Making Games Live Longer With Mods

rmohr02 writes: "Popular Science has an interesting article about people hacking games to get more replay value out of them. It mentions games like Quake and Doom which are still played due to the mods people distribute for them, and that the code for Doom's level editor was made free so hackers could use that code to get what they wanted. It also mentions that the next Team Fortress hack, Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, will not be distributed for free."

Comments

TF2 not free?!?!

[Morgahastu]

Maybe it is because it's not a mod. It is a completely new game. They just meant that their next project (the guys who did TF[1]) would not be free.

We need more open standards

[mangu]

Perhaps THE long-lived game is Grand Prix Legends, it's still being sold, in more or less, the initial version, after five years. But what is really needed are open file formats for all games. There are many car-racing games out there, but most of them have proprietary track files. I would like to compare and race tracks from one game with cars from another game. I have reverse-engineered a few of them, but it's hard work. The same can be said of most other simulations and FPS games.

I hope some day the marketeers will get a clue that it's better to sell a million mods for $10 each than fifty thousand new games at $50 each.

When mods are better than the original...

[EvilFrog]

It's odd how sometimes mods become more popular than the original games. Try playing Tribes 1. Dozens of Renegades servers. Dozens of Annihilation servers. Dozens of Ultra servers. Maybe one dozen base servers.

How many people play Counter-Strike each day? Compare that to how many people play vanilla Half-Life.

The best mods are those that aren't even recognizable as the original games. A great example is Thievery UT, which turns Unreal Tournament into a multi-player version of Thief: The Dark Project. (It's unfortunately Windows only, but the dev team has offered to share the code with those who want to port it...)

Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies to Mods... 90% of them are crud.

Re:When mods are better than the original...

[Nspectre Anatomy]

I've been running the second most popular Renegades server for close to three years now - Brute Force's World o' Ouchie.

A Frankenstein's monster of Ren 4.0, Arena, Duel, Duel Tourney and our very own mod... Dual Duel (thanks Check and DeadGuy!).

My decision, lo' these many years passed, to switch from Base to Renegades was to escape the, IMHO, tedium and limitations inherent in Base. With only three armor types (light, medium and heavy) after a while it got played out.

For myself, the Renegades mod definately breathed new life into the game. More sub-classes to the Base armor types, more deployables (force-fields and turrets), etc, really opened up the playability to more personality types. Like chess over checkers, it made it more of a thinking-man's game while also opening more avenues for the cowboys out there.

I would probably not still be here, three years later, playing Tribes, let alone running a clan/server, if not for the mod community.

Not hooks, but code tricks

[FortranDragon]

"These people are just ingenious," says John Romero, co-creator of Doom and Quake. "They have figured out all the weird little bitty tricks in the code that we didn't even know about."

From what Romero said it looks like people have studied the code enough to learn how to use the _existing_ code in new ways. (Jedi code tricks, anyone ;-)) They aren't finding unknown API/function calls.

This isn't surprising. It usually takes a fresh-to-the-code mind to see new functionality because as a programmer you tend to view code as only applying to the problem you want solved. Also, modders spend more time with the code that the original programmers who probably have moved o to a new project.

All in all this is a Good Thing (tm). Hats off to those companies that make their old source code available/work with the mod community and to the people in the mod community who work hard at extending the life of the older games. :-D

Thanks, Doom....

[Retron]

Although there were level editors and graphics modifiers for Wolf3D, IMO Doom is the game that brought modding to the masses.

The original Doom level editor was based on a Next cube, and the game itself was meant to be closed.

It was only after the efforts of hackers (in the proper sense of the word) that loading external WADs was introduced (in version 1.2 IIRC) - at least id realised what was going on and actively encouraged it.

Later came Dehacked - lots of things were hard coded into the EXE, but with a small DEH file you could change rates of fire, animation frames and add extra effects. No wonder that id made these things easier to change in Quake onwards - again kudos to them for realising that fans like open games.

At the last count, there were tens of thousands of extra wads, ranging from simple level replacements to total conversions where barely anything from Doom remains.

Thanks, id!