Hey, I was jus thinkin (as i do once or twice a day).

Wouldn't it be nice if some company went out to create a game that was made purely for modification?

What I mean is if someone went out and made an extremely good engine, but designed it from the ground up aroudn being open to modding. Built tools right in for easy modding (like non coder ppl could use pulldowns and the like to tweak options, models, easy map editors, that kind of thing) but you could go down the spectrum in difficulty to actual coding, using real modelling programs, using real mapping programs, etc. But it was all built into the game, handled in-house like.

To explain it a little better (and less rambly) i mean something like this. Say you're a modding noob. You can, instead of coding everything, enter some kind of attribute editor for the engine. Instead of tweaking code to mess with things like player speed, you'll use an interface to do it. You can go anywhere from point and drop map making (kinda like you see in rts games) to full scale, real map making programs. You can edit models with character builders like you see in popular games such as tiger woods or fight night (except of course with many more features, options, and character species), or you can use the built in tuts to learn how to really model. Same for everything, from noob game making to expert.

And, to make it even better, the netcode would be designed with all of this in mind. You could auto-download mods (server admins would of course set whether you could do this or not, and it would be auto-removed for larger sized mods). So, small ones that use purely the built in modification features could be downloaded much like custom maps in hl2. You would scroll down server lists, expanding tabs on each server's mod name to see what each one was, pick one you wanted, and test it out. No hassle or anything.

Course, no company would ever do this, cuz it'd take some crazy marketing campaign to draw ppl's attention to it. And it'd prolly need some popular mods behind it at launch to really sell well (they could really play on the 'many games for the price of one' thing in their commercials. While most fps games are like this, or a lot, ppl don't all really realize it, and if they had several mods at launch it'd really have a good chance of raking in the dough, cuz ppl can't resist a deal :lol: ). It'd be great though.

How would you make money off this, though? The average user would not want to pay more money then it costs to buy a normal game, and you would somehow have to ENSURE that quality 3rd party stuff would be made.

This is sorta like the system for using the Unreal Engine, but you have to pay a TON of money to get the rights to it.

Also like the Far Cry map maker, was one of their big selling points: "Look how easy it is to use! You can make a map in 2 min with no experience!" I havn't heard of any huge, breakout mod made with that, though...nothing to the level of DoD, CS, NS, etc.

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they -kindof- tried this with UT.
UT was designed to be easily moddable, and when moddable you could do a billion things with it. racing games, shooters, etc etc.

Then UT 200X took that to a whole new level, they sucseeded but, the only problem is that lots of people have a thing against downloading a mod because it takes time (like Jailbreak) which is the best gametype of ut200X, but noone plays it and plays crappy onslaught instead.

Sorry, turned into a rant... anyway UE3 is going to kick ass, both engine and modability wise. Sourceforts should be made for that as well!

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<RabidZombie> I'm hopefully going to see Hot Fuxx today
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<SwiftSpear> ...

they did

only they gave it an amazing single player game anyway and promised a sequel. then they calle dit half life 2

halflife and hl2 aren't anything near like what i'm saying. And valve isn't too reliable anyway. But they were built as games where you have the extra benefit of being able to do mods. Not as mod bases.

Oh, and they'd sell the same as any other game, ppl buy it

and yeah, i realize they'd have to guarantee a few good mods from the get-go. That's why i said they should contract a few beforehand.

i really like the idea of being able to make your own games and the like. but i think it would cause major finance problems. and it will boil down to like what happened with the playstaion and the n64.

sony allwoed developers of all types, regardless of reputation to make games for their console. nintendo was very selective with their dev's, therefore had more'quality' games. [debateable i know].

either way, you will more than likeley have maybe a handful of good mods, and a million and one pieces of crapoddle.

Hehe, I never had n64. All I know is that now they have a seemingly paralyzing fear of the third party. I bought a nintendo DS, for instance, mostly for the promise of a DS version of advance wars (cuz i hadn't heard of a strat game on psp). I WAS however expecting some other games. Lol, stupid me for having such high expectations. They're a few crappy ports planned, a few crappy ports already out, and then a few equally crappy looking original games coming out, mostly from nintendo. I know there are exceptions, but that's about the layout.

And playstation was extremely sucessful, so they must have done something right I mean, granted, they had a lot of shatty games, but at least there was pretty much every game you could possibly desire for the system.

Oh, and the whole idea is that ppl could make a lot of mini mods, or even medium sized mods, without screwing it up due to lack of experience. This way there should be a fairly large number of good mini-mods to play, and you can download them as you are loading the server b/c your game already has all of the options in its' directory. Then there would most certainly be a few very worthy total conversions made by the community, maybe more. If it was fairly sucessful, though, it would draw modders off of OTHER games as well (after all, why build a mod for some complicated engine when there is one there that's made SPECIFICALLY w/ modders in mind and has a large fanbase?) and you'd get a plethora of good mods.

Battlefield Vietnam...c'mon you guys can't seriously they made such a bad game to NOT be modded?