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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."
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...
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.
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).
Take a look at WadC, a scripting language for building Doom levels, you filthy infidel.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
He's referring to the fact that HL is based on the Quake I engine, which Valve licensed from id. However, Valve rewrote some 70% of the code.
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.
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.
I've played Quake2 on a modded Xbox via this port. I was able to add the CTF files to it and it worked perfectly, well except for the fact that I was using the xbox controller and found it useless for a fps, I was playing guys on PC's and couldn't turn and aim nearly as fast. I'm not sure if the Q2 CTF files counts as a mod or not, I believe id put them out but I could be wrong.
In comparison Half-life was a huge rewrite of the Quake I engine by a company that had licensed the code. If that's a mod then GTA:VC is a mod of Burnout 2, because they're both built on top of the Renderware graphics engine.
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?
Not Ruby, but I'm working on a Python library for Doom called Omgifol in which I recently implemented a complete API for editing levels (the version on SF is quite outdated, though, nothing to see there).
;-)
I don't know how useful the level editing features of the thing will end up being, but I have some ideas of making a random level generator similar to Slige with it. Using a language as powerful as Python, it should hopefully be possible to create stuff more advanced than Slige's linearly arranged square sectors
Valve hired the developers of TF to make TF2, and eventually we ended up with a TF2 dev cycle that is nearing DNF, but they also developed TF Classic for Half-Life, which is somewhat similar to the original Quake mod (Valve also eventually released a DM Classic mod which is similar to Quake DM). TFC was released around the same time as the first SDK for Half-Life, basically as a way of showing off what could be done with the SDK and the HL engine. TFC itself has also been updated several times during it's life, including a re-incarnation of the engineer's teleport pads.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
This would be a bit simpler probably for older 2 1/2 D games like Doom, ROTT and Descent, compared to full 3D engine games like the Quake and Unreal series. But definitely do-able I think.
Just FYI, Descent was a full 3D game in every sense of the word.
Heh. Go work for a newspaper and then come back again in six months.
Trust me, I know how this works. Sure, you have some companies trying to railroad stories through, but it's usually some editor who tells a peon "I keep hearing about game mods--write a story!" Then the peon pokes around, contacts people at what Google turns up, then leans hard on whoever is first to reply. I've been through this enough to know the drill.