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Games Entertainment

The Mod Squad 109

Posted by michael from the headshot dept.
Devil's BSD writes "Popular Science has a new article in this month's issue about gaming mods. It contains a nice history of mods, touches on mods for the Big Three gaming systems today (as well as those for computer games), and a beginner's guide to mods. Interesting, but not much new for the l33t h4x0rs out there though."
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The Mod Squad More

The Mod Squad

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  • Ahhh the days (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kymermosst ( 33885 ) on Sunday July 14, 2002 @04:34PM (#3882823) Journal
    I remember doing my own (simple) DOOM mods. Then came Quake and I loved the mods, expecially CTF, even played semi-professionally for a little bit.

    However, after hardware advanced too fast for me to be able to afford upgrades, I have pretty much left the gaming scene entirely.

    It was damn fun, though.
    • Barney and Aliens were my personal favorite Doom mods. :)

    • Re:Ahhh the days (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Yorrike ( 322502 )
      Agreed, I used to make maps and level for Doom/2 and Quake/2 with every moment I wasn't deathmatching. But in regards to hardware; that's the main reason I've moved away from PC gaming and concentrated on consoles.

      I loved the old skool mods that Doom and Quake brought about, but in order to enjoy the newer games these days I'd have to buy a new box every year, which is more than participation in the scene is worth to me.

      There are exceptions though, and the releases of NWN [bioware.com] and Warcraft 3 [blizzard.com] have resparked my interest in PC ghaming and given me reason to upgrade my aging desktop.

      • Agreed, I used to make maps and level for Doom/2 and Quake/2 with every moment I wasn't deathmatching. But in regards to hardware; that's the main reason I've moved away from PC gaming and concentrated on consoles.

        Consoles are good, but the PC wins when you include mods, multiplayer, updates, and the amount of better games. Plus you cant really get 9.99 bargin bin games for consoles until the new game systems come out. I normally wait until a store has a sale, and get the newest pc games for around 29.99 dollars (seems to be the onsale sweet spot).

        But for consoles, my kids still turn off the xbox/ps2 and turn on the snes for Super Mario brothers. Some games just hold replay value. And I still like fzero, and street fighter every now and then. The N64 still has some good 4 player games, but Ive seen monkey ball on the nintendo gamecube which is rather addictive for a group of people.
        -
        Half this game is 90% mental. - Danny Ozark, manager of the Phillies

    • ...even played semi-professionally for a little bit... However, after hardware advanced too fast for me to be able to afford upgrades, I have pretty much left the gaming scene entirely.
      I've heard a lot of good reasons for people moving on from hardcore gaming (getting a life, discovering sex etc) but not being able to afford the equipment isn't one of them.

      Surely, if you were playing semi-pro, you would have made enough to a new graphics card every year or whatever?

      • no you most certainly would not have. There were no $100k tourney's back then. A 5k tourney purse was huge. Almost all of the gaming was done in college dorms not at home over cable/dsl.

        Semi-pro means you would still get your ass whipped by the really good players (ie Thresh Gollum, Xenon).

      • No. Tourney's weren't that big then, and quite often there was only good money for the first few places, and sometimes some hardware. I've got my fair share of id software hats and tee-shirts, though :)

        All in all, semi-pro gaming was, at best a good hobby. :)

        Getting a life and a wife certainly didn't help much, either :)
    • I still have them [zimage.com]. IIRC, I think they work well in jDoom [newdoom.com] too. :)

  • Yeah, but... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Jonboy X ( 319895 )
    ...how many games do you really want to see the characters naked in?

  • Counterstrike (Score:4, Informative)

    by prestomation ( 583502 ) on Sunday July 14, 2002 @04:41PM (#3882851)
    When I hear the word "mod", the first thing I think of is Counter-Strike. If you don't know what that is, you should get out of that hole you've been living in! :) It's a tatical terrorist vs. counter-terrorist mod to Half-Life. A few months ago there we're about 13,000(yes, THOUSAND) active servers. Now there's only a few thousand, but it's more then any other mods I believe. It must be by chance that this story was posted right after I've been playing CS for the first time in a couple of months. http://www.counter-strike.net
    • Counterstrike is filled with cheaters, lamers, and worst. At least you can go pubbing in places like rtcw without some of these issues.
      • Have you played CS recently? Since 1.4(I think they're on 1.5 now) they have built-in "anti-cheat technology". Granted, it's not that good, there are still some cheats you can get to work, but many many cheaters are gone.
    • Yeah, its a shame that they didn't go into CS a little more. A mod of a game built around an engine pushing 6 years old commands more online servers than stuff released in the last two years. But it is Popular Science, they approach the Weekly World News for credibility and substance.

