Melee Mod Studio

A closer look at what it is, what is in it, and what I built.

What the app does

Opens a game disc image directly from your own machine and patches it in place, with no upload step and no server copy of the game.
Gives each kind of mod its own workbench: character gameplay, cosmetics, portraits, stages, music, 3D models, and a checkout flow for assembling a pack.
Edits character move scripts frame by frame, with hitbox groups, knockback, trajectory, and directional influence shown alongside the numbers.
Hosts a searchable marketplace of community cosmetic mods with per-fighter filtering and shareable detail pages.

Reads the GameCube disc image, walks its file system table, and rebuilds that table when a replacement file changes size.
Parses the game's HSD archive and model format - joints, display objects, materials, textures, and polygon data - and animates fighters from their own animation data.
Decodes the GameCube GX texture formats, including the compressed CMPR format, for portraits and costume previews.
Decodes and encodes the game's HPS music container and its DSP-ADPCM audio so tracks can be swapped.
Draws models with a WebGL2 renderer written for this project rather than a 3D library, sharing one context across every thumbnail on a page.

Byte patches refuse to guess at a mirrored offset rather than silently writing the wrong one, which is what fixed the stage mods that used to apply and change nothing.
A Python harness drives the Dolphin emulator through libmelee to check that an edited move actually behaves differently in the running game.
The repo keeps a delivery audit that checks every completion claim against the source, and tracks work as built, verified, or confirmed rather than just "done".
GitHub Actions deploy to separate staging and production Workers environments that share one D1 database.