I am just a bit worry... Maybe all these plugins will ruin NS.
I am from France and there is a NS server called "NS-FC" on 3.1 which is a really fun server (at least, that's what they want we to believe <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" /> ), but this server isn't funny because there are too many plugins. For example, you can put chambers on walls, you can walk on web, you have a hook as gorge, etc... This is really funny... 5 minutes <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" />
I think you have to keep the "real NS", as you imagine it. If people want to change the game, they have just to become a "Flayra Jr." and create their own game <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
<!--quoteo(post=1608262:date=Feb 21 2007, 05:17 AM:name=Sheepe)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sheepe @ Feb 21 2007, 05:17 AM) [snapback]1608262[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Extra levels was fun when they only added 2 levels... <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes... I think the best is to have 15 levels max. But the worst is not the extra levels, but the xmenu upgrades, because it gives a real advantage to aliens, or to marines if they are winning, and if Uranium only costs 1 point. I just love LMG with uranium level max <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
<!--quoteo(post=1608193:date=Feb 21 2007, 12:24 AM:name=SpaceJesus)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SpaceJesus @ Feb 21 2007, 12:24 AM) [snapback]1608193[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You seem to be forgetting that a lot of what voogru did (as an example) was really, really bad. mp_blockscripts anyone?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> I can't believe you people are still going on about this. Blockscripts was not voogru's idea, it was a broken feature and voog was assigned to fix it. Also, 404 was talking about the voogru server-side mods that happened before he joined the team.
<!--quoteo(post=1608193:date=Feb 21 2007, 12:24 AM:name=SpaceJesus)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SpaceJesus @ Feb 21 2007, 12:24 AM) [snapback]1608193[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Seriously, modifying the gameplay is what, in my opinion, killed ns1 (co, extralevels, siege maps). Please don't make the mistake of encouraging the same behaviour from your players.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> And the second red herring. NS is five years old, and still, you are posting on its message board. I'd argue that this is a good indication of just how much the whole thing has died. Sure the player numbers are down. It's a HL1 mod, folks. Sure the servers are modded. It's a multiplayer game. What did you expect?
<!--quoteo(post=1608179:date=Feb 20 2007, 11:04 PM:name=404NotFound)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(404NotFound @ Feb 20 2007, 11:04 PM) [snapback]1608179[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'd say that the idea in the blog is less about "prosumerism" and more about lowering the knowhow needed to be a "pro."<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Enabling consumers to produce content is actually pretty much the definition of Prosumerism <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink-fix.gif" />
<!--quoteo(post=1608179:date=Feb 20 2007, 11:04 PM:name=404NotFound)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(404NotFound @ Feb 20 2007, 11:04 PM) [snapback]1608179[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> What's the difference between this and NS as it currently stands? Why should in depth coding knowledge be some weeding-out process to make a mod for NS?
I'll bet that for every voogru of the world that has good gameplay ideas and coding skills there's 10 people who have good gameplay ideas. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Modding a game just by changing a text file is a lot easier than whatever they do now. This means that there will be a lot MORE of the mods, most not very big or balanced(since everyone has their own idea of what is balanced). And what do you mean, good gameplay ideas? I haven't seen any since the medpack armory, and even that was meh since you had to pay for the healing.
<!--quoteo(post=1608341:date=Feb 21 2007, 09:49 AM:name=Nemesis_Zero)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Nemesis_Zero @ Feb 21 2007, 09:49 AM) [snapback]1608341[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I can't believe you people are still going on about this. Blockscripts was not voogru's idea, it was a broken feature and voog was assigned to fix it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't recall claiming that it <i>was</i> his idea.
As for your second point .... you don't play public NS do you? If you did you'd probably understand the situation better. Over 80% of the public servers are totally empty - all the time. Perhaps 15% are 50-level combat servers with massive amounts of plugins, and the remaining 5% of servers are on siege map rotations (which incidentally usually have combat extralevels).
Finding a good public server nowadays is virtually impossible, the only servers that are really worth playing on anymore are YO Clan whos admins will ban you if you say anything bad about anyone, and TacticalGamer who will ban you if you "don't communicate".
Seriously, the situation really isn't as good as you'd all like to believe.
Sarisel.::' ( O ) ';:-. .-.:;' ( O ) '::.Join Date: 2003-07-30Member: 18557Members, Constellation
Leave NS to its senility and talk about NS2.
