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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."
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!
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.
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.
Really, I don't know what you are complaining about. Microsoft Office and Visual Studio have tremendous scripting features, as does just about every major application these days. It's not like Valve gives you the Quake 3 engine source code, they just give you the data manipulation tools for the data on which that engine operates.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
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
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.
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.