[EvilViking]

Well, actually, I've been around for a good while. Bet none of you remember me, though. I was a quiet member of the community before An Act of War. I got into RA2 the month it came out. I saw an ad in my copy of The Sims Livin Large (thankfully, I got out of the Sims craze before the next x-pack). I didn't get the game until that Christmas, but I was an avid poster (well... spammer hehe) at www.soviet-invasion.com... ah, that was a great site. Anyway, it was soon after I got the game that while on the official boards I discovered this thing called "mods". I got what it was pretty quick, and thanks to XCC tools, I was soon giving my Rhino tanks 99999 damage lol. :lol:

Well, that just wet my appitite. As I started looknig at changing things besides health, cost, and damage, the first VXL editor came out. I got a copy of it, and opened it up. I was horrified! That thing was evil... I still have a copy on my old computer, and I still can't use it lol. So, after a few tries, I stuck to the INI editing. After a while, I added my first unit, a clone of the Soviet sub with powerfull torpedos. Well, it was invisible. Why? I forgot to add Image=xxx to it. I didn't figure it out until Ra2's later days. I bought YR, and enjoyed a bit of editing there too, but still, nothing major, and nothing worth releasing. After playing RA2 for almost 2 years, I got bored.

Cue the Renegade era. I pretty much fell out of the community, losing touch with some good friends. Then, one day, I just decided to punch in ol' CnCDen (well.. it was rather new then) just for fun. Lo and behind, it was the month that the first Generals screenshots were released. I was HOOKED. Even beforeit came out, I was planning a "Police mod" for it, letting you control a police ans SWAT force. That is actually when I started modding Tiberian Sun. I added in the police car, the officer, the SWAT van, and a few others, and it was pretty good, I just never finished it.

I started dropping in here after the Generals test was released. I liked what I heard. Once I got the game, I cracked open the INIs... and almost passed out. COMPLETLY differant from RA2 and TS. It looked like my editing days were over, so, I stuck to light map making and Skirmish mode. Around April I decided to make a singleplayer mission about Iraq. I was pretty good, ok looking, a few LIGHT scripts, nothing special. In fact, it was rather buggy and would never end lol. I was enjoying it, though, so I decided to make it a campaign. I quickly realized that the current USA was just not realistic enough. I quickly found Brian's Blackhawk/Bradly mod from GeneralsFiles, and got permission to use it. Now I was getting into it. I started bugging you guys here for help, and at the time my mod was called "Operation: Desert Eagle".

Wow, I didn't mean to ramble like that, lol. It's 11:43pm right now, and I've got school tommorow, so I'll wrap it up:

Big_poppa agreed to build my website, and then STURM-SHREK joined the team as our skinner. I learned quickly, and now I can do ANYTHING with Generals modding. Then Matt joined up, then Sara, then another modeler (who I lost contact with after a massive computer failure 3 months ago), then Matt was kicked (lol) Sorry for all that... Anyway, I remember a lot from the RA2 days, and I know some about the TS days too, if you have any questions.... I'm going to bed now :drunk:

- PCTeen1

[EvilViking]

holy crap! I just realized! I'M AN OLDBIE! Ah-hahahahahaha!!!



......... :tard:



I'm done now. I need sleep.... ops: :dead:

[Proclone]

you're not an oldbie, if you weren't around for TS hype you're only middle aged :P

[mad ivan]

Originally Posted by smurfbizkit

Ra2
A much more advanced community than the TS one. This is our first real step into modern modding...with many many mods in the works.
Main community Hub: i forget the forum, but modden was a cool mod site

top mods:
Ra2 Deezire
Eagle
Blitzkrieg 1
Allies Revenge 2
Code Red

the forum was Ra2Mods.com!!!How can you forget such a thing-that was the N.1. modding place ever.

kornlord - ar3 aint out yet.Hey-Where the Hell are you (go on MSN )

Anyways-NO MORE OFF TOPICS!

[smurfbizkit]

@ proclone, wasn't it "nurple's maps"? for ra1?

----------------------------
btw, i need all the help i can get on this...so if you could point some vets towards this forum it would be a big help

[Cyborg]

I've been around for TS! and RA1 too! One thing that you've forgotten about Smurf,the mass creation of missions in RA1! Just check PlanetC&C! They have a crasy amount of missions made for RA1! Lots of campaigns,where some even have almost 30 missions!(I know,cause I have many of them! ) Also,dont forget RedEdit 98,the ultimate modding program for RedAlert! TS has SunEdit 2k,which is made by the same people who made RedEdit 98. TS has many god mods,but one of the best,that you forgot,is the famous Tech War mod! As for RA2,I have ca.50 mods,but I dont know which ones you would se as amongst the ''top mods''. :|


Hmmmm,think I made a little to many smilies there.......Oh well!

