Hey guys... we don't have time to fix the mod ourselves, we're too busy trying to add new content to the standalone game, but I have always promised that if people submit patches I will integrate and publish new versions of the old mod version of combat for you.
Is this open source? It uses a lot of code from NS2. It also has a lot of "Copyright (c) 2003-2011, Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved." Does this mean it's free to use in NS2 mods the same way the NS2 content is?
I tried to contact the developer one year ago without any success.
Due to the high number of changes, the ns2 combat mod is not usable and the pull request will not change that.
The mod was created by replacing entirely a lot of classic games files.
Because of that, it's now very hard to make it works again. (new mods rely more on hooks, which avoid a lot of problems when dealing with game updates)
The few developers that have the capabilities to redo the mod are not willing to do it, because they have the impression that they would steal the work of the creators.
I have to agree with Bof. Combat is no more. The mod is gone and the SA is dead. Why do people want to keep trying to revive it? Short of hell freezing over, I doubt combat will ever return, at least to ns2. It's sad, but that's life.
Instead of trying to revive a horse that's long decomposed, why not make a new mod? Scatter's assault mod (in my opinion) is a perfect replacement.
If you're talking about the steam mod, steam's workshop copyright rules are pretty straight forward. If you're talking about the stand alone, I'm not sure there was ever really a straight answer. I'd ask a uwe higher up or flg (if you can get a response).
But this brings me back to my first point: why bother with combat? It's wrapped up in so much red tape you'd get a new mod done far faster and easier then trying to poach stuff off the heavily broken combat mod.
Considering @GhoulofGSG9 worked on this and contributed code, maybe he can fill us in with the copyright situation.
First of all I'm not a lawyer so anything below could be incorrect. But I looked into this topic a few years ago and did a little research.
The Steam ToS mostly only covers Valves and their partners legally to be able to contribute and use user generated content. However that doesn't change anything in regards to who owns the copyright of the given content.
So far most modders have been using game code to generate new content under the aspect of Fair Use . Now i couldn't find any precedence law case which could be used to specify what Fair Use is in the context of game modding.
Also both publishers/developers as copyright owners and modders have avoided creating given precedence case by not bringing anything directly to court. Valve will take down any user created content as soon as anybody issues a legitimate DMCA claim.
In regards to NS2 this means the game code is under copyright of UWE. However because NS2 has been promoted for being moddable and UWE are rather friendly in regards to modding in general (as they have been modders as well in the past) you can assume it's okay to use the code in your non-commercial ns2 mod under the terms of Fair Use. Same has to be applied for using other modders code.
Of course it would be great if we could avoid these legal uncertainties by UWE issuing any kind of legal document that allows Modders to use their code for non-commercial ns2 mods. But creating such a document is rather troublesome in itself.
Best practice for modders would be to include licenses with their mods and avoid to use vanilla code as much as possible because to license your mod you will have to disclaim that usage.
Anyway back to Combat. Back then I contributed both to the combat mod and even more to the standalone. My contributions have been basically code donations because i wanted FLG to succeed with their dream of becoming a game studio.
But after the disastrous launch and due to how they were treated by large parts of the ns2 community mostly everybody of FLG has moved on miles away from anything to do with NS2.
So I doubt that Alex still visits this forum or watches the github repro. Your best chance to reach any of them is most likely via email.
To be honest the Combat code base is "ancient" at this point and hasn't been maintained for some time, so from my perspective you are better off starting new using the old mod code as guideline for the new mod's design.
Overall the main reason for me to bring back Combat are the combat maps. It's kinda sad to have all the creative work rotting in the workshop without anybody being able to use them.
But after the disastrous launch and due to how they were treated by large parts of the ns2 community mostly everybody of FLG has moved on miles away from anything to do with NS2.
It's painful to think back at that launch thing. Gisp mentioned some outright sabotage in the marketing campaign, like people ddosing, reporting as spam and people lying to get people not to buy it and shit.
I was one of the people that really didn't see the game succeeding from the start, and I couldn't recommend the game in good conscience. I wasn't going out of my way to tell people not to buy it of course. But I am still horrified at the actual sabotage tactics some assholes were using. I really didn't think humans could get so low. Nobody deserves what happened to flg.
What a damn shame. Big blow to the ns2 community. We lost so many great and amazing modders over the years.
