Comments - sluggo

Seeing that dream become a reality is an awesome thing to behold my friend.

hey bro - very curious to hear from you if you're still around. :)

Hey bud. Contact me if you still read this site. I'd like to see how you've been doing since TOD :)

Sure ya are buddy.. :)

Actually, err come find me on IRC sometime.. ;) Just not today ;)

Selfish is 'for me and me alone', selfless is 'for the good of others before myself'. Contributing work to a community effort means that the effort owns it. If the person that contributes work to the community effort can revoke that work at whim, the entire spirit and point of community efforts ceases to be valid.

Imagine the linux operating system. It is very much like a mod. Several people work on this effort. No one person owns anything, their work is rolled into an effort for the greater good. If one person had the right to sabbotage that effort by pulling out say the hard disk driver then Linux would cease to be a valid community project.

It is completely the opposite of selfish as I understand the word. What it means is that you are contributing towards a collective goal. When you leave, the credit and contribution that you put forth stays (you did it 'for the community', not for yourself), it would be unfair if the mod team pulled the credit for the work when someone left. We don't suggest that. What we suggest is that mods protect themselves from selfishness by asking people that want to contribute to realise their contribution persists beyond their working relationship with the mod.

Certainly people expect programmers to work under those assumptions. Should mods delete all the lines of code one programmer did when they leave?

The point isn't nastiness, it's clarity. The goal or objective of a mod is to make a team effort to produce a work. That work includes and is inseperable from all the files that make it up.

Anyway, as always by over explaining a simple idea, I may have confused the matter.

Ok one last kick at explaining this idea. Let's say you work in a factory that produces widgets. You get paid by the factory. At some point you quit the job because you got your MCSE and you want to go reboot Windows NT servers all day for a living now. Does the company have to take all the widgets the factory made that you ever worked on and return them to you? Of course not.

All this 'agreement' stuff is just putting into words that basic concept. That basic concept is a fundamental part of any team or group effort. Some people don't understand that concept so it's best in our view to put that in writing before they contribute to the effort. With mods, the payment is just the credit that 'so and so did this pretty model', or 'so and so did this sound file', or 'so and so wrote this code', etc.

It's odd that if you ask the 10 or so people that are still on the team about respect and how they are treated, I think you'd find they disagree with the assertion that the team doesn't respect each other, or somehow treats members like 'crap'.

In fact, we've had to work hard to keep the team composed of individuals who are serious and respectful towards each other. Those that didn't fit in either drifted away or were asked to leave quite simply because they did not fit that mould.

Creative people disagree now and then. Mature creative people don't hold grudges, and realise that in any disagreement what is important is not 'who is right' but that the problem can be resolved. Mature creative people don't 'take their bat and ball and go home' when they have a problem with a group.

Mod teams should be wary that they cannot be destroyed by one upset persons' actions, that is all this is about. Otherwise, years of work can be scrapped by a personality conflict, which is sad really.

And the fact that the time that people served in Vietnam was often referred to by that name. Which is where both the tv show and the mod draw the name from.

Well, I guess like politics, the media makes for strange bedfellows too. One lesson that's hard for some in politics to learn is not to offend the media (we all have skeletons, and they'll find them - cigar Bill? :P), or let your personal tastes get in the way.

They contacted us out of the blue, not overly familiar with the publication myself. Ah well, anything that the public consumes has fans and enemies I guess, so we'll try to get our PR dogs biting at the ankles of PC Gamer too for the future. :)

Yeah, we'll never win with rockets. We had someone come post on our boards to say they've gotten rid of the mod because of this.

When 99.9% of your users are whining about one issue, and you try to fix it (with a comprimise that is NOT getting rid of the weapon and NOT that extreme), you start questioning your sanity in trying to please the public.

I guess that's why mod dev teams eventually ignore their fanbase, it's the only way to stay sane :(

Since the question seems to be being raised, and I have a penchant for getting into these kinds of discussions....

Valve's done an excellent job of keeping their platform going, dated as the core engine technology is.

They support us by reading discussion lists and answering developer's questions (i.e. the folks who made the original game, not support drones), and release constant updates to both the core engine code, and the SDK code that we modify.

We've emailed them and got an answer from a real employee with real information, not a '**** off i'm too busy' type response.

The same can't be said for many companies. Valve has also acted as if they view mod authors as either potential independent developers of salable products (ala counter-strike, blueshift, opposing force...), or a fertile pool amongst which to recruit potential employees.

They just opened up the Steam technology to the world this year, which will allow mod developers to sell their mod (for a small fee) in cybercafes (something we disregard mostly in North America where anyone can own a PC, but go to asia, where that's not always the case -- they're huge there). Also, other things can be sold this way, some other gamedev shop talked about trying it out.. I have to admit that speeches on the last day of the GDC are hard for me to keep awake for, particularly once they stray from the technical side as Gabe Newell (sp?) did that day a bit.

Also, I'm a programmer, you're not going to catch me scripting a mod, that may be interesting for the level designers or the modellers out there, but that's not going to give me any experience that I either enjoy, or would be able to market in the workplace. Some 'sdks' are really just scripting engines, which would bore me in a week (not being arrogant or cocky, we all enjoy different things and programming and scripting are not the same, nor do they appeal to the same people).

The last reason to pick this engine in my view is that the mod community for it is one of the largest out there. The number one online game (outside of MMPOGs -- don't know what the number for those compare like) worldwide continues to be Counter-strike, last I checked.

However, those are only my reasons. We all have our own reasons for liking mods. However, I'm not interested in mods for engines I don't play the base game for -- I don't own Unreal because it didn't appeal to me aside from visually, I don't own quake III for the same reason either.

As soon as another company offers this level of commitment to its mod community, I'd consider making a mod using their engine, however, they've all lacked Valve's vision in this department to date. Hopefully they'll learn soon -- Raven who made SOF/SOF2 I'm keeping an eye on, they seem to be getting the message.

But, if you don't want to make a mod for a particular engine, don't.. we didn't ask you to, not sure why you feel the need to comment about them, but it's a free world I guess... Best of luck with your respective projects.

We actually feel that 90% complete is too low, however, the options we're giving here are in lots of 10 only.

No big deal, cause it's a good rough idea.

Anyway, thanks all for the positive feedback, we hope to have some teasers for everyone soon. :D

If the feedback (the good the bad or the ugly) is to be legitimate, it should be open to any who want to post.

If someone posts something that is totatlly inappropriate (really offensive), I would hope that moddb would have some other policy that would allow it to be removed.

Open and honest commentary is something we've never been afraid of anyway ;)