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NYT on Game Mods
Bansuki writes "The New York Times has an article about the role of the modding communities in the games industry. It's a decent overview of the current state of modding though it focuses heavily on Epic Games and the Unreal engine. They spotlight the Unreal University program (an Unreal sponsored event giving classes to potential modders) and Red Orchestra (a highly ambitious mod of the Unreal Warfare engine). The article also mentions machinima as a type of mod with artistic potential and gives due credit to Id Software and Bioware for their work in making engines available to the community. But here's a glaring omission: Half-life and its wildly successful mods. Odd."
It's not really all that odd. The mainstream press isn't exactly tech savvy. Heck, mainstream press isn't exactly savvy in ANY field, and often relies upon press releases from outside bodies to figure out if something is worth pursuing as a story.
The Unreal guys probably got proactive about getting this story out there.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I've poked around a bit trying to find a way to generate DOOM PWADs using a script... but I can't see a way to build a map outside a level editor. It seems like there are two components necessary - a sector layout thingy and a binary space partition calculator.
At any rate, I've started a little project to generate DOOM levels via a Ruby script. And if it turns out this is already possible via other means, I'll shut the project down
The Army reading list
The games with wildly successful modification scenes are games that are commercially wildly successful, in general. The positive correlation is real.
It mystifies me that a game these days can possibly be shipped without a comprehensive editing tool. They're artificially limiting their games' lives and shooting their sales in the foot.
are a great addition to commercial games...
so long as there is a moderating system to sort the wheat from the chaff (to use a biblical metaphor)
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
has a clone under SDL... See the SDL home page for a link :-)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
This link will let you in without the registration:
u its/04modd.html?ex=1071118800&en=579e6cf0a57082db& ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
:)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/technology/circ
Thanks google
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
I played lots of Quake2 mods, Action Quake2 being my favorite. Personally I didn't like the Half-Life net code when the game first came out but I heard that it got much better, but by that time I had dropped the game and moved on to something else.
Games with mods do seem to have a much longer life than non-mod games, look at Tribes, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 1942, Neverwinter Nights (which LIVES off of the mod concept), heck, even games not designed to be modded (Silent Hunter 2) have had mods done by very creative and dedicated fans.
Allowing people to make their own maps is not enough, let them play with the engine, the graphics, the models, the scripting, it pleases the fans and makes them come back for a sequel. Its been proven lots of times, heck, people still play QUAKE1 because of the mods!
And NOT trying to start a PC vs. Console war, game mods are one of the most important features that keep the PC gamers coming for more and paying big bucks for hardware (well, compared to consoles that are sold at a loss).
On the other hand, mods (and in general, user-created content) are responsible for the metamorphosis of the computer games industry since the early 8-bit era to what it is today. No longer can you sell a hit game every 6 months , due to this extra content the average life of a good game has increased immensely, and thus, game companies now have to think carefully about their plans and development programs.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
... for BG2 has to be the best unofficial mod I've ever played - a huge effort by the team. It unbalanced the game somewhat, but it certainly made it different to run into an area you knew well only to be completely ambushed. Oh sh...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Perhaps the article was just focusing on the current generations of engines, so Unreal would be a good choice, now that it is getting yearly updates. I hope the vehicles in UT2k4 are going to be good...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Perhaps Half-Life mods weren't included since Half-Life is a mod itself.
mbbac
Slashdot Half-Life. Cmdr. Taco is the G-Man, Hemos is one of those big brown red lightning throwing guys, and CowboyNeal ... well ... he's a BIG boy, so he gets to be that fat slug thing crawling through the portal at the end of Opposing Forces.
Mods like Counter-Strike are a boon to developers. Its like having people who work for free. I know that valve has taken CS under their wing now but there are many mods that keep games playable - with no work on the part of the developers. Imagine all the people who bought half-life so they could play counter-strike on the internet (or DoD or TF)? Originally CS was just a couple of nerds with some free time on their hands.. Not to mention that you can't make everyone happy.. mods let people take a great engine and make a game that is "boring" to them fun. Some people like CS, others prefer TF, some are into DoD.. I'm pretty sure that many of those people never bother to play multiplayer HL.
I find it a glaring oversight to see an article on PC game mods not even mention Half-Life, a game which has had a ridiculous shelf life powered almost solely by the bevy of mods released for it.
And no discussion of Half-Life would be complete without a discussion of Natural-Selection, a mod that turns HL into an FPRTS with marines fighting aliens and a focus on resource control (and now, with a level-based team FPS that's leagues beyond other mods dedicated solely to team FPS).
