What happened to all the modders?

_Grendel__Grendel_ Join Date: 2015-05-07 Member: 204238Members
edited May 2015 in NS2 General Discussion
I've been reading over a lot of older post and there used to be a very strong modding community making some pretty awesome content. Lately it seems like the modding scene as dried up quite a bit. While there are still some mappers creating some pretty cool looking maps, most of the modders (especially the asset modders - skins/new weapon models) have vanished into thin air. Just searching for "new weapons" brings up a huge amount of ideas and half done models. I'm just wondering if there is much of a modding community left. I'd also love to know if any of the weapon models were finished. I've gone over workshop a dozen times looking for some sweet new weapons (or at least new weapon models). Found a few cool ones (one is in combat). Sadly most of the posts talking about new weapon models no longer have any of their pics :/

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  • McGlaspieMcGlaspie www.team156.com Join Date: 2010-07-26 Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
    My modding time has been devoted to rebuilding the CDT's infrastructure from scratch. I've got plans for several things I hope to complete once this work is done.
  • BeigeAlertBeigeAlert Texas Join Date: 2013-08-08 Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
  • cooliticcoolitic Right behind you Join Date: 2013-04-02 Member: 184609Members
    The modding scene isn't quite dead, but the lower activity is probably due to the dwindling player count and the age of this game.

    Also some modders now work CDT, like @McGlaspie.
  • BeigeAlertBeigeAlert Texas Join Date: 2013-08-08 Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
    The game will liven up a bit once the updates start a-flowin' again.
  • IeptBarakatIeptBarakat The most difficult name to speak ingame. Join Date: 2009-07-10 Member: 68107Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
    Consistency checking happened, the strict default settings killed any chance of a mod scene growing.
  • KalopsiaKalopsia Join Date: 2003-05-15 Member: 16331Members, Reinforced - Shadow
    I've put development for ns2_nothing on hold for two main reasons:

    - Player numbers
    - Server map rotations mainly focus on official maps

    People only want to play highly tested and balance maps (which is fair enough), so custom maps hardly get played. In saying that, it's a double edged sword because you need players to identify changes in your map, but people only want to play the highly tested/balanced maps.

    If only we had the custom map community like we had back in the NS1 days.
  • bonagebonage Join Date: 2012-10-13 Member: 162230Members, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
    A couple of reasons:

    1. What's the point in modding for a scene this size which shows no sign of recovery: http://steamcharts.com/app/4920

    2. The antiquated workshop system is an incredibly frustrating process to use.

    3. The modding tools themselves aren't great (the cinematic editor doesn't even work)



  • FrozenFrozen New York, NY Join Date: 2010-07-02 Member: 72228Members, Constellation
    edited May 2015
    Kalopsia wrote: »
    I've put development for ns2_nothing on hold for two main reasons:

    - Player numbers
    - Server map rotations mainly focus on official maps

    People only want to play highly tested and balance maps (which is fair enough), so custom maps hardly get played. In saying that, it's a double edged sword because you need players to identify changes in your map, but people only want to play the highly tested/balanced maps.

    If only we had the custom map community like we had back in the NS1 days.

    I'll forever stand by the fact that every map is automatically balanced for a 2 round match. Too bad that it's not a compelling argument and doesn't make people prefer variety and flavor.

    I fucking hate Dunkin' Donuts... But it is... consistent... I suppose
  • IronsoulIronsoul Join Date: 2011-03-12 Member: 86048Members
    @mattji104 if the core gameplay managed to keep scores over 2 rounds then maybe that'd improve things.

    Mind you, the first round advantage problem IS still there, it's simply greatly reduced (you'll be a bit tired by the second round).
  • DC_DarklingDC_Darkling Join Date: 2003-07-10 Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
    Just a reminder that we at TAW actually do run maptests... if you need a certain map tested.
    We dont always test pure greyscales (to keep the players interested in playing the maps) but its better then nothing right?
  • UncleCrunchUncleCrunch Mayonnaise land Join Date: 2005-02-16 Member: 41365Members, Reinforced - Onos
    matso wrote: »
    Granted, _fully_ implementing/supporting a mod system (in which I include great tools, great documentation and great version control) would have been several man-years worth of work...
    I wouldn't go so far. When it's done properly it can be enjoyable to work with and to complete. Ex: not like the shoulder patch shader which, to my opinion, is quite a good example of the following : Trying to make things as fast as possible without proper thinking. And then everybody is stuck. By saving time before; we all loose time after. It's worse. It's like forgetting about grabbing the keys before going to your car and then, in front of it : "dude where's mah keys???".