      FWIW, the Kali server tracker shows 17039 CS servers, 19714 total Half-Life servers (CS, TFC, DOD, DM, etc). That compares to 3612 Q3 servers, 2842 UT servers and 26190 total game servers across all games. Of course, I don't think Kali quite tracks all the new games that have moved to their own server tracking services (or something like Battle.Net). But it still illustrates the power CS has.

    • Day of Defeat mod is popular... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by antdude ( 79039 ) on Sunday July 14, 2002 @05:18PM (#3882956) Homepage Journal
      DoD Web site [dayofdefeatmod.com]. I think it is gaining more players and to me, this mod is much funner.

    • Re:Counterstrike (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Corby911 ( 250281 )
      I had to give up on CS. I used to be a decent player and a quite good admin (according to those who frequented my server anyway). I gave up the beast when the cheating got REALLY out of hand around 8 months ago. This was also when I was moving to linux as my only OS (I just booted windows for games), not to mention the fact that I had finals to worry about, and was moving off campus (say goodbye to the dual oc-3's).

      At any rate, I'd become disinterested. The newer maps failed to add anything exciting to the game, and I'd played them all to death. I started adding older maps (think beta-4 era) to the rotation (de_desert, etc) but it pissed too many people off. In the end, I'm glad that I gave up the game. I know of no less than 4 people that failed out of my school [rpiscrews.us] because of counter-strike alone.

      That being said, I can't wait for our ACM's fall LAN party... nothing like a bunch of geeks, some pizza, as much caffiene as you can stomach, and video games that can give you heart attacks when it's not 4 AM...
      • Good point, I co-ran a server doing the same thing, running old-skool maps (de_nuke ect..)

        ive been playing (or had been) since beta 0.1 or whatever.. any one remeber gun running on cs_docks? lol

        the reason i quite, was because of the retail version in just one week there were 100's of new crappy servers, filled with crappy players, and at certain times of the day 3-5 the language of the kidz playing was just awfull.. to many immature kidz playing. it ruined the game for me.

        now DOD is going the same way.. the more coverage in the magazines it gets (maximum PC, PC Gamer ect..) the more kidz play, the more they swear, the easier it is for me to kill them, and i get called a cheater.. its skill, ive been playing just halflife and halflife mods since it came out, except for some age of empires i havent played anything else, to this day i havent even seen Q3 or know any one who has a copy of it.

        just halflife.. and nothing but
    • DOD 3 is out! DOD 3 came out three days ago and the characters all are upgraded and it looks sweeter. I'm still downloading it but DOD 1 didnt work and then when DOD 2 came out it did and it's fairly good. DOD went from 200 players to I think theres many thousands! CS is old news.

    • Re:Counterstrike (Score:2, Funny)

      by MrWa ( 144753 )
      If you don't know what that is, you should get out of that hole you've been living in!

      Of course, most of the people on those 13,000 servers are living in a hole (or, atleast their parent's basement) so if you did live in a hole, odds are you know about CS.
    • A few months ago there we're about 13,000(yes, THOUSAND) active servers.

      School is out for summer, the colleges kids will have the servers up start of the school year. What else do you do with all that bandwidth in your room? Run a CS server of course!

  • Advancement in mod'n abilities (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had the fun of working on a mod. When Q2 came out they have you the game source code for the .dll or .so, not the graphic engine and netcode. The code was pretty hard to work with because it was highly undocumenets.

    I recently have been playing with Unreal Tournament. It come with it's own language and compiler that resembles Java. It very easy to work with and doesn't change much from each game release. Each new game just adds new classes or extends existing classes. It's lowered the learning curve, since you don't have to learn a new language for each game release.
  • I remember hearing some time ago about a Legend of Zelda mod. I downloaded it and ran it through a NES emulator. That sucker was about a thousand times harder than the original. I think I got about half way through the thing and finally gave up because it was too much. It was pretty cool though. The sprites were all colored differently and behaved in different ways than their original counterparts. I don't know, I may have heard about it here. If it can be done, and done well, for an NES game the newer ones would be real nice. If you get someone really creative and give it a good plot, you might have something better than the original.

  • Old game engines with mods impress me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Sunday July 14, 2002 @05:11PM (#3882935) Homepage Journal
    For example with Day of Defeat [dayofdefeatmod.com] mod for Half-Life, HL is like a few years old and yet the mod is very popular. v3.0 beta just came out a few days ago and I am in awe with this mod.

    Sure, the game engine uses outdated engine, but the fun is there. Now, if I could just play this awesome WWII mod in Linux (no Wine and stuff). :)

    • Re:Old game engines with mods impress me... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Sunday July 14, 2002 @05:36PM (#3883006)
      What amazes me is that people (myself included) still play the origional QuakeWorld Team Fortress (now days you HAVE to include "QuakeWorld" in the description as there's an entire generation who equate "Team Fortress" with Team Fortress Classic and know nothing else - damn kids). That alone shows the amazing draw to a good mod. If it wasn't for the easy modification of Quake, it would have burned through its cycle years ago - and computer games tend to have an amazingly short burn cycle.

