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A General Guide For Mod Creation
Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen has combined and updated a series of guides he wrote for getting into the development of game mods. He provides a detailed explanation of the process from concept to reality as well as a look at some of the obstacles you're likely to run into. Quoting:
"First thing is that it really is work, and should be planned as such. As I've said earlier, you really need to be aware you have to sacrifice other elements of your life to get it done. If you just rely on your free time, the Mod will fail. You may find it helpful to actually time-table periods when you can do stuff, in the same way you would book a regular evening class. If every night you put aside a limited amount of time to do work, you'll make steady progress. This is considerably healthier than the boom/bust approach which most modders will follow. But - y'know - most people on your team will move on a cycle of massive productivity followed by long fallow periods."
I thought soundtracker MODs were making a comeback. :(
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
It's true that if you just rely on free time to do work on a mod you'll never get it done.
For almost 5 years I woke up an hour early for work to work on my Quake 3 mod called BASE Conflict. This was the guaranteed only way to get things done with a full time job, part time school, and a wife and kid. Work finally came to a halt sometime after I transferred to WSU and with the increase in school work and I found myself working on homework in the morning rather that debugging UI code. But up until that point I made an amazing amount of progress. I'm currently porting my code to the ioquake3 code base and the patch files created for the port total nearly 400k or somewhere in the realm of 13000 new or changed lines of code.
It also helps to write out a list and keep it where you can see it. After I graduated I didn't really get back into the swing of things until I made a new to do list. If you check my sig you'll see that getting my website back up is somewhere near the top.
BASE Conflict for Quake 3
Well, it depends on the scope of the mod, actually. Not everything is a total conversion, like the summary seems to assume.
I could be remembering wrong, but I think the smallest mod I've seen that did anything useful and got downloaded, was a 1 line change to a Creatures 3 script. Admittedly, there was obviously some time involved in reading and understanding the scripts, but I still can't imagine anyone needing to set time aside over long periods for that.
Also, a lot of games allow a more modular approach to mods and personally that's the kind of mods I'd like to see more. I do realize that it's not applicable to all games, and it does pose problems in multiplayer. But I kinda like more the kind of small mods that I can mix and match, like, say, most Oblivion mods, instead of one big chunk that changes everything. Or in X2: The Threat, my favourite "mod", was again a collection of smaller scripts, ships and other small changes, that I had put together for myself out of such small pieces that other people made and were available for download separately.
At any rate, again, I doubt that most of those plugins had to be a second job to get done.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Don't write your own mod, you'll just screw it up. Use the % operator built into your language -- it will be faster and always come up with the right answer.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
My team is currently leading The Witcher mod competition, and I read through this article thinking 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes'. Compared with the very well established Neverwinter Aurora toolkit, D'Jinni, The Witcher toolkit, is very fragile, and very under-documented. And, of course, we're pioneers, so while there are a few people who have already tried some things, we're having to learn a lot through trial and error.
My conclusion? This is the last mod I'll do with closed source tools. D'Jinni produces very polished results - the scenery of The Witcher is breathtaking - but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. So we're looking carefully at The Blender and the Java Monkey Engine.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
just wear a suit everywhere and buy a Vespa.
Oh yeah, don't forget to look out for rockers.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
called a Ranger.