Blogs - INtense!

I feel like i've been rather quiet lately, which is odd because I'm working harder than ever before. The radio silence has been due to many things. In the space of a few months I got married, went on a honeymoon, launched mod.io, attended E3 to pitch mod.io and triple checked all of our privacy policies to ensure we are GDPR compliant.

It's been a busy time so it's great that things are quietening down and I can focus on what's next. Right now that means helping developers get integrated and up and running on mod.io. I just posted in the forums why I believe this is important (feel free to join the discussion). Ultimately it comes down to our love of mods which begun 16 years ago when we launched ModDB.com in 2002, and thinking about what the future of modding looks like.

I didn't want to change this amazing community by making radical changes, but at the same time I felt there are many gaming companies which cannot use Steam Workshop for various reasons, and a solution was needed. Hence mod.io was born and working on it and ModDB.com remain my priority.

I personally believe that mods are only going to become more significant in the future, and we aim to help all games and consumers benefit by providing a powerful, platform agnostic mod API / SDK. I'm looking forward to sharing what we are cooking up and working more closely with game creators in the future. Get in touch if you'd like to know more.

We have never been great at asking the community for help. Usually we just let everything run itself - but I think it's time we changed that as i'd love to see the community take a more active role in our forums and our discord channel.

So with that said, are you passionate about forums? Do you think you can respond helpfully to most posts and try and encourage activity? If so please post a comment here or email me directly. Serious applicants only, who have time to volunteer.

Or if you think Discord is the future, know how to personalize channels with fun titles, groups, icons and all that other colorful stuff, we'd love to have you help us run our discord. If this sounds like you again either post a comment here or email me directly. Serious applicants only, who have time to volunteer.

If all goes well and we find amazing moderators, i'd like to consider a next step and create a system which allows people to run certain games. Help those individual communities flourish - as we prepare to grow in 2018.

Every year I make it a point to fly from Australia to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. It's an awesome experience and one I highly recommend all developers try and do, should you have the means. But it can also be rather overwhelming at times, surrounded by talented and successful developers everywhere. This years conference was a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions for me. I'm busy working on various ideas and decided to pitch them at GDC. The pitches went well, and I look forward to sharing them with the community in a few months as they get closer to release.

But amongst all of the chaos, I wanted to highlight meeting two modders that brought a massive smile to my face and really made the week worthwhile. Amongst all of the chaos, business deals and competition, I met the creators of a much loved C&C mod Tiberium Secrets Matthew and Eric (GeneralJist and Fandore). Together they reminded me why I started ModDB 15 years ago, and why I continue to work so damn hard on this site and community. While everyone else was at GDC trying to make money and do whatever it takes to succeed, these modders were there purely to learn and for the love of the game. I tip my hat off to you both, your dedication to your craft and many others like you has pushed our industry so far forward, and I look forward to many more years of following your work on the site. Thanks for making my week.

The big news right now is the public alpha of v5 starting in the DB Testing group. But we also deployed a number of other small enhancements at the same time, the biggest being the addition of "you may also like" in all profiles.

The idea of this feature is simple. Discovery is a challenge for everyone, if not downright annoying. If your mod or game is not in the top 100 your chances of being found here and on other sites is difficult. The recommendations feature aims to combat this by adding a few suggestions at the bottom of every profile. We hope it will encouarge a little more exploring and for you to find some hidden gems. Enjoy!

One of the hardest thing about modern day modding, is that games have basically become "software as a service" and so they are continually being patched and changed. Whilst these changes are almost always for the better, they are usually done with little backwards compatibility in mind.

Whilst this is a minor inconvenience for actively developed mods, many old and classic mods are no longer being worked on as their team has understandably moved onto bigger and better things. Sadly this means many of these mods wind up incompatible with the latest version of the game, until members like malortie step up. Malortie (and others) have worked tirelessly to fix upwards of 50 Goldsource and Source engine mods.

This includes a few of my favorites like Ravenholm, Research and Development, They Hunger and Poke 646. Whether you play Source mods or not, it is the tireless efforts of individuals like malortie that make modding such an amazing community and we encourage everyone to thank him for his work to date. Best of luck malortie and whenever you find the time, you are always welcome here.

Site updates

I thought I would add onto the end of this post a few quick site updates for everyone. Firstly we have being patching and fixing minor things all over the place. The most recent is an update to the groups system so companies and community groups are more easily found. They are now ordered by most recently updated (not alphabetically) to reward the active groups on the site.