    It's true that Unity as a free engine now (or share of profit), is quite on top. Granted they started earlier, with more people etc.. but it isn't what makes it better. It's Docs and the uber import/export from free tools (like Blender etc.) natively... automatically...
  • MauvaisVitrierMauvaisVitrier France Join Date: 2014-04-10 Member: 195291Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond
    edited May 2015
    EDIT :
    Shit, this is way off-topic.

    so first (on topic)
    @Kalopsia : run new updates and you will get back onto the SCC maptesting sessions :)
    And yeah ask @Mephilles as well, TAW is running comp or 7v7 maptests each week.
    mattji104 wrote: »
    I'll forever stand by the fact that every map is automatically balanced for a 2 round match. Too bad that it's not a compelling argument and doesn't make people prefer variety and flavor.
    So if you have highly alien-favored maps, it's balanced because you play both sides ? The interesting part of balance is that you can have similar to equal chances to win both rounds. Otherwise it's just dull.
    Veil is still kind of alien-favored and requires from marines some heavy stuff from the get go and the snowball effect is real. But I remember on an old version of Caged that we played during season 5, we all knew that it was favoring alien turtling and it was super hard to push without being constantly worried by the serious and deadly threat of a counterpush to which we wouldn't be able to do shit about.
    So yeah, you play both rounds, so it's balanced, even if one side is heavily favored ? No that's not balanced, that's dull and boring. Especially if everyone already knows the result and expects a draw every match played on this particular map.

    On caged the issue was that you were as marines able to get a fair number of RTs up, but so did the aliens and pushing them effectively was hard because of the map's size. You were failing a push on a harvester, you'd have to run for a long time to get another shot at it. PLus rotations were kind of funky back then. Now it's much better.

    For me, balanced maps for both sides make up from more interesting gameplay and games overall.
  • FrozenFrozen New York, NY Join Date: 2010-07-02 Member: 72228Members, Constellation
    If there was more ways to force 2-round matches for maps then strategies would develop that would make the maps fun because of the nature of one team being down. It's why I loved playing caged so much. It was serious marine struggle to hold back res, while trying to get shipping and purification. Pretty unique
  • MauvaisVitrierMauvaisVitrier France Join Date: 2014-04-10 Member: 195291Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond
    I'm talking about comp pcws, gathers and matches where you have the two sides played everytime.

    What you are saying sounds boring to me, honestly. Fighting map balance shouldn't be a thing. Fighting a slight imbalance towards one of the sides can make things interesting. At the time, caged wasn't interesting. It is more now, though still flawed.
  • BacillusBacillus Join Date: 2006-11-02 Member: 58241Members
    matso wrote: »
    That said, the Spark engine actually does a lot of really cool stuff that I suspect other engines don't.
    Out of curiousity, can you give some examples of this?

    I'm working on a few small things in Unity and it's always interesting to have some insight on where and how various other engines differ.
  • lwflwf Join Date: 2006-11-03 Member: 58311Members, Constellation
    matso wrote: »
    Also, the engine code (C++) is very high quality and rather enjoyable to work with .
    Now you're just teasing. :p
  • _Grendel__Grendel_ Join Date: 2015-05-07 Member: 204238Members
    I sincerely hope that the patch will bring the player number back up and with it new (or old) modders. I'd love to see some new content besides maps in ns2 (not that maps aren't awesome, they are!). A little of topic, but Maybe FLG and the CDT/UWE could do some sort of cooperative development? Would be cool to see what they might come up with :)
  • NordicNordic Long term camping in Kodiak Join Date: 2012-05-13 Member: 151995Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
    _Grendel_ wrote: »
    I sincerely hope that the patch will bring the player number back up
    The next patch might, but I would not expect it to be the silver bullet. The next series of patches as they come out will hopefully do more.

  • ArchieArchie Antarctica Join Date: 2006-09-19 Member: 58028Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter
    Consistency checking happened, the strict default settings killed any chance of a mod scene growing.

    I don't actually think this is an issue at all, the problem is there is not enough content in the form of models, sound packs, etc, new "mods" consistency is an easy fix for any server operator, or anyone willing to test there mods.

    And then the problem stems from having tools which no longer work with current versions of latest software, or tools which don't have current guides or guides that work very well with latest versions of NS2, that and importing your own models with rigging/bones is a piece of shit.