Contrary to popular belief I'm pretty sure that Valve took the Quake (not Q2) engine and redid something like 70-80% of the code.
:D
But it was Quake IIRC which was the first 3d shooter to actively support and encourage a modding community by releasing QuakeC.. I guess half-life's huge mod community is just an extention of that success.
Did anyone ever play the "TW Creeper" mod for the original Quake? As nice as the 1st person shooters have gotten - Counterstrike is so much more realistic and several orders of magnitude more impressive in terms of rendering graphics - I still haven't found more enjoyment in a multiplayer 1st person shooter than that old modded version of Quake. Sounds silly I guess ...
... is that the classic Quake/QuakeWorld engine really started the ball rolling for mods, and is/was responsible for some of the things we take for granted in these games, like CTF (Thanks Zoid and Threewave for helping me waste sooo much time playing - had a blast) and the original TeamFortress.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
My worlds collide.
I need to lay down for a bit.
The games with wildly successful modification scenes are games that are commercially wildly successful, in general. The positive correlation is real.
Being "commercially successful" means just that. That is sells many copies, it does not mean that people are actually playing the game out of the box .. Take Half Life for example and look at how many people are playing Un-MODed HalfLife today .. Not many .. The ONLY reason Valve is still selling HalfLife, is because of the MODs..
Therefore talking about a "positive correlation" is, mildly put, misleading.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I seem to remember playing TF on Quake 1's engine. As a matter of fact, me and my college buddies worked with the people making TF. We exerimented on our own selves (being in a college dorm, we had a perfect environment) trying out weapns like the gib gun, and *I* even prototypes the sniper dot. It was an 'x' originally.
So there might be a TF for HL, but TF is and always shall be a Quake mod. After all, Quake was the first engine that was open to modding by average Joe.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This is true. However, during development, Q2 was released and Valve was given an infusion of Q2 code. So the HL engine is mostly custom, with a fair amount of Q1 and some Q2 code.
Too bad they didn't mention Multitheft Auto for Vice City. Those guys made their own netcode and everything with no access to the source code.. don't ask me how that sort of thing is done. (I'm sure there's someone here who will inform me that "it actually isn't very hard to do.") The only thing (IMFO) that the GTA franchise is missing is solid multiplayer functionality.
p
My point was that there's a correleation between having a thriving mod scene and having a lot of sales. I think we're trying to agree on this, but not finding the right words.
I'm a big fan of Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942, seems as though the designers/coders have formed their own company headed by founder Frank Delise. This seems like a great way for mods to break into the gaming scene, release an amazing mod for free, then start a company, then PROFIT! (sorry..). I'm really looking forward to see what these guys are comming up with next.
The real question, though is when (if ever!) net access by consoles are going to allow widespread modding of console titles. I look forward to it, if it's even possible.
With games becoming more and more 'mainstream' with each generation of games, I think they're doing the right thing by paying attention to current games instead of going 'old skool' and start off their article back during the days of Doom.
True. QuakeI with modified lighting (RGB instead of 8 bit), plus skeletal animation, decals, updated particle effects, and C++ for game code instead of QuakeC...
Half-Life's Code: Quake1 or Quake2?
But here's a glaring omission: Half-life...
Simple, no linux support.
There have been lots of articles in the mainstream media about mods, but usually they end up talking almost exclusively about Half Life and Counterstrike. For once, I'm glad to see them not get mentioned. It is time for the online FPS gaming community to move on from those 5 year old games and mods. There is much better stuff out there to play now than Half Life & Counterstrike. I think the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 has a chance of becoming the "new" Counterstrike.
I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world but in Australia there are about four times as many Desert Combat servers as "Vanilla" BF servers, and they are always busier. (DC is, as you might guess, based on both recent Gulf Wars).
This is despite EA Games being very reluctant to support mods. Even the map editor promised shortly after the game was released only came out almost a year later and after a lot of complaining in the BF community. There is now a rudimentary SDK, but this is probably because the suits at EA saw the official expansion packs do comparatively badly and saw how well community made mods (epsecially DC and the Vietnam mod Eve of Destruction) were doing. You need a copy of the original game to play the mods, so reluctantly EA have started to co-operate.
Valve are probably the industry leader in terms of encouraging mods. This is an interesting business model, as it resembles OS while still allowing the games companies to sell licenses. If even EA are moving in that direction, then I think gaming is going to get very interesting (from both the players' and modders' point of view) in the next few years.
