Originally Posted by oXYnary

....
Again, your entitled to your opinion, but "homey don't play dat". I'm gonna call you on it.

Really?

For every "royalty pay" type indie game project/mod/etc there are countless horror stores of projects that abuse inexperienced artists with the guise of "we'll pay you when we're rich". At least mods are generally straight up with the fact that you're working on a voluntary basis with no chance of pay for your work, well, most mods atleast. Whether you have an LCC or not has nothing to do with anything.

Sure there are respectable indie studios that can successfully release a project and then afford to pay their staff, and there are mods like CS, Portal, etc that strike it big. The simple fact of the matter is that these are the exception, not the rule.

If you think this has anything to do with my own ego, you're way too emotionally invested to give an objective opinion on the matter. Ego is one thing, self respect is another.

Originally Posted by Ace-Angel

I would love for example, to create mods for Skyrim, not any mods mind you, armor and weapons with characters and voice acting, but the chances of that happening are next to zero since everyone in the team will try and slip-slide a finger with what they want from A to Z, or maybe I want to do something crazy with Last Cause, but why bother if almost no one will see it?

I think this illustrates two of the biggest problems with modders these days. Firstly, the idea that every mod needs a team; I see people looking to recruit 4-5 artists for their mod when they really only need one, or mods looking for PR guys and people to make the trailer when they're first starting the mod. If you want to make a mod with armour and weapons for Skyrim, why do you need a team?

Secondly, and this I think is a huge problem in so many fields, is thinking "why bother if almost no one will see it?". Why bother learning guitar if you'll never get a record deal? Why bother learning to paint if your art will never land in a gallery? Bother doing it because it's something you enjoy doing. Minh Le never thought Counter-Strike would become one of the most popular games ever and John Lennon never thought his high-school band would become the biggest ever. Why should you feel you should only do something that will be widely seen?

Regardless, I think that modding is as well and alive as ever, or at least that's what I get the impression of from being in the Mount & Blade community and visiting ModDB frequently. I do, however, think that the release of things like UDK have perhaps left a negative impression in the sense that a lot of people seem to view modding and making a UDK game as the same thing. They really aren't --- one is simple and can often be done by one man, wheras the other very often requires a huge time-investment by several people.

Anyway, that's my two-cents. Now I'll go back to lurking.

Originally Posted by Docm30

one is simple and can often be done by one man, wheras the other very often requires a huge time-investment by several people.

Or often not.

Most people will have an easier time writing a project in UDK than writing a mod for any source game, Unity even more so.

But I guess you're right, modding largely involves modifying a game in tiny ways, such as many mods to for skyrim.

Originally Posted by ambershee

Mods don't have to include environments. They could be purely code as an example. No giant amount of data to distribute there.

True, many would've wanted to tweak rages experience to be a bit better, which is largely how I felt with bioshock, another game that ended up without modding support when its predecessor had it.

Originally Posted by ambershee

Like what?

Most of the modded titles around now are 5 years old, or even older. With what remains it's largely Source that retains a sizeable community (though Crysis is still dragging its feet). UT3s community largely fizzled out around the same time Epic stopped their support of the game and MSUC came to an end.

It's a popularity contest, source rarely gathers pure mods these days, they're mostly minor mods to other mods, such as those to TF2, or those for garrys-mod, or even now recently easily made custom maps via an even easier map-editor.

I guess what you want is the large community to go with the modding tools, which might not always happen.

UT3 largely died out because it was a bad game, you'll have a hard time gathering a community around a bad game, and total conversions could just go UDK these days.

Originally Posted by ambershee

When Battlefield 1942 came out, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament (Bf1942 was closely followed UT2k3) and Half-Life were already in full swing. That's the modding mainstay right there. Vice City, Neverwinter Nights, The Sims and Warcraft 3 all also had fairly large modding communities - all of which would have been more sizeable than anything we have at the moment save Source, which in itself is a somewhat unique platform.

Again, source isn't as big as it used to be but has passed on its crown to easier modded sub-project and games.

Plenty of games gets modding capabilities, but not all of them gets the following to reach critical mass (they most often still get the mods though), and most total conversion modders have been jumping ship towards more free to use and easier to use engines.

And while this might seem a weird thing to say these days: First person shooters are not as dominant as they were back then when they often were the MAIN area of modding, we have so much more places these days, especially when series like the elderscrolls which did not support modding suddenly started to, and big hits like minecraft building a massive community of modding without even supporting it.

If modding doesn't exist when a community out of brute force makes a title fully moddable out of nothing then I'm not sure what is real anymore.

Originally Posted by ambershee

That's not modding. UDK is a toolkit for indie games; there's no game there to mod. It's not really 'for the better', since the massive level design community around it has largely diminished. Maps, mutators, custom characters, etc are a part of what that franchise is and they don't really exist in any kind of the same way in UDK terms (sure they technically exist, but it's not the same).

You're right there, most mods were small changes with a big impact which wouldn't have fared well in UDK, others like total conversions would've been just at home though.

There was always a mix of both.

Originally Posted by ambershee

That's just nitpicking that I neglecting to mention Blizzard's games. The point is that the communities surrounding those games were massive. The fact that they 'didn't make an impact' isn't relevant; CnC mods were largely never intended to and were built for the sake and joy of being built.

That's true, it was the same thing with doom back in the day, never intended to be modded.
Games die, and EA made a pretty good job killing command and conquer, thus modding c&c died with the series, but modding itself never died.

But what was the point of all this, are we talking about missing games that we used to mod or the actual death of the modding community?

It is as dead as pc gaming is dead.

