Not Making the Same Mistake the Second Time Around

[Emon]

Originally posted by toms

Emon - part of the problem these days is that it is no longer as easy as it once was to make these mods. What used to be single user creations requiring a few free tools and a little bit of knowledge of a few areas now require a whole team, often with expensive modelling software and lots of skills in high polygon modelling, lots of texture maps and so on. By the time a lot of these large scale mods get close to completion people have already stopped playing the game... that is if they don't get bogged down before they are finished.

 

I disagree. For JK, we had to make all the tools ourselves and figure everything out on our own. Most mods were made by just a few people, rarely did any kind of huge conversion ever suceed.

 

With JO, on the other hand, almost everything is given to us. Expensive modeling software? That's not a problem. More player models appeared for JO in two weeks than than have appeared in JK's six years.

 

Modding for JK was a hell of a lot harder, especially for the first two or three years. But that didn't make people quit. It's got nothing to do with how hard or easy it is to make them. It all lies within the quality of the game itself. JO just wasn't good enough to attract and maintain enough modders, ane especially enough players. I know several guys who did JK for years, but were not inspired to edit JO.

[StormHammer]

Originally posted by Emon

Modding for JK was a hell of a lot harder, especially for the first two or three years. But that didn't make people quit. It's got nothing to do with how hard or easy it is to make them. It all lies within the quality of the game itself. JO just wasn't good enough to attract and maintain enough modders, ane especially enough players. I know several guys who did JK for years, but were not inspired to edit JO.

 

While I agree to an extent, I think there are other factors that contribute to this kind of situation. You have to remember that when Jedi Knight was released way back in 1997, there were not a great wealth of games supporting MP on the market.

 

Since then, as you know, practically every FPS released has had some kind of MP elements, and we've also had dedicated MP games in the form of Q3 and UT (and it's sequels), BF1942, among others. The entire gaming vista has changed, and there is a great deal more choice available regarding where modders can apply their talents.

 

Perhaps you're right in that JO was not as popular as some of these other titles...and it certainly has it's own flavour of gameplay style...but there must also be a situation where mod crews are simply spread more thinly across a range of different games. It must be increasingly hard to target a particular game asyour mod development platform, when you know that a year down the line (after you've finished your mod), the community around that game may have dwindled considerably and moved onto something else. So it makes more sense to support the vanilla mainstream, on occasion. Basically, Star Wars and a mix of melee/gun combat is not to everyone's taste.

 

Personally I think there is quite a good community around these newer games in the JK series, and some remarkable talent associated with some of the better mods out there, but I know they also have problems attracting more people to their teams.

 

Hopefully, the new Siege mode in JA will attract more of those people who prefer that style of play (like Enemy Territory for Wolfenstein). As long as the engine is more mod-friendly and flexible enough, it could revitalise part of the community.

[Emon]

Yes, that was another problem. JO's MP rendering engine just sucked. A lot. The addition of AI and scripting right in MP gives ordinary level editors more freedom without having to code new entities.

[ArtifeX]

Originally posted by StormHammer

While I agree to an extent, I think there are other factors that contribute to this kind of situation. You have to remember that when Jedi Knight was released way back in 1997, there were not a great wealth of games supporting MP on the market.

 

Since then, as you know, practically every FPS released has had some kind of MP elements, and we've also had dedicated MP games in the form of Q3 and UT (and it's sequels), BF1942, among others. The entire gaming vista has changed, and there is a great deal more choice available regarding where modders can apply their talents.

 

Perhaps you're right in that JO was not as popular as some of these other titles...and it certainly has it's own flavour of gameplay style...but there must also be a situation where mod crews are simply spread more thinly across a range of different games. It must be increasingly hard to target a particular game asyour mod development platform, when you know that a year down the line (after you've finished your mod), the community around that game may have dwindled considerably and moved onto something else. So it makes more sense to support the vanilla mainstream, on occasion. Basically, Star Wars and a mix of melee/gun combat is not to everyone's taste.

...

Hopefully, the new Siege mode in JA will attract more of those people who prefer that style of play (like Enemy Territory for Wolfenstein). As long as the engine is more mod-friendly and flexible enough, it could revitalise part of the community.

 

I was going to write a post along these lines, then read this one. Suffice to say:

 

^

|-------What he said.

[RandomMonkey]

I'm not sure if this has been posted, but what they need to do is the Warcraft 3 effect, where their are high speed p2p downloads ingame. That makes it a lot easier for customs to be intoduced into the comunity

[Emon]

That is a fantastic idea. Many servers cannot afford to send files to serveral users at once.

 

P2P would be good, as would support for FTP and HTTP downloading, you could have the mod author insert several mirror URLs into a file and have the game download it from those.

