What FPS Game Engine, is best to MOD?

The best engine to mod, in terms of 'potential', 'ease of use' and versitility is the Quake 1 engine.

I mean Halflife is built off a modified quake 1 engine, and look how many mods it has. (that is why it is not listed inthe poll)

Sure the engine maybe dated and graphics lacking the lusture of newer titles, but still some fantastic looking stuff is, has and continues to be made for both Quake and Halflife.

quake 1 is by far the best engine i just looked into coding for it and its so much easier than hl and many other games

Im down with UT2003

ditto to deadsoulja

UT UT UT!!! :P

Quake1 was a great engine (that's why hl based on it). It was easy to use and an interesting engine.
Quake2 is also not bad but lacks on some points. Good to mod because Q2 is where the Action Mod (now AHL) has been coming from ( 8) )
Quake3 i'm not really fond of. The whole animation thingy is crap but the skin designing system is interesting.
UT you can crap too. It just forces you too much into UT like style and besides this... using a Script Language to code pure Windows Function Procedures in Scripting is just like a fist on the eye (:sick:).
UT2k3 i'm not fond of too. To much bloat, too much useless features and the Scripting faults they made in UT they took over instead of correcting them. The good thing, great graphics if you are willing to buy you a pc fast enough (i'm not). Other good point that the phisycal system althouh in MP you will never need it nor recognize it but brings down your FPS. Nice trick with vehicals too for people who like it (me not). To mod it's a bit better than ut but no match with Quake related engines (like HL).

Strange... I can't vote in this poll, although I haven't yet voted.

its cause you voted on the public enemy one

Dragonlord is biased.

:D q1!!!!!! its the best im telling you!!

who is deleting polls that just went up... HOW RUDE!

Hm... what you mean with biased?

I deleted the poll... didn't really think it was appropiate to have a poll on one modification, need to give all mods a fair go :D

how old are u? -_-

From my experiance, the Unreal engine's UnrealScript makes it by far one of the most versitile and easy to modify engines around.

Just stay away from the GUI stuff :D

UT. You don't need to have a DLL complier. And you can even add iin DLL's if you want too!

1) I'm 22
2) UnrealScript is ugly. It's everything else but crossplatform and that's the main reason you do a Scripting Language. Or you want to keep people off direct memory access (kinda VM) but in that way US failed too. It's just a useless scripting language (:sick:).
That's why I'm doing my own Scripting Language to get past those ugly flaws (and to have a useful SL).

UNREAL2K3 TILL I DIE!

Quake is by far the easiest to code i just started learning quake coding i already made a couple things (ut scrpiting makes no sense to me)

UT2003.

Just a note : It doesnt ask what engine is the easiest, they ask "is the best" so Unreal Tournament 2003 is the best engine out there, with the karma engine and fabulous lighting possibilities

Oh, and you also need to think about mapping, not only coding. UT2003's editor is one of the easiest to work with, since you can pull off a map in 5-10 hours

And one of the most unstable... The editor with the most crashes I ever saw, the most bloated GUI. I never saw a bigger mess like that.
Lightning effects? The first I turned off... they didn't impress me but only lowered brutally my fps... switch off what you never will need and isn't thaaaat impressive.
Make the gameplay, animations and that stupid model format better and then, only then you can come with graphics, not before (BTW the biggest disease in todays games... *sigh*).

I like ut2k3. Well come on. all of those useless features are for use of to the mods. It gives you more freedom of what you want to do.

BF1942! Look what the guys over at Desert Combat have produced, only a few months after the release of the game. Bloody amazing. It wipes the floor with every other mod on earth in terms of what it's done (excluding NS :D)

man quake mapping is easy to i could make a map for quake in like 5-10 minutes haha!

although halflife is of the quake one engine, it has been heavily modified, so would that not entitle it to be an engine in its own right?

Half-Life is more than an exstension. It has completle be rewritten and enhanced with sierra internal ideas. BTW: all that useless features you think are usefull for moders, i can tell you that you can do them with almost any engine out there. you thought this is done by the engine? nope, sorry. it's all done by the actor and item code. the engine can only delivere an event to make things a bit easier but the effect doesn't come out of the engine. and thus makes us able to do it on other engines too.

best engine is quake1 because it is very easy to modify (sorry for my english)

"By Dragonlord
Date Mon 21st, Apr 2003 @ 7:08:38am

Half-Life is more than an exstension. It has completle be rewritten and enhanced with sierra internal ideas. " Since when Sierra codes?....Sry but I though Valve were the ones behing the Halflife engine coding...

For me the best engine for modding would be UT2003 cause it has great tools for modding. Also Epic support to modding is one of the best ever. They are even planning on making a Modding Contest. Soon we'll see many great mods for this engine. In fact no other engine has been able to produce such quality work that fast.

Q3 modding comes second cause franky..no other engine can breed mods so extremely so diferent from the original version like the good old Q3.

Battlefield engine mods seem great but until we see a serious comitment to modding teams from the developers...it will come on 3rd place.(and Im not talking about that greedy finantial "want to make you retail" EA kind of interest)

By Maldita_Vecindad:
Since when Sierra codes?....Sry but I though Valve were the ones behing the Halflife engine coding...