I've recently been sucked into the competitive gameplay world (where teams organize into divisions, leagues, etc, tournaments are held periodically for cash and prizes, and all that good stuff). As much as I used to chuckle at the thought of "pro gamers", it turns out that there can be just as much nuance to strategy and execution to appreciate in watching a multiplayer video game as there is in watching say a football game. At least to my mind.
One cool thing about mods is that they can be used to improve games to a point where they're suitable for competition. The ETpro mod by bani for the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory alters some aspects of gameplay to make it more suitable stopwatch competitions.
The other thing mods can do, and this is kinda neat, is actually add in features to accomodate game spectators. Again, using ETpro as an example, bani included some small changes to help shoutcasters quickly identify players and get stats during the match. A multiview feature was also added so that a spectator could watch the game from several different points of view with a Picture-in-Picture style setup.
In the future, I see mods stepping up to fill in the roles that the original game developers either couldn't think of or didn't want to address because the competition world wasn't their target audience. I can see a mod coming out that can not only handle broadcasting video of the match, but offers optional commentary via an mp3/ogg stream from a caster and presents information kind of in the same way FOX does for football games (current scores, tickers for other matches, league stats for players, etc).
Yeah. Mods are crucial if you want to let your users take your software places you'd never even thought of before.
Notwithstanding the criticisms of Half-life and its prodigy (which is silly since it is largely the mods of that game that is likely the impetus of this article), mods are great in that you buy the game, and sometimes the mods are better than the game they're modded from. I currently play Desert Combat, which is a mod of the BF1942 franchise, and is the next CS (IMHO).
The best all-time mod I've played is Weapons Factory for Quake II. It was an intense, class-based, capture-the-flag gameplay style that I've spent countless hours playing. Quake II was arguably a weak follow up to the uber-popular Quake I, but this mod greatly extended its life.
The Half-Life compile process has been drastically upgraded over the years - initially in a semi-official capacity by a Gearbox employee, and then unofficially by numerous programmers all over the world. The tool source code has been available for ages, and new features are still being added - more accurate clipping hulls, reduced engine load, improved lighting, optimised BSPs which effectively break hard-coded engine limits such as the maximum plane count...
Here's a snippet from a real Half-Life
Most of the time I need to get on and get my fix in a hurry. I know this sounds sad, and yes I'm addicted.....admitting is the first step towards recovery. - MK-Ultra (to Urban Terror regulars)
-- Probability does not dismiss possibility --
Here's a thought; I'm a huge fan of BF1942 (it's a bit slower-paced than most FPS, and I like the "real" weapons.) EA Games have brought out a number of pretty cool add-ons for it (Secret Weapons, Road to Rome, etc.) as well as a number of really neat maps with new weapons and whatnot.
Does this count, or are people religiously opposed to something being called a "mod" if it comes out of the same shop that brought out the game in the first place?
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I've lost so many contacts from those days, but I still email Robin every so often to see what he's up to. I'm afraid to ask what the atmosphere around the Valve office is in the aftermath of the recent security breach.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
here is the page for the above mentioned mod. I'll definitely have to check it out.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Last I checked, Half-Life was based on the Quake2 engine, which id software made, and released all kinds of developers kits for. They already covered it, methinks.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
But how about CrystalSpace? Hasn't anyone worked with that free, open sourced game engine?
But consoles are the future for game clients. The simple, common, stable platform provided by a console is far preferable to a PC from a development and support standpoint.
I see the future of PCs in gaming to be content creation platforms and persistent servers, with consoles as the clients, aka Client/Server gaming.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
A big ommission is the barney Doom mod. The first mod I can remember seeing. It was for the original doom and changed the "small" demon at the end of the demo or first level into the vile purple fiend.
The story ignores the real base mods from the DOS era when the tools/source were not released and had t obe reverse engineered by users.
The Alens total conversion for Doom is still the best mod I've played.
When 1% of your audience plays mods online, and the best-selling FPS of all time has the biggest mod scene, it's a pretty good indicator that there IS a positive correlation.
The fact that the percentage has increased over time helps, as well, but Quake 3, which is a newer game, sold fewer copies and has fewer online players than Half-Life. People build mods for the game that sells and has the tools.
On the other hand, The Sims, for instance, would probably have a bigger mod scene if it weren't for the 20-million expansions they sold for the game that more or less add the same content that players would normally have added for them. The Sims also happens to be the only PC game to have out-sold Half-Life.
As far as mods selling games goes, that's a really hard position to push, and can only be proven if you can find sales numbers for Counterstrike specifically, or any other mod sold on the shelves. The number of online players for CS still makes up less than 1% of the copies of Half-Life sold, not to mention adding in the number of copies of Counterstrike sold.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Sounds familiar. A buddy of mine does work on the Forgotten Hope mod for Battlefield 1942, and I can remember him bitching about EA's tools. He mentioned that some of the guys from his mod team would respond to replies by EA Games of "Well, what more do you want?" with a resounding "Source code!"
