Wheres the originality?

S

Sp0ck

Guest
Must every mod revolve around the same series of weapons and the same style of gameplay? Can we not create something new and original?
 
well yes we can but the fact that everything has already been done and people know that certain games will only make it. Then people take good parts from games and create originality from that. The fact that u ask this question just shows that u know nothing (no offense) no matter what your ideas are on originality anyway do not matter, its like a storyline in a MP game. Its mearly pointless unless it physicllys effects the way u play the game. Originality in ideas means nothing. Its how the game will play. So many ideas that u say are not original. Will play totally different to there predacessors.
 
One need to define "new and original". For example, would the non lethal option in my mod be new and original? I have not seen it in a MP game before (SP in the Swat games). But its facts in real life that you never kill something unless you have to, so its not new nor original.

Would a game mode where you are resistance fighters trying to score with Alyx (need to impress her by dancing around with the other resistance fighters) be new and original? Hell yeah! Its NEVER been done.

Which idea would you prefer? The one that is neither new nor original (non lethal takedown). Or the one never has been done before and is as original as it gets (impressing Alyx by dancing with people)?
Think on it :p
 
I agree, 90% of the mods out there look like the same game. I dont give a shit i the back story is diff. like ichi said that shit doesnt matter all that matters is gameplay. And when you use the same ****ing weapons and same ****ing scenarios the gameplay can only vary so much from game to game. Most people are building these huge warfare mods with 20 vehicles and 10 player classes and 50 weapons and shit, but you know people arent gonna play these mods. Very few mods actually become popular, so isnt it better for the community for some o fthese teams that are basically making the same game anyway, team up and make one game even better than the two are on their own. Ide rather have 1 mod of great quality than 100 bland and boring mods.

How about a mech fighting mod. the player pilots a mech against other players, the game is played form the perspective of the player inside the cockpit, the mech is controlled through various control panels inside the cockpit. Maybe impliment flash movies into the game the same way doom3 does for its ingame GUIs. They look badass and are very functional, and the in-game GUIs we have seen so far in hl2 look like utter shit. Just look at the computer screens in the alex vid, you cant even read the shit its so blury. Anyway, im just brainstorming, trying to come up with some ideas for a mod that arent already in production for a change.
 
Originally posted by Sp0ck
Must every mod revolve around the same series of weapons and the same style of gameplay? Can we not create something new and original?
Click to expand...

Personally, I would like to think of my mod idea - which you can see in this thread, or at its homepage - as fairly origonal. It even includes a story to back up the gameplay and give direction to the mod.



To answer your question, I can tell you why there is little creativity simply through the two semesters of statistics I took when geting my Psych degree.

In any given population, any charachteristic will show up as a normal distruibution (bell curve), hieght, weight, arm lenth etc.

In this distribuition, the mean, median and mode will all be the same, this is called "the norm" or just "the mean". Evyeone will vary (deviate) from the norm to a certian degree. The average of all these deviations is whats called the "standard deviation".

On a nomal distribution, 68% of people will fall within one standard deviation of the mean.

Creativity can also be displayed using a bell curve.

What this means is that 68% of people are only of average creative potential.

Of the other 32%, 16% are of BELOW average creative potential.

This leaves only 16% of the population who have ABOVE average creativity and 84% of the population either average or below.

So, if gamers start 100 mods, there are likely to be 84 average or below average in creativity and only 16 above average in creativity.

Statistically, uncreative mods are likely to outnumber creative ones more than five to one meaning less than one in six mods is likely to be creative.
 
This has been talked about before. Drop it.

It I were a moderator, I would lock this damn topic.
 
for originality

Original
:steampunk
:mecha
:cyberpunk

Unoriginal
:counter-strike ripoff
:tfc ripoff
:battlefield 1942 ripoff
 
where the originality in your posting? A quick look around the forum will show that this question has been asked almost as much as whether the Delay rumors are true. It's getting a little irritating. If you don't like the weapon selection of a mod. Make you own. Or if you don't have any skills or talent search through the mods and find one you like.
 
take it easy hiro, this forum is here so that we have a place to discuss such things. And thats all we are doing. I didnt know it was against the rules to dicuss a topic more than once.

