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How PC Game Modders Are Evolving
Lanxon writes "Wired has a lengthy investigation into the state of PC game mods, and the amateurs keeping the scene exciting in the wake of draconian DRM placed on many PC titles by major studios. It highlights a number of creative modders, such as Scott Reismanis, founder and editor of Mod DB, and his community-driven alternative to Valve's Steam — Desura — which is 'a distribution system, and, like Steam, will sell games and champion indie titles. But the way it handles mods makes it even more exciting.'"
I thought they were intelligently designed?
I'm just trying to figure out, what exactly stops malicious content? Does it rely on the community to say "Woah this mod does some bad stuff to your PC!" or is there some other way to catch it? What if someone is the editor on a hugely popular mod, get's his account hacked (or just has a malicious roomate) and starts uploading some content that does harm to users computers? Or is that not possible due to the mods being sandboxed? The article is quite lacking in what exactly this system does or is capable of doing...
My nephew wants to start doing game modding (He actually wanted to make maps for a halo title but it looks like you need one of the expensive 3d molders). What would be a good title to get him that has a good sdk? is source sdk still a popular path?
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I never knew doubleclicking an icon and clicking "Next" a few times was a complicated and difficult install process.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
This is a very lame shallow attempt at an article. They ask one guy who is a modder about a few things. No mention of Gmod for steam? What a joke! Gmod is way better than ANY system in place. My kid was modding to build a car out of parts of games he owns. Sliding box car doors, Giant looking people with small buildings! He got counterstrike for the new mods, buildt upon the parts of counterstrike. Last time he played G mod he made a sign , wrote "Fight Club" on it made a town square area for it and people joined and fought. Then the "cops" came (characters spawned as swat guys using the Cstrike Swat character models). Fun shit! Dedicated servers should be what PC gaming is about. They should just keep these games PC only. So to shut up the PC world they could have skipped it all together, hell they should have since there was no dedicated server. Games now are coming out with VASTLY superior editing kits. Check the new Starcraft game editor. One guy FPS'ed it one guy makes a racer, another a RPG...OUTTA STARCRAFT! The game companies just need to make the tools in house and not a wackjob hack tools splatter fest of tools the modders use. Then the mod is uploaded and put in the community like Gmod.
http://www.garrysmod.com/
There isn't even a public beta, let alone source code. Sorry, but it's a lot easier to get excited about this stuff than a bunch of screenshots.
And now that Steam is being ported to Linux and OS X, will this project be portable? Will it be open source? Will it integrate with local package managers, or other distribution systems?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A game I pulled off the shelf and played the other day when I redid the XP Bootcamp partition was Star Trek: Bridge Commander. Turns out after all these years, new models and patches are still being made and maintained. Well going through the documentation, the designers developed and distributed a SDK that was largely Python based scripting. With the added mods, the game is still interesting and even more fun that it was years ago when I bought it.
Look at Falcon 4: Allied Force. I bought the original Falcon 4 in 1998 for $15. Graphics were cool for its day, but it is the definitive modern combat flight simulator however, it's dynamic campaign engine was so buggy it was broken. Well, the mod community stepped in, formed a company, got a license from Atari and produced Falcon 4: Allied Force which fixed the campaign bugs and turned it into a playable and really interesting combat simulator. (This was the last game I purchased)
The mod community has kept those titles going strong.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
If you want to see how heavily modded a game can get take a look at Microsoft's Flight Simulator series, especially the 2004 version. There are terrabytes of free and paid mods for EVERY aspect of the game. Aircraft models and artwork, instrumentation (including binary mods), weather, scenery, visual controls, sounds, special effects. Even hardware manufacturers that could sell you specialised consoles and panels to integrate You name it. The default simulator is very game like. With addons you can replicate fine details like the flight dynamics and starting sequences of aircraft so that you can follow real airliner manuals while flying over scenery based on satellite imagery. The simulator was built with extensibility in mind, but the modders really pushed the limits too. It's a pity this franchise died. Even though mods are still made for FS2004 and FSX, the team that build the simulator were disbaned a couple of years ago and in a lot of ways what we have now is a zombie mod community. A shadow of what it once was.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
No mac or Linux support, and no source code available.
