Modding Communities

I wanted to make a brief foray into the world of modding communities today. I say brief because I’m still half dead from my scheduling problems, so don’t expect this to be too terribly coherent.

Anyways, it just struck me as odd that modding communities tend to be both an incredibly good and horrible thing for games – at least from the companies perspective. If you have any experience with games that have a thriving modding community (Counter-strike, Half-life, Star Craft) you probably won’t be surprised to learn that they’re still running today. As in yes, people are still making maps for Counter-strike. Hell, Trevor’s post was on doing just that. This is where the good comes in, at least for the player base.

Games that can be molded and reworked by the very community that bought them tend to have an uncannily long life, even if the initial game wasn’t all that great. A good example of this would be the Battle for Middle Earth RTS games. I wouldn’t say they were the worst RTS’s ever made, but in terms of actual laddering or popularity of their first builds, they didn’t last too long. But they did survive on with a truly impressive quantity of maps. Between making some of the first scripted encounters and diverse and interesting battle modes the online modders seemed to pick up right where the developers stopped and kept the servers populated for years.

The debatable downside is means there’s a hell of a lot less incentive to buy the next game coming around. On one hand it keeps the fan-base strong, but detracts from their need to invest in a new game at the same time. This leaves developers perhaps wondering if they should bother to open up mapping tools to their customers. A philosophy that’s shown in every FPS that’s released $15 map packs that just look like rehashed ideas of what came out with the game originally. This process does theoretically make the company more money, assuming they don’t alienate too much of their player-base, so it actually ups the likelihood that a sequel will get made, something that tends to cheer up the fans.

So the question is which is better; a game that allows fans to make their own creative takes on it and keeps them loyal for years, possibly at the cost or sales – or games that churn out content more frequently but charge their players for every scrap of it. Things aren’t clear even when looking at it from a purely business attitude. Loyal fans will reliably keep coming back – look at the Half-Life franchise if you’re in need of proof. But it doesn’t rake in as much money in the short term, and possibly not more over-all if the company that just churns out content for cash keeps churning it out. The eagerness with which people buy identical shooters every six months seems to indicate the latter plan isn’t without merit.

Personally of course I’m for modding communities, but I’m a fan. Why wouldn’t I be all behind any idea that gives me more diverse and interesting gaming experiences at little no extra cost? It’s a matter of finding a way to include modding communities yet still support the company that made the game. There lies a tricky problem that I guarantee wont have any solution that doesn’t piss some one off.

General Stuff with Subtitles

General

Be happy blog, today you get subtitles. It’s not so much been a slow week; there’s just a bunch of little things. I suppose I could’ve come up with some grand unifying title and make perfect transitions between topics, but I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. If you ever find yourself in the somewhat rare position of being able to make your own schedule for work I don’t recommend trying any experiments. Turns out if you crank all your shifts back to about three or four hours earlier than normal to give yourself more evening time it nearly kills you in the mornings. Consequently sleeping has been a bit of a hit or miss experience this week and I’m willing to milk that excuse to be lazy with this post.

Game of Thones

I’ve wanted to ramble on about a Game of Thrones (the TV series) once more for a while now, but I’ve held off because we wanted to make a pod-cast. We still do in fact so I’m not going to consume the next three pages typing up everything I think about the casting, changes and art style. No, I just wanted to say that the series seems to be really hitting its stride now, and once again toss the name out there in the vain and presumptuous thought that it’ll somehow convince other people to watch the show. Granted, no one reads this blog – but still, the show deserves whatever recognition I can give for managing to take a rather convoluted and twisty book series and hammering it out in new type of media. Don’t take those adjectives as insulting though; I loved the books. I just felt the story had so much to it that trying to convert it all into any format other than a book would be at best incredibly difficult and more likely impossible. HBO has proven that wrong, and I’m quite happy to admit it.

