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Developers Ever More Encouraging Of Modding
Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for its column discussing game companies' continuing encouragement of 'modders' for content creation purposes. Valve's Doug Lombardi points out the obvious advantages his company received from modding: "In the typical scenario, even if a game is a mega-hit, within eight to 12 months on the store shelves, it's gone. But, in the case of 'Half-Life,' our revenue stream increased year after year for the first three years of the game's life. I attribute a lot of that to three mods -- 'Day Of Defeat,' 'Team Fortress,' and 'Counter-Strike.'" It's also mentioned that modding is starting even before a game hits the shelves, since Vivendi Universal has "even licensed an outside team that is building a mod, 'Starsiege 2845,' using the [as yet publically unreleased] 'Tribes Vengeance' engine."
A cheap way for them to get others to make extra levels for them for free instead of making expansion packs to keep the interest up.
Secondly its free advertisement cause sometimes these mod packs get distributed on game mags/sites etc.
Thirdly it allows everyone to be happy when the game leaves out something that the fan wants. Don't like something? change it. miss something that was in the prequel? add it back! take for instance civ 3. When it first came out there were no engineer units but with a couple of changes to the config files and ripping the pic from civ 2 (or making your own), engineers were back. Microspose eventually put it back in in Gold edition but the ease of mdding the game meant fans didnt have to wait.
From counter-strike, which has been professionally supported for a pretty long time now.
DoD is reasonably popular but I doubt it sold many copies of half-life. Lesser mods, probably none.
Last time I checked, Natural Selection for Steam had 1.5x to 2x more servers then Day of Defeat did. And it's still getting bigger. The NS team is still innovating. I don't see Day of Defeat going much anywhere, the only things that'll change are more maps. But, Natural Selection is free, and Day of Defeat is not. Too bad Natural Selection will get my $20 and DoD won't. :)
I've been dying for a good mech game. It sucks that Microsoft has the Battletech license. Mechwarrior 2 was the ultimate, everything after that was downhill. I've got the original DOS CD-ROM and I can't get it to work in any kind of emulator or anything, believe me I tried. Someone should make a real mech game like that that is moddable. Or create a mech mod of an existing game. The world needs it.
Oh yeah, modding is great and all, but developers really need to make it easier to make a mod. I mean, most stuff is undocumented and development tools and resources are not available in any official central location. If you want people to mod your game, release a dev kit that is up to date and documented. What is needed most is an intuitive map making program. I remember trying to use Worldcraft to make a half-life map once and giving up within 15 minutes because the program was the worst piece of crap I had ever seen. I still can't understand how people make beautiful things like the natural selection maps with such shitty programs like that.
Also a note to mod makers. Make your mod and all necessary files available in a safe place on the internet that isn't file planet. If your mod can't be downloaded it can't be played.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Yes, it's the content that drives gaming.
Half-life is a wicked game. You get that and the engine when you buy it. Most of the rest of the expansions are free, and this is good because it allows Valve to get higher ROI in the engine. Because the same engine was used on Half-Life, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, etc, they kept raking in money because people would buy Half-life to access these. Doom had a similar start -- since everyone could release content for it, wonderful wads were made for it, and allowed it to continue to have strong sales longer than most games. Best of all, towards the end, the true cream of the crop became bundled (Final Doom -- with TNT and Plutonia wads).
What does this mean? Half-Life 2 is all well and good, but if Valve is smart, they'll have contests for modders. Best mods get official distribution and licencing, which allows the modders to get money, Valve to get more return on their HL2 engine, and keep interest high in HL2 technology games. Win-win!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I still can't figure out for me why users create mods instead of free games.
There are many brilliant engines out there and teams which support development practically at the level of modding but allow the team more freedom and if successful can be distributed to the user base for free!
Why put in all that work to make someone else money?
Please teams before you start a mod look at the resources available to everyone for free! You can find something that might eventually have 100% Mac/Linux/Windows penetration for free!
i hope vivendi realize that tribes is using the unreal engine. epic might be a bit pissed i'd say.
Was I the only one who first read "Developers support Modding" to mean "mod chips"?
I would think in that case, there would be an opposite reaction, as most developers don't want their games pirated.
http://www.mechina.com/mod/
I don't think anyone plays it though.
But ehm those new commercial engines are available for free. I can make my mod without paying anyone except of course the price of the game.
