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."
It's not really all THAT odd... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Unreal guys probably got proactive about getting this story out there.
It's not a coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
It mystifies me that a game these days can possibly be shipped without a comprehensive editing tool. They're artificially limiting their games' lives and shooting their sales in the foot.
user-created levels (Score:3, Insightful)
are a great addition to commercial games...
so long as there is a moderating system to sort the wheat from the chaff (to use a biblical metaphor)
Mods... (Score:5, Insightful)
Games with mods do seem to have a much longer life than non-mod games, look at Tribes, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 1942, Neverwinter Nights (which LIVES off of the mod concept), heck, even games not designed to be modded (Silent Hunter 2) have had mods done by very creative and dedicated fans.
Allowing people to make their own maps is not enough, let them play with the engine, the graphics, the models, the scripting, it pleases the fans and makes them come back for a sequel. Its been proven lots of times, heck, people still play QUAKE1 because of the mods!
Game mods are the best card for PC games (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, mods (and in general, user-created content) are responsible for the metamorphosis of the computer games industry since the early 8-bit era to what it is today. No longer can you sell a hit game every 6 months , due to this extra content the average life of a good game has increased immensely, and thus, game companies now have to think carefully about their plans and development programs.
Re:It's not really all THAT odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not really all THAT odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, it worked for Valve, it can work for us.
I know Half-Life was the only game I ever bought more than once, as sick an fanboyish as that sounds to me now.
Consoles? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's not really all THAT odd... (Score:2, Insightful)
Heh. Go work for a newspaper and then come back again in six months.
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor... (Score:3, Insightful)
The "standard" way to build levels is just to generate a WAD without the data and run it through one of the many existing BSP calculators. No offence, but it seems rather pointless to reinvent the wheel. (Plus, as much as I love Ruby, it might be a bit slow for this purpose..)
Re:Building a mod inside a level editor... (Score:3, Insightful)
> genetic algorithm. You could evolve
> the (near-)perfect level.
The difficult part might be coming up with a good fitness algorithm. I mean, a perfect level for one person may be a lousy level for another.
I'm hoping to come up with something that could be used to generate a level from, say, a building floor plan, or a Visio diagram of something - stuff like that. It would be nifty to run around inside of a Cougaar [cougaar.org] agent community, for example.
glaring omission (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple, no linux support.
Yay! For once, HL & Counterstrike not mentione (Score:2, Insightful)