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Games Entertainment

Making Games Live Longer With Mods 174

Posted by timothy from the fun-if-not-deep dept.
rmohr02 writes: "Popular Science has an interesting article about people hacking games to get more replay value out of them. It mentions games like Quake and Doom which are still played due to the mods people distribute for them, and that the code for Doom's level editor was made free so hackers could use that code to get what they wanted. It also mentions that the next Team Fortress hack, Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, will not be distributed for free."
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Making Games Live Longer With Mods More

Making Games Live Longer With Mods

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  • And as an art project... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:02AM (#3925788) Homepage Journal
    There are some really neat experimental art mods for Quake 1.

    Check them out at www.untitled-game.org/ [untitled-game.org]...

    (Personally, I still play Quake 1 straight... a game doesn't stop being fun because newer games come out with flashier graphics!)
    • Great page. Not only is it horribly ugly, it's also entirely functionally broken. This [untitled-game.org], for instance, is a nice html file, no?
    • Not really an art project, but I am part of the Freedoom Project [despayre.org] which is working to create a full doom game. Combined with the GPLed Doom source, when done it will result in a complete free game. Part of the hope is that Doom will continue to live on in an open (as in Open Source) fashion.
    • "a game doesn't stop being fun because newer games come out with flashier graphics!"

      Funny you should say this with respect to a 3D first-person shooter. They're one of the few cases where there was an undeniable, pressing need for better graphics -- reducing motion sickness.

      Back in the Wolf3D days, I could barely play for half an hour before becoming ill. Quake was a little better. But it wasn't until the 3D accelerated FPS games that I could play such games non-stop (hooray for being able to blow a weekend on TFC).

  • TF2- what a joke (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it was my impression that TF2 was a full blown game, not a mod.... and that it's a pipe dream.

    When it's released, it'll be bundled with gravy trader.
    • "When it's released"

      We are optimic today aren't we?
    • Let's go over the history of TF2. First it was supposed to be a mod for Quake 2, much like many of the sequels to Quake mods. Then, Valve made a deal with the guys who made TF, and TF2 was supposed to be a free-as-in-beer mod for Half-Life. Plans changed again, and it was turned into a commercially sold mod. Eventually, they changed their minds again, and decided to sell it as a separate game using the HL engine. However, several months through development, they decided to make a totally new engine for it.

      Several months ago, I went onto the messageboards at the official TF2 website, and it seems like all development has stopped. It's a shame too; I still hoped it would be good vaporware (like Diablo 2 as opposed to Diakatana).

    • Re:TF2- what a joke (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Note: The TF2 this article points to is TF2 (FOR QUAKE). You are referring to TFC2 which is an official release from Sierra.
    • Hahahaha Gravy Trader. I bet everybody at PCG is wet over that one. :-)

      I'm still holding out hope for the Coconut Monkey virtual sex simulator.

      sedawkgrep
    • A mod being commercial is a serious impediment to its adoption by the critical mass of people.
    • considering that America's Army [americasarmy.com] is now out (and it's really quite good) i don't see what the point in trying to get TF2 out is at this point anyway.

      TF2 did contribute one non-vaporous thing tho... the moving mouths when you speak through the mic in Counter-Strike. yeay!
      • by playing America's Army, you're basically telling them you think it was okay to spend $7 mil on a propaganda tool for minors. not everyone want to support that. nevertheless, point is moot as TF2 has been entirely vaporous for some time now.

  • Total Annihilation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:08AM (#3925798)

    Perhaps this was one reason for the success of Cavedog's excellent Total Annihilation RTS. The game itself was good, but it was also designed from the word go to allow the incorporation of new units, maps, etc. Cavedog made several available on their web site over the months after the launch, and released an add-on (Core Contingency) that included whole new types of unit and terrain.

    Today, even after Cavedog are done, there are still enthusiasts out there [planetannihilation.com] working on quite ambitious extras, and this is something like four years after the game first hit the shelves, and when you apparently can't even buy it in the UK any more. (Anyone know a good way to get it in the UK, BTW? None of the usual shops lists it any longer, and there's nothing on UK E-bay.)

    • Hey i didn't see your e-mail or anything so i had to reply on the board. I have Total Annihilation and the expansion and i never play it anymore. I would be willing to send it to you for the shipping costs or something. I don't know if you need the UK version for some special reason i have the regular american release.
    • HMV and Game still occasionally stock the game. Even PC World will have it in sometimes. It's usually always in the budget section.

