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Whats the easiest PC game to mod?
Reign90
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I want to be a game designer when I grow up so I thought about getting a game that's easy to mod. That way I can practice and see what I come up with. Does anyone know any good games that are good/easy to mod?
"If I be condemned to evil acts," he said, "there is still one door of freedom open: I can cease from action."
Madness is only the pinnacle of reason
Madness is only the pinnacle of reason
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Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
Pre-Generals Command & Conquer games also store game data in text files, and .shp files (that buildings, infantry, and map doodads are made of) are glorified sprites made in an editor somewhat like mspaint. Vehicle models are voxels, built literally block by block in another editor that the community made.
Jagged Alliance 2 has an active modding scene, with the engine source in varying stages of change (original source, latest mod release, etc) Complete with map and item editors.
Then there are you classic Half Life and Unreal Engine games which are generally quite easy to mod, due to extensive tools and documenting.
Also, when you say you want to mod games, are you thinking the unglamorous job of coding them or the flashy, mac using, thick rimmed glasses wearing job of graphic design? If the latter, you might want to start with modding a game that uses sprites. 2d makes things a bit easier to imagine. Then you should look into making new skins for existing games. If you've never looked at one before, a skin is just that. It's a 2d image file of the skin that wraps around the 3d model. Imagine an orange peel pressed flat or an undistorted map of the world in 2d. I've never tried making a new skin myself, but looking at existing ones, I'm sure some trial and error into how things look on a model is inevitable. Next you could...obtain...a 3d modeling program to make your own models and create skins for them. Beyond that, I'm not entirely sure what exactly goes on under the hood.
TF2 is popular and you can shoot some ideas around in the thread. Though you'll never become a "Game Designer", as that position is filled by the almighty focus group/sixty year old neckbeards nowadays.
You have to go through a lot of crap to get custom hl2 things running though. Models, textures, and a couple other things are very counter intuitive. I haven't used it for a couple years now so maybe they fixed all of that. But then again, valve isn't exactly quick to fix things.
TF2 mapping is prob your best bet if you want to get recognized as a mapmaker.
It would take like a day to get a map up and running using hammer and a tutorial.
Getting a map finished and optimized is going to be difficult no matter the game though. Especially if you use a lot of custom content.
My recommendation is try modding Clonk or gusanos, both will ultimately deal with programming without the hassle of booting up SDKs.
Neverwinter isn't a bad choice, but my personal choice is probably Clonk or Gusanos. Skip the 3d technicality and chew out something easy, like new weapons or maps.
Well, I'll at least try. Your sig is reason enough alone.
Madness is only the pinnacle of reason
NWN modding is nothing special, he wants a goddamn job in the industry, NWN will not do that for him.
If you want to get a job as a game designer, you need to be able to make games. It's as simple as that. So any existing easy-to-mod games won't do it for him. He'll need to learn to do all sorts of things. In the meantime, while he's still "growing up", he can start using map editors and scripting languages.
Madness is only the pinnacle of reason
Yeah, the guys who made Counterstrike and Portal definitely didn't get jobs at Valve.
Oh wait...
You also should consider buying Flash CS4 and making your own simple Flash games to get your feet wet.
EDIT: Plus valve has been packaging certain community maps with their official updates, while not exactly the same as working in the industry it'd still be nice to have on a resume if you're beginner (if you want to go the level design route)
But yeah, pick a direction; Coding, Art(concept,texture,models,levels (being able to do all of these well is ideal)) or Animation(good(read: above average) animators get paid well and hard hard to come by). Try and pick one and go with it.
OR you could save A LOT of money and download C# express and XNA game studio for FREE and learn to program fully featured DirectX games and learn some OO programing to boot.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
It's relatively easy to quickly build and test ideas in Flash, and extremely easy to distribute your games and get feedback online.
Object oriented programming is certainly important, but learning that is independent of whatever language he starts dabbling in. He really ought to take a few intro-to-programming courses to learn the fundamentals.
XNA is not limited... in any way. It's managed DirectX... the same DirectX that runs all your other Windows based PC games. It just has higher overhead do the the managed code.
And if this guy is just starting he doesn't need to worry about distribution.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
But it seems we mostly agree. Decide what kind of modding or rather what kind of work you want to do on a game. Games are much too big anymore for one person to create on their own, so try modding a few different games and parts of games to get a feel for what you like doing. For instance, I dabbled with 3d modeling and hated it. The amount of time spent perfecting something would make me puke. On the other hand, I don't really mind hunting down missing semi colons.
That's like learning to run before you learn to crawl. I don't think most people who have never programmed before should start off with anything more complex than "hello world".
The same way flash would require additional installs(if you lacked flash), or python(if you lacked python).. or java(if you lacked java) most major PC game releasesl ship with a DirectX redistributable they want you to install and even sometimes the latest C++ redistributable. It's just the nature of the beast when coding for PC.
If coding in XNA you would look for feedback within the XNA community (the people who most likely have the prereqs installed) just as if he were to write a mod for game "X" he would look for feedback among the community who has game "X" installed.
But this is a digression from the topic of this thread.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
He has quite a large post on how all his applications for jobs went. Though I suppose that he did just get lucky and most of the time people don't get jobs.
Steam // Secret Satan
print Hello World
Hello (name) how are you? is the new standard.
EDIT:Breakdown of Languages:
C; mostly used for hardware nowadays.
C++:The "real" programming language, used for most everything
Java:don't use this, ever.
Python:easy mode, used for anything that doesn't need to be done fast.
(DO NOT GET A FOR DUMMIES/ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS BOOK, with most programming languages the official documentation tells you more than those and is cheaper.)
I know Hello World is simple, and that's why it should be an introduction to programming for beginners. It shows people that programming isn't as inaccessible as they might think.
I really, really hate Java as well. I went from C++ to Java and it felt like everything was more difficult and altogether unintuitive in Java compared to C++. Transitioning from Basic to C++ wasn't nearly as awkward as transitioning from C++ to Java.
For learning how to program I would recommend these:
http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/
http://www.archive.org/details/MIT_Structure_of_Computer_Programs_1986
The best thing to use would probably depend on what exactly you're hoping to get out of it. Do you want to program, develop art or levels, build a world and story, or create a balanced and interesting system?
Whatever discipline you pick, take games like UT, Half Life, etc, easily moddable games, and find every program you can that lets you rip them apart.
If you want to learn how to model, find programs to decompile professional models used in games. Same for animation, same for texturing, mapping. Look at how they're built and what makes them game assets, rather than something used in a Pixar movie or whatever. Coding I don't know as much about, but I know you can look through a lot of the code for weapons etc in Source engine games.
Neverwinter Nights (or maybe the sequel) so that you can make full-fledged adventures and stuff. Hell, when BioWare was hiring last I think they insisted that you should them what you could do with their campaign editor.