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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."
There are some really neat experimental art mods for Quake 1.
Check them out at www.untitled-game.org/...
(Personally, I still play Quake 1 straight... a game doesn't stop being fun because newer games come out with flashier graphics!)
it was my impression that TF2 was a full blown game, not a mod.... and that it's a pipe dream.
When it's released, it'll be bundled with gravy trader.
Perhaps this was one reason for the success of Cavedog's excellent Total Annihilation RTS. The game itself was good, but it was also designed from the word go to allow the incorporation of new units, maps, etc. Cavedog made several available on their web site over the months after the launch, and released an add-on (Core Contingency) that included whole new types of unit and terrain.
Today, even after Cavedog are done, there are still enthusiasts out there working on quite ambitious extras, and this is something like four years after the game first hit the shelves, and when you apparently can't even buy it in the UK any more. (Anyone know a good way to get it in the UK, BTW? None of the usual shops lists it any longer, and there's nothing on UK E-bay.)
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I'd pay 100 bucks per level for some new mariokart battle fields, and a little more for a complete circuit :-P *sigh* will the cube version never be released. Can anyone hack a game that was originally just for a gaming console? I see people doing dumb stuff like turning character sprites into vegetables and renaming the games junk like "super mario potato head".
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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.
It also mentions that the next Team Fortress hack, Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, will not be distributed for free.
Just replace "for free." with ", ever.". Pretty much the same thing,
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
Bear in mind that Counter Strike started life as an Half-Life mod. Now you can go buy it. The main difference between CS and TF2 in this respect is that TF2 seems destined to remain vapourware.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Popular Science really did their homework with this one, which is not unusual for them. (I used to subscribe.)
I found it scary the one of the ID software guys said people were using hooks in their software they didn't know existed. Either he doesn't know what he's talking about, or ID needs some code review. If the games really do have hooks like that they don't know about, that's all the more interesting.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Just what the subject says. When you think vapourware, think TF2 .. they've probably had to swtich 3 or 4 generations of game engines underneath it throughout the ages, if they are indeed still working on it ....
And for the record, TF is the greatest mod ever.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Hmmm...maybe this modding business DOES have some potential after all...
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
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.
Turns out things things like that are a pretty good intro.
somehow I thing that not as many people would get into programming by tinkering with the macro language of your typical generic office suite, for example.
we need more of this kind of stuff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I guess Timothy doesn't read what Michael posts.
Here's the same article from a week ago. Get your act together, editors!
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
For those of you who can stand a game that doesn't include the term "frame rate" in its specs, there's a very nice 'low profile' strategy game called Space Empires IV which doesn't require hacking to be modded. It's designed to be altered by the users with most of the game data in external text files. Check it out, and the community of modders it has accumulated, at www.shrapnelgames.com where you can download a demo.
Valve haven't actually been working on TF2 properly for as long as DNF has been in production over at 3D Realms.
Their excuse? They've written their own engine, from the ground up. And Steam, their content delivery system. And really helped their Half-Life mod community.
3D Realms excuse? Er... I don't think they have one. Been using the Unreal engine for pretty much the whole time (started with the Q2 engine). Must be terrible team management. What they have showed (at last years E3) wasn't even that impressive.
Let's go over the history of TF2. First it was supposed to be a mod for Quake 2, much like many of the sequels to Quake mods. Then, Valve made a deal with the guys who made TF, and TF2 was supposed to be a free-as-in-beer mod for Half-Life. Plans changed again, and it was turned into a commercially sold mod. Eventually, they changed their minds again, and decided to sell it as a separate game using the HL engine. However, several months through development, they decided to make a totally new engine for it.
Several months ago, I went onto the messageboards at the official TF2 website, and it seems like all development has stopped. It's a shame too; I still hoped it would be good vaporware (like Diablo 2 as opposed to Diakatana).
I think what they mean is that they used things other than the published API.
You can be sure SOMEONE knows about it.. it just may not be an official feature.
But is halflife the game to thank when it comes down to who made it possible? Nope, we still have doom in my book, the game that made everything possible. What made first person shooters and mulitlevel games the best thing since sliced bread? Doom. What gave everyone who had enough time and patience the ability to create their own game inside a game (know known as modding, back then known as wadding)? Doom again. What game set the presidence of how first person shooters would work? Doom.