    Need, video/text guide on updated

    Model importing from 3ds/maya/blender etc, both dynamic and static
    static props etc^
    Sound importing/extracting (i'm working on it kindof, i'll probably get bored of it in the next 2 days)
    how to import or create new textures

    The rest of the stuff like using .lua to create new mods, can be added later(there are guides out there, but they require many hack and fuck around fixes)

    I mean now i know how to import models, textures, sounds etc but i cannot create new models/groups.

    i cannot create the .lua files needed for those models, like for instance i was converting NS1 to NS2, i thought it'd be pretty simple but i could not for the life of me get say a resource extractor to function properly or properly animate even though i had converted to a spark enabled format, like i had 2 phase-gates from NS1, one static and one dynamic, imported into NS2 it just acted like a prop, rather annoying, didn't give me any popups to use the different model, and it was working in 3ds etc. The other issues are converting from NS1 and the model source files not containing all the needed data.
  • Soul_RiderSoul_Rider Mod Bean Join Date: 2004-06-19 Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
    From my side, I've moved on from modding because I want to make games everyone can play, which obviously is not possible with a mod.

    From my own perspective, I must say Unity is incredibly easy to use, and certainly the clincher is the easy asset importation, which is one of the things that really stunted the modelling options.

    I loved my time modding NS2, but having way too much fun learning to make games from scratch :D
  • xDragonxDragon Join Date: 2012-04-04 Member: 149948Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow
    I suspect that more patches will actually drive more modders away... if there really are many left tbh.  While its understandable to have to update things when low level changes are made, unless you make an entire 'mod' from scratch within NS2, most likely every single patch requires some additional work.  Good practices and certain design strategies can reduce that, but there are limits to that.  As more and more things get changed, and reading up on some of the discussed changes forthcoming in trello, it sounds to me that most existing mods out there will get completely broken at some point in the (near-ish) future.

    There are also the countless mod related bugs and annoyances that realllly kill enthusiasm.
  • matsomatso Master of Patches Join Date: 2002-11-05 Member: 7000Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Shadow, NS2 Community Developer
    Yea, that's what I meant when I said "great version control". You need to be able to evolve NS2 while still allowing people to run mods on old versions of the game. Not easily done though; you would basically have to keep stable snapshots of complete NS2 builds around.

    Nothing impossible with it technically - you just need to have the time, money and people.

  • xDragonxDragon Join Date: 2012-04-04 Member: 149948Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow
    edited June 2015
    I don't even think it necessarily comes down to having great version control, especially when there is essentially none currently.  Much of what I noticed as the problems were not really from NS2 gameplay logic changes, those are expected especially while the game evolves.  Most of the problems were the underlying systems - Sound, Collision, Movement, Models/Animations etc which in many other engines would be considered low level, but in NS2 are almost 'high level' since there is a fair bit of code for each in lua.  Many changes at this level were done without any regards to the previous iteration, and often times cause a fair amount of rework for mods that really didnt have much/any shared NS2 code.

    What would make some things much easier IMO would have been a more expanded set of 'core' libs in lua, which were more carefully documented when changes were made.  This all relates to lua mods, models and other modifications are a completely different ballgame.
  • _Grendel__Grendel_ Join Date: 2015-05-07 Member: 204238Members
    So it seems there are a number of reasons why the modding scene dried up; one of the biggest being the lower player count and lack of proper documentation on modding. I've seen a few how-to's sticky-d on the modding forum, but nothing seems 100% complete. Maybe someone from cdt or a few knowledgeable community members could stitch a full guide together? I really want to take a stab at getting something (anything) into the game :)
  • corundcorund Siberia Join Date: 2015-04-13 Member: 203372Members
    I wanted to make single player mod but i realized that there is no documentation or tutorials on lua scripts. I spent 2 weeks investigating source code, asking for help on forums (thanks for help!) and i only wrote 10 lines of code. I understood that i will never finish project in reasonable time without documentation and i abandoned my mod.
  • Soul_RiderSoul_Rider Mod Bean Join Date: 2004-06-19 Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
    It's all about skill and scope.

    If you are new to modding and development, make small mods, mods that don't take much more than 10 lines of code.  Make many of them, expand each time.  

    Trying to turn a multi-player game into a single-player game is a massive undertaking, way beyond the scope of a beginning modder.

    GorgeCraft, which on the face of it is a relatively simple single-player mod took around 3 years to make, and i made many small mods before that:

    Gorge Farting Bile Bomb
    Fire-Breathing Lerks

    are two I can think of on the spot.  The code in NS2 is typed using LongName schemes which means the functions and the variables do a really good job of telling you what is happening in the code.

    Don't become dis-interested in modding as a beginner because you can't make the next half-life game in a week, instead set your goals and targets much smaller and progress as you go.

    If you have a lot of programming experience already, the code is very simple to understand, so I am assuming you don't have too much coding experience.

