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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...
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
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!
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.
The "standard" way to build levels is just to generate a WAD without the data and run it through one of the many existing BSP calculators. No offence, but it seems rather pointless to reinvent the wheel. (Plus, as much as I love Ruby, it might be a bit slow for this purpose..)
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
> it might be a good application for a
> genetic algorithm. You could evolve
> the (near-)perfect level.
The difficult part might be coming up with a good fitness algorithm. I mean, a perfect level for one person may be a lousy level for another.
I'm hoping to come up with something that could be used to generate a level from, say, a building floor plan, or a Visio diagram of something - stuff like that. It would be nifty to run around inside of a Cougaar agent community, for example.
The Army reading list
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.