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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."
1775-1783: The British crown presents a bill to American settlers who must now pay for their protection. Ungrateful settlers who are already allergic to taxes go on a rampage and attack tea boxes on a ship; several Americans are wounded in explosions. Americans win their sole victory in Saratoga when general Burgoyne realizes that Canadian merchants sold him ragweed instead of tea before his departure. Facing a mutiny he decides to surrender. In the following years Americans will lose most of their battles due to their lack of discipline and massive desertions. In 1781, 30,000 French soldiers & sailors accept to integrate 11,000 American mascots who will play music from afar while the French win the Battle of Yorktown.
1812: The American army is crushed trying to invade Canada and abandons annexation plans.
During the 19 the century, several raids are led against Indian women and babies with the US troops achieving some victories, but fail in their effort to ethnically cleanse the Indians. Nevertheless, some sucessful slaughters will lead them to believe that they are mighty and couragous warriors.
1861-1865: Americans win an impressive victory against themselves but it took a while. The Civil War as it comes to be called, will turn out to be the only war Americans ever win. Mind you they beat themselves, but why digress.
1898: The Spanish succeed a master coup and get rid of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at the expense of the Americans, leaving them the impression that they won the war. Soon the US discovers that there is no oil there, and that their new possessions are a wastebasket, more than anything else.
1900-1950: A series of military interventions against banana republics in South America and the Caribbean against people armed with slingshots and spears has a beneficial effect on the American ego.
1918: The Americans arrive just on time to see the victory of the French and the British against the Germans. They then turn around, and try to claim the high ground by sabotaging the peace treaty and stabbing France in the back when it tries to enforce reparations and prevent Germany from rearming, thus setting the stage for WWII.
1941-1945: While as many as 20 million Russians die bleeding the Wermacht to death, the US wait until the Germans are left with the Hitler Youth, a childrens' force comprised of 14 year old soldiers to launch their assault. They are still saying today that they suffered heavy loses at their hands. In the whole Normandy Campaign they suffer less casualties than the French did in the first six months of 1940, and inflict less damage on the Germans, yet this is enough for them to claim they liberated Europe. That claim alone is the biggest piece of historical myth in history.
1950-1953: The US fails to beat North Korea, in 1953 the borders are still roughly what they were three years earlier.
1963-1973: Americans suffer cruelly from the lack of AC and marijuana of a poor quality in Vietnam. When they realize that their soldiers can be killed in a war they retreat.
1983: The combined aviation, navy and ground troops apply an audacious plan and succeed to beat a bunch of cuban workers armed with shovels in Granada. The celebrations go on for weeks with parades and chants of USA, USA.
1991: Americans align more soldiers than the French or the British combined and succeed in crushing an army of barefoot shiite drafted against their will who are armed with empty rifles and have barely had a thing to eat in months. But even this so-called victory is hollow as it is actually led by the Daguet division from France which leads the charge while American soldiers console themselves by rounding up prisoners that TV crews did not want.
2003: Iraq. Need I go on? I think not.
frist post
Game mods are great, they extend the life of a game far beyond the shrinkwrapped versions.
U R teh funnee!
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!
Never played Red Orchestra, the installer never liked me or my computer.
Mods are great, they make the game more interesting from a players point of view.
Ive been playing Desertcombat and Eve of Destruction 2 mods from battlefield 1942, and they are alot more fun than the original game itself.
Wolve
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0_o
RALEIGH, N.C.
IMAGINE buying the latest "Lord of the Rings" DVD and discovering that the cameras, lights, special effects and editing tools used in its making had been included at no extra charge. Or finding your favorite CD's crammed with virtual recording studios, along with implicit encouragement from the producer to remix the music, record your own material and post it all on the Internet.
It might seem far-fetched - except to computer game developers.
For years, players have found ways to hack into the digital DNA, the primary computer code that operates some of their favorite games, and alter its rules. Consequently, weapons can be made more lethal, explosions flashier and more thunderous. And game characters can acquire godlike invulnerability or have their steely-eyed glares swapped for the hapless glaze of, say, a Homer Simpson.
In recent years, players dedicated to modifying store-bought computer games have morphed into an underground movement - mod makers, as they often call themselves. Now they are showing signs of breaking into the mainstream as game developers are increasingly willing to give away the very software tools they use to construct the games, including them on the disc with the game itself.
As a result, working alone or in teams, the mod makers are spending hundreds of hours tweaking or completely redrawing popular games to be played on their own terms. The payoff is fun and bragging rights, and just maybe a career in the multibillion-dollar electronic game industry.
Those various motivations drew hundreds of mod makers to a game company's weekend seminar at North Carolina State University on the finer points of animation and building virtual worlds, allowing them to compare notes on poly modeling and the intricacies of static mesh.
"I've been wanting to make video games ever since I was 9 years old," said Dan Jones, 23, who drove 17 hours from Siloam Springs, Ark., to be here. He said that when his grade-school classmates were doodling comic-book heroes, he was sketching side-scrolling video-game environments inspired by Nintendo's Mario Brothers.
Mr. Jones, a recent graduate of John Brown University in Siloam Springs, where he majored in digital media, is working with two friends to build a medieval third-person action game. His path as a mod maker, Mr. Jones said during a lunch break, was inevitable: "There are a lot of creative people who have grown up playing video games and stuff. You kind of want to make what you already know."
Another mod maker, Maegan Walling, 26, added, "People are taking the tools that someone else made and using them as sort of a paintbrush to define their own canvas." Ms. Walling joined friends and classmates from Full Sail Real World Education, a multimedia training center in Winter Park, Fla., for a road trip to Raleigh. "They are really, really expressing their own creativity and defining the ideal environment for their own game play. I would go as far to say that it is an art."
Whether mods are art is debatable. But a group of major computer-game makers agree that mods are good for the industry. For one thing, they create a rich secondary market for aging games being bought for raw materials. And some designers say that game makers can inspire loyalty, and sales, by creating games that remain fresh by lending themselves to modification or even serving as the basis for entirely different games.One company in particular, Epic Games - the co-producer of Unreal Tournament, the best-selling first-person-shooter franchise that is a favorite among mod makers - is flinging open its doors to modifications and complete game makeovers called conversions.
And some mod makers, like Blake Politeski, are making names for themselves with downloadable hit mods like his Infection, a horror and survival game that was built out of Unr
and made this first post. My time machine is powered by juiced carrots. Healthy and non-polluting! Cars should be made to run on juiced carrots and so should robots. FIRST POST! I am the envy of all carrot eating rabbits! General Woundwort didn't die! He's still alive! He's a vampire rabbit! General Woundwort is a GOD! All will receive the General's new mark of 666.
666! `._o` --- even the demons tremble
... 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 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.
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'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 thought HL was based on a highly modified version of the Quake II engine.
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]
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.
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!