    • TA is definitely the best war RTS ever. I've been playing Warcraft 3 and it is just not as good. TA had great balance, great graphics (every object was rendered in 3d), great AI, great features, and great multiplayer. Pick it up at a used software place, and get all the patches and Cavedog units. I would used to play 3-4 hours games that were more like chess matches, it was so awesome. The one really bad part of warcraft 3 is that the action happens waaaayy too fast and your heros die really easily and before you get a chance to use their spells. In fact, in the middle of a big battle, you waste too much time trying to figure out where your hero is so that you can cast the right spell. Also, you can't cue up builds which really sucks because it means you need to micromanage even more. In TA, you could speed up or slow down the game speed on the fly, but Warcraft 3 only has 3 settings, slow normal and fast. Slow is still too fast. I wish Chris Taylor would just go ahead and make TA 2. Kingdoms beautiful to look at but wasn't very fun, and Dungeon Siege was a disaster. Back to the original point, TA has been modded to death. Way before Age of Empires did it, the TA community did a Star Wars mod, and it's pretty awesome. As well, it was really easy to create your own units. It's 5 years old but still kickin'!
    • TA is easily the most impressive RTS I've ever played. It gives the player an incredible amount of control and eliminates most mandantory micromanagement.

      And the music was great. :-)
  • I'd pay 100 bucks per level for some new mariokart battle fields, and a little more for a complete circuit :-P *sigh* will the cube version never be released. Can anyone hack a game that was originally just for a gaming console? I see people doing dumb stuff like turning character sprites into vegetables and renaming the games junk like "super mario potato head".
    • Right now there are a lot of people working on designing/creating new Halo levels for the Xbox. There is already an 'underground' Q2 port for the Xbox, and I assume that all aftermarket maps will work with it. I also assume that if and when Q3 makes it to the xbox the same will be true.

      Ironically, it'll require true enthusiasts (read: people who'll 'hack' their console) to be able to even attempt these such things. (Usually because media cannot be read under normal circumstances)

      Isn't it funny? The people who are REALLY into the game/console and into making more with it end up being lumped with the ones who are frowned upon simply because "hacking a console is bad".

      As an aside - if MS would release a "enthusiast" license for the XDK, the Xbox would have more software for it than probably the Macintosh/OSX by 1Q 2003. (Only a slight exagerration...not intended as a flame)

      sedawkgrep
    • Can anyone hack a game that was originally just for a gaming console?

      Given the various emulators on which you can play ROMs, I don't see why not. You would need to reverse engineer the ROM code, but then you could start hacking.

      My son is playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time right now, and I'd love to see it hacked to anti-alias the textures better, if nothing else.
    • Yeah it's possible.

      Do a search for zelda on slashdot.

      fifth result "Rewriting the past..."

      This is a game based on a hacked Zelda.

      As far as playing on a console, I have an snes emulator for my Dreamcast, but it can't do 100% speed on many games, and all games have a frameskip of 1 at least.

      Hope this helped

  • TF2 not free?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Morgahastu ( 522162 ) <bshel ... fave bands name> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:12AM (#3925806) Journal
    Maybe it is because it's not a mod. It is a completely new game. They just meant that their next project (the guys who did TF[1]) would not be free.

  • For free? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mstyne ( 133363 ) <`gro.yeknomahpla' `ta' `ekim'> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:13AM (#3925808) Homepage Journal
    It also mentions that the next Team Fortress hack, Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, will not be distributed for free.

    Just replace "for free." with ", ever.". Pretty much the same thing,

  • Bear in mind that Counter Strike started life as an Half-Life mod. Now you can go buy it. The main difference between CS and TF2 in this respect is that TF2 seems destined to remain vapourware.

  • Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <{petedaly} {at} {ix.netcom.com}> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:16AM (#3925815)
    Popular Science really did their homework with this one, which is not unusual for them. (I used to subscribe.)

    I found it scary the one of the ID software guys said people were using hooks in their software they didn't know existed. Either he doesn't know what he's talking about, or ID needs some code review. If the games really do have hooks like that they don't know about, that's all the more interesting.