The real challenge will be seeing if they have any plan for speeding up late-comers to the series with what’s going on. They’ve already got a green light for the next season, and presumably they’ll attract new fans when it begins to roll. But it’s not like the huge quantity of plots and twists in the story end with the last pages of each book. No, it all interlaces; gaining more depth as it goes. I really don’t know how a new viewer would ever catch up while trying to keep tract of the continuous new information at the same time. Bar, of course, some one swatting them and telling them to watch the entire first season on DVD, but asking for a $50 investment to just understand a show won’t be very enticing to new people. More so since they’ll have likely only seen one utterly baffling episode and will want more to fully judge it.

L.A. Noir

L.A. Noir happened. Not all of it though, I’ll inevitably come back and do a full review when we’re finished. My first impressions for the four-ish hours we got into it though are mostly good. The facial animation is superb, the various crimes you solve are interesting and generally keep you guessing without having any absurd twists to them (Shamylans, as they could be known) and the game-play is fast paced enough to keep the game fun for people who like a bit of action. I’d say it’s a nice blend taking some of the better elements from Heavy Rain and Deadly Premonition, but honestly it didn’t use all that much from the former and just about no one knows of the latter. The one thing that should be pointed out is this really isn’t a GTA game where you play as the cops. No, you’re not going to run around gunning down people when you get bored in this game, and if that was one of the major appeals of the GTA classics, it won’t hold much for you this time around.

Anyways, it’s got thumbs up from me for now, but we’ll have to see how the crimes progress in the remainder of the game before I’m making any final decisions.  

Psychosis in Stories

Or rather our strong habit of applying it everywhere.

I’ve recently been floating between a variety of forums dedicated to some of my favorite authors. This is actually somewhat of a new thing to me; I’ve previously avoided places like that on account of the expected high number of idiots and spoilers. The latter of which still keeps me firmly out of any forum about a series until I’ve quite finished it. While I’ve been doing so I’ve come across an oddly high number of similar threads about, of all things, sociopaths and psychopathic behavior.

The first place I came across these in large numbers were the Song of Ice and Fire forums – or at least one of the biggest fan forums at any rate. I wasn’t too surprised to see it there, after all there’s actually a goodly number of characters George Martin wrote that could feasibly have deep set mental issues brought about by traumatizing pasts (Hell, traumatizing presents for that matter), so it made a degree of sense. Where it started getting odd was when I spotted it in Jim Butcher’s forums, a number of Discworld ones, and even a few quieter forums still bumbling about concerning Edding’s work.

My first assumption was there must have been some phase of trolling that existed purely on fan sites that I dodged by largely ignoring said sites. Then I started actually skimming through the threads. Unsurprisingly the first posts are by and large a big collection of usually tenuously collected facts about some character in the story and how it ‘definitively’ proves said person is exhibiting the behavior of a sociopath. What’s shocking is it’s not just a first post bravely made by some troll seconds before he leaps out of the wave of flames that are returned by the inevitable fan base, but actually an ongoing argument. A surprising number of people seem to genuinely believe a large portion of modern characters are indeed mentally unstable.

Admittedly a lot of this seems to be people confusing actions taken under extreme stress or without time for extensive moral consideration as proof that a character is insane. It’s fairly clear that a chunk of it comes from misinformation about what makes a sociopathic person. I’m not too surprised at that. To be blunt; people are stupid. Even with things like google and wikipedia a click away a depressingly large number of individuals will just guess at shit and claim it as fact anyways. No, what shocks me is the prevalence of this type of discussion.

The closest I’ve got to an explanation is that this is some bizarre extension of what might be summed up as the habit of people being ‘arm-chair psychiatrist’. Since that term isn’t exactly universally known, I’ll elaborate. It’s the annoying and near omni-present tendency for people who learn virtually anything about psychology or sociology to immediately begin diagnosis everything around them, including themselves. Blame it on the human ability to perceive patterns. It’s perfectly natural and I’m not exaggerating when I say pretty much everyone does it. I don’t have anything like a statistic to point at, but I’d wager its well over 90%. It’s gotten to such a point that every course I’ve gone to about such things usually has the professor make note of this phenomenon. I have the worrisome feeling that since shows like Criminal Minds and, hell, more or less the entire Law & Order collection have gotten so popular this is beginning to happen to everyone. The knowledge that there’s a million little phrases and terms to explain the behavior of more or less everything anyone ever does just seems to fill us with the need to label shit. It doesn’t mean that these things can’t be labeled, or that they’re even wrong, it’s just when you have a vastly incomplete knowledge base of these things it’s generally okay to assume you’re going to suck at using said labels.

