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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."
Or why we all post on Slash dot... Nothing like being modded ;)
so where are the Tuxracer mods to support that?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Let people play *with* the game as well as *in* the game. And you still make money. If only other software companies would learn this lesson.
I still think that Team Fortress Classic is one of the best mods ever done for halflife. It was the reason I bought halflife... I enjoyed playing TFC so much. I never played the single-player version of halflife... but the mod motivated me to make the purchase.
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...
I remember playing "Barney-stein" with the Beavis and Butthead guards and loving every minute of it!
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
A game programmer friend of mine gave me a preview of Natural Selection and I am blown away by the amount of flexability that can be added to the half life engine. Charlie added a particle system for some smoke and dripping water effects. He made it more strategy-oriented by letting one player enter a control room where he can oversee operations and give resources and orders to the other players....
It's a beautiful thing.
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!
The Quake3 mods are far superior to the inept Half-Life mods which use (as the article states, the Half-Life engine, which, in turn uses the Q1 engine)
/.'ers are interested in Quake3 mods, I recommend www.urbanterror.net; similar to CheaterStrike, er, CounterStrike, but it's based off the Q3 engine, thusly, a far better experience. Note the screenshots of volumetric smoke and water with the lazer scopes. Very cool.
If fellow
~[e]Nosferatu aka :
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
I think a perfect example of how vital mods are to a game is to look at Halo on the Xbox. I've been playing it for months, but it's starting to feel a little long in the tooth. Being accustomed to games like Unreal Tourney and Quake I/II/III, where there are literally thousands of add-on maps, characters, etc. online for the taking, I'm used to adding stuff to my games, keeping them forever fresh.
Since Halo isn't (officially) online yet, there's no way to add mods or functionality. My use of Halo has started to taper off, while I still play Unreal Tourney pretty regularly. Not bad for a game I've had for over 2 years.
I bought Quake 3 when it hit the shelves not because I thought it was good (indeed, as a game itself it is incredibly weak), but because I knew that Carmack and crew were bound to learn from the previous Quake experiences (Action Quake was one of the best games ever, but was a mod) and they'd make it versatile, and that they did. Now I'm a big fan of Urban Terror and it has made my Q3 purchase absolutely worthwhile.
The saddest thing though is that mod workers are usually compensated by accolades alone: Urban Terror, as an example, represents an unbelievable amount of work and talent, yet while id is pulling in $50 from every player, The Urban Terror crew is pulling in nothing.
But I don't think that that's the same as saying that they are the lifeblood of the industry. They do increase sales of some titles, but mods also mean that you don't have to buy more titles because the one game you purchased turns into more games, magically, and for free! Eventually it starts looking dated, and you start looking around for the next pretty engine with some cool mods, it gains weight (the mass of subscribers, though engines do submit to a bloating process over time) and the cycle begins anew, as one might say if one was feeling wanky that day.
Basically, I bought half-life about when it came out. I played a lot of it. Then I played counterstrike, in the days before it was known as cheaterstrike; Before every asshole had an aimbot and transparent wall drivers - before the transparency drivers even existed. Now that it's been overrun by cheaters, I play Tactical Ops. I lost my HL CD key, and I don't even care.
So now I'll be able to pretty much just play games on UT for a while... If I want an entertaining special forces tactical game, I play TO, and there's a bunch of other mods. Of course, nothing has been modded as imaginatively as Quake1, but who plays that any more? Besides me. But the point is, I won't bother to buy another FPS until the new ver of UT comes out... whatever they decided to call it. Is that healthy lifeblood, or just stagnation?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
They treat us MOD developers (like Day of Defeat) VERY well, giving us resources, channels to communicate with each other (and them), tools, plus PR.
:^)
If you've ever read the Clue Train Manifesto, I think you might agree with me that they follow some of the Cluetrain Rules. Open things up, allow players and developers to talk, etc. How many game companies run mail lists where their own coders get involved with discussions with mod developers? If you didn't look at the 900 pound gorilla behind them, you'd swear it's open source or something
What skills are useful? Any good books?
