a bot on your stream that uses commands, AA will update your twitch game for you if you change games. It also has a few other AA exclusive commands, such as !map (tell the chat which map you are on), and !linx (tells chat what you have currently selected in AA)
  
• You can have your twitch chat in AA, which can be utilized in your own ways if you are creative enough. One useful thing is if someone in chat drops a link, you can spawn it in AA just by clicking it.

All you have to do, is fill out the rest of the above Twitch settings tab. Click the "Get Your Token" button to get your twitch token, and enter it into the screen beside it, and press enter to save it. DO NOT STREAM YOURSELF DOING THIS!! You do not want others to get that information, which is why it hides it here. Make sure when you are streaming, you enable the bot to be able to use the commands talked about above.

Reshade is now shipped with Anarchy Arcade, and adds a lot of personal customization to your Arcade. There are a lot of presets and tutorials for reshade available online, so I'm sure you can find something more detailed than this, but as it's part of AA, I feel the need to explain it a little. It really does make a big difference.

Fair warning, you WILL see a frame rate loss, so don't run this on a potato.

For instance:

To start working with reshade, make sure it is turned on with the launcher. The second option lets you use Depth of field in reshade, as well as a few other options that utilize Reshade's depthmap feature (more on this later). If you turn it on, it disables the in game UI by default, meaning you will not be able to see chat or any other popups without opening a menu first. Personally, it's worth using.
side note: the reason you have to enable it in the launcher, is it uses a different .dll file than normal, so when it's enabled, it changes .dll files upon loading AA.

Once you have those options on, and you load anarchy arcade, you will see reshade initialize across the top of the screen. Please be patient as it loads everything. On your first time loading reshade, you will have to do Reshade's tutorial. I recommend going through it if you have never used it before. It's fast and gives you a lot of good information.

A couple of users, including myself, have multiple presets for different arcades, or for different reasons, such as screenshots or testing effects, like the old crt monitor above.

Now that everything is ready, load up your arcade, or the map your arcade will be on. After it is loaded, press "shift-scroll" to open and close Reshade's ui.

Make sure you make another preset. If you don't, and you make changes to the default one, it will most likely reset them later. The best thing to do when first starting is to go through each setting and toggle it on and see what it does, then toggle it off. Do this for each one to get a feel for them. Then you can add them together to get the results you are looking for.

On the bottom of the UI is where the nitty gritty comes in. Every option you turned on now has sliders and check boxes to play with. Feel free to mess with these as much as you want.

I highly recommend you go to "edit preprocessor definitions" on the bottom part of the UI and make sure "RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_UPSIDE_DOWN" "RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_LOGARITHMIC" and "RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_REVERSED" are set to "0"

With all this said, there is a toggle to turn reshade on and off while in AA, so even if you have it turned on through the launcher, but want it turned off for some other reason, you can set a toggle in the reshade menu. You WILL want to do this because reshade will not pause like AA does when you pause AA, so you will need to toggle reshade off FIRST, and then pause AA. If you don't reshade will continue to try to run shaders over itself and it will look like you broke something. If this happens, just unpause AA, toggle off the shaders, and pause again.

Libretro allows you to play roms IN AA on the actual cabinets, versus making you launch the game. This does not work for every emulator, so don't get upset if your emulator and favorite games cannot be used. Most of the ones that work are psp/psx and older. One user (FunkyPixie) created a list of working roms that he has found so far. This does not mean they are the only ones that will work, but the ones that most use.

Funky's list of working libretro cores[docs.google.com]

With that, there is also an in game mini tutorial to get you started as well. This is found in settings - embedded - Libretro. If you click the 'About' tab from here, you will get most of the information you need.

"How do I get started with this?" you might be asking. Well, let's get started!!

After you have read the information in the 'About' tab, you can get the cores needed to play the games you are wanting to play (please be aware there are no games included in anything AA related for legal reason). Once you download them, you will want to put them in the folder SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Anarchy Arcade\aarcade_user\libretro\cores. If you have Anarchy Arcade open, you will want to restart so it can mount them.

Once you are restarted, go to the 'cores' tab in libretro and you should now see your cores.
(note:there should already be at least one in here for mpegs)


Now, you will want to click on the core, and you now see a new screen on the right. This is where you will activate the core, as well as tell it a file path for content. You can add as many as you wish.

Once this is done, you should be setup and good to go. Just drag you file from windows into AA to create the link, or middle click and use the in game file browser. Since this is not a Steam game, it will not automatically be populated with images and previews, so you will want to manually edit them, or, if your like me, you might have seen this game in a server, so all you would have to do is place down the shortcut, and edit the item to you file path, and your good to go.

There are multiple ways to make sure your props are exactly where you want them. I have been told numerous times that some of the prop placement in my arcades are top notch, and here I will share with you my secrets!


The most important secret technique is patience. Don't be afraid to take a lot of time placing your props. You don't need to fill an area in a hour. You can visit this arcade as much as you want. I have arcades I've been going to for months, and they still aren't 'complete'. I tend to pick an area and start placing a few things until an idea for a theme forms. In the images above, it was space and music.

Another technique to use if you need to fine tune where something is placed, is crouch. When crouched, you move a lot slower, and allows for better control.

If you're looking to place things in straight lines, I use an image of a line of some sort on the ground as a guide, then place props on that line. Another way is use a prop like the imax screen or something big and flat in the position wanted, then place props against it.