    -Pete
    • I think it's a matter of the original coders doing something to spec "We need the engine to do this, this and this" while the mod comunity puts more though into "Ok, it does those things, but why doesn't it do this thing too?" and then make it do that thing.
    • I think what they mean is that they used things other than the published API.

      You can be sure SOMEONE knows about it.. it just may not be an official feature.
    • I found it scary the one of the ID software guys said people were using hooks in their software they didn't know existed. Either he doesn't know what he's talking about, or ID needs some code review.

      Since the guy in question is John Romero, the quote certainly is interesting. I'd say he probably knows what he's talking about.

      It's too bad the history of "modding" didn't make it into the article. I remember when a hacked version of Gauntlet came out, that was x-rated and had little genitalia running around instead of the usual dungeon monsters. It was called "Cuntlet" and was a favorite amongst those of us who were BBSing and just hitting puberty... =)

    • Not hooks, but code tricks (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FortranDragon ( 98478 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @11:18AM (#3925966)
      "These people are just ingenious," says John Romero, co-creator of Doom and Quake. "They have figured out all the weird little bitty tricks in the code that we didn't even know about."

      From what Romero said it looks like people have studied the code enough to learn how to use the _existing_ code in new ways. (Jedi code tricks, anyone ;-)) They aren't finding unknown API/function calls.

      This isn't surprising. It usually takes a fresh-to-the-code mind to see new functionality because as a programmer you tend to view code as only applying to the problem you want solved. Also, modders spend more time with the code that the original programmers who probably have moved o to a new project.

      All in all this is a Good Thing (tm). Hats off to those companies that make their old source code available/work with the mod community and to the people in the mod community who work hard at extending the life of the older games. :-D
  • Just what the subject says. When you think vapourware, think TF2 .. they've probably had to swtich 3 or 4 generations of game engines underneath it throughout the ages, if they are indeed still working on it ....

    And for the record, TF is the greatest mod ever.
    • Valve haven't actually been working on TF2 properly for as long as DNF has been in production over at 3D Realms.

      Their excuse? They've written their own engine, from the ground up. And Steam, their content delivery system. And really helped their Half-Life mod community.

      3D Realms excuse? Er... I don't think they have one. Been using the Unreal engine for pretty much the whole time (started with the Q2 engine). Must be terrible team management. What they have showed (at last years E3) wasn't even that impressive.
    • Someone once speculated that Valve is slowly releasing updates and patches to TFC so that one day they'll release a patch with an update message that reads, "oh and by the way, this is TF2". It seems they keep adding features to TFC that I knew/read about being introduced in TF2.

      I actually had the privilege of working on and releasing TF 2.8 and 2.9 for QW (my brief and subtle brush with fame [planetfortress.com]). I actually was given the sources for what was to become TF2 way back before Rob and John got hired by Valve. It was going to be a free Quake 2 mod at the time. It's a shame that the two TF guys at Valve didn't mention their pal Ian in the article, who AFAIK worked on it right there with them from the start.

      • Are you Robin? Wow, cool, in my books, thats not a subtle brush with fame .. thats pure awesomeness. I still miss Q1 physics. :) TF grens were the best grens of all time. I've never been able to make people catch impending explosions with sure pure raw precision ever since TF, although I did spend 4 years with it ... ever seen the name Kraftboy around? I was a junkie, knew lots of folks ..

  • Cool! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dthoma ( 593797 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:21AM (#3925827) Journal
    "Consider whether you would hack a DVD of the film Gladiator so that Russell Crowe was relocated from Rome to, say, a Wal-Mart parking lot in Missoula, Montana."

    Hmmm...maybe this modding business DOES have some potential after all...

  • We need more open standards (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mangu ( 126918 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:22AM (#3925828)
    Perhaps THE long-lived game is Grand Prix Legends, it's still being sold, in more or less, the initial version, after five years. But what is really needed are open file formats for all games. There are many car-racing games out there, but most of them have proprietary track files. I would like to compare and race tracks from one game with cars from another game. I have reverse-engineered a few of them, but it's hard work. The same can be said of most other simulations and FPS games.

    I hope some day the marketeers will get a clue that it's better to sell a million mods for $10 each than fifty thousand new games at $50 each.

