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."

Comments

Ahhh the days

[Kymermosst]

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.

Re:Ahhh the days

[PacoTaco]

Barney and Aliens were my personal favorite Doom mods. :)

Re:Ahhh the days

[Yorrike]

Agreed, I used to make maps and level for Doom/2 and Quake/2 with every moment I wasn't deathmatching. But in regards to hardware; that's the main reason I've moved away from PC gaming and concentrated on consoles.

I loved the old skool mods that Doom and Quake brought about, but in order to enjoy the newer games these days I'd have to buy a new box every year, which is more than participation in the scene is worth to me.

There are exceptions though, and the releases of NWN and Warcraft 3 have resparked my interest in PC ghaming and given me reason to upgrade my aging desktop.

Re:Ahhh the days

[donnacha]

...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.

I've heard a lot of good reasons for people moving on from hardcore gaming (getting a life, discovering sex etc) but not being able to afford the equipment isn't one of them.

Surely, if you were playing semi-pro, you would have made enough to a new graphics card every year or whatever?

Re:Ahhh the days

[Kymermosst]

No. Tourney's weren't that big then, and quite often there was only good money for the first few places, and sometimes some hardware. I've got my fair share of id software hats and tee-shirts, though :)

All in all, semi-pro gaming was, at best a good hobby. :)

Getting a life and a wife certainly didn't help much, either :)

Re:Ahhh the days

[BrookHarty]

Agreed, I used to make maps and level for Doom/2 and Quake/2 with every moment I wasn't deathmatching. But in regards to hardware; that's the main reason I've moved away from PC gaming and concentrated on consoles.

Consoles are good, but the PC wins when you include mods, multiplayer, updates, and the amount of better games. Plus you cant really get 9.99 bargin bin games for consoles until the new game systems come out. I normally wait until a store has a sale, and get the newest pc games for around 29.99 dollars (seems to be the onsale sweet spot).

But for consoles, my kids still turn off the xbox/ps2 and turn on the snes for Super Mario brothers. Some games just hold replay value. And I still like fzero, and street fighter every now and then. The N64 still has some good 4 player games, but Ive seen monkey ball on the nintendo gamecube which is rather addictive for a group of people.
-
Half this game is 90% mental. - Danny Ozark, manager of the Phillies

Yeah, but...

[Jonboy X]

...how many games do you really want to see the characters naked in?

Re:Yeah, but...

[s10god]

Tomb Raider ... Tomb Rader 2 ... Tomb Raider 3 ....

Counterstrike

[prestomation]

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

Re:Counterstrike

[crisco]

Yeah, its a shame that they didn't go into CS a little more. A mod of a game built around an engine pushing 6 years old commands more online servers than stuff released in the last two years. But it is Popular Science, they approach the Weekly World News for credibility and substance.

FWIW, the Kali server tracker shows 17039 CS servers, 19714 total Half-Life servers (CS, TFC, DOD, DM, etc). That compares to 3612 Q3 servers, 2842 UT servers and 26190 total game servers across all games. Of course, I don't think Kali quite tracks all the new games that have moved to their own server tracking services (or something like Battle.Net). But it still illustrates the power CS has.

Re:Counterstrike

[Corby911]

I had to give up on CS. I used to be a decent player and a quite good admin (according to those who frequented my server anyway). I gave up the beast when the cheating got REALLY out of hand around 8 months ago. This was also when I was moving to linux as my only OS (I just booted windows for games), not to mention the fact that I had finals to worry about, and was moving off campus (say goodbye to the dual oc-3's).

At any rate, I'd become disinterested. The newer maps failed to add anything exciting to the game, and I'd played them all to death. I started adding older maps (think beta-4 era) to the rotation (de_desert, etc) but it pissed too many people off. In the end, I'm glad that I gave up the game. I know of no less than 4 people that failed out of my school because of counter-strike alone.

That being said, I can't wait for our ACM's fall LAN party... nothing like a bunch of geeks, some pizza, as much caffiene as you can stomach, and video games that can give you heart attacks when it's not 4 AM...

Re:Counterstrike

[MrWa]

If you don't know what that is, you should get out of that hole you've been living in!

Of course, most of the people on those 13,000 servers are living in a hole (or, atleast their parent's basement) so if you did live in a hole, odds are you know about CS.

Re:Counterstrike

[BrookHarty]

A few months ago there we're about 13,000(yes, THOUSAND) active servers.

School is out for summer, the colleges kids will have the servers up start of the school year. What else do you do with all that bandwidth in your room? Run a CS server of course!

Re:mod of legend of zelda

[PacoTaco]

There are some pretty decent Metroid mods that run on NES emulators as well.

Yep, me too. I made two DOOM 2 mods.

[antdude]

I still have them. IIRC, I think they work well in jDoom too. :)

Old game engines with mods impress me...

[antdude]

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). :)

Re:Old game engines with mods impress me...

[_Sprocket_]

What amazes me is that people (myself included) still play the origional QuakeWorld Team Fortress (now days you HAVE to include "QuakeWorld" in the description as there's an entire generation who equate "Team Fortress" with Team Fortress Classic and know nothing else - damn kids). That alone shows the amazing draw to a good mod. If it wasn't for the easy modification of Quake, it would have burned through its cycle years ago - and computer games tend to have an amazingly short burn cycle.

Before someone says it - QWTF is dying. Yes. Its been dying for years now. Its like the classic Monty Python scene.

"I'm not dead yet!"

"Wait a minute. He says he's not dead yet."

"Well he will be in a minute."

QWTF is just about to the point where it goes "I feel happy!" and then meets with a sudden ending at the end of a club (some claim that such a clubbing was attempted by Carmak's releaseing Quake source code and the rampant cheating that followed). But right now - its not QUITE dead yet.

Day of Defeat mod is popular...

[antdude]

DoD Web site. I think it is gaining more players and to me, this mod is much funner.

mods vs. rockers

[sfraggle]

I'm more of a gaming rocker myself.

Copyright protections include alterations/mods

[Totally_Lost]

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.

Urban Terror Rocks!

[Starving Artist]

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.

Re:Urban Terror Rocks!

[antdude]

Yes, that's another fun mod. :)

Re:mod of legend of zelda

[handsomepete]

Don't forget BS Zelda. It's a remake of The Legend of Zelda for SNES by a third party (I think). Download, flash and play for the SNES - they were ahead of their time.

Can anyone who actually had one of these Satellaview systems explain it in better detail? I've only seen the roms, and I'd be awfully curious as to how it worked.

GTA3

[British]

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.

Commerical developer support to the mod community

[H3XA]

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

You Whipersnappers!

[JoeCommodore]

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.

15K pound car

[Rupert]

That would be a snow plow. People in the Twin Cities are quite good at driving into those, with the effect that you describe.

Game Modding for Dummies...

[bje2]

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...?

So you're a 'gawker'?

[Chris Pimlott]

So you're a 'gawker'?

Parent is funny.

[mekkab]

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...