How Powerful is Modding?
Sethbeastalan
Join Date: 2011-05-05 Member: 97360Members
Join Date: 2011-05-05 Member: 97360Members
in Modding
Comments
Keep in mind though. Mods in this game will always be written entirely in lua unless you know C language and like many scripting language on its own isn't that great. In fact if I'm not wrong even to attempt running lua files you need a IDE or something like that written in another language like C++. There are an entire group of programming language (such as C++) which is more preferred to make games.
@RedTalon You can actually control the rendering process to a degree. While you don't have 100% control (I.e. the C++ source code), the rendering pipe-line is in effect data driven. See core/renderer/Deferred.render_setup to get an idea of what I'm alluding to.
The spark engine, which is written in C++, handles the direct x 9 rendering, so if you knew what you were doing, you could reverse engineer the lua calls to rendering stuff, and write an opengl renderer for ns2... if you wanted.
I don't know what the netcode is written in, but the game itself is completely moddable and total conversions wouldn't be too difficult, e.g. a role playing game like skyrim is creatable in the spark engine.
Yes, someone make me a RPG in the Dune universe! I'll gift you a copy of NS2 in return! Deal?
Maybe something enclosed like a dungeon crawling game maybe... well I'd want a horror survival genre fps that has partial mmog but that only exist in my dreams... (deadspace themed would be cool).
This!
I've always quite liked modding--though i'm a total amateur at it, and i was really exited about modding NS2. All my ideas thus far have ended in failure after I've spent fruitless hours wadding through lua files after lua files trying to figure out exactly what it is i'm looking for.
The really annoying thing is: when you look through it all it does seem like it would be *amazingly* mod-able, and fun to mod. If only I could figure out where to start.
UWE should drop all those important thing they're doing and dedicate all their time to extensively commenting all the lua files, and producing a huge, detailed appendix/glossary thing...specifically for me. ;P
As much as you're joking here, that's not a half bad idea. If the barrier to entry is lowered you'll see a huge influx of mods.
No need to tell me how hard programming AI is. I'm still gonna keep my fingers crossed though.
You could make other types of games with it but then lots of other engines would be much better comparatively. Basically if you don't use the advantage of having a fps-rts mix already built-in you throw away most of what could give Spark an edge over the competition.