Comments - Crispy

You're obviously not old enough to remember the golden age of games in the UK. Many, many popular games today would be a shadow of themselves or wouldn't even exist without the contributions of UK developers from the 90s.

The cost of games has GONE DOWN over the past 15 years and the cost of development has GONE UP.

RRP may be the same but the price of games drops off severely after release, and even before release you can buy a game online for a significant discount. I spend less money on a game today than I did 15 years ago.

This isn't the film industry where the technology is essentially complete. Games constantly need new tech and new talent, and that is expensive.

You want to squeeze the price harder because you're essentially ignorant to what goes into a game. Read the credits on a game (that's right, all the way through) next time you play one, and you'll begin to understand why the price is justified.

Indie games cost less because less people worked on them. It's that simple.

Demos have also been shown to reduce sales in some circumstances. If you show too much (or, for example in a Beta, it lasts too long), people who would have bought the game to see what it's like would no longer buy it, ro, people have simply had their fill (in the case of a multiplayer beta).

I'd rather deal with the people who will buy the games and serve them better than focus on why people are pirating; most don't have a cohesive argument, including why "it's not theft" is justification for circumnavigating the price the author has set for their creation. Ultimately it's a question of respect, and the anonymous and remote nature of software piracy remove the barriers of social acceptability that would otherwise prompt the pirates to think twice. The fact is piracy is socially acceptable: tackling that mentality is beyond what you can do as an indie dev.

Hatred is more dangerous than freedom: that's why Intense had to do what he did.

Congrats on getting to this stage. Would love to help out!

Congrats to all of you for making it to release!

Looking forward to playing it, and will try and get as many people at work to give it a go. ;)

Surely innovation should be rewarded. If there are only two feasible nominees for the award one year, the lack of contenders could be enough to see more modders look to be innovative the next.

Afterall, the point of these awards is not only to congratulate the accomplishments of those who are able to complete a mod/game, but to encourage potential in the modders of tomorrow.

Trac is more basic than Mantis for bugtracking, but not in a bad way. For a mod team Trac is the better of the two.

An article on Gamasutra that ties into this. I'm posting it here more for interest than for practical advice.

"Collaborative Game Editing"
Gamasutra.com

Scores are treacherous territory. The critique-versus-review approach is best, especially for a site about making games.

...and I just saw Intense! is considering Trac and SVN for a Moddb members' service. Awesome!

I think he has a point.

"tutorial : a session of intensive tuition given by a tutor to an individual or to a small number of students"

This article is more of a single piece of advice than a tutorial. When I came to it I was really hoping it would be a piece about keeping balance in a mod team (i.e. picking a good blend of team members).

The 'karma' reference is ill-chosen. If you wanted a better name for it, it would be: Inspiration. Nobody wants to join a mod whose leader isn't inspiring, and the best way to inspire allegiance in others is to demonstrate tangible examples of your hard work. If your mod lead is working constantly, you will feel inspired to keep working too. If your mod lead starts to slack off, others will follow this person's lead.

Is there any way you could partially subsidise hosting to offer us cheap (but not free) hosting?

Or if not get together with some regional hosting providers and organise some sort of Moddb member fee in exchange for referrals?

I have, and Trac + SVN = awesome.

"[Trac] provides an interface to Subversion (or other version control systems), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities.

Trac allows wiki markup in issue descriptions and commit messages, creating links and seamless references between bugs, tasks, changesets, files and wiki pages. A timeline shows all current and past project events in order, making the acquisition of an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy. The roadmap shows the road ahead, listing the upcoming milestones."

This is a really exciting announcement. Bravo ModDB! Bravo!

"For any project organization is one of the biggest things. Without proper leadership your project may die"

I would say this tutorial isn't about leadership, it's about project management. For example a mod might fail in spite of good project management just because it's steered in the wrong direction. I was going to do a page about file distribution options in my QA Lead tutorial, but you've done quite a good job here so I think I'll link this and maybe add some download links.

Also -for large projects with big teams- I would personally recommend TortoiseSVN client, along with Trac. Working on a Source Mod (with ~17,000 files) I didn't find it to be slow, albeit having nothing else to compare it to (plus we were using a sponsored dedicated server). Trac is a simple Project Management wiki-style program, so when using TortoiseSVN in conjunction, the Trac page will give you reports of all the changes. The two go together very well.

"[Trac] provides an interface to Subversion (or other version control systems), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities.

Trac allows wiki markup in issue descriptions and commit messages, creating links and seamless references between bugs, tasks, changesets, files and wiki pages. A timeline shows all current and past project events in order, making the acquisition of an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy. The roadmap shows the road ahead, listing the upcoming milestones."

Good int. And finally I found out how the Commander view is going to work with NS2 mapping, sounds good.