Secondly, work on v5 experimentation has finally begun. Right now we are just exploring ideas, they are all extremely buggy and hypothetical, but once they get a little more polished we plan on inviting our community in to explore them, and help us refine them into something amazing. Busy times ahead!

A new member feature is waaaaay overdue, following on from the first one I posted featuring Kark-Jocke. I know we said staff shouldn't be featured, but technically Erayer is a volunteer. He works tirelessly to make mod profiles on this site look amazing, and after seeing this thing of beauty recently, I knew I had to thank him for sharing his talent with us. So if you ever see a custom mod profile and think "wow" chances are Erayser helped set it up. He is well worth sending a thank you to.

In good news for all, we are now trying to work with Erayser and investigate how we can modernize the design of ModDB and IndieDB. We have already experimented a little on Indie DB, and now know a little about creating beautiful responsive websites. It will be a tough process to update ModDB and IndieDB, as we want to make sure we balance your needs with ours. We don't plan any dramatic changes, but profile headers might be removed as we experiment with more streamlined profiles. Rest assured all longterm members will have a chance to test the changes before they officially go live.

So thanks again to erayser, let's see what we can make together in 2016. Oh and if you'd like to find out a little more about me, I recently did an interview with Tim which you may enjoy.

Just saw Black Mesa ads running on ModDB. So good to see a mod succeed then turn around and support our community. Means a great deal to us and enables us to keep doing what we love. Here is to a new year and promoting a new batch of amazing mods and games.

So they've been a few changes to the site which you may have seen lately. Firstly if you missed the news games, mods can now be labelled as early access. This is to help content show up in the release section and allow reviews, whilst also highlighting the fact that their work is not yet complete. It's step 1 in our release functionality overhaul.

I've also added the ability to embed tweets directly into posts and comments. To do it just put your tweets URL into a new line (with no spaces or punctuation around it). If people like this change i'm contemplating allowing images, videos from our sites + youtube to be embedded in the same way.

Twitter.com

Finally and the reason for this post is the change we've done to descriptions on profiles where you must now click "read more" to see it fully. It seems a lot of developers and power users are unhappy with the change which is entirely understandable. The problem we have however is description consistency. Some descriptions are ultra long, whilst others are short. This leads to confusion for new users who aren't aware that to get to the pages content (gallery, downloads, comments etc) they need to scroll through the description. The read more change allows us to address this by keeping the description there but hidden, which makes profile pages far more consistent. But we want everyone to like the change so I wanted to discuss the options available:

1. Keep descriptions the way they were, long and inconsistent
2. The new change is good, clicking read more
3. The new change is good, but if I click "read more" the site should remember that and do it on every page I visit
4. Move the description so that it is on the left, and doesn't push down the entire page, demo:
   
5. Make it so the first 400px of the description is shown (so short ones still fit), then there is a read more button, demo:
   

Tell me which options you like best and why? Also worth noting our Github features / bugfixes board is public for all to contribute to.

But for today, apart from the news I just posted about changing galleries, our github for you to report bugs and suggestions, and the fact that work on v5 of our sites has begun, i've caved in and simplified all of our social media icons. Continuing the theme of a different color for all DBolical sites we now have new icons which embody this. Prepare for the rainbow:

What color comes next?

At ModDB, we are extremely fortunate to have a number of long-time members who have been actively participating with the community for a lot of the 13 years we have been around. I thought I would try to semi-often recognise some of these members and welcome anyone from our community to let me know of good things others have done around here to make the site a better place. Things like adding content we are missing, helping others, posting tutorials are all examples. One I'd like to call out now is Kark-Jocke. As a passionate fan of ModDB and helping us grow and remain strong, he runs frequent competitions where he puts up his own games as prizes. We never asked him to do this, but appreciate the effort and generosity he shows (and I'm sure the winners do too).

Right now an example of this is the two active competitions he is running. First up is the Halloween competition, which you can read more about it here: K-J Game Competition - Halloween Time! and the other is the Game Competition (Dead Island Collection).

Kark-Jocke thanks for your continued support and suggestions on how we can improve ModDB! Means a great deal and we hope we can continue to promote, support and help your competitions grow. Don't forget to enter everyone, you have a great chance of winning. Also please let us know of other members doing great things, we are a community run site after all :)