There is no reason to hate modification because it attracts the players that enjoy the particular modifications instead of driving them away from a game mode that they no longer find to be fun.
If easy modification is allowed, it won't hamper the success of the game. People will play what they want. If there is some desire to promote a pure form of NS2, then there just need to be incentives for playing as opposed to modifying it. Make the pure form more popular than the mods, if this is really desired.
How do you do this? Support and promote the competitive scene that operates on the pure mode of NS2. Create some kind of stat system or global uplink that makes official servers more interesting and immersive.
schkorpioI can mspaintJoin Date: 2003-05-23Member: 16635Members
<!--quoteo(post=1608212:date=Feb 21 2007, 10:25 AM:name=6john)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(6john @ Feb 21 2007, 10:25 AM) [snapback]1608212[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> the problem with making it so almost anyone can modify the game is that there will be so much crap to wade through to get to the good plugins that a lot of people will leave. i think its true that being modded killed ns1 because it created all these outlets for people who play 30 minutes a month to come in and play their 30 minutes, but on the other hand they are all playing these modded versions of the mod and theres not enough people in the vanilla games because no one is playing the versions that keep people around for hours, or days even. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i dont think that its a problem, all of those servers are clearly labelled to say that they are modded - and why not start a POPULAR NS MODS page on this official site as a guide to players wanting to try something new. If anything these mods have given the game a longer lifespan
Charlie and Max I think your idea is visionary. Everything about this idea is in essence Natural Selection. The Strong ideas will survive.
I understand peoples concerns about community fragmentation but modding is the way of the modden day computer game. NS1 wouldnt be a outstanding mod of Half Life if it was'nt. Denying gamers the oppotunity to mod their favorites games is longevity suicide. Embracing modding is visionary.
How many of you have shelved a game(s) because it had no more to offer, I bet you all have on many titles good and bad.
Charlie and Max are looking to the future of NS2 not just the inital release. They bought us a top grade game once. Trust them too do it again.
The point that a lot of people seem to be missing here is the longevity of a retail game that is modded, with accessible, and easily distinguishable versions.
I bring your blinkered eyes to the attention of Warcraft 3. A game which , despite being 5 years old now, is still going strong, with a stable playerbase going, on the Telia-owned Northrend Europe realm. If you look into the player bases, then you will see two distinct, and mutually exclusive, groups, and one group of floaters. You get the classic WC3 players, who will never, ever, click on the "Custom Game" button. Then you get the "Customs" who will never, ever click on the classic game button. Then you get the floaters, who are just playing whatever they fancy.
Me? I'm a custom kind of guy. I have never been able to get the hang of Warcraft against another person. I prefer the tower defence kind of games, where you stop enemies getting to a certain area, by killing them with nothing but static defences...
What I'm trying to get at, is that the lifespan of a retail game is determined only partially by it's initial sucesses, but mainly by the extent that the community remains interested in it. People are still mapping for Warcraft 3, despite many people moving on to other games. The LUA scripting that will give NS2 a breath of life is a godsend, seeing as how Charlie has explained about the core of the game remaining uneditable...
<!--quoteo(post=1608409:date=Feb 21 2007, 10:48 PM:name=Sarisel)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sarisel @ Feb 21 2007, 10:48 PM) [snapback]1608409[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> How do you do this? Support and promote the competitive scene that operates on the pure mode of NS2. Create some kind of stat system or global uplink that makes official servers more interesting and immersive. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think that is a very, very good way of encouraging people to stick with NS core. At the same time it would need to be structured in a way that promotes teamwork blah blah blah, all those good things. I know a lot of people who refuse to play BF2 mods, purely because they want to get "X medal". Personally I think that's insane, but it seems other people don't.
Maybe just some kind of awards / achievements rather than stats.
It would be easy enough to just ignore them completely, although it probably wouldn't be worth all the effort of weeding out the stat padders. Plus the recognition might motivate more people to cheat, so maybe not the best plan ever.
Yes, global stats don't tend to work well in FPS games. I remember when QuakeWorld first came out with global stats.
It was a fun idea, but didn't work. People set up maps with just them and a friend who would stand their getting shot repeatedly.
I'm sure that there are workarounds to this, but people will always find ways to abuse it. I think that the best way to work it would be to only have stats on trusted servers (perhaps hosted by UW). This way, they could be more easily monitored for such abuse.