[Cyborg]

Oh! MooMans Rules has got to be amongst them!

[Chronosfera]

XCC is likely not to continue. Olaf told me he doesn't like Generals for some reason. I remember how MHR and I were one of the few lucky guys to get a preview of XCC while the whole community was still using the Mix Viewer (or something?). Almost had an orgasm seeing the list of all the extracted voxels in TS for the first time.

Maybe I can contribute a little piece of fragment from my point of view, before my memory fades completely. I am not sure you want to read all this though, because it will be long and perhaps also boring.

I did mod RA1 too, but I did not invest a lot of time in modding until TS. The modding community was almost brand new for there was a long lapse between RA1 and TS, everyone started fresh and interested in the lots of things to explore. Like the bunch of other founding modders (How many are still around? Blade?) I started in Blueprint. And although Tiberian Sun was released in August 1999, the first voxel editor (not including TS Gold's one) did not come until May 2000, so in the earliest days most people were focused only on cool INI hacks and figuring out how to crack the voxel format. One of the few early prominent mods include Real Life and Alkaline's Rules of Engagement. Later on MHR, Squall (a very smart guy, sadly he vanished from the community one day) and I formed a quite powerful mod alliance consisted of the mods Icestorm (Arguably the most popular TS mod), Covert Operation II and my Allies Revenge. By today's standards of course they all stink, but at that time they were considered to be some of the mods with the most creative INI uses (and new voxel-turret combination ... lame). Things weren't as preety as some remember, everyone tried to claim the throne after TS Gold blew the modding scene wide, with lots of espionage and mod wars going on. But despite all these, the icestorm network was as popular as ever despite numerous so called 'Icestorm crusher' mods planned and killed (by MHR through infiltration) before actual work began. I don't remember most of their names now, but 'Nemesis', 'Reborn' and 'Tiberian Moon' were defintely amongst them. Everyone was happy before things after things started to go wrong.

In May 2000, 2 months after Firestorm's release, although there were still lots of new mods and modding material site (e.g., Firestorm and his Editing Source, which led to lots of dispute in the RA2 times. No one seems to remember that besides Firestorm's, mine was the only other name on the original Firestorm site's staff list), the modding community was already crumbling as many early modders left the scene for more moddable games. After some heated flame wars with JRP of Tech War, I decided to close Allies Revenge despite the new opportunities the new Voxel Editor offers and instead focus on helping Icestorm (which at that time I was its 'vice president'). Anyway, after a few more weeks, one day in June, I made a terrible decision that forever changed my modding life in this community. Some nameless guy called SmurfBizkit () sent me a message in ICQ saying something like he's giving up and leaving the community and so he's handing 'Nemesis' and all those cool tricks in it to MHR and me. Those so called cool tricks like Tiberium Spawner and Buildable Water are nothing today, but at that time those were almost like the holy grail of INI modding. I don't know why I said that, but I told Smurf fuck MHR, I would leave Icestorm to work on Nemesis with him. He told me he's touched. Well, then I made a speech in the Icestorm forum and basically broke the Icestorm team apart, successfully leading some head Icestorm staff like Squall, TallCommando, Neuralize and a few other guys to leave Icestorm. Needless to say, MHR hated me like hell for almost a year. Then we, under the attack from almost everyone, formed Wipeout Studios, which I believe was the first 'studios' network in the C&C community, in order to work on what we then called 'Nemesis 2' and several other mods hosted there. Because of some dispute however, Smurf quickly left Nemesis 2 and worked on his own version which he called Daybreak, leaving Squall and I working on Nemesis 2 in Summer 2000. The infamous Eclipse Modding Network was the first one to reach to Wipeout and proposed affiliation. It didn't take long however, for us to discover that all they wanted was to take over Wipeout <_<, well, that didn't happen of course, what happened instead was about the largest mod war ever, lasting months. Unlike Eclipse, Wipeout was really trying to work on mods, but at that time Eclipse gained dominant support from the community and so we were constantly losing grounds. The last blow came when Deezire one day (for reasons that I still don't know) withdrew all his posts in RA2 blueprint, and Whirley and Gellpak successfully framed me of having kicked Deezire out of the site, and for some reason I also don't know, they made people believe them. So guess what, everyone flamed me for a whole week, many friends turned against me, all my established status in the community was gone, Wipeout was dead, and I was forced to leave all community message boards for months. :\

Many interesting people came into the scene of my story at the time of Wipeout nonetheless, and among them the most important one to me was defintiely Godwin. Godwin was originally part of Eclipse before he left the network to join Wipeout near the time when Eclipse was trying to swallow Wipeout. He was also the only guy that followed me when I 'escaped' from the community to start all over. There were several other Wipeout guys, who may still be around, Mad Ivan being one of them if I am right.