Yeah, it could still be a project trying to "serve the community" but as we've learned by difficult example, the only way to really "be the community" is to be open.
The windows-only thing is possibly practical, but it means I'm not excited.
-josh
I'm a little confused, the article spends a lot of time talking about how modders scorn newer games for the Source engine. How is this evolving?
http://www.tenjou.net/
Not mentioned is that Stardock promotes modding. In fact, it's CEO/founder Brad Wardell, who often hangs out on forums and chat (how many other CEOs do that?), went on a modding sabbatical recently.
I'm more interested in the mods that seem to be doing what only companies with a lot of resources could do a few years ago. Think of The Forgotten ( http://theforgotten.cnclabs.com ), which is a popular C&C mod that blends both indie filmmaking and indie game design. I'm sure there are others.
I am amused no one mentioned Doom here, it is definitely a stepstone in game modding.
True that most of that modding came after source ports were made, but making a Doom mod is a process that takes relatively little time, and has potentially good results with not much effort.
There are mods that, using ACS scripting (a few kilobytes of human-readable code), change Doom gameplay radically. There are bigger mods such as ZDoom Wars (combining FPS + strategy) or All Out War 2: The Second Coming (a team based mod heavily inspired by C&C:Renegade) that put the fun levels up enough to make them "games on their own right" while running on the Doom engine.
Current games never feel as easy to mod as Doom was, even games fully designed to be modded. Just the requirement of 3D modeling limits the possibilities for many potential modders. You can literally make fully featured and beautiful maps/mods in 24 hours.
(And, despite kids in general being annoying in games, at times... give an annoying kid a very easy to mod game, and you might be surprised with the results. I only saw such a thing in Doom...and perhaps Dwarf Fortress)
Should we care what Reismanis thinks about modding? ModDB is also the site that botched an opportunity to host the entire fileset from a cumulative decade of devoted modding of Total Annihilation. You remember Total Annihilation, right? The game that has spawned at least one spinoff and three sequels, with a fourth anticipated?
When the last sites that were host to what remained of the TA modding community, tauniverse.com and fileuniverse.com, were under imminent threat of disappearing for good last year, the site's complete modding archives - essentially everything that had ever been created by a third party for the game - were offered to ModDB for preservation. ModDB accepted and received the files, but then did absolutely nothing with them.
Fortunately the TA community rallied yet again and retained control of the key domains and all that content, but ModDB dropped the ball. Many people were neither impressed nor amused.
Why has no one here mentioned Quake2?
With Qoole it is very easy to create maps and mods...
Prophunt is a mod of Team Fortress 2. It's hilarious. Kind of like hide-and-seek with flamethrowers and axes.
If all of these "modders" would contribute to creating an open source game instead of nipping at the scraps left by commercial games we would have even better open source games in the control of the community instead of unrewarding idea mills for the corps. Not to say that commercial games should not exist. Just that it would be nice if these very talented people would be more farsighted in their efforts.
I hear that civ 5 will have a very open modding system.
It comes w/ the full modeling, map making, and event system. It's easy to jump into, Lots of resources, and you can build a lot w/ it's scripting engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnrealEd but it, like many dev platforms are mostly map editors.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
As a former half-life modder I'm going to have to recommend staying away from the Source engine. Why? It's old and the code is an absolute mess, both in design and organization of file structure. Hammer, as a world editor is clunky and unintuitive. However, what finally turned me away from it was Steam. I need to be able to write code (and test it) on a machine that will never be connected to the internet. Can't do it without cracking Steam.
Half-life 1 was great to mod.
I've always enjoyed the Unreal franchise mods and TCs. Having started with modding "Duke" (limited to 2.5-D/sprites) it was great to have real 3-D in UT to mess with.
Epic has always supported modding on UT - and even has their "Make something Unreal" contest. A lot of great and creative mods came out of this like: "Red Orchestra" (WWII); "Tactical Operations," "Neotokyo," "Frag Ops," & "Strike Force" (contemporary weapons); and "AirBuccaneers" (a steam-punk, hot-air balloons and cannons mod!)
However, I feel like the "golden age" of UT mods has passed, back with UT-2004. There was a long hiatus before UT-3 came out, and a lot of gamers and modders moved on, and there was also the steeper learning curve to the UT-3 editor.