 

I think Valve has the right idea with Steam. Games like HL and Quake seemed to suffer from random messes of fansites, where you had to scour the internet to find what you want, and where smaller mods had more trouble surviving. This is one time when centralization is a good thing. JK was blessed with having all the relevant mods and tools at just one location, Massassi.net, JO is lucky to have just three or four important sites, unlike the hundreds I see for other games. :/

[Grey_Wanderer]

Inevitably, Raven will stop making patches to the game. At that point, it will be up to the mod community to move the game to the point that they are happy with it. Just like JO.

 

The JA mp will just be JO on steroids, crack, and shrooms, so no doubt they'll make the same 'mistakes' again.

 

For the record, I really enjoyed Promod... it was what FFA should have been. You did a good job with that mod Arti, but I still felt that Raven's original code for sabers was better for dueling. Call it a personal preference.

[Rumor]

Originally posted by Mith[OmNi]

Inevitably, Raven will stop making patches to the game. At that point, it will be up to the mod community to move the game to the point that they are happy with it. Just like JO.

 

The JA mp will just be JO on steroids, crack, and shrooms, so no doubt they'll make the same 'mistakes' again.

 

For the record, I really enjoyed Promod... it was what FFA should have been. You did a good job with that mod Arti, but I still felt that Raven's original code for sabers was better for dueling. Call it a personal preference.

 

rather Lucas Arts dropped the ball. THEY are the ones who halted patches for the game. not raven.

 

get you facts straight. you have proven over and over to have a very twisted and strange view of the world.

[FK | unnamed]

Well I think a lot can be learned from http://www.splashdamage.com and the work they did on RTCW ET.

 

Just simple things that make life easy for the average player is exactly what makes people happy.

 

Look at the demo recording system, total perfection.

 

You simply bind a key in your controls menu and not only does it do all the commands you normally would have to enter in the console or initiate via a script but it puts a "time stamp" on your demos so you can tell them apart easily and it also gives you a *very easy to use on-screen play back control system so you can actually skip/pause/rewind parts of a demo you are viewing.

 

 

 

Look at auto downloading.

 

In Q3/JK2 you generally had to limit it to 2/3 kbs or it lagged the hell out of a server.

 

In RTCW ET, same q3 engine but you can dl maps upon connect at 200+ kbs (not sure how they do this but it rules).

 

That would be a massive boon to the mapping community and get a lot more of these maps into rotation on servers if people could download them in a single minute as opposed to 30 minutes.

 

For those of you mod makers who are looking for some type of "project idea" for JA I strongly suggest you download RTCW ET (it's a free download and you do *not need RTCW to play it) and just look at all the things splash damage did right when they designed that game.

 

 

There a just so many “little annoying things” that I have hated about the quake 3 engine since it came out and SD really did a damn good job of simplifying and correcting a lot of those things.

[Emon]

I'm pretty sure ET just lets you set the cvar for auto download speed, you should be able to do that in JO. A lot of servers couldn't dool out the bandwidth without severly affecting the game though.

[FK | unnamed]

Originally posted by Emon

I'm pretty sure ET just lets you set the cvar for auto download speed, you should be able to do that in JO. A lot of servers couldn't dool out the bandwidth without severly affecting the game though.

 

See that's the thing, you *can set it to w/e you want in q3/JO but it cripples servers when set high.

 

In ET you would think a server full w/ 35 clients and having custom maps being downloaded at 200 kbs would kill it right?

 

Or it must be some massive bandwidth host right?

 

Nope, somehow they got around it like the Unreal tourney people did w/ it enabling clients to download from sources other than the actual server while connecting.

 

I'm not sure how they did it (ET) but the very same company hosting some of our JK2 servers also hosts ET servers and I know how much it kills our server if I jack up the auto dl, yet these ET servers on the same host w/ the same connection can run 40 clients and at the same time let connecting players dl maps at 200 kbs w/o a drop of lag..

 

[ArtifeX]

Originally posted by RandomMonkey

I'm not sure if this has been posted, but what they need to do is the Warcraft 3 effect, where their are high speed p2p downloads ingame. That makes it a lot easier for customs to be intoduced into the comunity

 

I did actually mention something like this in my initial post, but my suggestion was to allow server admins to point all autodownloads to an alternate http address so that downloads could happen at high speed for all new players while the in-progress game suffered no adverse performance effects. The P2P idea is a good one, but I think that would be more technically difficult, as you'd have to start worrying about making sure that the files downloaded were exactly the right files using some kind of file id or crc-checking device. With an http solution, the server admin would be in total control of whatever files he wanted to make available. He could even slightly modify them and repost, while players wouldn't get annoyed by having to download a minor mod/map at 2/3kbps.

 

LA/Raven: Are you listening?

[Emon]

I'm pretty sure ET didn't change the auto downloading code. I don't see what in the world there is to change, it just sends a file. ET is a lot more demanding than JO for bandwidth, so it's not uncommon to run into a server running off some insanely fast university connection, which would result in fast auto downloads.