I imagine that UW would rather avoid a hassle like this, though.
I know I'm late to this topic, but just wanted to add my 2 cents...
Overall, I think what should be most important should be to establish an <b>identity</b> before allowing users the ability to change the game in any way shape or form. There have been (and will continue to be) issues where the vision of the developer(s) don't mesh with the desires of a portion of the user base. There have been many debates on this, and then there were mods that 'over-ruled' the developer intent.
When one is trying to extend the sheft life of a title, that's all fine and good, but I think much can be said for providing a common experience. If a particular mod becomes so popular that nearly every server runs it, then the developer faces the problem that they are no longer 'developing' the game.
While I don't oppose adding in the functionality to enable these kinds of mods, I do think that the functionality should not be made available for at least 6 months after release. The game should be given the chance to get its footing and be adjusted. People with ideas for the game should be encouraged to share those ideas here in the forum, so that good ideas can be implemented into the game, instead of ending up with a pile of 'mandatory mods' that servers must run.
However, there should be a clear line drawn between mods that influence the concept of the game, and mods that influence the experience of an individual playing a game. I've very much in support of mods that allow a player to 'tweak' their interface to allow for maximum enjoyment. These 'client sides' mods can be very popular, so long as they don't give any one player an inherant advantage.
Go ahead and build the functionality into NS2, but don't allow it to be used on public servers until after you are happy with where the game is.
Allowing anyone to mod the game easily will fragment the community. By differentiating between "base" game and "custom" game servers, it helps players that want to play the base game find each other, but it doesn't change the fact that once a single change to the base game gets made and becomes popular, any players that like it are browsing custom servers. Once you get there, there is no practical way to represent how "modded" the game is, or notify players of huge balance changes. The closest you could get is which lua files have been modded - which is moderately useful to people that know what to look for and useless to everyone else.
On the other hand, look at how heavily modified the game is now. Look at other popular mods built on the HL1/Source engines. To some degree, fragmentation of gameplay is unavoidable. Lua doesn't change the fact that people already mod the game in "broken" ways, it just lowers the skill of entry. You may want to pretend that the people who know how to mod the game now have a better idea of balance than the people that would mod Lua, but by and large, I'd bet the difference is fairly small. Yes, that means there will be more servers with drastically unbalanced gameplay elements, such as LMGs that do 100x damage, or skulks that can melt through walls and have a billion HP - these will be the ones that people don't play on, because the imbalance isn't compelling.
The advantage of Lua isn't just player side, it's also developer side, and on some level, that reason alone is almost worth it.
As a final note, the analogy between custom and WC3 is a false one. Many of the popular gameplay styles in WC3 custom date back to Starcraft and possibly before. They are gameplay styles that are not emergent in the WC3 engine, but have a following that has moved into the WC3 engine. More importantly, the rulesets that make those game styles are built into the map - imaging turret defense, or an RPG map on one of the base WC3 maps. These game styles are dependent on the map, and map development for FPS's has more of a learning curve than RTS's. Probably what we will see with NS2 is that many of the popular mods will continue to be popular, and any emergant gameplay types will be few and far between.
Probably the most important thing when developing NS2 is making sure that the base game serves the population of plays sufficently that they do not feel the need to slip into the morass of custom games.
<!--quoteo(post=1612681:date=Mar 8 2007, 05:24 PM:name=Akfeka)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Akfeka @ Mar 8 2007, 05:24 PM) [snapback]1612681[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You may want to pretend that the people who know how to mod the game now have a better idea of balance than the people that would mod Lua, but by and large, I'd bet the difference is fairly small.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> I'd argue that the other way. People who are good at design will make the best mods, but people who are good at design are not necessarily the best programmers. If our scripting interface makes modding easier than the traditional techniques (which is probably true), then it means modding will be more open to good designers. The overall quality of mods will also be higher because the developer is insulated from a lot of the complex stuff especially the interfacing with the Source engine (not to mention that you can't crash the game or leak memory from Lua).
<!--quoteo(post=1608310:date=Feb 21 2007, 05:58 AM:name=Porcepic)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Porcepic @ Feb 21 2007, 05:58 AM) [snapback]1608310[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Yes... I think the best is to have 15 levels max. But the worst is not the extra levels, but the xmenu upgrades, because it gives a real advantage to aliens, or to marines if they are winning, and if Uranium only costs 1 point. I just love LMG with uranium level max <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" /> <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Try xmenu on my server sometime, I've actually taken the time to balance it and disabled some of the problematic marine upgrades. The biggest tip is to make gestate eggs a lot stronger and give acidic vengance and SoA a slight boost while removing cybernetics.
