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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?
Lack of exposure. Even a popular mod for a popular game has so little exposure -- especially among non-technical users -- that it's not worth exploiting as a vector. It's easier to go with the familiar vectors discussed here all the time.
Malware still shows up in packages claiming to be pirate copies. My bro tried to grab a copy of Worms Armageddon. What he got was Worms Armageddon with the installer replaced by a trojan neatly disguised as the installer. I had a good laugh while I removed that. I've never seen, or even heard of a malicious mod, though.
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."
Source SDK absolutely. Get him a copy of TF2, which will come with Valve's Hammer software. Valve are quite supportive of their community and highlight the best new community maps on their tf2 blog. There are also DVDs in valve's shop on how to create maps.
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
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)