Do you just download an SDK or what?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
This is something that Ambrosia Software figured out a long time ago. They have produced some of the best Mac [the phantom ducks his head to avoid rotton tomatoes] games of all time. Some of the games that they have put out are truely amazing, such as Maelstrom (a really good Asteroids clone), the Escape Velocity Trilogy, and Ferazal's Wand (sp?). However, what has made their games truely wonderful is the ability to midify them. Escape Velocity Override was a great game, but you could only play it through a few times before everything had been done. But, there was the Frozen Heart plug, Femme Fatale, and several other complete replacements that forced me to pay for that little bit of shareware. And Ambrosia has been allowing users to modify their games for a very long time -- it seems to me that Maelstrom was one of the first, in the early 90s.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Besides the usual awful AppleSoft BASIC hacks, my earliest (and fondest) memories of game tinkering were with Pinball Construction Set's awesome built-in editor. IIRC, it was the first game to ship with out-of-the-box modding support. EA was way ahead of its time, one might say...
Bill Budge is my hero.
y
I've been playing it for months, but it's starting to feel a little long in the tooth.
Don't nobody at Bungie care if you get bored of a game after many months. They businesses, and they in business to SELL games, not support them.
You know you woulda bought that game anyway and you know you gonna buy the next one when it comes out too, cause it was tight when you got it and you already got a few good months outta playin it. That's all they was sellin right there. A game that would keep you instrested until the next new $hit come out. Ain't no money in helping your customers re-use the same played out $hit foreva.
Na'am sayin?
It would seem to me that other companies should be getting a clue just by watching other companies enjoy success as a direct result of mods. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Is there something intrinsically wrong with the system that other companies are so stuck in the cost/revenue/profit cycle they can't/won't step out for a minute and realize that they would be better off sharing development with players?
I would like to propose a user-driven move for all software to be more like this but my faith in our ability to do such is waning...
Liora
Was accomplished with a hex editor on Jordan Mechner's "Karateka" for the Apple II. We started by changing the starting credits, so "By Jordan Mechner" became "by [insert your name here]". We were 11 at the time, and that was exciting.
Then we discovered ehere in the disks were the sprites, and started to change them by trial and error. Not an ounce of artistic ability, too. So, we ended up with even crappier sprites. But "we made them".
Ah, the memories...
That, IMHO, CounterStrike is STILL selling copies of Half-Life, while the game itself is getting pretty old. This is a proven case where a mod was more popular than the origional game.
The even made a box edition because it was selling so well.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
It's a great piece of work.
;-)
The best WW2 game I know. That includes realism in the first place. That's the key. Sounds, models, movements, weapons, how weapons work etc.
Personaly, that's the only online game I play.
Now, as for lifeblood...
You know, from the developer point of view, the mod is created for particular game as a hobby of course, but you want your mod to be playable on as many computers as possible.
And Half-Life exists on very many computers. It was game of the year by all accounts, and sometimes even for more than one year.
And then Counter-Strike came (which is popular due to the same reason - popularity of base game). And even more people bought the game.
Half-Life is 3 years old now. And it's not the same as it was. High-quality models, voicecomm and netcode fixes really transformed the base game. And mods take advantage of it.
Actualy, HL it coming very close to what TF2 was supposed to be. Will we see TF2 as a mod for HL?
The only problem is that it only supports 32 players.
In the end, I (the consumer) win. Mods are free. Woohoo. I bought HL to play CS. Valve releases new patch with voicecomm. Free. I fed up with CS and switched to DoD. Free. Then they release new version (2.0), totaly new gameplay (and much better too). Free.
Anybody else remember the Doom II Aliens total conversion?
A friend of mine had found it, played it through, and told a bunch of us to set aside our Saturday afternoon for it. He was the computer attendant in one of the school's least popular labs and he told us he'd lock all four of us in while we played this game undisturbed. We were to bring headphones.
With the lights off, and the headphones in our ears (no music), it was very easy to immerse ourselves in the Alien world we saw in the movies. We had precisely one rule: No respawning.
I didn't find it extremely replayable, most of the enjoyment was based on having absolutely no way of knowing what would happen next. I was a decent Doom II player, but I didn't have a good familiarity with the maps -- I was roasted on maps that everyone else knew. This time was different, none of us knew the maps. It was the first time I played a co-operative game and had it actually work. And work it did! Looking like the dorks you see in the movies, we physically jumped back when some of those creatures came at us.
I still tip my hat off to those copyright infringing guys. You are truly talented.
http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/news.php?artc=2552
Not a mod, per say, but this kind of amateur development is important, too.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
About 6 months ago I bought Red Faction for the sole purpose of modifying it. My team chose this platform because the type of mod we wanted to produced would benefit greatly from the engine's GeoMod technology. To make a long story short, the games creators to my knowledge have never published any means to create mods beyond simple deathmatch variants. What my team had planned was quite an in-depth total conversion so we were forced to scrap the project. We're hoping the next engine from id, Valve, et. al will contain dynamic terrain so we can pick it up again, or that Red Factions creators will come to their senses.