I'm not too sure of how LUA works, but I imagine we will be limited to implementing features that the devs have setup for use in LUA.
I'm am undecided how well that will work. A lot of the plugins I created in the past I had to stop half way and say to sawce, hey can you add this feature to the ns module as I need it for this plugin to work? He'd usually do it within minutes or at the latest a few days. Then the plugin could be released with links to the latest ns module.
I suspect that fast turn around of additions we request might not be possible, and if it gets to the stage where it stalls so badly we can't stand it anymore, then I think we'll be back at the stage where one of us will just hack it ourselves and implement our own scripting language.
So in effect you will have to compete against the alternative options out there. If you can keep updating it every release there shouldn't be a problem.
on combat servers, Lerk lift add's a terrific dimension to the game. It's a big moral booster when a Lerk lifts eggs out of danger, teamates will thank you over and over again. terrific add-on.
Lerk Lift can be fun (as long as Onos lifting is disabled), especially on freefall maps where lerks pickup and drop rines off the edge and JPers kidnap gorges healing the hive. Sure its buggy and I wouldn't want it on all (or even most) servers but it provides an amusing change every once in a while. That's what most mods are good for.
<!--quoteo(post=1622083:date=Apr 20 2007, 07:01 AM:name=werk)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(werk @ Apr 20 2007, 07:01 AM) [snapback]1622083[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> on combat servers, Lerk lift add's a terrific dimension to the game. It's a big moral booster when a Lerk lifts eggs out of danger, teamates will thank you over and over again. terrific add-on. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What does this have to do with anything! hehe
I think you guys should listen carefully to what Cheesy's saying.
Comments
I am from France and there is a NS server called "NS-FC" on 3.1 which is a really fun server (at least, that's what they want we to believe <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" /> ), but this server isn't funny because there are too many plugins. For example, you can put chambers on walls, you can walk on web, you have a hook as gorge, etc... This is really funny... 5 minutes <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" />
I think you have to keep the "real NS", as you imagine it. If people want to change the game, they have just to become a "Flayra Jr." and create their own game <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
<!--quoteo(post=1608262:date=Feb 21 2007, 05:17 AM:name=Sheepe)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sheepe @ Feb 21 2007, 05:17 AM) [snapback]1608262[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Extra levels was fun when they only added 2 levels...
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes... I think the best is to have 15 levels max. But the worst is not the extra levels, but the xmenu upgrades, because it gives a real advantage to aliens, or to marines if they are winning, and if Uranium only costs 1 point. I just love LMG with uranium level max <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
I can't believe you people are still going on about this. Blockscripts was not voogru's idea, it was a broken feature and voog was assigned to fix it. Also, 404 was talking about the voogru server-side mods that happened before he joined the team.
<!--quoteo(post=1608193:date=Feb 21 2007, 12:24 AM:name=SpaceJesus)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SpaceJesus @ Feb 21 2007, 12:24 AM) [snapback]1608193[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Seriously, modifying the gameplay is what, in my opinion, killed ns1 (co, extralevels, siege maps). Please don't make the mistake of encouraging the same behaviour from your players.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And the second red herring. NS is five years old, and still, you are posting on its message board. I'd argue that this is a good indication of just how much the whole thing has died. Sure the player numbers are down. It's a HL1 mod, folks. Sure the servers are modded. It's a multiplayer game. What did you expect?
<!--quoteo(post=1608179:date=Feb 20 2007, 11:04 PM:name=404NotFound)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(404NotFound @ Feb 20 2007, 11:04 PM) [snapback]1608179[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'd say that the idea in the blog is less about "prosumerism" and more about lowering the knowhow needed to be a "pro."<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Enabling consumers to produce content is actually pretty much the definition of Prosumerism <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink-fix.gif" />
What's the difference between this and NS as it currently stands? Why should in depth coding knowledge be some weeding-out process to make a mod for NS?