Damn it! Read first! I talked about Sierra's own ideas not that they coded those ideas!! :rolleyes:

@Dragonlord
"Make the gameplay, animations and that stupid model format better and then"

Gameplay and animations?
Well sounds like perfect modding material then :)

Quake 1 is the best engine to mod for a variety of reasons. First of all, the language that comes with it, QuakeC, is very powerful and easy to use. It has certain drawbacks, such as the inability to modify things like HUDs and menus, but QuakeC is better than DLL coding because it's so easy to read and write, and it's cross-platform.
Second of all, Quake1's engine source has been GPLed! Thanks to this, as well as some very genius coders, many enhanced engine modifications have been released. Tenebrae is pretty but an outcast, Darkplaces is all the rage. Many of these engines have the ability to compete with all sorts of games on the market today.
Thirdly the Quake community has been whittled down to only the elite. Ever since Quake II's release in 1997, modders have been leaving Quake 1 to go to these newer games. All the while since then, many others have been coming and going. Now, the Quake community is small, but some of them could code the pants off UT2k3 modders and the like. Plus they generally have seven years of experience with the Quake engine, and a lot can happen in that time period.
With the Quake engine, as I am doing with Fniggium, it is possible to create a whole new game, not a mod, without spending a penny. We can modify everything down to the menus, and even add new model and map formats. Is there a bug or annoying limitation in the engine? Who cares, why don't we fix it or improve it. We can also readily add new capabilities to QuakeC with ease.

If you read this post and say something along the lines of 'Oh, but UT2k3 can do ____, and Quake can't'... Well, you'll regret saying that, because someone might just come along and add that feature to Quake.

Half Life 2 :thumbup:

Really good points PANTS.
I just saw the screenies of some mod on the news page using ut2k3. I agree that those bushes, grass and WTF ever is extremly nice but... Do you need an engine like ut2k3 for that? Nope. All that has been done there are billboards (a horrible lot of them). Billboarding is far one of the most old techniques you can think off (doom and co had them the first and all the game was made with it). It depends on the amount of billboards you plant in the world and wow... look at that... a quake based game would look alike... but with resource consumptions you would go mad of excitement and... 0$.
BTW... why will you never see code of UT2k3 or UT? Because the code is awefull! Have you ever seen this nice Assertion Errors during startup? Yeah? You know what that is? Debugging code!! Assertions are used for (poor) debugging and should never ever be visible nor occure in a finished app because Assertions mean 'brutal, unrecoverable error' and a release app should cath'em. And BTW you can see in those error messages a little bit of their dev-tree and this one is horrible... it's even worse than windows and linux code together!
I would never ever code with an engine under my *** beeing coded so miserable. I would take Quake because this one was made with brains not with $$$.

Todays engines shall break limits? I'm laughing out loudly!
There's nothing a older game engine couldn't do compared to UT2k3 engine. I saw no engine out there today which impressed me... none (that's why i'm doing it myself, so I get an engine which has what I want and need)!
> You say that graphics, physics 'n' stuff are not necessary. The only thing is a good coding.
Not quite correct. Coding is essential to make a game working (I saw horrible crashes, problems and so on, with UT, UT2k3 and HL). It's true, I'm a hard-coder and I'm interested also very much in the way engines are made but that's not the important point. Good Graphics and Physics are ranking very low in my list of what a game needs to become a good game. All that stuff that people send into battle as arguments for todays engines don't impress me because graphics, sound, models, all that stuff does not depend on the engine. You can make the same super graphics on quake so there's no point in it for me to favorate a bloated engine which doesn't really delivers more.
So my point is clear:
Why shall I use a bloated engine and get lots of troubles when I can have/make a free, fast, and easy to use older/selfmade engine which I can modify to look like the new ones and that just works without making troubles.

Hehe, DragonLord is funny, he's probably never bought any Unreal powered game :P

Q1 all the way, easy to code, and if you complain about the graphics at one point we (I) have you backed up.
Moddb.com

interesting discussion... you had numerous bad experiences with UT2k3 i presume 'Dragonlord'

I was thinking of adding HL to this poll, but a). i didn't think it is deserved since it aint really an original engine and b). everyone would just select it, so i wanted to see what other engines would get a good run :D

prolly should have added Doom 2, tons of nice mods for it... damn mate of mine forces me to admire them all the time :)

"And one of the most unstable... The editor with the most crashes I ever saw"

Let me guess :

You're on Win98/ME. 98/ME arent supported by UED3.0. Only NT based OSs are fully supported. I never crashed one single time.

UnrealEd3 works on Win98SE for me.

I haven't said that my engine is better than others. it's my first one so don't expect a miracle (everybody starts small) and i'm not into competing with the big ones. i wanna achive some special goals that i didn't found this way in other engines. the reason for doing this is the challange and fun, fun, fun :D.

about that winme/98 thingy... yeah, i have a win98 amongst my systems. although fortunatly the troubles have been less the last time i used the editor to view a model (god damn will i be happy as soon as that gme get's finished, then i can drop that shït) i'm not very happy. i once stumbled across some editor field in it but since then i never found it again... haha... an editor you don't find a feature again even with rtfm is just a joke.

But i guess this topic starts to stagnate. i've my opinion and you have yours. it's like c++ vs delphi, it ends in a stationary war in the end.

Yehaa, ut2k3 go for it

How can anyone make a sound judgment without even knowing what they're judging?

That sentence of mine does not mean that Dragonlord's engine is worse than the others, as well :)
It only means that every engine has good and bad sites. So the discussion about the best programmable engine should be done by real hard core coders ;)

you forgot source :O:O:O:O