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

And as an art project...

[Tom7]

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!)

Total Annihilation

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.)

For free?

[mstyne]

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,

Interesting

[peterdaly]

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

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.

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