It's funny, since then I've almost completely turned the other way around, advocating for legitimately dead games like Reflex Arena and Warsow, my two favourite games of all time, arguably beyond reason. Even though they share similar problems with NS2:Combat, like being a tiny niche in a saturated market.
Anyway, back on topic. Somebody get combat back! It was an instrumental tool for learning lifeforms back when I was starting out, new players are missing out on this!
[...]
Anyway, back on topic. Somebody get combat back! It was an instrumental tool for learning lifeforms back when I was starting out, new players are missing out on this!
Last Stand was kinda created for that purpose. A new combat mod will face the same issue any other game mode mod had so far: Getting people to play it. A large part of the current player base plays NS2 specifically for the vanilla game mode and to some degree despise anything else.
Combat IMHO was able to build up it's own player base after the NS2 launch mostly due to the NS1 veterans who enjoyed NS1 Combat more than the base game mode. But I guess those folks moved on a few years ago so you will have to build up a completely new player base for the Combat mode.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited September 2017
TBH, Last Stand, while neat, kinda lacks depth and it plays like a survival thriller. The main issues I find with it to use as a "teaching tool" are on the one hand it teaches nothing about territory/map control and it also teaches something very wrong for the aliens, basically saying they are a skulkrush suicide squad so to speak.
It's a bit too different from vanilla, while combat was more representative of it with territory control with maps at twice as big and that penalty for dying. So, apart from mods spawning super units with ultra upgrades and the different way structures work, combat was the slightly better "teaching tool"
Both are somewhat representative for movement teaching, I guess...
However, the best teaching tool is and will always be (or rather should) be vanilla itself.
[...]
Anyway, back on topic. Somebody get combat back! It was an instrumental tool for learning lifeforms back when I was starting out, new players are missing out on this!
Last Stand was kinda created for that purpose. A new combat mod will face the same issue any other game mode mod had so far: Getting people to play it. A large part of the current player base plays NS2 specifically for the vanilla game mode and to some degree despise anything else.
Combat IMHO was able to build up it's own player base after the NS2 launch mostly due to the NS1 veterans who enjoyed NS1 Combat more than the base game mode. But I guess those folks moved on a few years ago so you will have to build up a completely new player base for the Combat mode.
I believe a game mode where you can hop in and out at any time during a round that is also very simple and similar to Team Deathmatch has a much higher chance of being popular. Last Stand is different.
I advocated years ago for a mod like combat mod but where your res wasn't based on kills but rt's, more similar to vanilla. You'd have a bot place rt's etc. I didn't know about Assault at all, but it sounds a lot like that. I think that would be a terrific alternative to combat.
If at all possible, it would be amazing to have a duel mode for ns2. It's notoriously difficult to get games sometimes in ns2 because you need 11 willing bodies, and sometimes you just want jump in and have some quick action. This is why I've gravitated towards arena shooters the past couple of years.
Ghoul is of course right about the issue of getting people interested in what ever mod. But I think if you want the game mode to be succesful, there *has* to be an element of competitiveness in it. What is more competitive than a duel mode, similar to combat or assault?
I don't think Last stand really had much of a competitive element to it. It's as people here are saying, it feels more like a survival co-op.
What should really happen is ns2: combat should got F2P. What would it take for this to happen? Does both FLG and UWE have to agree to this?
From what I gathered, FLG owns the rights to NS:Combat, it's own Combat assets and has a license to use NS2 assets and Spark (their engine version is also incompatible with Spark used for NS2. UWE is their publisher in this case. So my take on that is, FLG has to make that call. But I am standing by to stand corrected
What should really happen is ns2: combat should got F2P. What would it take for this to happen? Does both FLG and UWE have to agree to this?
Free2Play is not some kind of magic generating players for a game. For a successful F2P launch you need to do a basic marketing campaign so people know about the launch. Also you need to offer servers so players can play and some basic technical support and community management to keep players playing. All of that costs money. Money that has to come from somewhere. And IIRC combat has no micro transaction system in place that could generate given money.
Disclaimer: The following comment is my own opinion and does not represent Unknown Worlds Entertainment in any way!
If FLG is really interested in "reviving" Combat at this point the best option they have is to sit down with UWE and turn it into a NS2 DLC like most ppl asked for.