But that bit has the words in the wrong order. It sounds like:

"Est-ce qui comme pote?" Which means: "Is it who as a pal?", and the word-order is as strange in French as that translation. In modern French, wouldn't you say: "Qui es-tu pote?" ?

The accent sounds French, and the team is indeed French:

Streum On Studio
1 place saint François
93 360 Neuilly Plaisance
France

Donc, quelqu-un de l'equipe nous peut faire connaitre la raison pour laquelle la diction a l'air de Francais mais l'ordre des mots est si etrange?

It was either that or death. If you're a fan of death over a commercial product, then I guess that's your opinion.

(hit the character limit...)

I am looking forward to InterWave returning ND to something that is closer to the original design than where the mod had ended up (pretty much dead). I should also note that IW is very committed to engaging with the community. In many ways it makes more sense for a retail project to forge strong bonds with a community who can help them shape the best game possible and will make up a portion of the playerbase.

I know not everyone is excited about the prospect of a retail game as opposed to a mod. I say let's wait and see what IW can do before we judge. They've already proved they can complete a full mod in a 6-month turnaround, create and manage community websites, create anticheat applications and they are backed by an affiliate company which has helped them fund a Source engine license.

These guys are very organised as a team, very hardworking and very dedicated. They are the best option for the continuation of Nuclear Dawn and the entire mod team agreed to green light them based off a tech demo they put together recently. I for one wish them the best of luck with carrying the torch for ND.

I think some facts definitely need some clarification here.

- A "large proportion" was not 'fabricated for PR'. This makes it sound like it had no place in the game and was more of an advertising campaign. I can't find anything other than concept art and the model poses in the screenshots that has been shown as media that isn't in the game files.

The only possible thing this could be referring to is when Dave took the HUD concept and allowed/deceived/colluded with a magazine to omit the fact this was a concept paintover. I would not call this 'a large portion of the functionality', and its an error that the vast majority of the team at the time was not aware of, including myself. I have asked IW to change the statement to show who was actually responsible for this decision, because I was PR Manager at that time, and it definitely wasn't something I orchestrated or was aware of.

- It's true that the design had massive cutbacks. There was a lot of argument over this, but in the end the overriding decision was that it had to be done. But the end result was definitely not CS CTF. There was a CTF mode that was added in addition to the primary game mode, principally because the primary game mode was getting a lot of stuff cut out from it. I think perhaps Michiel is slightly confused between that mode and the main mode which was point capture, with the points having flags indicating their location (similar to DoD). CTF is not the same as point capture. One involves static bases and two objectives, the other does not necessarily involve static bases (in ND it did not) and involves multiple objectives.

I just felt that should be cleared up.

So this is where you've been hiding.

The GameReplay forums are baying for more DoW2 VODs! Luckily in your absence a few more good shoutcasters have emerged, so it's not all bad.

"Ed Harrison has put together a 2-DISC OST for NEOTOKYO (27 songs). When it becomes available we'll let you know where and how you can get it."

I have been waiting for this moment for a loooong time!

Looking forward to the mod guys. I know it will meet expectations.

Hi! I know it's some time since you made this comment, but I've updated the Bug Hunter section with some ideas for multiplayer testing anyway.

FireArms was also deserving of the list. I also liked Hostile Intent for a short while.

(was FLF the one where you spawned in choppers and you could shoot the choppers down, or was that Global Operations?)

What's with the video quality? The framerate was terrible, some sections were squashed from 16:9 to 4:3 and there was this weird 'blurry' effect throughout.

Gonna try out the demo, might write a review.

Very nice to hear about the latest project Hourences is involved with. Good idea, certainly.

I'm not entirely sure it will port easily to XBLA since there are size requirements that the U3 Engine won't really fit. The concept, though, will surely port over quite easily.

I'm not 100% convinced you've nailed the Aztec visual style based on that video. But it looks good all the same.

Temporary problem, down to a short-lived hosting problem.

That 'grunt work' doesn't build mods every often, though, does it? :P

The fact of the matter is that the industry is splitting into multiple smaller fields in the level design sector anyway. No, one person creates their own level any more. You've got the scripters, the environment artists, and of those sometimes you have 1 guy just doing terrain and others all working on prop sets.

Call this a tool for budding scripters where other tools give more control to the artists.

"The problem here imho is not that many noobs will do ******/moderate maps. Its that level designer is limited to premade stuff(models, mainly). That means, we'll get bored very, very quickly of all those africa maps, with the same houses, structures, enviroment props etc."

Honestly this was the case with Half-Life 2 and still is, to a degree. If you want to make a mod that isn't set in a near-future universe you need to make your own weapons, new textures, new NPCs (from models to animations), everything. Your argument could go for most games.

True, with other editors you can make free-form shapes as you like them, but if this ships with the console release or as DLC, this will be the single most powerful editor ever to be put into the hands of console gamers.