[smurfbizkit]

I don't know about this "stealing mods", since I am pretty sure the creators of CS and DOD made out pretty well from the deals they made. Hell from what I hear some of them actually ended up helping make HL2 itself...

Now as far as source for Gen, I never mentioned that...but then again letting us make our own scripts (and have the game load them up similar to ren's scripts.dll) would be nice.

[full_circle]

Mishkin - For modding FPS games, you effectively re-code how everything works from scratch. In Half-Life you had to write your code in c++, compile it into a little dll then load it into HL.

Generals/ZH is sooo easy it's a dream come true . But then it's equally limited in what you can do too

[Ambershee]

I don't know about this "stealing mods", since I am pretty sure the creators of CS and DOD made out pretty well from the deals they made. Hell from what I hear some of them actually ended up helping make HL2 itself...

The raw recruits of the current gaming industry are those with experience in the Mod Industry. As far as selling technology goes, Valve made a stupidly awesome profit from what they bought, with absolutely no need to do any development work themselves. Think what would have happened if Mr X. had purchased the source for Windows 3.1 from Microsoft for a tenner?

For modding FPS games, you effectively re-code how everything works from scratch. In Half-Life you had to write your code in c++, compile it into a little dll then load it into HL.

Well, you don't have to re-write everything, or indeed anything, but you still need comprehensive grasp of the language that the source has been written in, and nit's very much not spelt out to you like configuration files, the way Generals works - here's an exert from what I wrote today for Dh3;

inline bool IsOrthoUniform (const Matrix44& b, float fTolerance = 0.01f)
{
	for (int i = 0; i < 3; ++i)
	{
		if (fabs(b.GetRow(i).GetLengthSquared()-1) > fTolerance)
			return false;
		if (fabs(b.GetColumn(i).GetLengthSquared()-1) > fTolerance)
			return false;
	}
	return true;
}

inline void OrthoNormalize(Matrix44& m)
{
	m.NoScale();
}

// given the bone matrix, returns its inverted.
// the bone matrices are orthounitary
inline Matrix44 OrthoUniformGetInverted (const Matrix44& b)
{
#ifdef _DEBUG
	for (int i = 0; i < 3; ++i)
	{
		assert (fabs(b.GetRow(i).len2()-1) < 1e-2);
		assert (fabs(b.GetColumn(i).len2()-1) < 1e-2);
	}
#endif
	return GetInverted44(b);
	Matrix44 m;
	m(0,0) = b(0,0); m(0,1) = b(1,0); m(0,2)=  b(2,0); m(0,3) = 0;
	m(1,0) = b(0,1); m(1,1) = b(1,1); m(1,2)=  b(2,1); m(1,3) = 0;
	m(2,0) = b(0,2); m(2,1) = b(1,2); m(2,2)=  b(2,2); m(2,3) = 0;
	m.SetTranslationOLD(b.TransformVectorOLD(b.GetTranslationOLD())); m(3,3) = 1;

#ifdef _DEBUG
	Matrix44 e = b * m;
	assert (e.GetTranslationOLD().GetLengthSquared() < 0.01f);
#endif
	return m;
}

Welcome to the world of advanced vector mathematics and complex matrices - the sort of stuff you'd be learning in a degree level math course. Needless to say, that function is the equivalent of a single ini "Wibble = 0.5"

Hope the exert wasn't too long, lol, it was the shortest one I could find quickly.

Generals/ZH is sooo easy it's a dream come true . But then it's equally limited in what you can do too

Ease of use over adaptability, the common tradeoff. It's the same with Far Cry at the moment - you can easily modify it compared to say, Quake 3, but you'll be damned if you can do as much with it.

[scythe_3000]

you can mod the first c&c ok its not calle dini edited but the basics are exactly the same(i think i'm showing my age in the modding community here..lol) also yeah the code is more um complicated for fps games. well not really complicated theres just a hell of a lot more of it. and much more animation and things. basically i could knock up say 2/3 mods in the time it would take me to do a fps mod. so its a trade off like ambershee said (by the way hows those poly counts going) its easier to mod this game but u cant do as much. its harder to mod say ut2k4 but u can make almost anything u want.

[Ambershee]

you can mod the first c&c ok its not calle dini edited but the basics are exactly the same

Well, they are similar, as are the Dune RTS games. It's still a configuration file that you edit, not any actual real 'code'.

well not really complicated theres just a hell of a lot more of it. and much more animation and things

No, just more complicated. There doesn't have to be a lot more of it if you do it well either - the weapons I coded for Dh1 were only about ten lines of text some of 'em (minus projectiles, projectile movement etc, lol)

so its a trade off like ambershee said (by the way hows those poly counts going) its easier to mod this game but u cant do as much. its harder to mod say ut2k4 but u can make almost anything u want.

Yep, definitely a trade off. If you're really desperate to make a totally custom RTS, do it for an FPS engine (Torque or OGRE are actually very good starting points, lol).

The polycounts are getting there with no real loss of detail *phew*. I've also got a few cool beans stuff going, like a planet with axial rotation and seperate atmosphere with cloud cover, but i'll show that off later when it's ready, mwahahahaa.

[Capt_Pickles]

Originally Posted by smurfbizkit

The point of this post is how fps games bend over backwards to support modders, and in the end modders can do practically anything they imagine. CNC games get no support like that, the closest thing we got was a half-assed -mod command.

Why support it... its made up of geeks and kids... Theres nothing inherently cool about playing or modding a game like generals... ... they have fps tournaments and things to hype up those games because it will always be cooler to blow a guys head off while blood gushes everywhere than a game with little tanks

[smurfbizkit]

Eh, your point comes back to the fact that fps games are more popular than rts.

At this point for me, its just kinda like deciding when is the best time to get out of an abusive relationship. I mean you may like the other person a lot, but when they treat you like shit after a while you reach your breaking point.