Why Won't Mod Teams Work Together?
Quaunaut
The longest seven days in history... Join Date: 2003-03-21 Member: 14759Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
The longest seven days in history... Join Date: 2003-03-21 Member: 14759Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">It'd benefit us all.</div> I've always been a strong believer in out of studio/group help. And in the world of Mods, it may just be one of the best ideas ever. I could just imagine some of the coding power of NS in The Specialists- imagine the possibilities of Wallrun. And the (even better, in my opinion) particle system in The Specialists in NS. Many things that are in one mod, we all know would make another better, but because there seems to be some unsaid rule of "Don't even indulge into another mod, wanting to take a idea. Its just bad". I still don't understand- both mods could co-exist- they do now. And any way you look at it, the only bad part would be some of the idiots saying "Well, Game1 uses more of my[game2]s code than it does of that!", but then again, everyone hates those kinds of people.
Why won't any mod teams do this? Makes me sad.
Why won't any mod teams do this? Makes me sad.
Comments
there are valve sponsered mod expos (as I remember, they might not happen any more...)
also, just about any mod can get help from Valve crew itself.
The other thing is that, many modders don't want to simply give their code away (few coders actualy are willing to do that unless it is designed to be open source AND DON'T HAVE A STUPID open source debate, k?)
Because they have different ideas. Different design philosophies.
Because there's often nothing to gain from helping out another mod. Why would you want to devote your time, effort and skills to a game that isn't your own, when you could be working on your own?
Because there isn't time\resources to work on your own baby AND help someone else with theirs.
Because there isn't necessarily anything that can be done to help. Being able to help a project often depends on having an in-depth knowledge of it (it's kinda hard to debug code without access to most of it), which there isn't really time to acquire.
A big part of modding is to make their mod ideas different (NS Stratagy vs. TS Deathmatch)
But you need the extra little bells and whistles, including graphics, to draw more players to it.
That's just one example, and there are many many more cases of this, as mod teams, especially the coders, are usually very willing to help out a fellow mod dev, because with the exception of a few elitist jerks, most of us have a "the more the merrier" mentality.
[Note for clarification]
This doesn't mean coders don't mind just giving all their code away for people to copy and paste. I mean if you work for hours on something you don't want some joe to just import it into his crap without any idea of what went into it. But if you're doing something similar and you're stuck and need help, people are almost always willing to show you how to get things done yourself, rather than simply letting you mix and match other people's hard work.
[/note]
Luckily feelings like these are in the minority. After all, <u>every</u> mod team out there worth its salt needs help from others at some point, and I will firmly stand by that any mod team claiming they didn't is either lying, full of it, or their work is complete crap not worth wasting your time over.
And due to HL being so big, there are dozens of places out there for you to get help, whether you're a lowly nub trying to make an octupus give you the finger 8 times, or to whether you're trying to implement a particle system of your own, or are perhaps haxing the HL renderer to make it do things its not supposed to do (like Polyfighter did w/ the terrain stuff)