Let's do a basic approximal financial pitch for that:
Let's assume the migration will take about 500 work hours and each hour costs avg. 40 $ . Now let's say you want to give every combat owner a free copy of ns2 (in case they don't own it yet). Based on https://steamspy.com/audience/310110/4920 (you need to log into steamspy to access this link) you would need to hand out about 5000 copies * 10$/each . Also you would need to do some basic marketing to promote that DLC launch at Steam. That would cost about 2000 $. Hosting official servers for a max CCU of 1000 players in the first month would cost another 1000 $. So in total you would need to invest 500 * 40 + 5000 * 10 + 2000 + 1000 = 73000 $ .
Let's assume you sell the DLC for about 5.99$ . On avg you will gain 40% (=2.4$) of that per sold copy (keep in mind the share Steam, credit companies get and the regional different prices). So you would need to sell at least about 30500 ( > 73000/2.4) DLC copies to start making any profit. Knowing NS2's DLC sale numbers that's not a realistic number even during steam sales.
However if UWE is willing to give away the extra NS2 copies for free the number of needed DLC copies drops to 9600 (> 23000 / 2.4) which would make it a somewhat interesting investment option.
Still it would all depend on the goodwill of UWE & FLG to cooperate and do this not with the aim for any major profit but to get Combat played again.
Edit: Another option of course would be to finance the project directly using the community (via e.g. a gofundme campaign)
While it would be nice to see combat re-integrated, even as a DLC, I doubt FLG cares to put that much effort in, and (this might just be my take on it) I think UWE cares even less about combat (PDT, Subnautica, etc).
So in the realm of plausible possibilities, I think F2P is as good as it's going to get. I wouldn't expect an explosion of new interest and players, but a few handful of new players - enough to get a few servers going a few times a week - would be far, far better then the truly dead, barren wasteland that is combat atm.
Combat going F2P doesn't cost anything and won't require much if any work (as far as I know).
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited September 2017
Like I mentioned, AFAIK keep in mind their custom Spark engine version has a lot of integral things specifically designed for NS2:Combat and they run an older version as well, lacking all kinds of optimizations NS2 now has.
Also is NS2:Combat 64-bits? I'd imagine the lack of those specific things and not being 64-bits are going to make this whole "DLC port" thing a bit more involved than we'd expect. All in all, I doubt this would get more people into NS2. It is and always will be a niche game and it's also not on the radar anymore, but it would be a neat addition nonetheless...
Neat enuf to justify the work involved? That is the question here, along with UWE's and FLG's interest obviously
Also, FLG is not interested in ever working on combat again. There's a lot of bad blood, and as far as I know they are not interested in having any form of business relation with UWE again.
Not to mention that they have just generally moved on with their lives. It's been what, one and a half years? Two?
Combat going F2P doesn't cost anything and won't require much if any work
This is not the case.
It would cost a lot, as Ghoul mentioned.
I think you guys are misunderstanding me. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've seen games change their prices. Not like a sale, but the base price. Now what I'm suggesting, stay with me here, is that however the price is changed, not sure if steam does it or the dev just set it in a box or something, but just delete the $5.99 in the box and replace it with $0.00. That's it. Don't do anything else - no advertising, no anything. Just make the game cost $0.00.
Now I know some people will ask "whats the point if no one knows about it anyway?". Browse by Free to Play. Thats how. And as i said before, this wont re-energize the community or anything, but maybe get a few servers filled a few times a week.
I don't think you can do that @_Grendel_. Why in the world would valve facilitate a game like that on their platform? They would be wasting bandwidth, from the workshop and downloading of assets, for a game that literally has 0% chance of making money, even if the game suddenly became popular out of the blue.
I see non-microtransaction free indie games on steam all the time, but you may be right. It was just an idea, a shot in the dark. Plus, it's on steam now and making 0 money for valve anyway.
Comments
A pull request has been sitting in the repo for over a year: https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat/pulls
Is this open source? It uses a lot of code from NS2. It also has a lot of "Copyright (c) 2003-2011, Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved." Does this mean it's free to use in NS2 mods the same way the NS2 content is?
Due to the high number of changes, the ns2 combat mod is not usable and the pull request will not change that.
The mod was created by replacing entirely a lot of classic games files.
Because of that, it's now very hard to make it works again. (new mods rely more on hooks, which avoid a lot of problems when dealing with game updates)
The few developers that have the capabilities to redo the mod are not willing to do it, because they have the impression that they would steal the work of the creators.