If you don't like the weapon selection of a mod. Make you own.
Click to expand...

If you dont like the topic of a thread, dont post in it. Make your own.
 
My mod is original and unique.

Two teams, counter-terrorists and terrorists. Both sides have different weapons, but of equal strength. When you kill an enemy you get money to purchase weapons and ammo and equipment.
 
The truth is 90% of mods will die the second the game is released. Its 13 year old kids going "wow, it would be cool to have a clean-the-toilet mod. Lets post this on halflife2.net" as soon as they have to do any work the entire thing collapses in a heap of nothing. The 10% who actually has the tallent to survive the release of the game and the choosing of the mods (where the community decides which mods are cool and which are lame) There will be about 20-40 decent mods left. At release another 60% will bomb because of bugs or weak releases. what you are left with is about 10 very good mods (thats alot, but the HL2 community is huge). These mods will be played regularly by a bunch of people who will then come to this forum to bitch about which is the best. 1 or 2 mods will become ultimate mods and they will make the other 8 underdogs and those 2 mods will be flamed at by many, although everybody plays em. Finally the game will die off, the final 6 or so mods who got bought by valve will continue to develop for HL3, the rest will retire with the knowledge of a job well done and the developpers will continue on to something else. ^The life of a modding community^
 
Mad is right :) But I think they will start to die off as soon as the SDK arrives, not necessarily when Half-Life 2 is released. (I am still going by information that the SDK will be available prior to the release of HL2 - correct me if I am wrong)
 
I'm pretty much with Hiro on this, if you don't like the world you change it - or to qoute Nike "Just do it" ;).

As for survivability thing - A lot of mods are working hard already right? They're all gonna quit once the programmer has to do some work? I guess I don't understand the reasoning you guys are using.
 
Addendum - I guess I think a mods survivability has less to do with when the game/sdk is released and more with the leadership and overall maturity level of the members.
 
Originally posted by WickedEwok

Maybe impliment flash movies into the game the same way doom3 does for its ingame GUIs. They look badass and are very functional, and the in-game GUIs we have seen so far in hl2 look like utter shit. Just look at the computer screens in the alex vid, you cant even read the shit its so blury.
Click to expand...

Well, it wasnt considered an interface, it was a texture/image used to make it look like a computer. If you read the Valve Dev Round table you would have learned how versatile vgui2 is and that flash is worthless compared to what you can do with the built in functions.
 
Once they get to programming, they might see that some things that they have planned to include won't be entirely possible.

An aspect that leads to a mod's failure is not having a proper understanding for the engine they are creating it for.
 
Well, it wasnt considered an interface, it was a texture/image used to make it look like a computer.
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Well, it was still supposed to represent a digital interface, and it still looked like utter shit. All computer interfaces are done dynamically in doom3 with flash, and you can even use them to hack into networks on the bases. When it comes to things like this, we can only go by what we see. So far we havnt seen any decent ingame gui in hl2. you cant go by what devs say, they will only praise their engine in any area. You have to go by what you know.

The hostile undertone of your post is not surprising in such a thread, considering that your mod sounds like an exact clone of Stalker.
 
Ahh thats a good point Argyll, although Valve has led us to believe just about any type of game is possible with Source.

Other important contributing issues to survivablity - good work ethic and long term dedication ...
 
There are many factors that can drive a mod to failure or little success. I have been around the mod community a long time and can probably pin-point them. I have been considering writing an article on it...
 
Please do. I was wondering some time ago why there wasn't something like that around. Another idea that goes along with that are mod "Postmortems" like you see for games on Gamasutra.
 
I might get flamed for it, but I will do it :) It might even 'kill' mods if leaders open their eyes and see that their mod fits the criteria of a 'failling mod.' We'll see...
 