Some of us were adding *emphasis* to our /email/ long before HTML was thought of. Typing habits are hard to break. Besides, typing * is a lot quicker than typing <b> and doesn't have the same catastrophic effect if you forget to close the tags.
--
E_NOSIG
well, there's "crystal space", which comes damn close to what you are after
Give the audience the engine for graphics and menus, etc..., and what do they have left to deal with?
Game Design
So you have people that can ignore the months of engine building a tweaking, but, instead, spend those months on plot, balancing, and gameplay.
Like DeusEx? That's nothing more than a heavy UT mod.
But I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. Now the gaming industry can't do what its done for years. They (meaning the publishers, ie - EA) always want a copy of the latest hit, for example, everyone wanted a "Doom" clone. This evolved to using the same system with a twist, like Doom with a plot where the plot isn't to kill things, but to sneak around (Thief).
Now, they can't do that, cause some kids will do that, and release it for free.
So, for the gaming industry to survive, they need to really innovate games, make them mod'able, and hope for the best. This is quite a new turn.
It'll either kill the industry, or we'll see some majorly different games in a year or two....
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I wonder if I'll get a response, but I played MegaTF for 4 years in college (ending 2001).
Know what? It's based on the Quake1 engine. But it's a heck of a mod and the community kept it lively. Gameplay is king over graphics. Even 33.6'ers could join in and still participate in matches without fear of being owned by LPB's.
God I miss that game. Sadly, after 6-7 years of development, someone discovered bunnyhopping and ruined it. Perhaps one day I'll return...
------
Today's Top Deals
You know, it is suprising how often these mods get left out of mod discussions. TFC and Counter-Strike have only been like the two biggest, most successful mods in the past 3 years.
Can't wait for that inevitable TF mod for Jedi Knight II.
It hurts when I pee.
It is all the mods to the mod that has made it one of the largest Counter-Strike communities in the world!
Licenses are the lifeblood of the gaming industry.
Mods are bloody cool, but
a) You don't get them on consoles, and console games make up the majority of games sales.
b) They do add value to a game, but for the majority of games with modding ability, the reality is that only a small community of dedicated players actually make/use them.
point b) is a good thing,as it means that the minority who are modding are actually concentrating on a small set of games, rather than being spread around between many games.
The only game I can think of that has resulted in a measureably large increase in sales due to mods is Half-Life, as a result of Counter-Strike and TeamFortress. I suppose you could also say MS Flight Simulator is another example, but really - there aren't many. Quake (I, II, III etc...) have probably been helped by mods, but I don't think their sales have been driven by mods in the same way Half-Life's has.
2 games series, mechwarrior & quake.
Back in the days of 1996 you had two large communities. Quake and Mechwarrior. There were leagues for both, there were active online players of both.
One you could expand (Quake) and one you couldn't (Mechwarrior)
Quake community grew and grew and as the game changed and became more advanced so did those doing the mods, maps, and skins. They spawned Weapons Factory, Rocket Areana, Ubran Terror.. countless maps, and even more numerous skins. The code was open, the architectire was open(.pk3).We got statistical tracking, we got cross referencing those stats. Other game developers caught on and we got RTCW, MOH, DoD, and the one i'm hooked on..Kedi Knight 2: Outcast. Open game, active community.
Now take a look at the Mech community, that was around at the same time. Everyone was in a clan, a huge percent of players were involved in leagues. The game wasn't open but the mechs were(a text file). That spawned mech editors, NAIS(mercs), cheat detectors, and mech organizers( i have 500 varients). That was it tho..untill Microsoft stepped in. Mechwarrior today has had all the "sim" like features stripped out of it, skins are difficult to make(they provide no blanks). There are 0 mods, there are 0 apps, it keeps log files in some non standard format...but uploads stats IN BINARY! to microsoft tracking servers(hacking would be against DCMA).
so 2 genres, 2 communities starting at about the same time. Its pretty easy to see that its not "if you build it they will come" but rather "IF YOU LET THEM build it THEMSELVES, they'll come running!"