I'll bet that for every voogru of the world that has good gameplay ideas and coding skills there's 10 people who have good gameplay ideas.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Modding a game just by changing a text file is a lot easier than whatever they do now. This means that there will be a lot MORE of the mods, most not very big or balanced(since everyone has their own idea of what is balanced).
And what do you mean, good gameplay ideas? I haven't seen any since the medpack armory, and even that was meh since you had to pay for the healing.
I don't recall claiming that it <i>was</i> his idea.
As for your second point .... you don't play public NS do you? If you did you'd probably understand the situation better. Over 80% of the public servers are totally empty - all the time. Perhaps 15% are 50-level combat servers with massive amounts of plugins, and the remaining 5% of servers are on siege map rotations (which incidentally usually have combat extralevels).
Finding a good public server nowadays is virtually impossible, the only servers that are really worth playing on anymore are YO Clan whos admins will ban you if you say anything bad about anyone, and TacticalGamer who will ban you if you "don't communicate".
Seriously, the situation really isn't as good as you'd all like to believe.
There is no reason to hate modification because it attracts the players that enjoy the particular modifications instead of driving them away from a game mode that they no longer find to be fun.
If easy modification is allowed, it won't hamper the success of the game. People will play what they want. If there is some desire to promote a pure form of NS2, then there just need to be incentives for playing as opposed to modifying it. Make the pure form more popular than the mods, if this is really desired.
How do you do this? Support and promote the competitive scene that operates on the pure mode of NS2. Create some kind of stat system or global uplink that makes official servers more interesting and immersive.
the problem with making it so almost anyone can modify the game is that there will be so much crap to wade through to get to the good plugins that a lot of people will leave. i think its true that being modded killed ns1 because it created all these outlets for people who play 30 minutes a month to come in and play their 30 minutes, but on the other hand they are all playing these modded versions of the mod and theres not enough people in the vanilla games because no one is playing the versions that keep people around for hours, or days even.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i dont think that its a problem, all of those servers are clearly labelled to say that they are modded - and why not start a POPULAR NS MODS page on this official site as a guide to players wanting to try something new. If anything these mods have given the game a longer lifespan
Everything about this idea is in essence Natural Selection. The Strong ideas will survive.
I understand peoples concerns about community fragmentation but modding is the way of the modden day computer game. NS1 wouldnt be a outstanding mod of Half Life if it was'nt. Denying gamers the oppotunity to mod their favorites games is longevity suicide. Embracing modding is visionary.
How many of you have shelved a game(s) because it had no more to offer, I bet you all have on many titles good and bad.
Charlie and Max are looking to the future of NS2 not just the inital release.
They bought us a top grade game once. Trust them too do it again.
I bring your blinkered eyes to the attention of Warcraft 3. A game which , despite being 5 years old now, is still going strong, with a stable playerbase going, on the Telia-owned Northrend Europe realm. If you look into the player bases, then you will see two distinct, and mutually exclusive, groups, and one group of floaters. You get the classic WC3 players, who will never, ever, click on the "Custom Game" button. Then you get the "Customs" who will never, ever click on the classic game button. Then you get the floaters, who are just playing whatever they fancy.
Me? I'm a custom kind of guy. I have never been able to get the hang of Warcraft against another person. I prefer the tower defence kind of games, where you stop enemies getting to a certain area, by killing them with nothing but static defences...
What I'm trying to get at, is that the lifespan of a retail game is determined only partially by it's initial sucesses, but mainly by the extent that the community remains interested in it. People are still mapping for Warcraft 3, despite many people moving on to other games.
The LUA scripting that will give NS2 a breath of life is a godsend, seeing as how Charlie has explained about the core of the game remaining uneditable...
How do you do this? Support and promote the competitive scene that operates on the pure mode of NS2. Create some kind of stat system or global uplink that makes official servers more interesting and immersive.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think that is a very, very good way of encouraging people to stick with NS core. At the same time it would need to be structured in a way that promotes teamwork blah blah blah, all those good things. I know a lot of people who refuse to play BF2 mods, purely because they want to get "X medal". Personally I think that's insane, but it seems other people don't.
Maybe just some kind of awards / achievements rather than stats.
It was a fun idea, but didn't work. People set up maps with just them and a friend who would stand their getting shot repeatedly.
I'm sure that there are workarounds to this, but people will always find ways to abuse it. I think that the best way to work it would be to only have stats on trusted servers (perhaps hosted by UW). This way, they could be more easily monitored for such abuse.