I guess they were tired of EA dragging their feet and wanted to make some tools of their own.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Knowing some friends who have modded games and after speaking with some game developers and reading some interviews, it's pretty clear that if you are really serious about being a game programmer, modding is the way to go.
If you work on something in your spare time, alone or with some friends, you're not going to come up with anything too amazing if you start from scratch. Just look at the best open source games written from scratch. Their either clones meant to be compatible with a commercial game, or if not they don't have the community even close to that of, say, a CounterStrike mod. It's not to say you can't learn a lot from that or market yourself from that, but if you make a decent mod, and leverage the existing fanbase of the original game you have a much stronger position if you're hunting around for a job.
http://www.talknerdy.org
If you had EVER used Worldcraft or QRadient you'd see how stupid your 'awesome' scripting plan would be. There's just no way you can script in all the detail you need. Noone would ever want to play in your lame-ass uber-elite-hand-coded maps.
Well, zoids are anyhow, apparently also an anime.
:-)
I used to have some when I was younger, brought down from Japan. Iron Kong was a cool gadget
Not to throw your point, but the reality is that you could have the zoids makers argueing that "For all slashdot knows, Zoids might be a game mod or something"
Anyone remember Unlimited Adventures from SSI? It allowed you to create your own AD&D goldbox games. People modded the hell out of the game EXE to enable more monsters, character races, and all sorts of stuff. And I believe the modding community for Unlimited Adentures still exists (game came out in 1993).
a modded Xbox
That doesn't count. We want to make total conversions of games without modding the console itself.
HL was based off of licensed Quake I code...then heavly modified (netcode was used for HL multiplayer
As mentioned, calling HL a Quake mod is like calling Jedi Knight II, Star Trek: Elite Forces, Alice and a whole slew of other officially realesed games mods, for Quake III...
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
because they have been commercially packaged as programs that don't need Half-Life to run, such as the CS boxed version.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
wasnnt the anti cheat addon Punkbuster orginally started as a mod? and evolved into a standard program addon?
True Combat is a great game mod based off of the Quake III engine.
If you haven't tried it yet, it is like a whole new game.
Really cool game play without the cartoon effects of other games.
http://www.planetquake.com/q3t/
There's no technological barrier to mods on consoles, at least in some form:
Until the final stage, mods will be a bit more than free (at the very least you'll need to download the ISO and burn to a DVD) but considering that they're often more entertaining than the original game, that's not a significant problem. Also, as long as the games are stored on physical media there's no way for a mod on one media to access the original game on another. This will be solved in the short term by allowing mod developers (like CounterStrike) to redistribute the game engine and in the long term by doing away with physical media (could a mod fit on a memory chip?).
Personally, I can't wait to do away with the shackle of trying to use a general-purpose workstation as a game machine.
Neverwinter Nights, in my opinion, was basically designed from the ground up for the mod community. The core game was somewhat "vanilla", but Bioware has tirelessly supported the community, adding requested features and even Linux support over the last year.
As one of those crazy folks who have been writing modules, it's interesting to see how my freely donated time has affected the community. NWN modules are quite a bit different, focused primarily on story and character development instead of twitch action. It's interesting that my rewards tend to be in the satisfaction that others are enjoying my work, rather than hard cash.
I've had cancer patients, Israeli soldiers, people who have lost family members, to ordinary people around the world drop me e-mails telling me how much they appreciate my work. It still amazes me that one person can reach out and touch the lives of so many.
-Adam Miller (author of the Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher campaigns)
My brother and I have both purchased Half-Life (that a copy each) just to play CounterStrike.
My brother occasionally ventured over to TFC when bored, but CS is the main game we play.
I have tried both Unreal and Unreal2, Quake 1, 2 & 3 and other first person shooters, but none seem to hold my interest for very long.
And as for Half-Life, I have never played the single person game and only briefly looked at the multi-player version!
So no, Half-Life is definitely no mod.
Clever signature text goes here.
They don't have to talk exclusively about HL and CS, but these are very important if you are first going to write an article on mods. The entire article doesn't have to be about them, but leaving them out shows that you haven't done enough research.
Clever signature text goes here.
Q2WF is still around, and is still being tweaked, and is still being played.
In fact, some WFA players are returning to Q2WF.
Check out Biosentral if you want more info.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
It's funny because it's true!