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Now lets talk. Valve decided it would be a smart idea to yet again, update good old Source classics.
And i am asking; Just why? Better load times? Easier mod management? Source has been one of the EASIEST games ever to mod, uninstall mods for... And i have never experienced slow loading times. Not for SP, nor for MP.
So this update is pointless, except if your PC is 10 years old (probably cant run these games anyways) you might enjoy this update.
However, why would i suddenly get angry about this update. Faster load times, easier mod management etc sounds great, it does. If just half of it was true.
It will be easier for the User to install mods, but a nightmare for people to make. And we're talking simple things here such as reskins... sound packs, models, maps. We now have to pack these in VPK files, which i honestly never ever figured out how works, i mostly tried to avoid them because they were not anything of my interest.
And now to my real reason for hating this; Mods for Source... At the moment this is not such a great problem, very few mods use CSS as a base, but for the Multiplayer mods its a whole different story.
Supposedly every MP mod for Source uses Hl2Dm as it's base, but now that the old Hl2Dm is gone a tone of Source MP mods have been rendered useless. Valves thought on this? "It is the modders responsibility, to make sure everything works and is up to date." Yes it might be, but do you think this will bring people back from the death to fix their mods? No. Its not.
People who made great mods 5-8 years ago don't care for Source now, and will most likely never touch upon it again.
Right now one of the Single player mods however trapped in this is Smod. Smod has the ability to mount alot of different games' content, like CSS. And most Smod mini mods use CSS content, so yeah thats gone now.
There was luckly posted some tips and tricks on how to future-proof Smod on Bsnooch.com by OneManShow himself. (Thanks man, you saved alot of people)
For now, this update has not broken much more. But is a show of what power Valve has and how little they care for their modding community. The people who helped them to the top where they are today.
It however breaks my heart to say, that similar updates will most likely be coming out for Hl2, Ep1, and Ep2. It will be pointless for everyone, except Valve. When that happens, say goodbye to every mod ever, cause they will become incompatible.
Maybe newer bigger mods will prepare for this, but all the good old classics will be dead and gone. I also have the sad feeling, that Valve will eventually "call" the Source Base 2006-07 obsolete and remove it.
Once that happens, its even over for Smod. And i got a feeling Valve is heading that direction.
That concludes this blog, i hope more people agree, and dont mindlessly support Valve. I've lost my motivation for working with Source... For now that is.
-Josh C. Zemlinsky signing out.
Sadly very few of the great old Source mods are populated nowadays, even those that are put up on the Steam Store for free. I doubt they'll ever get around removing Source Base 2006/2007, however. It would be too much of a hassle. Though that is a doubt, not a certainty.
It's very depressing to see Valve shape more and more like a business rather than a gaming company, but all good things come to an end. Some people don't even know these Source Mods exist, despite the fact that Valve took off because of the modding scene. You see less and less games being modifiable nowadays and Valve just might be looking forward to dropping accessible modding support entirely, save for the SteamWorkshop which currently works in their favor by letting them monetize whatever minor things that get uploaded to it.
What's so bad about .VPKs, anyway? Seem similar to pakrat. Also pretty easy to install and distribute, though this whole system makes utterly simple sound and skin modding a sore from what I've tried. I guess that's what you meant.
Glad to see my point got through to someone. And back when i read the page i was consumed in rage, and sadness lol. So i probably missed the "How to make a VPK" sounds simple tho.
And this was one of the things i did agree on, VPK is very easy to install/uninstall, distribute and so on.
But as you mentioned yourself, simple things like THAT will become so much harder to do.
In my own opinion, i think Valve should of kept this to their newer games. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
This would explain why I cannot play The Citizen.