    • That could be pretty interesting; having a standardised track format for most/all future racing games. It could be pretty difficult, considering how different some racing games are from each other, but I'm sure the problem could be overcome without having to homogenise them all. Or you could just mix and match tracks from different games. That could have very funny results.
      • I'm on my way there. I have cracked the Test Drive 5 and most of the Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed track formats. Now I'm working on making them compatible with each other. The NFSPU is much more complex, with breakable objects and roadside animations, but the biggest problem is that the NFSPU championship is defined inside a .DLL, the only way I have to put a new track in the game is by substituting an existing track.
    • Actually, GPL (Grand Prix Legends) is/was such a success exactly because the game engine itself could not easily be modified. sure you can add graphics and new tracks, but the physics engine itself and the characteristics of the car are just about unhackable (engines can be swapped in to different chassis, but that's as far as it goes).

      What this has lead to (combined with the amazing network code that Sierra wrote) is a very competitive online atmosphere even 4 years later. 180 degrees from counterstrike, there is no worrying about cheats or hacking..just VERY competitive racing. It probably helps that learning to drive the sim is overwhelming and won't appeal to your aver 12 year old.

      Wheil the game has many add ons, new tracks and anlyzing tools written by third parties, the core engine hasn't been hacked and this is a big part of the success.

      It is an interesting comparison to the usual story which is mod-able == successful.

      As an interesting aside, check out www.racer.nl [www.race.nl] for an open source racing game made to be 100% mod-able (including totally customized vehicle creation with up to 10 wheels!).

      Now I gotta go race (www.vroc.com [vroc.net])!
      Onnel
    • Well, Warcraft II (pretty much in its original version, just adding b.net) had relatively good sales for seven years before Warcraft III came out.
  • The Half-Life engine the most used game in current online gaming due to one thing, the mods and especially CounterStrike.

    Valve software has released many tools and the SDK for creating mods. One mod becomes extremly popular. Other people think they can make cool mods too. Some of them are successful (Day Of Defeat is EXCELLENT!) and then other people make mods. The mod community is huge. Even tho the engine is really outdated...

    Also notice that the fact the engine is old actually helps the popularity since it works on almost any computer (including *nix'es under Wine whenever the native doesn't exist).
  • I can personally think of a few guys who got into programming by screwing with the level editor for Doom.

    Turns out things things like that are a pretty good intro.

    somehow I thing that not as many people would get into programming by tinkering with the macro language of your typical generic office suite, for example.

    we need more of this kind of stuff.

    • somehow I thing that not as many people would get into programming by tinkering with the macro language of your typical generic office suite, for example.
      I did. One of my first languages was FRED from Framework III. Incredibly Framework [framework.com] still exists, it's now Framework VII. It was owned in the III days by Ashton-Tate (remember them?) Ahh, for the days of DOS office suites...
  • I guess Timothy doesn't read what Michael posts.
    Here's the same article [slashdot.org] from a week ago. Get your act together, editors!
    • If I'd seen that I wouldn't have submitted it this time. But it does show if you want story submissions, wait a week and resubmit a story that was already posted. After all, you already know it's /. material and that there are too many editors to keep everything straight.
  • For those of you who can stand a game that doesn't include the term "frame rate" in its specs, there's a very nice 'low profile' strategy game called Space Empires IV which doesn't require hacking to be modded. It's designed to be altered by the users with most of the game data in external text files. Check it out, and the community of modders it has accumulated, at www.shrapnelgames.com where you can download a demo.

  • Thank You Half Life (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <be@@@eclec...tk> on Sunday July 21, 2002 @10:40AM (#3925872) Homepage Journal
    Half life is the game to thank for the craze of make your own game out of the game you already have. While Duke Nuke Um 3D came with a level editor right on the disc it was basically Half Life and the HL SDK [valve-erc.com] have made it IMO the most modable game out there. Many gamers don't even realize that they are playing halflife still and not some other game. I know many gamers who can tell you exactly what counterstrike is, but have no idea what halflife is.

    But is halflife the game to thank when it comes down to who made it possible? Nope, we still have doom in my book, the game that made everything possible. What made first person shooters and mulitlevel games the best thing since sliced bread? Doom. What gave everyone who had enough time and patience the ability to create their own game inside a game (know known as modding, back then known as wadding)? Doom again. What game set the presidence of how first person shooters would work? Doom.

    Basically what I'm getting at is all these gamemakers made enough money off of their games that they wanted to help make it possible for those who had the time and dedication to elaborate on their work. I think everyone who codes, and especially open source, gets the greatest high when the work they've been working on is not only accepted in the OSS community, but when someone takes it and is so amazed with it that they want to take the time to learn it so that they can use it.

