Just my 2 cents about the mod thing

About people making their OWN mods, its because not all mods are good for everything. I personally am making a Halo mod, and its so different from any other mod out there we could not use ANY of them. We change the entire focus of gameplay for gods sake! Additionally, all mods are the intellectual property of their creator(s) and as such you can only use them for your own mod if you get their permission and give them credit. If you want to improve a mod, join the mod team. If you can´t mod, but have ideas to contribute, E-mail the contributer. I´m open for more <A href=´http://s12.invisionfree.com/FLCE´ Target=_Blank>mod team members</a> *hint hint hint* <img src=´http://x2.putfile.com/8/23412562373.png ´> FL:CE Mod Team Leader

Well... it´s not like I´m not often sorely tempted to go into other people´s mods and re-balance them so that their game-balance doesn´t suck. But I don´t, for three reasons: 1. A mod is a work of art. I wouldn´t re-interpret another person´s art without their specific permission, unless they said very specifically that they didn´t care whether other people used their work. I know how much work it takes to make a mod- I´ve done plenty of them <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> And I´d be pretty peeved if somebody treated my work with disrespect, so I´m very wary about the idea of going around &quot;fixing&quot; other people´s work. 2. Most fans of the mod would probably not like it if I put my biases into a mod whose gameplay they like already, even if that gameplay has horrible, obvious flaws in terms of game balance. Every game designer, even very good ones, has biases that influence their games. For example, I am very heavily biased towards skill-based play- iow, players of my games who aren´t very good at flying and fighting (which are, let´s be real here, the main activities of FL)... generally find my mods too hard, even though I go out of my way to make sure that the AI doesn´t get any unfair advantages. For the Toolkit Mod, I´ve been very gently tuning everything to provide appropriate levels of challenge- &quot;appropriate&quot; ranging from &quot;very easy even for people who´ve just started playing FL&quot; for the first Mission to &quot;wow, that´s really hard even though the AI isn´t cheating&quot; for the last ones. Some game designers are big fans of &quot;gadgets&quot; that alter gameplay (Epsilon springs to mind). Some are concerned with creating a gameworld that feels very internally-consistant (Free Worlds and TIE Universe are probably the best examples) and some game designers like secrets, hidden things, and little jokes (Monkey Universe springs to mind). I´ve helped various mod developers with their game balance, and written reviews of various major mods, but in the end... everybody likes different things. There is no standard of &quot;good&quot; in gameplay, at the high end of design- which is why games as diverse as Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike, which are both First Person Shooters where human-shaped 3D avatars attempt to score points by killing each other with various weapons and accomplishing various objectives... can be considered to be &quot;good&quot; games. Or not. It´s really just a matter of taste, in the end. That said... game balance is much more of a science. All computer games can, at the end of the day, be broken down mathematically. Math doesn´t substitute for reasoning, but it does supplement it, and it can quickly show a designer where a given area of a design is badly flawed. It´s pretty obvious that a multiplayer game about flying around in spacecraft and blowing each other and AI-controlled spacecraft is broken... when everybody who´s serious and competitive flies the same ship and uses the same weapons mix, for example. &quot;Vanilla&quot; Freelancer is not <i>quite </i> that broken in MP, but it´s close. Solving those sorts of problems is pretty difficult, but it can be done, and many mods have come up with a variety of solutions that work pretty well. 3. Last but not least... a big mod like WTS... is tens of thousands of lines of code. Ok, so it´s INI code, not something really complicated, but it´s still one heck of a lot of code to go through. And, when it comes down to it.... there are very few people who know enough about the art and science of game design to fix broken mods properly... and they do not (unfortunately, in my case) have unlimited free time. We all work for free here <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>

<font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade> I personally am making a Halo mod <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> Forgot that was still going on (I was one of the guys who started it). How close are you to release?

Well.... Not very, i´m afraid. We are making progress, however, most of the progress is in planning. We have been gathering huge amounts of information. The first PUBLIC release is still a ways off, however, soon we will be releasing a special alpha to our forum members for testing. <A href=´http://s12.invisionfree.com/FLCE´ Target=_Blank>FL:CE Mod Team Leader</a> Edited by - Blackhole2001 on 9/24/2005 1:40:02 PM

Um... well... I guess that what I was trying to say here was that philosophical + practical reasons are why I don´t just go around like some wandering digital monk, fixing mods up. If anybody were to pay my bills, get me a butler, and give me authority to willy-nilly recode all of the cruddy mods that get released, I´d probably do so <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>