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The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game

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Re: The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game

#21

Post by bombcar »

clarionbell wrote: post #11

Modding is one of the better ways to get into coding. I myself have fond memories restoring cut content to Fallout: New Vegas. It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard, in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad either. But nothing since then. Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying. Recently, CD Project…

Factorio has phenomenal first-party modding support I've heard - https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

And of course, I wonder how many programmers today owe their jobs to Minecraft modding - Java modding is amazingly well supported, even if not always directly by Microsoft/Mojang.

1.7.10 for life!

Re: The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game

#22

Post by bombcar »

nxobject wrote: post #16
tsimionescu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modding has always worked like that. Mods have always been unpayed work for the benefit of the game community, which ultimately also works to the benefit of the game publisher.

In the past, Valve has hired some of their most longest-tenured employees from modding, although not necessarily on GoldSrc - Counter-Strike and QuakeWorld Team Fortress come to mind. (But of course never Richochet.) The Narbacular Drop team came straight out of DigiPen with a noncommercial thesis project as well.

A decent number of Mojang employees started out as Minecraft modders, and ConcernedApe hired one of the main stardew valley modders to help port code.

Re: The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game

#23

Post by tomjakubowski »

tsimionescu wrote: post #9
snowram wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roblox commercialized that excitement. Kids now work directly for them and pretty much for free.

Modding has always worked like that. Mods have always been unpayed work for the benefit of the game community, which ultimately also works to the benefit of the game publisher.

Remember that Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod, before it was acquired by Valve. So modding work is only almost always unpaid.

(Same deal with DotA and Warcraft, in the Blizzardverse.)

Re: The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game

#24

Post by orbital-decay »

Insanity wrote: post #2

That’s an amazing project. It’s kinda sad that nowadays most AAA games are so locked down that the player will never get into modding. For myself it started with Jedi Knight, and then eventually mods on the Source engine (CS:S / HL2). To me it’s a good way to get people excited about the possibilities of programming at a fairly young age.

Nobody locks the games down. Most games with highly active modding scenes were never supposed to be modded, they all had to be reverse engineered or the source leaked. No tools, no engine modifications, nothing. DOOM, GTA, Mario 64, STALKER, Minecraft, the list goes on and on. Games like TES, ArmA, Quake, anything Source/GoldSource based are exceptions. And even then all major Bethesda games are heavily reverse engineered, the Morrowind engine got rewritten basically from scratch and the other games have a ton of fixes and sideloaded code. There's even an entire vehicle simulator (!) strapped on top of Fallout: New Vegas, which is absolutely insane if you know anything about its engine.

It all comes down to two things, player interest and the range of expertise/amount of work and coordination required for your mod to fit the base game. For example STALKER SoC has a lot more story mods than, say, Skyrim, because SoC is pretty janky: it has few animations and voiceovers are reserved to key plot moments, so it doesn't take much to match the quality.

Re: The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game

#25

Post by LowLevelKernel »

clarionbell wrote: post #11

Modding is one of the better ways to get into coding. I myself have fond memories restoring cut content to Fallout: New Vegas. It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard, in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad either. But nothing since then. Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying. Recently, CD Project…

Thanks to Pirate Software for SC2
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