    Does anyone else realize that halflife being as old as it is can still bring a top of the line machine to it's knees? This game was designed to be able to run on a p133 with 4 megs of video ram and 32 megs of system ram. I know that the mods have since made the game a little bit more in depth than the original, but I still find it funny.

    • Very good points I agree, but you could go further. Half-life is built on Quake 2 engine, which in turn is built on Quake 1.
      • > Half-life is built on Quake 2 engine, which in turn is built on Quake 1.
        Whilst it's true that HL uses the Q2 engine, it's inaccurate to say that Q2 is "built on" Q1. It was written by the same people (primarily Carmack) and he clearly learnt some lessons whilst writing Q1 that he carried over into Q2, but to say that one is built on the other is, I'm afraid, wrong. Go look at the source code if you don't beleive me.
    • I would say HL can bring a top of the line DELL to its knees, but not a custom built machine. My machine is 9 months old now, and it doesn't even get stressed, I get twice the frames on way more advanced games, their fps limit sees that most machines now are not stressed.

      The original radeons ran that game at its max fps, same with the gf2 gts cards.
    • SuperDuG said:
      Does anyone else realize that halflife being as old as it is can still bring a top of the line machine to it's knees?
      That's not necessarily a good thing, though.

      Yes, some mods do so because they add alot of extra gameplay depth and graphical wizardry, but others do so simply because they're badly written and poorly optimized.

      There is a point beyond which the performance drops are enough that looking for a new engine as a base, or even simply writting the mod as a standalone game, would be better.
    • Does anyone else realize that halflife being as old as it is can still bring a top of the line machine to it's knees?

      That's not my experience. My current gaming platform is an Athlon 1333 w/ GeForce 3 Ti200. Nice but hardly cutting edge. I play all the mods at 1600 x 1200, 32 bit colour, full textures. The max FPS is artificially limited to 97 as I don't see the point of going much above the monitor's 85 Hz refresh rate, and during the most intense on-line action with all the net graphs running it rarely dips below 96. Halflife didn't support resolutions greater than twelve by nine until the last patch. The graphics are still much cruder than MOHAA or RTCW.

      Besides the development tools, I would say Halflife's greatest assest is that it's easy on the hardware. It makes for great on-line game play. In contrast I find Medal of Honour unplayable on-line. For me the best combination of responsiveness and graphic capability is RTCW. Now all it needs are mods.

    • Hmm - maybe in its time, but I think UT gets the award for most moddable game out there now. The mutator system allowing for multiple mods running in the same game, properly organising mods into gametypes and mutators, allows for a much more robust environment. Plus it came with a level editor and SDK as well.

      UT I think lets the player work within the OOP nature of the game best.

      Quake 1 deserves the honour better then Half-Life though - while Doom was moddable, all the mods were levels/sounds/graphix, not actual gameplay. All the gameplay stuff (DeHackEd) were hacks, not working within the SDK - just randomly poking bytes in the .exe.

      Quake 1 on the other hand was the first to actually have real mods (Team Fortress was for Quake first). While Half-Life gets the award for acutally best supporting the mod community (sponsoring, SDK's, etc) I think Quake 1 is the godfather of the process.

      I think StarCraft gets the award tho, for having a "scripting/trigger" (sortof) system that even an 8 year old could work with. Still, not very powerful.
  • As near as I can find, this game is somewhat unique.

    The publishers/owners gave up on it (I think Sony has it now?). They aren't interested. So.. the community cracked it, and put it up for download so they'd actually have people to play with. Unethical? Stealing? Remember, they bought it as a multiplayer game, and it's rather useless unless others have it, and if nobody sells it.. well..

    Then, of course, came the total rewrite (which may or may not be as total as the author's claim.. I suspect not).

    Now it's pretty much a game in it's own right. I would actually say that if sony were to sue them now and try to stop it, it would be morally wrong.

  • TF2 (Score:2)

    by Vodak ( 119225 )
    The only thing that is taking longer to develop then Remoero's POS Daikatana is TF2. TF2 will be released the day after the first Mars Mission.

