NYT on Game Mods 172
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."
The Baldur's gate engine (Score:5, Informative)
Simon.
Link so you don't have to register (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/technology/circ
Thanks google
Re:Super (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps the article was just focusing on the current generations of engines, so Unreal would be a good choice, now that it is getting yearly updates. I hope the vehicles in UT2k4 are going to be good...
Glaring Oversight (Score:5, Informative)
And no discussion of Half-Life would be complete without a discussion of Natural-Selection [natural-selection.org], 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).
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Half-Life (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Quake, not Q2 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Battlefield 1942 (Score:2, Informative)
This is despite EA Games being very reluctant to support mods. Even the map editor promised shortly after the game was released only came out almost a year later and after a lot of complaining in the BF community. There is now a rudimentary SDK, but this is probably because the suits at EA saw the official expansion packs do comparatively badly and saw how well community made mods (epsecially DC and the Vietnam mod Eve of Destruction) were doing. You need a copy of the original game to play the mods, so reluctantly EA have started to co-operate.
Valve are probably the industry leader in terms of encouraging mods. This is an interesting business model, as it resembles OS while still allowing the games companies to sell licenses. If even EA are moving in that direction, then I think gaming is going to get very interesting (from both the players' and modders' point of view) in the next few years.
Competitive Gaming (Score:5, Informative)
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 [anime.net] mod by bani for the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory [activision.com] 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.
Re:Consoles? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Half-Life (Score:5, Informative)
In comparison Half-life was a huge rewrite of the Quake I engine by a company that had licensed the code. If that's a mod then GTA:VC is a mod of Burnout 2, because they're both built on top of the Renderware graphics engine.
Glaring omission? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know how useful the level editing features of the thing will end up being, but I have some ideas of making a random level generator similar to Slige [doomworld.com] with it. Using a language as powerful as Python, it should hopefully be possible to create stuff more advanced than Slige's linearly arranged square sectors
Re:TF a Halflife mod? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor... (Score:2, Informative)
Just FYI, Descent was a full 3D game in every sense of the word.
Re:It's not really all THAT odd... (Score:3, Informative)
Trust me, I know how this works. Sure, you have some companies trying to railroad stories through, but it's usually some editor who tells a peon "I keep hearing about game mods--write a story!" Then the peon pokes around, contacts people at what Google turns up, then leans hard on whoever is first to reply. I've been through this enough to know the drill.