    Learn to manage your expectations first, then you'll be amazed at how quickly you pick things up.  Everthing is always a struggle when you start it.

    Keep going and don't give up!! :D
  • sotanahtsotanaht Join Date: 2013-01-12 Member: 179215Members
    mattji104 said:
    Kalopsia wrote: »
    I've put development for ns2_nothing on hold for two main reasons:

    - Player numbers
    - Server map rotations mainly focus on official maps

    People only want to play highly tested and balance maps (which is fair enough), so custom maps hardly get played. In saying that, it's a double edged sword because you need players to identify changes in your map, but people only want to play the highly tested/balanced maps.

    If only we had the custom map community like we had back in the NS1 days.

    I'll forever stand by the fact that every map is automatically balanced for a 2 round match. Too bad that it's not a compelling argument and doesn't make people prefer variety and flavor.

    I fucking hate Dunkin' Donuts... But it is... consistent... I suppose
    "Balanced" in terms of each team having an equal chance of winning the match, but that's not all that balance is.  If the map is 100% one-sided, than every 2 round match ends in a draw, which is no good for anyone.  You can also have maps which favor particular strategies that make the game unfun and uninteresting: rushes, total lockdowns, unstoppable arcs etc.  Even if the map is a perfect 50/50 marine/alien winrate, that still doesn't mean the map is any good.

    Main problem with custom maps though is the learning curve.  When someone plays a map for the first time, they suck.  When a significant chunk of the players are first-timers, the match sucks, much like playing with a bunch of rookies.  Custom maps aren't played often enough for many players to get over that initial learning curve and actually play the map decently, so every match played on them in pubs pretty much always sucks because a good chunk of the players don't know what they are doing.  Even if you personally put in the effort to learn all the custom maps inside and out, that doesn't mean anyone else will, so the games played on those maps will still suck, so why put in all that effort?  Why bother even playing on the maps if you know the games are going to suck because everyone else doesn't play them either?
  • MauvaisVitrierMauvaisVitrier France Join Date: 2014-04-10 Member: 195291Members, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond
    Funny enough, in CSGO it's the competitive scene that kind of tests new maps. In the last few tournaments (sponsored by Valve) they even imposed a "new map" : Train.
    After Overpass and Cobblestone were redesigned to fit competitive needs (interesting, a fair number of strategies possible, "fairness", etc), Train got under a huge redesign and is now being played in tournaments and leagues. Wether you like it or not, you have to play it, and I wouldn't be surprised if the map doesn't get fixes soon enough. Having a pretty important and public competitive scene, pubbers now play Train much more often in Match Making.
    Other maps (the ones that come out with the Operations (like Breakout, Vanguard)) are fit to a 5v5 comp-like format but supposedly flawed and not interesting enough to be played on a pro level. However, the trend/the discovery/the changes to maps are closely linked to the comp scene. And there is a reason why maps are played by comp players, it's because they're good and balanced and make playing the game challeging and fun whatever side you're on.

    NS2 is a different game, yeah we all acknoledged that, but if the NS2 competitive scene was more important and known to every ns2 player out there, maybe changes could have been brought by them. New maps, new trends, new ways of playing the game  (you learn a lot from watching 'pros' playing, and you also learn to like new maps that the 'pros' play, psychologic reasonning). Hell, that's how I learned to like Jambi in the first place.

    I don't know what the CDT has in store. But I do hope there is something in the likes of promoting league com-play, comp style format (for pubs = something like a ensl gather but ingame) and casual play (more than 6v6, possibly 8v8). Dropping new maps into the game like that, and making a clear cut between maps being played in comp and maps being played in pubs isn't the way to go.
    I don't even think people know nexus and mineral were played in the ensl season 6, and I don't even know if people do know about ENSL or comp for that matter.

    So yeah @sotanaht, high learning curve onto new custom maps, but because there is no easing into it. I remember the first time I played official maps I got lost in Tram and SUmmit, hated Refinery from the get go (Lava Falls) and learnt to hate DOcking and Generators spawn because Stability and Maintenance naturals are completely retarded.

  • _Grendel__Grendel_ Join Date: 2015-05-07 Member: 204238Members
    edited June 2015
    @Soul_Rider Even starting with a small mod, there isn't anything close to adequate documentation on where to even start. I think if CDT were able to produce such a guide, it might open the door to a lot of beginner modders (possibly myself), which in turn might produce some cool new content, which just might lead to a few new players.

    *EDIT

    If the CDT doesn't have the time to write one, maybe the guys over at FLG could help (assuming combat is similar enough to ns2). They seem to be able to get stuff into the game easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjKqkKOIfM

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