ChessMess wrote:
Ahh let me clarify. I wasn't meaning the actual code and whatnot, I'm
talking about SDK/Mod Support. Such things as Epic releasing all the
video tutorials and whatnot. What they do to empower the MOD community
vs what Valve is doing.
I personally, and maybe this is because I'm new, expected a bit more
in terms of tutorials and documentation from Valve with the release of
HL2 and the large amount of lead time they had. Thus I posed this
question to see if that viewpoint was right, wrong, half-right,
half-wrong, etc.
Valve has always been supportive of the modding community, but not
always in a public manner. If you had a question about how something
worked in Half-Life, you could email the developers directly and get a
response back pretty quick.
Epic seems to be more publicly oriented toward trying to improve their
mod community by providing tutorial videos and reference information on
the udn.epicgames.com website. Basically encouraging as many people as
possible to MOD their games in an effort to make the games more popular.
The easier you make something to do, the more likely people are going
to try their hand at it.
Valve has recently begun making developer documentation available on the
collective.valve-erc.com website. And, of course, there are many 3rd
party websites that provided documentation, tutorials, etc. for games
from both of these companies.
With Half-Life, I don't think that Valve knew that the modding community
would become as huge as it has. Since Half-Life was Quake based, much
was already known about the engine and how entities worked because
people had figured out much of this already for Quake. Jumping from a
Quake MOD to a Half-Life MOD wasn't that huge of a leap, since QuakeC
code was fairly similar in function (but not structure) to Half-Life code.
Epic didn't initially have a huge modding community either, but since
the Unreal engine of today is very similar to the original engine used
to create the first Unreal game, people have had lots of time to
understand how things work in the Unreal engine and what can be done
with UnrealScript.
Epic seems to put forth a little more effort into trying to draw more
people into the Unreal modding community (by providing video tutorials,
MOD and map contests, etc). Valve doesn't really need to do this since
a bazillion people are already playing Half-Life MODs and creating
Half-Life MODs of their own. It's almost like Half-Life games have some
kind of "dark matter" black hole effect that tends to suck people into them.
I believe that over the past couple of years, Valve has spent more time
and effort trying to provide modding information to the public and have
hired people that have this task as a main part of their job.
You have to remember that Valve was pushing to make Half-Life2 publicly
available and didn't have much time to spend developing tutorials and
documentation. I imagine that over the next few months you will see
more and more of this type of stuff coming directly from Valve (more
than likely though VERC), but you will also see lots of this information
coming from the Half-Life modding community itself.
Also, with Steam, it will be very easy for Valve to distribute news and
links to this type of information when it becomes available. Valve, in
essence, is able to "push" this content to the entire gaming community
to encourage more people to get involved in this kind of thing. Before
Steam (as with the Unreal universe), the people playing the games have
to actively seek out modding information, and many people just aren't
that skilled at being able to use search engines to track down exactly
what they want and they don't visit (or don't know about) many of the
gaming news sites that make some of this information available to the
public.
Is Epic better at encouraging MOD development than Valve? Possibly, but
Valve now has the resources to improve in this area and I wouldn't be
surprised if this status changed over the few months or years.
I really look forward to seeing what the Half-Life community will be
able to accomplish using the Source engine (as I'm sure Valve is also).
Having "true" Physics, multiplayer vehicles, sophisticated
animation/blending/facial expression systems, and a large community to
begin with sets the foundation for some very interesting possibilities.
--
Jeffrey "botman" Broome
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