Another thing to think about is themes. I mentioned above how I place a few things to come up with a theme, but sometimes the map alone is enough to help you with that. For instance a zoo map would more than likely have animals or zoo related games. I have also seen a AA map turned into a Pokemon zoo.
But you can also decide on your own what to make as a theme, as you have plenty of tools to create whatever you can imagine!
For instance, these 2 area are very similar when empty, but the results are very different, after utilizing everything available:




Using sprites:
Edit: Gifs have gotten a major overhaul lately. They can now be played automatically instead of having to manually play each one. Just look at the image after it has been placed, and hold tab. Go to the commands tab, and there is now one called 'Always Animate Image'. It should start playing after this is pressed.

This essentially put all your gifs onto one webpage for AA to run. Be aware since they are all on one tab, that if you have too many, the quality will start to deteriorate.
End Edit

Sprites are basically moving images, like gifs, to add movement in your arcades. The only negative aspect of these, is they have to be selected manually, and when not selected, the areas that are supposed to be clear, are black. The images below show sprites being used. One images shows the black (them not selected), and then other selected. If you were in game, they would all be moving.



Holograms and Blend images
Holorgrams and blended images can be used to create some great effects. They are made specifically to be translucent, so black is essentially transparent. This can be used to create nice images on walls, or having something floating in the air. Some examples are as follows:



in this image, you see one image on the back, and multiple images on top of it to create one image. All of these images in the front have black backgrounds, so they become transparent.







In this image, holograms are used on the floor and ceiling to create a space feel, as well as with the text tool, so the text comes out on a clear background.

Utilizing cabinets

Utilizing models

Utilizing sprites, blends, and holos

Using stickers:
Stickers are something that, in my opinion, are under rated. They can be used to customize your cabinets, and you will see your stickers in any arcade you drop that same cabinet into.
Anarchy Arcade comes with it's own set of stickers, and will also allow you to use any steam achievement icons as stickers for that game. If you would like to add your own stickers, you can place a png here:


Once you have put your new custom stickers there, custom stickers can be placed on any cabinet from then on. This can be done by going to the cabinet, middle clicking it to bring up your menu, going to the stickers tab, and clicking "Edit". Once there, you can see all the stickers available, and you can place them anywhere on the top image, and move/edit them. Once done, press "save and Apply stickers".

Basics of the F8 tab are in pt1 of this guide.

The ability to copy and repaint textures is a cool feature that might need some explaining to utilize to it's fullest. Or maybe you have already figured out Anarchy Arcade well enough from this awesome guide that it is coming natural to you, in that case my job is done. In the mean time, I will continue with my ramblings in the case that someone needs the help.

The ability to paint textures on maps gives you another way to customize your arcades without using models or props. As you can see, it can have a significant impact on aesthetics.

Side note: As of now, this only changes single player, so if uplaoded to MP, it will look vanilla to visitors. Remember this if you are putting things together with a certain look in mind.

To use this function, either hold 'tab' and it will be the tab that looks like a little bob ross image, also called the "paint" tab. Or, you can press f8 to get there as well. This will bring you to this screen. Please note that if you are just starting your painting adventures, you will have nothing in here yet.



On this screen, on the top, is your current 'pallet'. You can add as many of these as you want to sort your textures. I highly recommend you do so, as you can see it can get hard to see things you want. Also, it takes longer to load your pallet the more is in it.
In the middle is all your textures saved. At first, when you save a texture, it will not have the sample, so if you hover over a texture you need a sample for, you will see a little camera appear. Press that, and AA will get your sample for you. This has to be done manually for now.
Across the bottom you have "re-apply all" which should put the room back to vanilla textures. "Reset Material" will set the just the texture you are looking at back to vanilla. And last, we have "Pick Texture", which gets you the texture you are currently looking at.

Now that we've gone over the UI, let's get some textures. This is where the exploring adventure comes in. Start going to different maps, and start sampling every texture you can!


You will find that sometimes there are textures you just can't get, and some that will give you something you did not expect. That is a side effect of the map itself, not AA, so unfortunately there is nothing that can be done at this time. Also, if you get a texture you don't want, there is a circle with a minus sign next to the camera button when you hover over the texture that will get rid of it for you.

PRO TIP: Change your pallet to where you want the texture to go BEFORE you sample it. This way it goes into the correct pallet.

After you have spent countless hours downloading maps, and shamelessly stealing every texture you can find, go back to your arcade and start painting! To do this, look at the texture you want to change, and press tab (or f8), and click on the texture you want to be there. There you have it!

When things are brought up in #Tech-support on Discord, I will post them here for other users to try if needed.

1. Problem: Missing textures/models from maps that you were not previously missing them from.
   
   Solution: add -config to your launch options if your launcher does not show at startup, and make sure you have workshop enabled. Also, check to see if you have mounted games, like HL2: EP2 or TF2, mid-way through an update in your Steam.
   
   
2. Problem: models not being found by Anarchy Arcade
   
   Solution: Verify model path is correct
   
   • correct: Arcade/aarcade_user/custom/freemanstuff/models/freeman/euclid
     
   • incorrect: Arcade/aarcade_user/custom/gmodstuff/freemanstuff/models/freeman/euclid
   Also after creating a new mounted folder, a restart is required
   
   
3. Problem: Maps from auto-mounted games do not show up
   
   Solution: Verify addons are turned on in the launcher.
   
   Verify games are actually installed. Also, verify "Detect maps when Aarcade starts" is checked in the menu.
   

Also, here is the Trello[trello.com] that Sith uses for development.

I'd like to thank SM Sith Lord, fastassonic, wolfen, okedoke, daleth, Teasnutz, VeGas-_-Gh0st, Funky Pixie, and the rest of the Anarchy Arcade discord group for always being there to help out anyone who needs it, and for being a great community.