So why should I mess with an engine that is several years behind in technology (show me a FPS capable engine that compares to todays commercial games) that nobody uses, that has no installed base and no content. Far easier to add the map/weapon/vehicle I want to an existing game then to build an entire game from scratch.
Only rarely do mods become entire games. The fast majority just add or tweak a tiny portion of the content.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People keep saying that OSS games are not possible because people don't create high quality game content (levels, models, etc.) for free. Modding shows that they do. Now, the only thing that's missing is connecting OSS game engines with the effort that goes into creating free mods.
They got paid (prolly) $750,000 by Vivendi for the engine to be used in T:V. :)
And no, Epic doesn't mind licensees encouraging modding too. The more people that get into the Unreal Engine, the bigger the fanbase for Epic and other potential licensees. Its a win-win-win-win-win-win (ad nauseum) situation for them.
If/when I even manage to finish the game I'm working on(a scrolling 2d action title...what you might get if you mixed Wing Commander with racing and changed the format), I'll release it as a GPL'd shareware game: the code's free, the content isn't.
I only came to accept this idea because of the language I chose when I started the project - Python. While it's possible to compile binaries in Python...it's only really *necessary* for Windows. Unix-based systems(and any other platforms that might run PyGame/SDL) are generally better equipped to run programs in script form, and binary packaging would introduce some ugly overhead. Additionally, I was planning to have "moddable" elements in the engine from the beginning, so, of course, why not make it totally open? It's growing into something that could handle any sort of 2d game using tiles and sprites(i.e. most of them - it's a bit on the slow side of course but I can still get 90+ fps), and I'm planning to reuse it myself.
In the worst case, nobody will care about the game or the engine. It would have made no difference whether it was closed or open then - a project to replace or extend the original content might form but it couldn't, out of necessity, end up being the exact same game, leaving the purchasing incentive intact.
But in the best case, I get free press, a stronger community, and a better game.
Definitely one of the best games for modding.
:-)
It's all built on top of an engine that runs their own language, so *everything* is customizable. The world, the interface, the creatures themselves... people even managed to do things that weren't originally planned like creatures that could fly or live under water.
The only closed part was the music, which had some cool format that allowed smooth transitions from one theme to another, but that seems to have been reverse-engineered.
Myself, I reverse-engineered a good part of the game's networking protocol
These days it's probably possible to turn it into something completely different, like a space shooter. Actually, the game had an easter egg where they had a space invaders game somewhere.
I'd thought expansion pack is made to exploit ever lasting popularity of a game to its max, making more money from it. If modders make expansion packs, original developer can't rely on extra revenue, except for licensing engines.
ROI is great, but what about mods that have an impact on the social conditions, such as Doom for Columbine and the 9/11 game? These have been examined by the NYT and yet the communities have discouraged the production of such mods, because they are tasteless.
I speak from experience, being the creator of Doom for Columbine; I have been outcast from most modding communities, such as Gamespy and The Mod Database, because of the suspected outcome of DFC, that it could be tasteless or that it *was* tasteless.
This is before the mod was even released, or before development had begun; people either understood what I was going for or they rejected it outright.
Movies about these same topics are considered wonderful, heartwrenching accounts of what occured in both tragedies, but video games are exempt from the same artistic liberty?
I am not sure if Doom for Columbine will see the light of day. We had a development team that was ready to go, but with the press we received, many backed away to save their careers from scrutiny, but I challenge this same scrutiny as being an ignorant attempt to control the use of modding to shed light on tragedy and get a sense of what tragedy must have been like.
We started Doom for Columbine as an anti-violence project, where the main character would attempt to understand violence in media in order to further the story and develop characters, much like a movie would on the same subject.
No matter which angle we planned for, the audience still hated the idea, largely because of the use of the word Columbine, without regard to any possible design account we may have implemented.
Most of the views of the audience were from the standpoint that Doom for Columbine would be a mod based in the reality of the perpetrators of the massacre, and not the story we were going to tell.
After considerable thought, I believe it's necessary to engauge the audience for their lack of understanding, and portray the events from the perspective of Klebold and Harris, because these were disturbed people, and they were disturbed for a good reason; they were living lives that were damaged daily by a lack of understanding from those around them. They were trying to be unique, and in doing so they were set apart from everyone and outcast. This lack of acceptance from peers is what was largely responsible for what happened at Columbine, combined with the easy access to weapons in America and the impatience/emotions of youth.