  • When mods are better than the original... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EvilFrog ( 559066 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @11:09AM (#3925937)
    It's odd how sometimes mods become more popular than the original games. Try playing Tribes 1. Dozens of Renegades servers. Dozens of Annihilation servers. Dozens of Ultra servers. Maybe one dozen base servers.

    How many people play Counter-Strike each day? Compare that to how many people play vanilla Half-Life.

    The best mods are those that aren't even recognizable as the original games. A great example is Thievery UT [thieveryut.com], which turns Unreal Tournament into a multi-player version of Thief: The Dark Project. (It's unfortunately Windows only, but the dev team has offered to share the code with those who want to port it...)

    Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies to Mods... 90% of them are crud.
    • Why do people never seem to open-source mods (and emulators)? The chance of them being able to make money off the code is extremely low, and it would let people help out and enjoy the work more.

      I understand an individual doing this, but it seems like the community at large doesn't release source to anything.
    • I've been running the second most popular Renegades server for close to three years now - Brute Force's World o' Ouchie.

      A Frankenstein's monster of Ren 4.0, Arena, Duel, Duel Tourney and our very own mod... Dual Duel (thanks Check and DeadGuy!).

      My decision, lo' these many years passed, to switch from Base to Renegades was to escape the, IMHO, tedium and limitations inherent in Base. With only three armor types (light, medium and heavy) after a while it got played out.

      For myself, the Renegades mod definately breathed new life into the game. More sub-classes to the Base armor types, more deployables (force-fields and turrets), etc, really opened up the playability to more personality types. Like chess over checkers, it made it more of a thinking-man's game while also opening more avenues for the cowboys out there.

      I would probably not still be here, three years later, playing Tribes, let alone running a clan/server, if not for the mod community.
  • I remember seeing some kind of Starcraft conversion to make it look like Warcraft... Since Starcraft is past its peak I can't seem to find it anymore. Some of the character & building conversions looked pretty sweet.
  • I also enjoyed this article when it was posted a week ago [slashdot.org].
  • Years ago I was busy with a binary editor looking at wolf3d files. With my decoding and other peoples encoding the 1st level editors were done. Then other people saw our work and decided they could do better. A race was on to figure out all we could. It was interesting that at the time there were some very nasty notes from developers at id complaining about our work and why we were doing it. One of these were from a man who has said "the computer is the game" but didn't understand why we had his great work under a microscope? At first there was fear in the comments, as if we were going to steal the secrets but then came the understanding that all good hackers understand. He had the gift for game coding and none of us could compete with that. We were happy to take ideas he built into code and rearange them. We could build complex levels that the game designers could never fully test. We were happy with that and it led to exploring other ideas that ended up in other games. When doom came out, it was clear that there was extra data in the files that the game wasn't using. I still wonder if that was there to help the people with the hex editors...

    I'm not a hard code gamer and I would prefer to hack on some project over fraging some virtual bad guy however I do have a n64 and there were two games for it that were above the rest. The 1st was golden eye 007 and the other was perfect dark. These games are both from Rare but now that the N64 is dead, there will never be any more. I don't care so much about the levels progression or the story or the funky interlevel video but I would like more levels. Right now Rare claims their next release will perfect dark zero but it won't be out till 2004. I would buy a game cube today to play a new verson of that game but since there isn't a ginle other game for it, I think I'll pass. So far the PS2 seems to have the most games but most of them are centered around a game play I don't like (In a shooter game, I'll be happy waiting with the sniper rifle, I don't like timed things). I also don't like to see the character in 1st person shooter games. Its just something I've never been a fan of. The result is we have one company that made the 2 most popular games on the N64 and they have decided to shut down their company because they can't get their new tricks to work can can't teach a few creative people how to use their old level designer. They should have had at least 2 other games on the 007 engine and by now they could have kicked out 4 or 5 perfect dark levels. But they made other decisions. Funny that id decided to let other people play with their core and I wonder who is more likely to be here in 4 years, id or Rare.
  • People are still souping up their cars, and people still buy new hardware (and software, even!) to modify their computers! Wow, what a newsworthy article!
  • Another very MODable game, with some of the MODS better than the original game.

    Shameless plug:
    http://www.taldren.com
  • This was posted less than a month ago: The Mod Squad [slashdot.org]. 'Stuff that matters.'? I guess game mods are a vital nerd issue.

