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The Mod Squad
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."
I remember doing my own (simple) DOOM mods. Then came Quake and I loved the mods, expecially CTF, even played semi-professionally for a little bit.
However, after hardware advanced too fast for me to be able to afford upgrades, I have pretty much left the gaming scene entirely.
It was damn fun, though.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
...how many games do you really want to see the characters naked in?
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
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
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.
I remember hearing some time ago about a Legend of Zelda mod. I downloaded it and ran it through a NES emulator. That sucker was about a thousand times harder than the original. I think I got about half way through the thing and finally gave up because it was too much. It was pretty cool though. The sprites were all colored differently and behaved in different ways than their original counterparts. I don't know, I may have heard about it here. If it can be done, and done well, for an NES game the newer ones would be real nice. If you get someone really creative and give it a good plot, you might have something better than the original.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
I still have them. IIRC, I think they work well in jDoom too. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
For example with Day of Defeat mod for Half-Life, HL is like a few years old and yet the mod is very popular. v3.0 beta just came out a few days ago and I am in awe with this mod.
:)
Sure, the game engine uses outdated engine, but the fun is there. Now, if I could just play this awesome WWII mod in Linux (no Wine and stuff).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't like this article. It starts off discussing mods, then veers off into rewriting the history of Team Fortress. It then makes interjections about mod communities in between telling of this alternate history.
I think this article was designed to soften people up after all the spite that has been built up against Team Fortress 2.
Among the false histories: The omission of the announcement that TF2 would be released as a Quake2 mod. The fact that the core TF duo was by Valve before Half-Life was released. That TF Classic was released to calm the public as much as for fun, and about the time of the last projected release of TF2, then a commercial add-on.
I'm not sure what this article was intended to do.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Why did this article spew off into a false treastise on Team Fortress?
It would have been far more on-topic if they had mentioned AliensTC, used the term "Total conversion", and brought up Foxing. They only vaguely alluded to the topics, perfering to talk about TF.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
DoD Web site. I think it is gaining more players and to me, this mod is much funner.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm more of a gaming rocker myself.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
All of them.
... Is that wrong?...
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
The PS author and editors blow it big time when they outright claim that all games are devoid of standard copyright protections against modification/alteration/derivative works. The blanket statement of "Although modifying began among hard-core hackers, it's not illegal." is just flat wrong, except where game publishers openly invite this activity.
Never heard of.
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?
DOD 3 is out! DOD 3 came out three days ago and the characters all are upgraded and it looks sweeter. I'm still downloading it but DOD 1 didnt work and then when DOD 2 came out it did and it's fairly good. DOD went from 200 players to I think theres many thousands! CS is old news.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
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.
There's already a booming mod commnuity for GTA3(pc version). SOmeone's making a whole new city with various tweaks here and there.
Man would I like to have GTA Twin Cities. There's also simple mods you can do, like make a car 15K pounds heavy, and any collision sends a car flying in the opposite direction.
I find that most Mods are reasonably pathetic, but sometimes they're better than the original game.
Counterstrike for Half-Life, Renegades for Tribes, etc.
Recently I've been playing a mod for Unreal Tournament called Thievery, although it's more of a Total Conversion than a Mod. Somehow they've stripped UT down and rebuilt it as a multi-player version of Thief. Don't know how they did it, but it's incredible.
The article is already /.ed so I need to ask.... was there any discussion about the support that devopers give to the mod community? I am not specifically talking about mapping and level designs but rather new game concepts adapted from the original.
Id Software seemed to start the mainstream trend with the Doom engine being easily adapted with the good folk that developed the right tools. Then Valve software came along and gave the fledging mod community a BIG helping hand to the point where they enter "partnerships" with the better and more popular mods (ie. CS of course). Even games like Morrowind and NWN ship with tools that say "Use Me !!!" to custom design or alter adventures. It almost seems expected of a developer to offer the extra incentive for what is probably the minority of users to keep the game "alive" until the next game by a developer is released... what with the 2-3 year development times now.
- HeXa
Any Map Mapmaker worth is salt has made a map of his school,house,campus,work,office,call center
;)
thoes maps are the best to play on, just dont get caught playing a network game on that map after hours
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Good point, I co-ran a server doing the same thing, running old-skool maps (de_nuke ect..)
ive been playing (or had been) since beta 0.1 or whatever.. any one remeber gun running on cs_docks? lol
the reason i quite, was because of the retail version in just one week there were 100's of new crappy servers, filled with crappy players, and at certain times of the day 3-5 the language of the kidz playing was just awfull.. to many immature kidz playing. it ruined the game for me.
now DOD is going the same way.. the more coverage in the magazines it gets (maximum PC, PC Gamer ect..) the more kidz play, the more they swear, the easier it is for me to kill them, and i get called a cheater.. its skill, ive been playing just halflife and halflife mods since it came out, except for some age of empires i havent played anything else, to this day i havent even seen Q3 or know any one who has a copy of it.
just halflife.. and nothing but
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
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
That would be a snow plow. People in the Twin Cities are quite good at driving into those, with the effect that you describe.
--
E_NOSIG
I have Q3A for linux (RIP Loki) but anyway, the mods are the best. Quake3 sucks rocks but Urban Terror and Navy Seals kick some stuff. I like Navy Seals the best right now but it take all kinds. If you have Q3A sitting around and are sick of it you should try out some mods.
Oz Out
can anyone recommend a good book or website that one could use to learn basic info about how to get started with game modding...and i'm not talking about just doing a google search on game modding...i can do that...i'm looking for some resources that people have successfully used to learn how to mod a game, etc...i am an experienced programmer, but i've never really taken the time (not that i have much free time) to fool around with game modding...and even if i did have the time, i wouldn't know where to begin...anyone have any good how-to's, etc...?
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
So you're a 'gawker'?
Here's the Link to prove it!
To bring this bad bwoy back onto topic-
I wonder what the half-life (pun intended) of most mods are. And for that matter, given the necessary hardware update, I wonder what the full lifecycle of a mod-player is- from newbie to retired geriatric in 1 year? Under a year?
That's why I stick to consoles.
P.S. -Makes me want to listen to "Twiggy twiggy" by Pizzicato 5...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I only see good things from the ability to make mods. I suppose on some small level it's competition for the commerical developers but generally, depending on the game, it's not likely that mods will stack up to the commerical game for the shear reason of resources. That's not to say there will not be some great mods. There will/are. But, it's just like the movies, Just because anybody can buy a video camera, edit video on their PC and make 3D graphics on their PC does not mean that everybody can make the next T2, Gladiator, Jurassic Park or Star Wars. It's not just about ability it about time and money. To make one of those movies generally requires hundreds of people to work FULL time, 8 to 12 hours a day for several months. That's not generally the kind of work you can get out of people AFTER their day job. The same is true of games. Metal Gear Solid 2, 40 people full time 2 years. Jak and Daxter, 30 people full time 2 years. Halo I'm sure is the same.
It might take an hour or two to make a new Q3 Arena using pre-made parts but it takes thousands of hours of work to make a truly new game with new enemies, weapons, geometry, textures, dialog, music, sound effects, cut scenes, etc.