Instead of trying to revive a horse that's long decomposed, why not make a new mod? Scatter's assault mod (in my opinion) is a perfect replacement.
But this brings me back to my first point: why bother with combat? It's wrapped up in so much red tape you'd get a new mod done far faster and easier then trying to poach stuff off the heavily broken combat mod.
First of all I'm not a lawyer so anything below could be incorrect. But I looked into this topic a few years ago and did a little research.
The Steam ToS mostly only covers Valves and their partners legally to be able to contribute and use user generated content. However that doesn't change anything in regards to who owns the copyright of the given content.
So far most modders have been using game code to generate new content under the aspect of Fair Use . Now i couldn't find any precedence law case which could be used to specify what Fair Use is in the context of game modding.
Also both publishers/developers as copyright owners and modders have avoided creating given precedence case by not bringing anything directly to court. Valve will take down any user created content as soon as anybody issues a legitimate DMCA claim.
In regards to NS2 this means the game code is under copyright of UWE. However because NS2 has been promoted for being moddable and UWE are rather friendly in regards to modding in general (as they have been modders as well in the past) you can assume it's okay to use the code in your non-commercial ns2 mod under the terms of Fair Use. Same has to be applied for using other modders code.
Of course it would be great if we could avoid these legal uncertainties by UWE issuing any kind of legal document that allows Modders to use their code for non-commercial ns2 mods. But creating such a document is rather troublesome in itself.
Best practice for modders would be to include licenses with their mods and avoid to use vanilla code as much as possible because to license your mod you will have to disclaim that usage.
Anyway back to Combat. Back then I contributed both to the combat mod and even more to the standalone. My contributions have been basically code donations because i wanted FLG to succeed with their dream of becoming a game studio.
But after the disastrous launch and due to how they were treated by large parts of the ns2 community mostly everybody of FLG has moved on miles away from anything to do with NS2.
So I doubt that Alex still visits this forum or watches the github repro. Your best chance to reach any of them is most likely via email.
To be honest the Combat code base is "ancient" at this point and hasn't been maintained for some time, so from my perspective you are better off starting new using the old mod code as guideline for the new mod's design.
Specially since you can replace the very buggy EEM module with xDragon's ClassicEnts (https://github.com/xToken/ClassicEnts under MIT) module.
Overall the main reason for me to bring back Combat are the combat maps. It's kinda sad to have all the creative work rotting in the workshop without anybody being able to use them.
It's painful to think back at that launch thing. Gisp mentioned some outright sabotage in the marketing campaign, like people ddosing, reporting as spam and people lying to get people not to buy it and shit.
I was one of the people that really didn't see the game succeeding from the start, and I couldn't recommend the game in good conscience. I wasn't going out of my way to tell people not to buy it of course. But I am still horrified at the actual sabotage tactics some assholes were using. I really didn't think humans could get so low. Nobody deserves what happened to flg.
What a damn shame. Big blow to the ns2 community. We lost so many great and amazing modders over the years.
It's funny, since then I've almost completely turned the other way around, advocating for legitimately dead games like Reflex Arena and Warsow, my two favourite games of all time, arguably beyond reason. Even though they share similar problems with NS2:Combat, like being a tiny niche in a saturated market.
Anyway, back on topic. Somebody get combat back! It was an instrumental tool for learning lifeforms back when I was starting out, new players are missing out on this!
Last Stand was kinda created for that purpose. A new combat mod will face the same issue any other game mode mod had so far: Getting people to play it. A large part of the current player base plays NS2 specifically for the vanilla game mode and to some degree despise anything else.
Combat IMHO was able to build up it's own player base after the NS2 launch mostly due to the NS1 veterans who enjoyed NS1 Combat more than the base game mode. But I guess those folks moved on a few years ago so you will have to build up a completely new player base for the Combat mode.
It's a bit too different from vanilla, while combat was more representative of it with territory control with maps at twice as big and that penalty for dying. So, apart from mods spawning super units with ultra upgrades and the different way structures work, combat was the slightly better "teaching tool"
Both are somewhat representative for movement teaching, I guess...
However, the best teaching tool is and will always be (or rather should) be vanilla itself.
