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The Mod Squad

Posted by michael on from the headshot dept.

Devil's BSD writes "Popular Science has a new article in this month's issue about gaming mods. It contains a nice history of mods, touches on mods for the Big Three gaming systems today (as well as those for computer games), and a beginner's guide to mods. Interesting, but not much new for the l33t h4x0rs out there though."

6 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Counterstrike by prestomation · · Score: 4, Informative

    When I hear the word "mod", the first thing I think of is Counter-Strike. If you don't know what that is, you should get out of that hole you've been living in! :) It's a tatical terrorist vs. counter-terrorist mod to Half-Life. A few months ago there we're about 13,000(yes, THOUSAND) active servers. Now there's only a few thousand, but it's more then any other mods I believe. It must be by chance that this story was posted right after I've been playing CS for the first time in a couple of months. http://www.counter-strike.net

  2. Advancement in mod'n abilities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I had the fun of working on a mod. When Q2 came out they have you the game source code for the .dll or .so, not the graphic engine and netcode. The code was pretty hard to work with because it was highly undocumenets.

    I recently have been playing with Unreal Tournament. It come with it's own language and compiler that resembles Java. It very easy to work with and doesn't change much from each game release. Each new game just adds new classes or extends existing classes. It's lowered the learning curve, since you don't have to learn a new language for each game release.

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

    Quake had the best mods, ever. Hands down. Threewave CTF absorbed much of my time i should have spent studying and can be directly attributed to my poor ACT scores (I spent the entire night prior engaged in a ferocious clan battle against a german clan. We won, but the price paid was evident on my ACT scores...which I'll refrain from disclosing ;)).

    And what about Quake Rally ? Jesus, those were some memories there. Really innovative control scheme that's just now catching on in other games. It did some really fantastic stuff with the Quake engine, but it just didn't seem as off the wall as.... Target Quake !!! God. A side scroller built on the Quake engine.. fucking _golden_ stuff there. Brilliant idea.. kinda reminded me of Abuse but in 3D.. :)

    Oh hell, and what about the movies available for Quake? Remember Blahbalicious ? How about Operation Bay Shield ? Apartment Huntin ? Hell, the massive 4 hour Nehahra ?

    Seriously, I haven't uninstalled Quake since 1996, i just keep transfering it over to my new hard drives whenever I upgrade. How the hell could I risk losing the ability to play Zerstorer or Scourge of Armagon ?


    hehehe, i bet you thought i was going to forget the Quake Done Quick movies, didn't you? ;)

  4. Urban Terror Rocks! by Starving+Artist · · Score: 2, Informative

    Urban Terror is a great Quake3 mod. It runs natively under linux, there's hardly any cheatz, and the community is strong, with the developers taking an active role.

  5. You Whipersnappers! by JoeCommodore · · Score: 4, Informative
    Alterations of a PC game are called "mods." Although modifying began among hard-core hackers,

    I began a whole lot longer before that, Go back to the 70s/80s where people with their 'big three' home computers starting out by modifying BASIC from a tape program or type-in listing (Yep I remember giving the mansters in Cursor's Dungeon silly names and myself better recharge stats)

    A Few years later as 8-bit computing progressed many pirates added extras to their 'cracked' games (which they called 'trainers' added such options as too many lives, indesctructible, level jump, etc.)

    Next the designers themseleves were modding their own games before release, type in this combo or do that joystick move to get free lives, etc.

    The article is old news to me.

    --
    "Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
  6. Re:Game Modding for Dummies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Thats a very broad question. I can help you if your interested in modding for Half-Life, which I am currently doing myself.

    everything from coding to modelling
    http://www.planethalflife.com/wavelengt h/models/

    lots of stuff on coding
    http://www.karljones.com/halflife/almanac. asp

    you need this to get the level editor, and the Half-Life SDK
    http://www.valve-erc.com/

    Your also going to need to know how to model, texture, and animate with 3DSmax or Milkshape. To learn this stuff you should probably start here - http://www.planetquake.com/polycount

    Be forwarned, making MODs for modern games requires alot of time and skill. Expect to spend several months just getting familiar with the basics.