Basically what I'm getting at is all these gamemakers made enough money off of their games that they wanted to help make it possible for those who had the time and dedication to elaborate on their work. I think everyone who codes, and especially open source, gets the greatest high when the work they've been working on is not only accepted in the OSS community, but when someone takes it and is so amazed with it that they want to take the time to learn it so that they can use it.
Does anyone else realize that halflife being as old as it is can still bring a top of the line machine to it's knees? This game was designed to be able to run on a p133 with 4 megs of video ram and 32 megs of system ram. I know that the mods have since made the game a little bit more in depth than the original, but I still find it funny.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
As near as I can find, this game is somewhat unique.
The publishers/owners gave up on it (I think Sony has it now?). They aren't interested. So.. the community cracked it, and put it up for download so they'd actually have people to play with. Unethical? Stealing? Remember, they bought it as a multiplayer game, and it's rather useless unless others have it, and if nobody sells it.. well..
Then, of course, came the total rewrite (which may or may not be as total as the author's claim.. I suspect not).
Now it's pretty much a game in it's own right. I would actually say that if sony were to sue them now and try to stop it, it would be morally wrong.
The only thing that is taking longer to develop then Remoero's POS Daikatana is TF2. TF2 will be released the day after the first Mars Mission.
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.
I remember seeing some kind of Starcraft conversion to make it look like Warcraft... Since Starcraft is past its peak I can't seem to find it anymore. Some of the character & building conversions looked pretty sweet.
"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."
;-)) They aren't finding unknown API/function calls.
:-D
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
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.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
I actually had the privilege of working on and releasing TF 2.8 and 2.9 for QW (my brief and subtle brush with fame). I actually was given the sources for what was to become TF2 way back before Rob and John got hired by Valve. It was going to be a free Quake 2 mod at the time. It's a shame that the two TF guys at Valve didn't mention their pal Ian in the article, who AFAIK worked on it right there with them from the start.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Years ago I was busy with a binary editor looking at wolf3d files. With my decoding and other peoples encoding the 1st level editors were done. Then other people saw our work and decided they could do better. A race was on to figure out all we could. It was interesting that at the time there were some very nasty notes from developers at id complaining about our work and why we were doing it. One of these were from a man who has said "the computer is the game" but didn't understand why we had his great work under a microscope? At first there was fear in the comments, as if we were going to steal the secrets but then came the understanding that all good hackers understand. He had the gift for game coding and none of us could compete with that. We were happy to take ideas he built into code and rearange them. We could build complex levels that the game designers could never fully test. We were happy with that and it led to exploring other ideas that ended up in other games. When doom came out, it was clear that there was extra data in the files that the game wasn't using. I still wonder if that was there to help the people with the hex editors...
I'm not a hard code gamer and I would prefer to hack on some project over fraging some virtual bad guy however I do have a n64 and there were two games for it that were above the rest. The 1st was golden eye 007 and the other was perfect dark. These games are both from Rare but now that the N64 is dead, there will never be any more. I don't care so much about the levels progression or the story or the funky interlevel video but I would like more levels. Right now Rare claims their next release will perfect dark zero but it won't be out till 2004. I would buy a game cube today to play a new verson of that game but since there isn't a ginle other game for it, I think I'll pass. So far the PS2 seems to have the most games but most of them are centered around a game play I don't like (In a shooter game, I'll be happy waiting with the sniper rifle, I don't like timed things). I also don't like to see the character in 1st person shooter games. Its just something I've never been a fan of. The result is we have one company that made the 2 most popular games on the N64 and they have decided to shut down their company because they can't get their new tricks to work can can't teach a few creative people how to use their old level designer. They should have had at least 2 other games on the 007 engine and by now they could have kicked out 4 or 5 perfect dark levels. But they made other decisions. Funny that id decided to let other people play with their core and I wonder who is more likely to be here in 4 years, id or Rare.
Don't forget Matrix Games; they have taken several of the best strategy games of history and rewrote them to be playable on win32 platforms, with probably the best work done on Steel Panthers: World at War (SPWAW).
They took SSI's old code for Steel Panthers 3, and rewrote the game so it would run on win32, instead of just DOS. and then, they made it free (as in beer).
While not quite as much fun to me as the original (the re-write only does warfare circa 1938-1946), this has got to be one of the most re-playable games out there.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Microprose's Falcon4 is probably a perfeect example of this. Released in November, 1998, it still has a large and dedicated following (well, as large as hardcore flightsims' followings get).