Originally Posted by eld

That's true, it was the same thing with doom back in the day, never intended to be modded.

Actually they were going to plan to encrypt the wad files originally, but decided against it to see what the "hackers" would come up with in terms of map editors and the like (and wolf3d had a small, but unstable modding scene prior to Doom they were aware of). It's what that -file parameter is for.


and from there on it became T-800 KILLS BARNEY SIMULATOR

my take on this:

FIRSTLY.
UDK/Unity/Sandbox, are all framework for making games from scratch, there is almost no REAL modding involved at all, and to say that there is, is fairly ignorant. people who work with those toolsets are indie teams, not modders. it's a distinction that needs to be made.

now, as for why "modding is dead".
partly because we now have UDK/Unity/Sandbox, so there's no NEED to mod existing games anymore.
and also, because the majority of games which are released now, compared to 10 years ago... just aren't moddable.

take gears of war, bulletstorm, arkham asylum/city, mass effect.

all made on the unreal engine 3. none of them moddable, and it's a biproduct of the way the engine works. once your game is "packaged", the files for the most part are un-moddable, trying to change them literally just breaks the game.
i'm part of a team who are, at the moment, trying to replicate the success of a mod we made for jedi academy, within UDK. we found that the limitations of the old engine are holding back our ambition so we're porting everything over, making everything better, designing new features which will be amazing. BUT, we're now limited in the one field we never wanted to be:
we wanted other people to be able to "mod our mod". we wanted people to be able to create a new character, drop it into the "characters" folder in their game files, and have it load into the game... but the engine won't let us do it.

but then when you look at unreal engine 2, ALL of the games made for it were moddable to varying degrees, some more than others, some from skin edits only, to others being totally converted.

it almost feels at this point, as though it were a conscious choice on the part of some developers to start cutting off the modding community. they took some form of soapbox and started saying "leave our stuff alone".

Gears of War has a level editor.

uh-huh, and which levels in the game could you edit?

You can't properly edit cooked levels. Nothing stopping you from making custom levels, however.

and there's the problem.

Originally Posted by almighty_gir

my take on this:

FIRSTLY.
UDK/Unity/Sandbox, are all framework for making games from scratch, there is almost no REAL modding involved at all, and to say that there is, is fairly ignorant. people who work with those toolsets are indie teams, not modders. it's a distinction that needs to be made.

Modding was still modding after you were able to work with the source code of a game, modding basically just means you're modifying a game, the ways you go about doing that varies completely.

Doom was modded by altering artwork and map files.

Halflife was modded by actually rewriting parts of the sourcecode.

Unreal had an intepreted language for you to add logic with.

Minecraft was decompiled, cleaned up and resulted in people writing mods by actually altering the source-code of the game (not to forget the re-emergence of player-model skinning :P )


There's no technical distinction as it can be done in any way, but there's the distinction that developers should let customers modify their experience here and there if they so wish.

Originally Posted by almighty_gir

now, as for why "modding is dead".
partly because we now have UDK/Unity/Sandbox, so there's no NEED to mod existing games anymore.
and also, because the majority of games which are released now, compared to 10 years ago... just aren't moddable ...

People are still modding games, more than back then, triple-a games with console as their target platform is an entirely different area though.

Should we start digging up numbers and stats on tools released for games today compared to 10 years ago?

Originally Posted by almighty_gir

i'm part of a team who are, at the moment, trying to replicate the success of a mod we made for jedi academy, within UDK.

Cool, JK2 & 3 where two of the games I modded most during my school years. What was the name of the mod and what's the UDK project called? link us lol! I'd totally enjoy seeing it
First thing I thought when I saw the U4 tech demo was "gonna make me sum proper lightsabers" haha.

Man I loved modding those games, the blood, gore, weapon, kungfu mods and depth of the saber combat gave it such a wide spectrum of directions to start from.

In a way I miss the starting point modding gives you, while kits like UDK aren't limited by the games existing specialization, at the same time its more effort because your starting from scratch.

Originally Posted by eld

Should we start digging up numbers and stats on tools released for games today compared to 10 years ago?

ModDB can do that pretty representitively for you; the stats aren't particularly in your favour. Modding still exists, but not more so than it did five years ago.

Originally Posted by ambershee

ModDB can do that pretty representitively for you; the stats aren't particularly in your favour. Modding still exists, but not more so than it did five years ago.

That says more about ModDB than it does about modding.

Going to the PC section of mods on ModDB gave me the number 8,849 (4691 released) of the entire collection of entries on the site, filtering them down to skyrim gave me 43.

Going to steam workshop and looking at just skyrim mods it lists 8,735 entries!

Portal 2's workshop page lists 162 thousand entries.

Originally Posted by dpaynter26

zoltan, i apologize for calling you an asshole

No offense here man. I linked that because there are typically a few pages that have been updated within the last 48 hours. I think the focus of this forum has changed, as the people who used to be modding games, are now paid to do so. So the focus of this particular forum tends to be more focused towards getting and maintaining paid work in the game industry. Where as a community like moddb or fps bannana are still fairly focused on modding. Lots of good points throughout this thread though.

The true litmus test of a game studio is "do you have business cards, and do you hand them out at the GDC?"

Originally Posted by ambershee

When Battlefield 1942 came out, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament (Bf1942 was closely followed UT2k3) and Half-Life were already in full swing. That's the modding mainstay right there.

Interesting that you site those titles as the modding mainstay, I automatically think of Quake & Quake 2 as the pinnacle and it went downhill from there... and I'm sure someone else would correct me and say the Doom PWAD days were the golden era.

so as mankind has been saying since the dawn of civilization "shit sux, it used to be better"