      Before someone says it - QWTF is dying. Yes. Its been dying for years now. Its like the classic Monty Python scene.

      "I'm not dead yet!"

      "Wait a minute. He says he's not dead yet."

      "Well he will be in a minute."

      QWTF is just about to the point where it goes "I feel happy!" and then meets with a sudden ending at the end of a club (some claim that such a clubbing was attempted by Carmak's releaseing Quake source code and the rampant cheating that followed). But right now - its not QUITE dead yet.
      • I can't agree with you more. I played TF avidly, even after TFC came out, even playing in tournaments with a clan for years. Carmack releasing the source almost destroyed it for me, but I had enough connections in the community to still find good games on private servers for a good while longer. I don't know how they did it, but TF found a perfect balance. What really did it for me was the teamwork. Before a match, our clan would spend days working out a perfect defense and offense. The classes meant noone could solo. In my opinion, the community hit its peak after its mainstream popularity had long faded. Public servers were ussually filled with skilled players who knew how to work together. Joining a public CS server is like jumping in a zoo of armed monkies in comparison.
    • Sure, the game engine uses outdated engine, but the fun is there.

      I personally think the maps that came out with CS1.5 show how using new textures and good design can make a game look new. Computers are faster now, so mod developers just use higher detailed skins and textures and keep the same engine running even longer. And with Anti-Aliasing, CS looks perfect. Americas Army using the UT 2003 engine is a step up in realism, and hasnt even touched all the potential for maps, textures and skins. Normally takes a awhile for them to fully milk an engine for all its worth.
    • You're impressed? I"m one of the Day of Defeat MOD developers and WE are impressed. Never thought it would go as far as it did.
  • I don't like this article. It starts off discussing mods, then veers off into rewriting the history of Team Fortress. It then makes interjections about mod communities in between telling of this alternate history.

    I think this article was designed to soften people up after all the spite that has been built up against Team Fortress 2.

    Among the false histories: The omission of the announcement that TF2 would be released as a Quake2 mod. The fact that the core TF duo was by Valve before Half-Life was released. That TF Classic was released to calm the public as much as for fun, and about the time of the last projected release of TF2, then a commercial add-on.

    I'm not sure what this article was intended to do.
  • Why did this article spew off into a false treastise on Team Fortress?

    It would have been far more on-topic if they had mentioned AliensTC, used the term "Total conversion", and brought up Foxing. They only vaguely alluded to the topics, perfering to talk about TF.
  • I'm more of a gaming rocker myself.
    • So you're a 'gawker'?
    • Here's the Link [egyptiantheatre.com] to prove it!

      To bring this bad bwoy back onto topic-
      I wonder what the half-life (pun intended) of most mods are. And for that matter, given the necessary hardware update, I wonder what the full lifecycle of a mod-player is- from newbie to retired geriatric in 1 year? Under a year?

      That's why I stick to consoles.

      P.S. -Makes me want to listen to "Twiggy twiggy" by Pizzicato 5...
  • The PS author and editors blow it big time when they outright claim that all games are devoid of standard copyright protections against modification/alteration/derivative works. The blanket statement of "Although modifying began among hard-core hackers, it's not illegal." is just flat wrong, except where game publishers openly invite this activity.
  • Never heard of.

  • Quake (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Quake had the best mods, ever. Hands down. Threewave CTF [threewave.com] absorbed much of my time i should have spent studying and can be directly attributed to my poor ACT scores (I spent the entire night prior engaged in a ferocious clan battle against a german clan. We won, but the price paid was evident on my ACT scores...which I'll refrain from disclosing ;)).

    And what about Quake Rally [planetquake.com] ? Jesus, those were some memories there. Really innovative control scheme that's just now catching on in other games. It did some really fantastic stuff with the Quake engine, but it just didn't seem as off the wall as.... Target Quake [telefragged.com] !!! God. A side scroller built on the Quake engine.. fucking _golden_ stuff there. Brilliant idea.. kinda reminded me of Abuse but in 3D.. :)

    Oh hell, and what about the movies available for Quake? Remember Blahbalicious [machinima.com] ? How about Operation Bay Shield [machinima.com] ? Apartment Huntin [machinima.com] ? Hell, the massive 4 hour Nehahra [planetquake.com] ?

    Seriously, I haven't uninstalled Quake since 1996, i just keep transfering it over to my new hard drives whenever I upgrade. How the hell could I risk losing the ability to play Zerstorer [planetquake.com] or Scourge of Armagon [ritualistic.com] ?


    hehehe, i bet you thought i was going to forget the Quake Done Quick [planetquake.com] movies, didn't you? ;)
  • Urban Terror [urbanterror.net] is a great Quake3 mod. It runs natively under linux, there's hardly any cheatz, and the community is strong, with the developers taking an active role.