Back in 1999, Hasbro/Microprose decided to drop Falcon4. However, before all of the developers were fired, the source code mysteriously ended up on the Internet.
A group which came to be known as Realism Patch Group (RPG) was releasing (free) patches to fix some of the realism issues in the original Falcon. At the same time, someone called eRazor had gotten his hands on the Falcon source code and was working on some of graphics issues. And simultaneously with this, an army of other developers were working on other aspects of the game. For instance, the eTeam took this F-16 only flightsim and added a Fly-Any-Plane patch, giving you the ability to fly any aircraft in the sim. Groups around the world immediately started working on accurate flight models for each aircraft and photo-realistic cockpits.
The two groups worked in parallel, releasing RPG and eRazor patches which more or less rewrote the sim. It was decided to create a Falcon4 Unified Team (f4ut). This group took all of the rewrites and data edits done by the eTeam and the RPG and combined them into series of Falcon4 SuperPaks. These patches/mods have completely transformed Falcon, and nearly made it into a completely new sim. The graphics engine was completely rewritten and is DirectX 8.1 compliant. Falcon supports anistropic filtering, antialiasing, etc. And the sim itself is one of the most realistic and engaging ever. It uses a dynamic "campaign-within-a-campaign" methodology to insure that play never repeats itself. Its literally a whole new ballgame.
In fact, the "unofficial" modding of Falcon has also snatched Falcon from the jaws of obsolescence. G2I Interactive has bought Falcon's IP and while allowing a last series of F4UT binary edits, will be coming out with Falcon5.
IMHO, this is the ultimate example of mods extending the life of a game or sim. And extending its playability. There are a number of active duty fighter pilots who are avid Falcon fans. That, IMHO is the ultimate compliment.
--Storm
Although modifying began among hard-core hackers, it's not illegal.
I was a little bothered when I read this sentence... even "hard-core" hacking isn't illegal in and of itself. I'm troubled by this continuing implication in mainstream media.
0x0D 0x0A
I'm not calling you a liar.. obviously I don't/can't know.
It just struck me as odd that the game engine was SO much identical.
Which cool awesome features turned the game around? As far as I can tell the game is identical.
A mod being commercial is a serious impediment to its adoption by the critical mass of people.
May we never see th
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!
LMAO yeah right that will last about 2 weeks before it is all over the place via p2p and server download sites. It has already been proved repeatedly that people won't pay for mods. Heck let them learn the hard way...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
...and dig role playing games, check out www.teambg.com they've been hacking & modding the Infinity Engine (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale) for quite a while now & have come up with some pretty cool stuff.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Are you Robin? Wow, cool, in my books, thats not a subtle brush with fame .. thats pure awesomeness. I still miss Q1 physics. :) TF grens were the best grens of all time. I've never been able to make people catch impending explosions with sure pure raw precision ever since TF, although I did spend 4 years with it ... ever seen the name Kraftboy around? I was a junkie, knew lots of folks ..
"Old man yells at systemd"
Funny you should say this with respect to a 3D first-person shooter. They're one of the few cases where there was an undeniable, pressing need for better graphics -- reducing motion sickness.
Back in the Wolf3D days, I could barely play for half an hour before becoming ill. Quake was a little better. But it wasn't until the 3D accelerated FPS games that I could play such games non-stop (hooray for being able to blow a weekend on TFC).
Maybe this is different enough, due to its coming from a different webmag, but it IS redundant. Definitely not front page material, but not easy to shoehorn into any of the existing sections either.
...
What we REALLY need is a new section just for games, so that the Benevolent Tyrants (aka editors) can keep posting articles like this without cluttering up the front page. It works for the Apple, Ask Slashdot and science articles, why not for the game stuff as well?
Just my ?0.02
I never played Starcraft, though I've often though about buying it just to see how it compares. A lot of people seemed to be pro-SC and anti-TA or vice versa at the time of the games' releases, and given the comments around, I've always suspected I'd find SC frustrating after playing TA. I like to set up lots of orders when I first build units, and often leave them pretty much to their own thing after that. I also make extensive use of numbered groups of units in TA when controlling a battle. It sounds as though SC's control system isn't as flexible as TA's, which has always put me off. Then again, it's in the budget collection for under a tenner now, so what have I got to lose? :-)
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