Comments - Ging

The lack of response from me was not permission for you to release this.

Take it down.

It's certainly not dead - the team's just been busy with other things, I get work done whenever I can find the time.

It'll be worth the wait, promise!

You don't have to defend copyright, you're thinking of trademarks. Copyright is an inherent right due to the producer of the item in question (at least, in most countries), trademarks can "expire" if they are not defended by the owner.

Companies send C&Ds to protect the image of their IP and to ensure that if they enter the market with a similar product (like the Halo RTS mod vs Halo Wars) that it's clear that it's an official product.

Modders should spend extra time to come up with something themselves or use existing IP as a basis to spring board from in terms of ideas, rather than just taking an IP wholesale and abusing it. I appreciate the work that's gone into mods like GoldenEye Source or PD:S, but I'd much rather the teams had made something new and distinct.

COD4 isn't based on id tech anymore - the engine for it was developed in house at IW.

The issue isn't about credit, it's about permission.

Elis never asked for permission to modify and re-release our model, I assume that's what leads him to not provide proper credit on that forum post. Chances are that someone sent him the model and asked him to do it without telling him where it was from in the first place - but it all boils down to someone not asking permission in the first place.

It's just the respectful thing to do, no?

There's something a bit odd going on with comments at times, Moddb.com is missing at least three comments from a couple of hours ago - one vanished and has now returned.

DB hiccup?

Hurray, I got to read the bits inside the asterixes!

We've not officially announced anything, but I figured I might as well join up so I'm ready when we do! :D

Trailer looks nice, but I wouldn't have minded less footage of iron sights firing.

But RoboBlitz does - so your point is moot...

Roboblitz does do something things oddly, like not supporting materials with only an alpha channel (one of our artists when he was playing with it used the emissive channel instead and he's got prior experience with the toolset), but there's certainly no real reason not to start working on the basics of your mod code now. (though it may require more experience with Uscript than if you were working with UT3)

Of this I am aware - I'm one of the demonstrators for that unit!

I'll see you in the Lab come September then - I assume you're doing the Games Design unit?

You'd be much, much better off using normal maps to get a lot of the same detail - the average Source player model is around 6k polys, so a 4k gun is overkill, no matter how important it may be...

University of Lincoln - in the UK? If so, which year (and units) are you guys doing?

Because that doesn't teach you how to write a custom shader for use in Source... Which is well, sort of the point to this tutorial...

I did a lot of the demonstrating for second year units last year, so you have probably seen me in the lab...

Thanks to everyone that voted for us in the Mod of the Year awards, it makes us all warm and tingly in our special places! A similar level of thanks to the kind fellows at moddb for awarding us with Editors Choice for Ambience - hopefully we'll see that 'fright' factor increase with each future release!

1.5 is due out towards the end of this year, it's getting a fairly massive code overhaul that brings with it some new weapons and a couple of new features to make playing a bit more streamlined.

In the current state of the modding community, the introduction of some form of cash flow is pretty much the next logical step - sure, it makes amateur mode teams "professionals" in respect that they are earning something from their creations. But I know from my work that I put in just as many hours working on my mod than I would if I had a job (which I don't so I can work on the mod)...

There are of course alternative methods of earning money than selling the product - if you can get permission, put advertising in game. As long as it remains in the ethos of the universe, such as posters or billboards in a current day setting, there's no reason not to put in some form of advertising. Even better, stream the ads from a remote server and charge dependant on location and duration of rent.

Cuts out the problem of getting the fans to pay for a mod but lets the mod team pay for sound engineer sessions, motion capture, whatever they can afford with what they get. It's certainly an option that my team has discussed, but we never got any feedback from valve about whether it was within the realms of the EULA.

kean - as was mentioned on the first page of comments, the comp was only open to mods that had released something playable when entry was open so insurgency couldn't enter.

nzMM - garry said he didn't want to pay for entry, which is fair play. What's any award worth? It's a good bit of recognition and well, it looks good on the cv if you can say "IGF finalist" (of course, that depends on the person reading it knowing what the IGF is)

methulah - we did in fact release an early version using CSS models and HL2 textures, with just a single custom map... That was way back in March time though and has (thankfully) since sunk into obscurity - what he have done since however is fall into the trap of doing larger updates spread apart, something myself and the rest of the team are acting on getting swapped around, so we can push out more releases quicker...

Part of the problem for using the "rapid prototype" method is just finding the time - both our coders are doing a full time masters course that takes up a fair bit of time, we're also working on a seperate "professional" project now that the mod is in a "reasonable" state... We're finally settling down enough to get back to working on the mod as well as everything else.

Another problem with getting an early release out is that gamers these days instantly want a professional level product to come out of a mod team, which I suspect is a major reason why some teams wait for nearly a year (sometimes more) before releasing anything playable... Both approaches have pro's and con's, this article does a good job of showing that - though looking at the comments, the wording may not have been perfect!

Boxy's always over eager with release dates - I say "weekend" he thinks "thursday" when I actually mean sunday...

Take from that what you will...