wilt, bam, kobe

We @dot_discovery have rebuilt the WWF No Mercy engine inside Unreal Engine 5. The intent here is to combine all the AKI series into a singular engine, for Free and open source on Github when done for non-commercial reasons. It uses modern solutions for shadows/lighting and internal things like AI behavior, but the AI matches AKI 1:1. This means that a creator can take a branch and turn this into something with extremely high quality models, but retaining that gameplay style that is beloved. I just hit record. ☺️ #N64 #AKI

Weekend modding, a bit more work on this. For those who don't know, the AKI games pre-def jam did not have finger "bones", so you will see when I put a modern HD model in, the hands are doing nothing - my solution was to mount all of them onto the Def Jam skeleton. All NM/VPW2 etc animations use that skeleton, you can't tell. Each character data has an option to use Def Jam animations as a checkbox for grabs/grounded/ etc if you want models with fingers, this is also good if modders want to run through with AI to solve the finger solution on all the old AKI animations since there are thousands. Also added the #WWE2K26 highlight reel to it and the Def Jam camera & camera cuts, with a Blazin' move from Def Jam ported too. You'll also notice the UI switches between VPW2 and No Mercy depending on the character, same for the arenas, retaining the aesthetic while merging. I'm dropping early builds in @dot_discovery if you're interested in trying them.