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
im sure kraf meant it's the most popular half-life mod, which is it
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Yeah. I personally think the 3D-Shooter genre is just about over. Well, it's been over for me for a while. To me, with exception of Heretic and some of it's mods, I found alot of the 3d Shooters the same. Sure, sometimes the behavior is a bit different, but the point of the game is known as well as the controls....cruise around a level, shoot stuff as fast as you can. While it's good stress relief, it's not much fun after you are totally unstressed. The one nice thing about 3d shooters is you can go online, play a few rounds and walk away. Their's nothing addicting about them to me anymore. I get more addicted to tweaking roller coasters in RCT. Playing with my city in Sim City 3000. Goofing off with the sims. Those games draw you in. I also like how Wil Wright created a nice 3d world with out the need for a super de duper 3d polygon pusher. 300 dollars for a graphics card?? No way. This is why games such as the Sims and all of it's addons and RCT and it's add-ons are popular...they run well on modest systems, even ones as old as Pentium II 450's. Somewhere along the 3d game lines some folks forgot that not every person has a Geforce 4 whatever but they do have something a littl eless. They forgot what it was like trying to find a PC game that would work on a older machine. I am not saying that they should not make these things it's just that games need not be super kewl 3d in order to be good games. I had a blast playing Mechwarrior 2 and it was a modest game (although the sequals are good too). But after playing those 3-d polygon fests, I just feel bored. I can't get addicted to deathmatching because when I go on a server, I am usually killed with in 10-20 seconds of coming into the game. This is even in games that are supposed to cater to newbies.
Gorkman
Licensing the engine costs money. Modding does not.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'm very suprised that Garage Games was not mentioned in the article.
They allow you to buy the source code to the engine that powered Tribes 2 for $100.
Not only that, but they have released a project called Realm Wars. This is a game that the community contributes to. If you bought the source code, then you can contribute source code. If not, you can still download the demo, and contribute SCRIPTS, artwork, models and more.
It will be extremely interesting to see how this pans out.
(as long as I don't get any UE errors)
People will pay money to play the same game, provided that the game engine is better. Since every game engine has its own inherent limitations, the drive in commercial game development will most likely be to develop good games on top of good engines.
Of course, there are cases like Deus Ex (and many other games that borrow their predecessors' engines), but a game engine only remains viable for so long. The Half-Life engine, for instance, has been pushed to its limit, and it's unlikely that there will be any more hugely successful half-life mods. People will inevitably want to move on to things like the upcoming Doom 3 engine.
I must admit I always found unreal tournament a bit boring. However I've been hooked for months already on a modification for it: strikeforce. Without that modification (and many others), unreal tournament wouldn't have survived long on my harddisk. Strikeforce is an absolutely brilliant mod. Great maps, great gameplay.
I had the same with the original unreal. Single player was fun while it lasted. After that I kept the game around to play the mods.
Jilles
I'm surprised no one has mentioned, but Civ2 is easily one of the MOST modded games ever. Six/seven years after the game was released, and after numerous clones/sequels, the game is still going strong (hell, I still play it on weekends).
The reason it was modded so often was that Microprose made all the data files open (hmm, almost Open Source, in a way). While the engine was still closed, players could edit plaintext files to control it's behavior, as well as that of the units. The graphics files, for units, terrain, cities, even leaders, were simple GIF's that could be easily modified. Later, Microprose even added a rudimentary macro language for scenario builders.
I have seen many truly remarkable Civ2 mods. Some people overhauled the ENTIRE game, replacing everything. Forget scenario editors, this goes way beyond.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
You know, one of the reasons I've always liked PC games better than console games is the ability to get mods, updated rosters, etc., through the Internet.
I mean, would anyone still be buying Half-life if we didn't want it to play CS and DoD?
I wonder if, once we can have Linux on our PS2's, we'll see mods for GTA3 and the like.
Does anyone know if it's possible to release mods for console games?
One of the big Advantages of Counter-Strike is that it is still playable on old hardware. P233 with no 3d accelleration? Fine - it'll still run!
Sure, the engine (A Quake I/II mix) is quite old now, but the creators of CS have done an amazing job with it. The sheer quality of the textures and lighting is amazing. To be honest, from the looks of the screenshots, UT looks like it has a higher polycount, but I don't think the overall impression looks all that much better.
Anyway, graphics can only count for so much. CS is great fun to play (I can't speak for UT, not having played it...), and CS is the most popular online game ever. I remember being amazed when I first tried Counter-Strike that there were over 20,000 CS servers out there. I don't think any other game has come close. CS is *BIG*.