I imagine that UW would rather avoid a hassle like this, though.
Overall, I think what should be most important should be to establish an <b>identity</b> before allowing users the ability to change the game in any way shape or form. There have been (and will continue to be) issues where the vision of the developer(s) don't mesh with the desires of a portion of the user base. There have been many debates on this, and then there were mods that 'over-ruled' the developer intent.
When one is trying to extend the sheft life of a title, that's all fine and good, but I think much can be said for providing a common experience. If a particular mod becomes so popular that nearly every server runs it, then the developer faces the problem that they are no longer 'developing' the game.
While I don't oppose adding in the functionality to enable these kinds of mods, I do think that the functionality should not be made available for at least 6 months after release. The game should be given the chance to get its footing and be adjusted. People with ideas for the game should be encouraged to share those ideas here in the forum, so that good ideas can be implemented into the game, instead of ending up with a pile of 'mandatory mods' that servers must run.
However, there should be a clear line drawn between mods that influence the concept of the game, and mods that influence the experience of an individual playing a game. I've very much in support of mods that allow a player to 'tweak' their interface to allow for maximum enjoyment. These 'client sides' mods can be very popular, so long as they don't give any one player an inherant advantage.
Go ahead and build the functionality into NS2, but don't allow it to be used on public servers until after you are happy with where the game is.
Regards,
Savant
On the other hand, look at how heavily modified the game is now. Look at other popular mods built on the HL1/Source engines. To some degree, fragmentation of gameplay is unavoidable. Lua doesn't change the fact that people already mod the game in "broken" ways, it just lowers the skill of entry. You may want to pretend that the people who know how to mod the game now have a better idea of balance than the people that would mod Lua, but by and large, I'd bet the difference is fairly small. Yes, that means there will be more servers with drastically unbalanced gameplay elements, such as LMGs that do 100x damage, or skulks that can melt through walls and have a billion HP - these will be the ones that people don't play on, because the imbalance isn't compelling.
The advantage of Lua isn't just player side, it's also developer side, and on some level, that reason alone is almost worth it.
As a final note, the analogy between custom and WC3 is a false one. Many of the popular gameplay styles in WC3 custom date back to Starcraft and possibly before. They are gameplay styles that are not emergent in the WC3 engine, but have a following that has moved into the WC3 engine. More importantly, the rulesets that make those game styles are built into the map - imaging turret defense, or an RPG map on one of the base WC3 maps. These game styles are dependent on the map, and map development for FPS's has more of a learning curve than RTS's. Probably what we will see with NS2 is that many of the popular mods will continue to be popular, and any emergant gameplay types will be few and far between.
Probably the most important thing when developing NS2 is making sure that the base game serves the population of plays sufficently that they do not feel the need to slip into the morass of custom games.
I'd argue that the other way. People who are good at design will make the best mods, but people who are good at design are not necessarily the best programmers. If our scripting interface makes modding easier than the traditional techniques (which is probably true), then it means modding will be more open to good designers. The overall quality of mods will also be higher because the developer is insulated from a lot of the complex stuff especially the interfacing with the Source engine (not to mention that you can't crash the game or leak memory from Lua).
Max
Yes... I think the best is to have 15 levels max. But the worst is not the extra levels, but the xmenu upgrades, because it gives a real advantage to aliens, or to marines if they are winning, and if Uranium only costs 1 point. I just love LMG with uranium level max <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
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Try xmenu on my server sometime, I've actually taken the time to balance it and disabled some of the problematic marine upgrades. The biggest tip is to make gestate eggs a lot stronger and give acidic vengance and SoA a slight boost while removing cybernetics.
I'm am undecided how well that will work. A lot of the plugins I created in the past I had to stop half way and say to sawce, hey can you add this feature to the ns module as I need it for this plugin to work? He'd usually do it within minutes or at the latest a few days. Then the plugin could be released with links to the latest ns module.
I suspect that fast turn around of additions we request might not be possible, and if it gets to the stage where it stalls so badly we can't stand it anymore, then I think we'll be back at the stage where one of us will just hack it ourselves and implement our own scripting language.
So in effect you will have to compete against the alternative options out there. If you can keep updating it every release there shouldn't be a problem.
What does this have to do with anything! hehe
I think you guys should listen carefully to what Cheesy's saying.
looks pretty cool...is that a c++ glue function or script?