Originally posted by Argyll
Once they get to programming, they might see that some things that they have planned to include won't be entirely possible.

An aspect that leads to a mod's failure is not having a proper understanding for the engine they are creating it for.
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That last statement makes the first statement incorrect. There is nothing impossible if you got the source. The game IS the source. And if all people thought that stuff was impossible, we wouldnt have cool mods for games. BF1942 is the perfect example. Look at what people did!! The kubel helicopter code was a stroke of genious (although redundant, I acheived better result with my Huey physics for EoD, with more "correct" engines (actually 3 in the middle pushing up (one constant, 2 with different acc), 1 in the back rotated 90 degrees on the side)). And all the other stuff... Like the ladder struck... hovering blimp code... Stuff that people immidietly said was impossible to get right.

Anyway, my mod will survive. Reason? I can get an alpha out 2-3 days after HL2 is released. Well, maybe a bit optimistic, lets say a week, and it would actually be a WORKING alpha :)
 
I think that there are tons of great things yet to come in games, its just that currently they arent possible. Well they are but not on any machines we would have, I think in the future we will look back of the games we know now and realize just how limited they really were.
 
At this point we are only limited by the quality of our programmers. There is nothing that cant be done in computers today aslong as you dont want to have excissive poly counts. In the next year or two, we will be able to have cinematic quality games.
 
There are limitations to games even as much as we don't want to think that is true. Face it. You can't do everything and anything. Although, much of it is possible, but like Mad said, 'we are only limited by the quality of our programmers.' That is very true and not all mods will be able to have a programmer that might be able to complete such an elaborate feature that some mods might plan on.

You safest bet is to just keep it simple for starters, then once you get a better understanding of things and more experienced, start to plan out bigger and better features. Just some advice :)

Also, just because you can get an Alpha version of your mod out rapidly after HL2 release doesn't necessarily mean that your mod will be successful in the long run. It could, but nothing is for certain.
 
Originally posted by Argyll There are limitations to games even as much as we don't want to think that is true. Face it. You can't do everything and anything. Although, much of it is possible, but like Mad said, 'we are only limited by the quality of our programmers.' That is very true and not all mods will be able to have a programmer that might be able to complete such an elaborate feature that some mods might plan on.
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Many of the elaborate features are fairly simple. For example, I created a train in Operation Flashpoint. You plotted waypoints, then it went between them, even stopping on designated waypoints to pick up passangers... A guy even went out and check so that people got aboard. And it could pick up vehicles, then offload them at the offload points. Making it kill people who got in front (forced move doesnt affect the player) was easily done. It had chugging sound that slowed/accelerated, smoke puffs, everything. The only limit was that it was based on 3 trucks in sequence (didnt have models).
It was very elaborate for OFP (nobody had done it), but still it wasnt very difficult (once I rooted out a few bugs) :)
Also, just because you can get an Alpha version of your mod out rapidly after HL2 release doesn't necessarily mean that your mod will be successful in the long run. It could, but nothing is for certain.
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Nope, cause it wont have new models, even a CS clone could beat Unaimed :p
 
I agree with you that the OFP example wouldn't be too difficult to do because what you described is all stuff that you know for certain could be done. Such as other aspects of OFP are similarly done and related.

What I am referring to is even larger, more difficult things. I don't want to give an example from anothe mod though for obvious reasons. But, in my mod, something like the way our teams are organized into Squads is something that we are unsure of what can be done (that isn't as large scale example as I would have liked to use though).
 
I didnt know when I made it. They just suggested a train and I investigated the possibility. I also made a system for morale in OFP (you could even yell surrender and they'd do that if morale was low), another thing someone suggested.