Therefore, as a game designer and writer, I must engauge my audience and that means I must take the hard road for design, and do so without concern for the consequences -- because that is exactly what a writer does. They write the truth.
How is modding any different? We have all the tools to create stories and examine truth, but many mods are just a ray of light apart from the base game; Counter Strike is not far from Half Life, except for new elements to gameplay. The story is missing; there is no CS story. And how is CS any different from a 9/11 game? It's the same subject matter, yet CS is separate from human history in that these are generic terrorism events, or counter-terrorism events that lead to a different outcome each match. It's the same, but it's missing the story. Is that the only reason CS is so widely accepted?
What if CS was a game about specific terrorist groups and their detailed planning of terrorist attacks? Would that be more or less acceptable? Would it be a better experience? Could that be used by law enforcement to train officers?
Because if Doom for Columbine was a true account of what happened at Columbine, law enforcement could get an understanding of the evil they are up against from youth today, and maybe, just maybe, some kid will decide to just play the fucking game instead of actually hurting anyone.
They hyped it to be better to mod for than the first but when it was rushed by those cock suckers Sierra the mod tools required Maya 3 and wouldnt work on anything but Maya 3. And that isnt available anymore.
End Reuslt = no mods worth speaking about as noone can make shit for it.
Content manifests itself in many ways. In terms of FPS games, it's usually through mods or maps. In sim/"sandbox" games, the game itself self-generates new content although it can be complemented by new buildings/add-ons. In MMORPGs, again the new content writes itself.
Look at almost any popular older game available today and you'll see they all have one thing in common - the constant influx of new content. Counterstrike runs on the positively ancient Half-Life engine (we're talking Quake1/2-era here), and it's still one of the most popular multiplayer games out there. People wouldn't still be playing Counterstrike unless there were new maps and experiences to have. And that all translates to increasing Valve's bottom line as people continue to buy Half-Life to this day.
Another example is the Red Faction series. The original Red Faction shipped with the RED level editor. To this day, there are still several multiplayer maps coming out for it each week. Nowhere near the level of Unreal maps, but fairly high given the community's size. And Red Faction has a commmunity, mind you. That's something that comes with editors/modability. When Red Faction II released, it had no editor and no multiplayer whatsoever. It just collects dust on the shelves of stores nationwide now and is chastised by the community that largely feels (and rightfully so) that Volition turned their backs on them. More damaging, Red Faction has no place on the PC now. It has no name and no reputation, other than being a game you'll beat in ten hours and then collect dust in the closet.
Surely, some corporate bigwig thinks with an economic mind that a bundled editor is pointless because the vast majority of users will ignore it. And that's true. However, what they have to understand is that the 1%-2% minority that actually learns it will produce amazing content for that majority, which is ultimately a win-win scenario for everyone.
I can't help but consider this to be one version of an "ultimate" modding environment, where the real point isn't the main adventure at all, but the tools and the whole general-purpose D&D environment that goes with them.
Of course, you can't change the game's actual code, but you can change a lot using the supplied editing tools, and even more (including new classes, adding new models, etc) using hak packs.
I know that I had more fun with the Aurora toolset trying to piece modules together and scripting them than I ever did with the Official Campaign.
And not all games are supported as much as they could have been.
For example, Command & Conquer Renegade.
The good:
A leveleditor that is a version of the levleditor that westwood used to make the game. Used to create levels as well as manipulate all the game data.
A GMAX plugin to create new 3D models.
A viewer for said 3D models.
Some nice info on the 3D format.
Some decent documentation on the 3D plugin and related items.
Very helpfull people from the dev team used to be on the official forums helping out.
The bad:
A number of documented bugs (some reasonably serious) in the leveleditor and other tools (a 3D model viewer that crashes every time without fail is not a very good program)
Some engine limitations that are a PITA to deal with.
No usefull documentation on the leveleditor or on all the many game settings.
No release of any code for the gameplay scripting (its some C++ code that goes into a seperate DLL, scripts.dll)
Never heard of it, and the site is either down or deleted. I'll continue to try to check it out, but even still... that's one opportunity versus the plethora of virtually limitless numbers of commercial engines available for use to mod, for only the price of the game itself. Understandably, the draw for Consumer-Level game designers to use commercial games is much higher, if only because the number of [b][i]good[/i][/b] commercial engines available is huge, and the number of even bad freeware engines is small. Seems like an issue of input/output... higher number of sources to input from yields higher number of finished products... baddabing.
Is Your 'super computer' really the Fastest PC