Moving onto RA2 - Many of the remaning TS modders (like Deezire) planned the RA2 version of the mod even before the game's release. Smurf and I founded AR2 in around August 2000 (the mod is 42 months old now and still being worked on) before Wipeout's eventual demise. He however soon left AR2 when he one day saw an interesting WW2 mod (Guess what the mod is called -_-). He told me WW2 mods are guarateed to generate better response than sci-fi ones because people just love WW2 stuff, eek. And so Smurf left me againto take over that mod, and soon after that, Wipeout fell and we departed with none but one mod with us.

AR2 itself has a preety long history, but I am only going to speak briefly of this part. AR2 had more than 10 hosts altogether, I can't even remember most of the earlier ones now. But after some time, perhaps a year, we ended up heading back to MHR's site ra2source.com (who, after the short-lived Red Storm, quitted modding and instead started his RA2 news site). MHR was the kindest man on earth to have forgiven me, and when hosted there AR2 made some preety decent progress and the first beta released in the forum. Version 1.9 was a total piece of crap despite all the hard work Godwin and I put in, we simply didn't have enough manpower to finish all the stuff ourselves. At the release we were even still using Smurf's loading screen which said 'Wipeout' on it although the network was long gone.

There are some parts that I don't remember here, but anyway after some more time we (I still don't know why) ended up being hosted by Eclipse. I guess there are no eternal enemies in this world. Soon after Eclipse's server crashed we moved onto Federation Studios (once hosted by Eclipse before it in turn hosted Eclipse back O_O) which I am sure many of you still fondly remember. AR2 really flourished in Eclipse and FedNet, but in the RA2 time, of course, all attention on RA2 mods fell onto RA2 Deezire.

The mid RA2 modding scene was one of mixed feelings. On one hand the modding community really proliferated, but people also saw the many problems in the community and even predicted the community's demise. Sites after sites fell because of the lack of resource, and many large mods went out of the race before completion because of the lack of interest from the mainstream community. Many people blamed this on the influx of newbies in RA2 modding brought by INI mods like RA2 Deezire and some other, some blamed it on RA2 being targetted on younger audiences, but with some careful observations one can easily tell where the problem really lies. Networks - Marshalus of Federation Studios once said that the whole concept of FedNET was inspired by Wipeout. FedNET in turn inspired numerous other networks to launch. Indeed, from Wipeout to Eclipse to FedNET, the existence of huge, free hosting modding networks changed the modding climate drastically. Mods in the TS times were largely hosted by news sites (with TumSun, PC&C, CNCNZ and Battleground C&C being some of them), but after the appearing of the huge networks, they took over the job and became the easiest means for a newbie modder, having just arrived at the community, to start his own mod. The result was of course, millions of n00b mods that clearly wouldn't get done appearing on all the networks -- their forums underused, their site either unopen or never updated, and their team hardly devoted. They finally dragged down the huge networks themselves and even RA2 players' interest on modding. There was one time when, yet another RA2 mod was announced, everyone knew it wouldn't be done. It shouldn't be hard to notice that standalone mods, hosted by news sites or having its own server, are way healthier and more professional. There are still several free hosting networks in the community hanging on, like C&C Guild (which I think stopped hosting new mods?), but they are just a shadow of the giant networks in their glorious days like Eclipse, FedNET or even Arm-ent.

After FedNET fell, AR2 moved to PC&C and stayed there till now. In December 2002, the two huge total conversions (AR2 and Blitzkrieg) were finally released, resulting in probably the very last time RA2 mods made a big impact on the C&C community.

After Generals' release, some oldbies like Smurf and Deezire immediately moved on to modding the new game and continued their modding career. After getting involved in some early plannings and INI works in Blitzkrieg 2, I decided to withdraw from the team and stay on RA2. Currently I am working on AR2 and Tiberian Conflict. Some other RA2 mods still hanging on include WH40k, DDAY and Mooman's YR Squared. I strongly recommend you guys to check them (and of course AR2, too) out!

To end the story with something positive, Smurf and I finally reunited after Wipeout and founded Derelict Studios. Derelict Studios is by no means a free hosting site. Instead it (yes we are the fucking elitists like one of you here said) is a place set up so dedicated modders can focus on making high quality mods and exchange ideas without worrying about hosting. It's made so as to ensure that some mods that take slightly longer time to develop can continue to exist. You will continue to hear about us in the future

[smurfbizkit]

there we go, those are some helpful posts cyborg and chrono....i'll update my main list tommorow

[mad ivan]

yeap-Chrono, i am still arround

I am still one of the little people that have started the same mod three times and canceled it two times (Space Imperia for Ren, RA2, And Gen) :P