Mods: "Lifeblood of Gaming Industry"?

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."

Comments

Unreal Tournament Mod Community

[chachi5000]

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.

Re:Aliens TC

[lpontiac]

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.

Re:How does one go about modding a game?

[psxndc]

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