Howard Day
Random art guy.
Yeah. Not the dumbest thing I've ever seen, but it's up there.
Nah, I don't think that's really true. Personally, I don't ever use mods that "add" anything to games, but's it's pretty neat that those who like that sort of thing can. If someone decides to add some 5000 cm damage gun to the game, I don't think most people would want to download it, and those who would would eventually understand that it's a bad idea, unless of course, they really are idiots.As a rule, players don't know what they want. When a game is very easy to mod a million stupid people will add a million stupid-but-flashy things... which a million similarly stupid people will add to their games on the faulty logic that a bigger ship or a more powerful gun will automatically make the game better... and then the game will be broken. History's truly great mods are the ones that were so difficult to pull off that the mod team was forced to act like professional developers -- everything else just comes off as pureed crap.
I don't think you're reading my post correctly, I'm not complaining about 'hard' modding tools. I support the idea - modding a game should be tough and it should force the modders to put a high level of thought into a project.You seam to have a splited personality don't you ^_^
No hard modding tools, no easy modding tools...so what do you want?
I don't think he could be more clear. Just to restate his specific example: Freelancer quickly ballooned into a bunch of funky mods. People went off and played these instead of the main game. Many of these were of fairly low quality or just gave everyone tons of super junk, so it burned people out quickly. Sure, of course there are people playing it today. People are playing everything today somewhere. I can find a game of Wing Commander Armada at 3 AM on a work night if I want today. But the effect of so many low quality mods so quickly in a game's life just dilutes its audience. Mod tools are great, but creating a situation where you force the modders to create quality products over time is going to be a lot more beneficial to game's community in the long term.I don't see the connection of mods and the loose of interest in the basic game. Please enlighten me.
Tough, yes. Requiring people to decompile, edit hex code, then recompile, though, might be a little too far. I wouldn't mind something like having to edit C code (or whatever language you choose to use) to modify things though, but having to recompile the whole pioneer.exe file or whatever may as well be totally unmodable.I don't think you're reading my post correctly, I'm not complaining about 'hard' modding tools. I support the idea - modding a game should be tough and it should force the modders to put a high level of thought into a project.
Well I certainly don't mind waiting another three years to see the finished game (or five years if it comes to that)--it will be worth it. Just please don't leave us hanging for months on end wondering where you've gone off to.Howard Day said:So that's where we are. We've been working on this for more than 3 years - and the end is not in sight.
I see your point, but I'm not sure this would be as much of a problem with a project like Pioneer. After all it has a much smaller, more devoted audience than Freelancer had, and I'm not really sure if there will be a multiplayer portion to it at all.It is simply a fact that easy modding made the game's player base quickly splinter into a thousand unbalanced pieces instead of prodiving a readily available base to interact with new players (and that nine times out of ten these mods were entirely without merit.)