I believe a game mode where you can hop in and out at any time during a round that is also very simple and similar to Team Deathmatch has a much higher chance of being popular. Last Stand is different.
If at all possible, it would be amazing to have a duel mode for ns2. It's notoriously difficult to get games sometimes in ns2 because you need 11 willing bodies, and sometimes you just want jump in and have some quick action. This is why I've gravitated towards arena shooters the past couple of years.
Ghoul is of course right about the issue of getting people interested in what ever mod. But I think if you want the game mode to be succesful, there *has* to be an element of competitiveness in it. What is more competitive than a duel mode, similar to combat or assault?
I don't think Last stand really had much of a competitive element to it. It's as people here are saying, it feels more like a survival co-op.
From what I gathered, FLG owns the rights to NS:Combat, it's own Combat assets and has a license to use NS2 assets and Spark (their engine version is also incompatible with Spark used for NS2. UWE is their publisher in this case. So my take on that is, FLG has to make that call. But I am standing by to stand corrected
Free2Play is not some kind of magic generating players for a game. For a successful F2P launch you need to do a basic marketing campaign so people know about the launch. Also you need to offer servers so players can play and some basic technical support and community management to keep players playing. All of that costs money. Money that has to come from somewhere. And IIRC combat has no micro transaction system in place that could generate given money.
Disclaimer: The following comment is my own opinion and does not represent Unknown Worlds Entertainment in any way!
If FLG is really interested in "reviving" Combat at this point the best option they have is to sit down with UWE and turn it into a NS2 DLC like most ppl asked for.
Let's do a basic approximal financial pitch for that:
Let's assume the migration will take about 500 work hours and each hour costs avg. 40 $ . Now let's say you want to give every combat owner a free copy of ns2 (in case they don't own it yet). Based on https://steamspy.com/audience/310110/4920 (you need to log into steamspy to access this link) you would need to hand out about 5000 copies * 10$/each . Also you would need to do some basic marketing to promote that DLC launch at Steam. That would cost about 2000 $. Hosting official servers for a max CCU of 1000 players in the first month would cost another 1000 $. So in total you would need to invest 500 * 40 + 5000 * 10 + 2000 + 1000 = 73000 $ .
Let's assume you sell the DLC for about 5.99$ . On avg you will gain 40% (=2.4$) of that per sold copy (keep in mind the share Steam, credit companies get and the regional different prices). So you would need to sell at least about 30500 ( > 73000/2.4) DLC copies to start making any profit. Knowing NS2's DLC sale numbers that's not a realistic number even during steam sales.
However if UWE is willing to give away the extra NS2 copies for free the number of needed DLC copies drops to 9600 (> 23000 / 2.4) which would make it a somewhat interesting investment option.
Still it would all depend on the goodwill of UWE & FLG to cooperate and do this not with the aim for any major profit but to get Combat played again.
Edit: Another option of course would be to finance the project directly using the community (via e.g. a gofundme campaign)
So in the realm of plausible possibilities, I think F2P is as good as it's going to get. I wouldn't expect an explosion of new interest and players, but a few handful of new players - enough to get a few servers going a few times a week - would be far, far better then the truly dead, barren wasteland that is combat atm.
Combat going F2P doesn't cost anything and won't require much if any work (as far as I know).
Also is NS2:Combat 64-bits? I'd imagine the lack of those specific things and not being 64-bits are going to make this whole "DLC port" thing a bit more involved than we'd expect. All in all, I doubt this would get more people into NS2. It is and always will be a niche game and it's also not on the radar anymore, but it would be a neat addition nonetheless...
Neat enuf to justify the work involved? That is the question here, along with UWE's and FLG's interest obviously
It would cost a lot, as Ghoul mentioned.
Not to mention that they have just generally moved on with their lives. It's been what, one and a half years? Two?
I think you guys are misunderstanding me. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've seen games change their prices. Not like a sale, but the base price. Now what I'm suggesting, stay with me here, is that however the price is changed, not sure if steam does it or the dev just set it in a box or something, but just delete the $5.99 in the box and replace it with $0.00. That's it. Don't do anything else - no advertising, no anything. Just make the game cost $0.00.
Now I know some people will ask "whats the point if no one knows about it anyway?". Browse by Free to Play. Thats how. And as i said before, this wont re-energize the community or anything, but maybe get a few servers filled a few times a week.
But hey, it's just a thought.