  • Don't forget Matrix (Score:2, Informative)

    by paganizer ( 566360 )

    Don't forget Matrix Games [matrixgames.com]; they have taken several of the best strategy games of history and rewrote them to be playable on win32 platforms, with probably the best work done on Steel Panthers: World at War (SPWAW).

    They took SSI's old code for Steel Panthers 3, and rewrote the game so it would run on win32, instead of just DOS. and then, they made it free (as in beer).

    While not quite as much fun to me as the original (the re-write only does warfare circa 1938-1946), this has got to be one of the most re-playable games out there.

  • So it'll live beyond it's first release? The Mod Squad [slashdot.org]
    • Maybe this is different enough, due to its coming from a different webmag, but it IS redundant. Definitely not front page material, but not easy to shoehorn into any of the existing sections either.

      What we REALLY need is a new section just for games, so that the Benevolent Tyrants (aka editors) can keep posting articles like this without cluttering up the front page. It works for the Apple, Ask Slashdot and science articles, why not for the game stuff as well?

      Just my ?0.02 ...

  • A perfect example: Falcon4 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Storm ( 2856 ) on Sunday July 21, 2002 @12:27PM (#3926176) Homepage
    Microprose's Falcon4 is probably a perfeect example of this. Released in November, 1998, it still has a large and dedicated following (well, as large as hardcore flightsims' followings get).

    Back in 1999, Hasbro/Microprose decided to drop Falcon4. However, before all of the developers were fired, the source code mysteriously ended up on the Internet.

    A group which came to be known as Realism Patch Group (RPG) was releasing (free) patches to fix some of the realism issues in the original Falcon. At the same time, someone called eRazor had gotten his hands on the Falcon source code and was working on some of graphics issues. And simultaneously with this, an army of other developers were working on other aspects of the game. For instance, the eTeam took this F-16 only flightsim and added a Fly-Any-Plane patch, giving you the ability to fly any aircraft in the sim. Groups around the world immediately started working on accurate flight models for each aircraft and photo-realistic cockpits.

    The two groups worked in parallel, releasing RPG and eRazor patches which more or less rewrote the sim. It was decided to create a Falcon4 Unified Team (f4ut). This group took all of the rewrites and data edits done by the eTeam and the RPG and combined them into series of Falcon4 SuperPaks. These patches/mods have completely transformed Falcon, and nearly made it into a completely new sim. The graphics engine was completely rewritten and is DirectX 8.1 compliant. Falcon supports anistropic filtering, antialiasing, etc. And the sim itself is one of the most realistic and engaging ever. It uses a dynamic "campaign-within-a-campaign" methodology to insure that play never repeats itself. Its literally a whole new ballgame.

    In fact, the "unofficial" modding of Falcon has also snatched Falcon from the jaws of obsolescence. G2I Interactive has bought Falcon's IP and while allowing a last series of F4UT binary edits, will be coming out with Falcon5.

    IMHO, this is the ultimate example of mods extending the life of a game or sim. And extending its playability. There are a number of active duty fighter pilots who are avid Falcon fans. That, IMHO is the ultimate compliment.
  • I was very impressed with this game - sure as anyone can tell you it is no Diablo II. D2 is a more rounded game BUT with modifications that are available you can add so much more so easliy to DS. Even the GUI is now configuraable using a scripting language.

    The company is creating its own mod tutorials and making the tools available for free. I am very impressed - almost

    Oh yeah, and of course Microsoft does have some interest in it... so that may be a reason we haven't seen more on it here. A smart thing they did by buying an interest in Gas Powered Games back in 98.

    http://www.packmule.org/ [packmule.org]
    http://www.dungeonsiege.com/siegeu.shtml [dungeonsiege.com]
    http://www.dsnetguide.com/ [dsnetguide.com] - awesome rsource

    I just boght the game a few days ago and I have spent too many late nights on it. The number of mods out there is staggering.

  • TF2 (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Team Fortress 2 is not a 'hack'; it's a new product that's been written from the ground up, developed by Valve themselves. It is not some amateur effort, and won't require Half-Life (unlike Team Fortress 1.5).
  • Strange that the article doesn't mention LucasArts attitude towards modding.

  • Although modifying began among hard-core hackers, it's not illegal.

    I was a little bothered when I read this sentence... even "hard-core" hacking isn't illegal in and of itself. I'm troubled by this continuing implication in mainstream media.

  • A question for all those game programmers out there - are any game developers considering modular game visual engines so that they can be upgraded?