The example you said, groups isnt hard either. Its all logic. A simple system would only need preset groups (empty) that you fill with player ids. (dont know what you want to do with the groups). It all depends on how complicated one want to get. For example, the really cool and completely gameplay altering movement deviance in DoD, its just a sinuscurve that shifts after one period :)
Everything (and I do mean everything) you say is complicated and difficult, I say is easy if you want to do it easy. It can be complicated if you want to do it complicated, yes... I dont think that way though, I go easy first :)
My morale system in my mod is a simple group system: Scan the area around you in a circle (or easier thinking, all friendly players positions and their distance to you): 1 player? Cool, health bonus. 2 players? Bonus... x2. 3 players? Bonus x2 again :)
Voila! A morale system! :)

And people say "Morale system?! 1337!!!!! Like so much more depth and stuff than simple CS!!!!" yet there can be 1000 different levels of complexity in this thing...

Edit: If you think I use to many smilies, go HELL YEAH! :p
 
Its all logic.
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That's exactly it! Most people don't think very logically. I for one do and have created ideas with the engine in mind and think in a logical way to make sure that it is possible or at least could be possible. Just like the Squads idea and pretty much all other features in my mod.

Anyways, the point of the discussion is that some mod developers don't think very logically and therefore won't be able to succeed in some of their goals resulting in failure or a demise of their mod.
 
Not necessarily ;) I am not a coder/programmer :) Even some 'coders' can not think logically...
 
Well, coding brings your mind to a whole new level of logical thinking. Problems which would have seemed insurmountable can be solved after you know programming. It basicly organises your brain in a way that makes you look at everything in code, kinda like that Neo scene at the end of the matrix. All of a sudden you dont see a person walking, you see a skeletal animation system moving a bunch of polygons. Its a really weird transition, when I first went through it I thought I was going crazy, like computers had invaded my mind... they did. Oh well, logic kicks ass :cool:
 
Originally posted by MadMechwarrior
Well, coding brings your mind to a whole new level of logical thinking. Problems which would have seemed insurmountable can be solved after you know programming. It basicly organises your brain in a way that makes you look at everything in code, kinda like that Neo scene at the end of the matrix. All of a sudden you dont see a person walking, you see a skeletal animation system moving a bunch of polygons. Its a really weird transition, when I first went through it I thought I was going crazy, like computers had invaded my mind... they did. Oh well, logic kicks ass :cool:
Click to expand...
Oddly enough, that's exactly on the spot :)
 
I still think games are limited, and the ones the do push the boundaries come up short in other areas. For one we still dont have any sort of liquid physics. I cant wait for the day I can blow up a dam and watch the water roar out convincingly. Secondly our computers cant handle too much action going on. In many of the games I imagine I would like to play I envision thousands upon thousands of real life and NPC characters. (Something else I notice about the gaming industry: we have RTS games, we have RPG games and we have FPS games... why dont we have any games that combine all three? ) How about map size, surely that is something that has limitations.

Frankly we wont know all the limitations until the barriers are broken. Then we will look back to the games today as we now look back to the games of the past.
 
Originally posted by Insid
I still think games are limited, and the ones the do push the boundaries come up short in other areas. For one we still dont have any sort of liquid physics. I cant wait for the day I can blow up a dam and watch the water roar out convincingly. Secondly our computers cant handle too much action going on. In many of the games I imagine I would like to play I envision thousands upon thousands of real life and NPC characters. (Something else I notice about the gaming industry: we have RTS games, we have RPG games and we have FPS games... why dont we have any games that combine all three? ) How about map size, surely that is something that has limitations.
Click to expand...
Everything has to do with the computers themselves. For example, the liquid physics could be done... But no one would have the computer to show it (we'll probably need at least 5 times as fast computers). The characters are also possible... But only nearly with modern CPUs, and out of the question for the graphics card to show them. Map size too, having a large map is quite possible today. But actually loading it? Like 20 minutes load time.

HOWEVER, dont underestimate a programmers ability to circumvent problems. For example, Postal 2 had ridiculus load times of a level. With the patch it loads in like 10-20 seconds. But it still has a stupid lag bug when alot of smoke is nearby (no matter where you look). Uhm... Well... If I ever would play it, its a stupid game, thats it, a really stupid game, no one in their right mind would like it... I would NEVER play such a game, hehe... hehehehe...
 
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