  • GTA3 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Sunday July 14, 2002 @06:13PM (#3883117) Homepage Journal
    There's already a booming mod commnuity for GTA3(pc version). SOmeone's making a whole new city with various tweaks here and there.

    Man would I like to have GTA Twin Cities. There's also simple mods you can do, like make a car 15K pounds heavy, and any collision sends a car flying in the opposite direction.

    • 15K pound car (Score:3, Funny)

      by Rupert ( 28001 )
      That would be a snow plow. People in the Twin Cities are quite good at driving into those, with the effect that you describe.
    • I've seen GTA3, but probably won't give it much of a try. I want multiplayer games. I want that engine (or even the whole game) to be multiplayer. I'd love to have either "teams" or just multiple players. I think it'd be great to either have two people gang up on the police or have one team be the police.

      It just seems that almost all games are more fun when there are multiple people playing them.
  • I find that most Mods are reasonably pathetic, but sometimes they're better than the original game.

    Counterstrike for Half-Life, Renegades for Tribes, etc.

    Recently I've been playing a mod for Unreal Tournament called Thievery [thieveryut.com], although it's more of a Total Conversion than a Mod. Somehow they've stripped UT down and rebuilt it as a multi-player version of Thief. Don't know how they did it, but it's incredible.

  • Commerical developer support to the mod community (Score:4, Interesting)

    by H3XA ( 590662 ) on Sunday July 14, 2002 @07:34PM (#3883337)
    The article is already /.ed so I need to ask.... was there any discussion about the support that devopers give to the mod community? I am not specifically talking about mapping and level designs but rather new game concepts adapted from the original.

    Id Software seemed to start the mainstream trend with the Doom engine being easily adapted with the good folk that developed the right tools. Then Valve software came along and gave the fledging mod community a BIG helping hand to the point where they enter "partnerships" with the better and more popular mods (ie. CS of course). Even games like Morrowind and NWN ship with tools that say "Use Me !!!" to custom design or alter adventures. It almost seems expected of a developer to offer the extra incentive for what is probably the minority of users to keep the game "alive" until the next game by a developer is released... what with the 2-3 year development times now.

    - HeXa

  • You Whipersnappers! (Score:4, Informative)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Sunday July 14, 2002 @08:26PM (#3883446) Homepage
    Alterations of a PC game are called "mods." Although modifying began among hard-core hackers,

    I began a whole lot longer before that, Go back to the 70s/80s where people with their 'big three' home computers starting out by modifying BASIC from a tape program or type-in listing (Yep I remember giving the mansters in Cursor's Dungeon silly names and myself better recharge stats)

    A Few years later as 8-bit computing progressed many pirates added extras to their 'cracked' games (which they called 'trainers' added such options as too many lives, indesctructible, level jump, etc.)

    Next the designers themseleves were modding their own games before release, type in this combo or do that joystick move to get free lives, etc.

    The article is old news to me.

    • Shit yeah...

      Intently watching the track counter on my Indus GT disk drive as games loaded...

      Countless hours poring over the code to Ultima III with a hex editor... redrawing all the cities, changing the dialogue... took a lot of trial and error rebooting to see the results of our handiwork, but we had a great time doing it!

      I don't know if Lord British would have approved, but it sure was fun.

      Ah... those were the days... teenagers with endless time on our hands, running BBSs, home computers to play with... what could be finer? (and we didn't need no stinkin internet).

  • I have Q3A for linux (RIP Loki) but anyway, the mods are the best. Quake3 sucks rocks but Urban Terror and Navy Seals kick some stuff. I like Navy Seals the best right now but it take all kinds. If you have Q3A sitting around and are sick of it you should try out some mods.

    Oz Out

  • can anyone recommend a good book or website that one could use to learn basic info about how to get started with game modding...and i'm not talking about just doing a google search on game modding...i can do that...i'm looking for some resources that people have successfully used to learn how to mod a game, etc...i am an experienced programmer, but i've never really taken the time (not that i have much free time) to fool around with game modding...and even if i did have the time, i wouldn't know where to begin...anyone have any good how-to's, etc...?

    • Re:Game Modding for Dummies... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Thats a very broad question. I can help you if your interested in modding for Half-Life, which I am currently doing myself.

      everything from coding to modelling
      http://www.planethalflife.com/wavelengt h/models/

      lots of stuff on coding
      http://www.karljones.com/halflife/almanac. asp

      you need this to get the level editor, and the Half-Life SDK
      http://www.valve-erc.com/

      Your also going to need to know how to model, texture, and animate with 3DSmax or Milkshape. To learn this stuff you should probably start here - http://www.planetquake.com/polycount

      Be forwarned, making MODs for modern games requires alot of time and skill. Expect to spend several months just getting familiar with the basics.
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