Easy modding

#1 Level design- wise I have never encountered more user friendly editors than for Serious Sam. Easy to use, great documentation, beautiful features. I know nothing about coding/scripting part though.

#2 I'll take a look at Serious Sam.

Noone else who can give me some suggestions?

#3 Maybe you should describe your mod briefly.

Do you need a good content pipeline? A robust and scalable network layer? Access to low level engine code?

The answers to these questions will affect which engine is the best fit to your mod.

#4 Realm wars ;)

#5 "I'll take a look at Serious Sam."
Which Serious Sam? If I remember right Serious Sam (original) did not allow for multiple uv coordinates on a mesh. I would make sure of that though.

#6 Brad: A robust and scalable network layer is the most important. As well as access to low level enginge code.

John: I've dropped Serious Sam. Quake 3 is the most intresting at the moment.

#7 Yeah I would sugguest Quake 3 Arena,
This site has alot of tutorials etc.

http://www.planetquake.com/code3arena/

But Soldier of Forture II would be much better as they have lots of code for things people want already in there, not to meantion lots of nice stuff added to the engine it self.

Return to Wolfenstein... may be good also.

But really depends on your game type.

Quake 3 is getting abit old now, and not sure how many mods take off in that area still.

Good Luck.

#8 Why make a mod when you can make a game? Start your mod on a Torque based platform, such as the FPS section of our demo (it's free!). There are tons of tutorials on this site and most of the Tribes 2 tutorials are also valid. If your mod really takes off, you can sell it if you want. All of the other mod platforms have very restrictive licenses that do not allow you to even make a dime off of your work.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#9 There are valid reasons to mod. A full game is a big undertaking... A mod is smaller, more contained, and has a better chance of being finished. I would say mod making, from an (early) educational standpoint is superior to game making.

You may be a programmer with no art staff. You may want to create something for an established player base. You may be generating resume pieces (knowledge of certain engines has great market value). Again, you could be educating yourself; Torque's structure may not be the best engine to look at in this case.

From my own experience, Canopy's first box product was an (unauthorized) QuakeII mod called Juggernaut for Quake II ... in todays climate, I don't think this would fly... though, from a creation standpoint we couldn't of handled much more.

There are many great game engines... if you want to *sell* your work, there are very few.

-J

#10 We already havea full game running. It is a mod. The difference is, you own what you make.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#11 I understand the own what you make angle... though, there is more to modding than this... Neverwinter Nights, Quake, Unreal, are heavily modded engines. One of the reasons is the amount of gameplay/content to play with... and an established player base/audience.

Modding Neverwinter Nights for fun and modding TorqueDemo for profit are pretty much unrelated. So, "Why make a mod when you can make a game?" is more than a rhetorical question. It's a valid question with valid answers.

-J

#12 Did i miss something here?.
Does Jeff mean that a mod created from the TGE Demo can be sold, without purchacing the source? (of corse this would also restrict what functionality you could add but still).
Or Did he mean once having got that far, buying the source would be the obvious next step, so allowing you to sell the mod/game?.

#13 I think Jeff's saying that if you use TGE to make your mod/game, you can sell it. If you use pretty much any other game to do it, you can't.

Really, the $100 is a minimal cost if you're going to sell your product. Two, three copies sold and you've made the money back.

#14 I think Joshua's point is, the support and resources for modding something like Neverwinter Nights or Unreal Tourny 2003 are much EASIER to get to and understand that say RealmWars and TorqueScript because of the massive amount of resources available.

THIS is a good example of supporting documentation and examples that no newbie could complain about.

#15 I really don't have much of a point. There is no singular answer. If I had a point, it would be that modding a game and making a game aren't necessarily the same thing.

I think modding Unreal/Neverwinter/Whatever is plenty cool. So is making an original game. Have fun, live a life...

#16 Interestingly a 10 second review of that site gave up a bunch of "this isnt really usable documentation" and "it could be simpler if they removed a lot of this doc" etc..

Frankly, you cant please everyone. So please the people that will stay with the product long enough to actually produce something and sod the rest.

If you need THAT much hand holding, then torque (or any engine, unreal included) probably isnt for you.

I'm getting a bit cranky I know, but I'm tiring of hearing everyone moan about documentation. It cant be THAT hard if enough of us are actually being productive with it, so the only factor has to be the will to learn and try new things.

I doubt strongly wether that sort of thing can be taught in a document.

#17 The wierd thing is, there used to be a huge Tribes and Tribes 2 mod community, and in fact, there is still quite a bit of activity in that area. There are still quite a few sites for modding Tribes, and there are a lot of resources available.

It breaks my heart to see hard working teams pump up Valve or id or Bioware or Microsoft or Vivendi by modding their games. I have made passionate pleas to the SS2048 team not to mod Tribes 3. My point is not to make a game, but to use a platform that allows you to do what you want with your IP once it is completed.

The process is the same, i.e. learn some scripting language or set of editors to change an existing game. At some point, you move beyond that and add your own art, possibly moving up to a total conversion. You might was well use Realm Wars or even our Torque demo as a starting place.

So, is it for fun, the learning experience, or to reach a large audience with your creation? Hard to say. I think a lot of people just want to find our what it is like to make a game. At some point, this passion or curiosity turns into real work, and many cool things come out of it.

I think you should cover your bases and use a platform that will not hold you back.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#18 I think modding existing games is an EXCELLENT way to start off prototyping a game or learning about game making.

Valve learned a lesson from Microsoft . . . treat the developers like kings and make it EASY to get information. Build it and they will come at work.

For one you have a built-in audience of beta-testers that already have 80+% of what they need to play the game already installed.

For two you have a large population of resources that already understand the content pipeline and tools that are updated frequently and well documented ( because there are so many people using them ).

I revived my game programming life with modding Half-Life ( coding ) then mastering WorldCraft. I then started a "realism mod" project around Soldier of Fortune that I got alot of favorable response to ( which Activision killed when they never released an updated SDK with the future patches ) there is a hard lesson to learn. Then I moved on to creating missions for Operation Flashpoint.

Not until I came across Torque did I see a viable opportunity to make "MY GAME". Of course "MY GAME" doesn't map 1->1 into Torque so there has been lots more coding than I expected this time last year.

But I am focusing on core componentization and flexiblity right now . . .