On the web, if you go for the few remaining gaming news sites, it is easy think that mods are the center of the universe. But then you look at where the serious action is in gaming:
1. Big console titles like GTA3, MGS2, FFX, Halo.
2. Monster PC titles like The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon. The Sims has sold over 6.5 million copies.
then you get a different feeling. Are mods interesting and important? Yes. But lets not get carried away. In reality the communities surrounding games like Half-Life and Unreal tend to be self-serving and isolated, with notable exceptions (gotta mention Counterstrike). You just don't find all that much innovation in mods for, say, Unreal. Now, sure, the mod community will argue otherwise, but that's what I meant by "isolated."
Regarding Wolf3D:
It wasn't the very first first-person game-- that title belongs to "Ultima Underworld" (1992), released a few months earlier from Looking Glass Studios....
Catacomb Abyss came out in December, 1991. Dig those EGA graphics!
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Right now, mods come after games, basically just using their engines, then modding everything but the core engine itself.
An upcoming title, Legends just may be the next step in the evolution of gaming. Basically a mod that just skips the first step of buying a different game just to get the engine.
The game is based off the tribes 2 engine, and will be released for free. People can modify it however they want and contribute to the project in any matter they see fit.
Will be interesting to see how their experiment goes. Could revolutionize online gaming, and change the way mods are developed forever, or it could fail miserably and accomplish little.
then The Sims would keep coming out with new "upgrades" or "add ons" every few months ...
...
...
then Pokemon would keep having new "versions" every few months so you would keep getting new ones
then AD&D would have kept coming out with new Books and Campaigns every few months since the dawn of gaming time
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Jesus! I've seen more patting on the back lately for mod makers, and frankly, it's making me sick. With Microsoft talking about paying modders for their work, I think many people don't understand what will happen when all this money and fame goes to a modders head.
:)
Alien Doom. Now there was a mod...
though ZanZan is really f*cking cool for a Doom mod!
It's been a long time.
You think Blizzard doesn't just care about money? Blizzard is owned by Vivendi Universal and I can guarantee you they only care about money. I run the boycottblizzard.org site.
Take a look at Torque - it's basically the V12 engine from Tribes 2 with all the Tribes 2 Intellectual Property pulled out. What's left is a nice, fairly good engine. Here's the cool part:
If you want to just do modding, you don't have to BUY Torque, instead, just download the demo. The also have all sorts of community boards for ya to look at and interact with each other for questions. Pretty nice.
If you suddenly decide you want to write a commercial game with it, or, you need the source code - no problem. License the engine. For $100, and a distribution agreement for commercial sales. Not TOO bad.
There is a built-in terrain editor, world editor, etc - however, no actually map-building tools for interior locations. But, you can use Quark or WorldCraft (er... guess that's Valve's Hammersomethingorother now) to do that work.
I licensed the Torque engine to do Trajectory, and so far it's been wonderful. C++'ish scripting language built in, plus having the source for some further modifications that I can't do in scriptin is great.
Go check 'em out at Garage Games and download the demo or the RealmWars demo to check it out. Or, heck, play Tribes 2 a bit, and you know what to potentially expect ;-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
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
It's at http://web.archive.org/web/19991012141834/http://h ome.earthlink.net/~bcbull/dotb.htm
Isn't it great how archive.org keeps stuff around just for situations like this???
Navy Seals: Covert Operations is the best Q3 mod out there right now, IMNSHOBIK. It's more realistic than the cartoony Urban Terror (or, god forbid, CS), and also more fun. Not to mention it's the only mod I've seen where teamwork consistantly spontaneously appears.
Once a couple problems get taken care of (speed whores, for example), it will be a masterfull game.
The enemies of Democracy are
Mods?
Screw them, I've always seen myself as more of a rocker.
Also, I was never a fan of their big coats and silly little scooters.
Think about it, you can sell X number of copies of your game due to your cheesy graphics and story (*cough* QUAKE *cough*) and then sell 2x more to die hard gamers who will download a free TC and replace your crappy creative work with stuff done by someone else. Basically you get paid for your engine, and somebody else donates the creative work for "cred". Not a bad scam. Maybe the TC folks get paid too, big friggin deal. Still, it's entirely reasonable given that game engines have separated the engine from the creative content for so long, to allow parallel development of the storyline and graphics from the rendering engine, combat system, etc.