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Mods: "Lifeblood of Gaming Industry"?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-hi-i-figure-it dept.

Jadsky writes "Salon is is running a story about how modifications to games are now the lifeblood of the industry. It cites "Day of Defeat", an add-on to Half-Life, and proceeds to give an analysis of the history and current work on game mods. It also mentions Castle Smurfenstein and the Doom Construction Kit, which many of us played with before there was z-space."

10 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Wolfenstein3d Barney Mod by aardwolf64 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I remember playing a Wolfenstien3d mod that replaced most of the Nazis with Barney. I found it around 1993, but it had probably been around much longer. There was a lengthy story in which Barney incited the children of the world to revolt and kill anyone over 13. It came with a DOS-based text editor that "glided" text onto the page (scrolling was very smooth.) It was a really cool story, and I've been looking for that text editor for the past few years, but have been unable to find it...

    1. Re:Wolfenstein3d Barney Mod by qurob · · Score: 2, Informative


      Are you talking about speedview?

      ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source

      It's with the Wolf3D source

      SpeedView v2.00 by John Romero (C) 1989 Softdisk, Inc.

  2. Unreal Tournament Mod Community by chachi5000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unreal Tournament is a three year old game that is still very popular because of mods. Specifically in capture the flag mode (CTF), which was really an after thought for the game.

    The player/developer community work together solving CTF problems (spawn killing mods), creating new ways to play the game (CTF relics that enhance your character abilities) and making it more fun (StrangeLove Rockets you can fly around a board).

    Check out this site www.planetunreal.com. The bottom left side of the navigation has about 25 different sites dedicated to mods. Many of them CTF related.

    Great independant CTF servers like www.unrealmafia.com and www.stealthdp.com contribute to the mod community. They give mods developers feedback and a place to test new ideas. Many of the mod developer s post regularly to the forums of these sites asking for feedback or ideas. Check out the mod forums of both CTF servers.

  3. Counterstrike by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Have they totally forgotten that counterstrike was a mod of its own? Holy shit, Day of Defeat is a dwarf compared to the popularity of CS.

  4. Re:Pinball Construction Set by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Or the incredible for its time Adventure Construction Set

    Mods have come a long way since then.

  5. Re:How about a game that's only mods? by anti-snot · · Score: 2, Informative

    well, there's "crystal space", which comes damn close to what you are after

  6. Re:What about the Quake3 mods? by WoodenBoy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Half-Life is based on both the Quake I and II engines. They (Valve) started work with Quake I and added in bits of Quake II where necessary.

    See PlanetHalfLife's FAQ for a bit more detail.

  7. Re:Aliens TC by lpontiac · · Score: 3, Informative
    Anybody else remember the Doom II Aliens total conversion?

    Well, it originally came out for the original Doom. When Doom II came out, someone kindly hacked the files about so they'd work with the new game.

    Incidentally, if anyone feels like giving it a spin for old time's sake and has a copy of the DOOM wad files, go to Doomworld and download an OpenGL-enabled version of Doom, grab a copy of Aliens TC that's been modified to work with modern versions of Doom and let her rip :P

    I still tip my hat off to those copyright infringing guys.

    The term "foxed" was coined when Fox shut down the Alien Quake project. :/ Somehow, Aliens TC for Doom has managed to survive without any action being taken.

  8. Re:How does one go about modding a game? by psxndc · · Score: 3, Informative
    disclaimer: this only applies to Halflife because that's all I've tooled with

    First, download the full sdk. Next, get a C++ compiler. Last I knew they promised compatability only with MS Visual C++. Next learn C++. :-) Lastly, go into the code, probably the weapon code first and change a value. Like change the damage values or the spreads. Recompile, play the game. Repeat but change a different value. Once you're comfortable mucking with that stuff, try mucking with the models. There are a couple good sites out there, here's one to start with

    psxndc

    --

    The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.

  9. People always forget... by scot4875 · · Score: 2, Informative

    People always seem to forget Abuse (1995, Crack Dot Com, www.abuse2.com) when they discuss 'moddable' game engines.

    When Abuse came out, to my knowledge, there were no other games with a built-in script interpreter. All of the game's AI routines were done in LISP, all easily editable by anyone who knew LISP (granted: most people don't know LISP), and the game engine has an integrated level editor. But this game came out a full year before Quake 1, and still never gets mentioned in these discussions. Hell, they even had a $1000 level creation contest when the game came out.

    Truly a shame, because it's a great game, and the engine was way ahead of its time.

    --Jeremy

    --
    Jesus was a liberal