But still. But still. You know, we do anyways.

I’m left asking myself if there’s some sort of hidden reward or goal for those who meticulously and often erroneously build cases to prove mental illnesses. I can’t personally see what it might be though. It’s the internet, it isn’t known for having civilized conclusions to arguments.   

Videos and whatnot

I'll be honest I didn't really have much to post about today, but the fact the video bar actually expanded past it's first initial excuse to have a channel deserves some sort of mentioning. I'll admit these two new videos aren't particularly better than the first, but hey - we are trying to figure things out here. They consist of a random vlog update for when we finish cobbling together our into, and the second is basically a bunch of clips of people hitting each other with swords. None of it is even pretending to be professional, but we had fun making it so what the hell. No harm done, right?

Well, a bit I suppose. That's just natural though with the swords and such. There's also a theoretical third video we were going to post. It's all the material we collected when we were making the intro - yes, there's actually a scene around that silly flag planting. The downside is it all came out so unspeakably terrible that we couldn't even feel justified posting it as a joke (which is how we escape shame for the rest of our work, in case anyone was wondering). It's still sitting on my machine here, but I'm not certain why. We agreed the only way it could be made to be worth showing is it we hooked all the footage up to the cheesiest Manowar track we could find, but that'd require me to actually deal with it some more and the lingering sense of regret and disgust from the first time isn't encouraging that.

I'd welcome whoever accidentally comes to this site to go accidentally watch those videos and call us assholes in the comments. It'll fulfill my expectations of the internet and get us views at the same time. There's ideas abound for future videos and with the success of these hopefully we'll actually keep making them. It's worth noting I consider 'posting them online before lethargy sets in' success here - none of them have any views yet, so we've certainly not gained anything like an audience from this.

In addition there was Trevor's heroic first contribution in the form of the long awaited map making walk through. I'd like to talk about it but it seems like describing it when it's directly below my post would be a bit redundant. So I'll simply say 'hurrah!' and hope some people at least browse through it. Trevor shows up in the new videos too so he's no longer a dubious third name on the contributor list without anything to link to. With luck we'll see some more from him in the future as well.

Map Dev Blog: Ice Wave

When it comes to online PC gaming, I tend to come back over and over to a single title despite my desire to always be trying the new stuff. That game is Counterstrike Source, and it's massive community has transformed the base game into a portal to countless mods, maps and game variants. I typically spend most of my time in Gun Game, a clever permutation that sees the terrorists and counter-terrorists fighting a team deathmatch battle where scoring a kill levels you up and provides you with a new weapon, until someone reaches the maximum level of twenty and then scores a knife kill (the knife being the level twenty weapon). The maps in circulation on most GG servers are aesthetically spartan; built entirely on the basis of accommodating fast, balanced gameplay. Seeing as how I have dabbled with level design and construction in the past, and that Gun Game maps do not require the great artistic skill that I lack, I decided to try my hand at crafting a GG arena. Thus, gg_icewave was born.

My initial challenge was to come up with a theme for the map, a central motif that would be uncommon to GG maps and provide me with a challenge I had not encountered before. As a starting point, I decided that the map would have an environmental hazard – players would have to watch their footing (though not to an intrusive degree) as well as their aim. This idea, coupled with the desire to create something utilizing source engine effects that I have not played around with, led to setting the map on an oil rig in the ocean. While the oil rig is a well-worn FPS setting, it provided the opportunity to dick around with water, lighting, fog, shaders, soundscapes, and all kinds of other toys as well as introducing the ocean as something to avoid.

 

The basic design is four-way symmetrical, with an open upper floor to provide verticality. 

 

Next time, I will go into the challenges posed by effects implementation.

 TREVOR