    I often wonder about these MMORPG games like Ultima, Dark Ages of Camelot, EverQuest. These games are all still around, but the developers have a limited lifecycle intended for each, so while you can still play Ultima Online today, is it true that it's graphics quality and overall reality of its universe are far less advanced than the new MMORPGs like DAOC?

    I ask these questions with the thought in mind that some day there may be an online game that is an identical copy of something like Tolkein's Middle Earth, or at least a gaming universe that is as limitless as a good hard-copy roleplaying game. Literally, you could be anything from a farmer to necromancer.

    Will these games also be passed by in graphics by the Next Big Thing (tm)? Or will game engines become modular, with both a proprietary version and an open-source version, so that five years after the game comes out, or 15 years even, the game is far more playable and far more detailed, being up to the match of technologies like bio/quantum computing and printed circuits allowing displays to be the size of your wall and five times as detailed as today.

    What are your thoughts on this?
  • Incase anyone is interested (as I am) in "hacking" together mods, heres a great link for everything you could need to get started modding half life.

    The Wavelength [thewavelength.net]

    They are in the process of reviving the site featuring other games than Half-Life.

  • Old Bungie's Marathon lives on as open source [bungie.org]. It even has Linux & BeOS ports now.

    IMNSHO, it had better game balance than Quake.

  • posted before.

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/14/2123 24 3&mode=thread&tid=127

  • Thanks, Doom.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Retron ( 577778 )
    Although there were level editors and graphics modifiers for Wolf3D, IMO Doom is the game that brought modding to the masses.

    The original Doom level editor was based on a Next cube, and the game itself was meant to be closed.

    It was only after the efforts of hackers (in the proper sense of the word) that loading external WADs was introduced (in version 1.2 IIRC) - at least id realised what was going on and actively encouraged it.

    Later came Dehacked - lots of things were hard coded into the EXE, but with a small DEH file you could change rates of fire, animation frames and add extra effects. No wonder that id made these things easier to change in Quake onwards - again kudos to them for realising that fans like open games.

    At the last count, there were tens of thousands of extra wads, ranging from simple level replacements to total conversions where barely anything from Doom remains.

    Thanks, id!
  • Jeez /., you guys already posted about this less then 2 weeks ago as yet another frontpage article ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/14/212324 3&mode=thread&tid=127 ). Why don't you guys put in some checks and balances in place so that an article gets read by 1) somebody with a high school graduation (lots of grammar mistakes lately), and 2) somebody that watches your own front page, so you don't do double posts like this. Get your act together /., there are millions of people that try to respect your news quality (though it gets harder every day)
  • LMAO yeah right that will last about 2 weeks before it is all over the place via p2p and server download sites. It has already been proved repeatedly that people won't pay for mods. Heck let them learn the hard way...
  • One thing that the article didn't mention was Valve's continuing move to the new STEAM [steampowered.com] program - a subscription service which allows the gamer to receive automatic updates of game patches whenever he connects. Technically, it's a form of distributed file system with DRM.

    The slide presentation to STEAM strongly hints that Valve (part of the Vivendi juggernaut) is planning a move to pay-to-play model for online gaming similar to Everquest. I wasn't able to find the exact page again where I read this, but IIRC CS was expected to go all STEAM around the release of v1.6 or v1.7. There was also mention that suggested mod authors were going to have to pay money to Valve to write a mod. (I think it was around $1000. I really wish I could find the page again.) This would be truly discouraging turn of events for mod authors.

    The reason I even noticed about this potential policy change was that I have spent the couple of years writing mods for HL myself and now am wondering if it's time to change engines. (The Ogre engine looks pretty darn good, but I don't think it has a networking support yet.)

    There is one other reason to take note of STEAM is that it requires a broadband connection (Dialup and 128K ISDN need not apply. 384Kb/sec throughput is the minimum.) This means that if you don't use cable, you're screwed. This is quite a change from when you could play Q1/Q2 on a 28Kb modem. The interesting thing is that it's not the game itself that requires this bandwidth, but rather it's distributed file system of the steam DRM. Is this the wave of the future? Will gamers cry foul? Time will tell.

  • ...and dig role playing games, check out www.teambg.com they've been hacking & modding the Infinity Engine (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale) for quite a while now & have come up with some pretty cool stuff.

    Jaysyn

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