Finding a mod team worth your while 101

I totally agree with everything. Luckly Nightwatch has 2 amazing coders and one of them being the current leader of the mod, Proffesional Victim. Awesome guy btw, and I also agree with members being together. NW, has had a few fights, but nothing big at all, we all admire each others work and accept critism like sex. Did i mention were out of an animator

I'll chuck in my opinion here, for what it's worth.

Far too many people start a mod without any idea of how much work is involved. Even if you do mange to merge a great concept with a dedicated, talented and well lead team you're a fair way from success. You've got to generate interest and deal with inevitable loss of staff and resources along the way. More importanly you've got to know when to relase and when to hold back and polish. Too many mods die because people feel like they always want to add more and end up stalling and going kaput. Then there's the opposite problem, releasing some cruddy ass bug-ridden, one map, two weapon alpha that makes your name shit in the community.

Even with focused and mature leadership things can get to the point where you're too close to hte project and it makes it hard to judge when the sweet spot is for release.

Another problem is that of far too many talented people being tied up in dead end mods that their mates are running and then whatever resources they have go to waste.

As for choosing a mod team, well thats tricky and depends on what you're doing and how much you want to be involved. Some of time, freelancing is the option, contribute your stuff to an existing mod and get your name in the credits without any of the internal strife. Getting in at the ground floor as it were can be excellent, your opinion will probably count for more and you get to see the mod develop and (hopefully) flourish. It does however commit you to rather more than churning out content because there will be inevitable debates about features and suchlike, even if you've got a concrete design document.

bleh, too tired to write more.

A team that is quite full when it comes to staff, where every staff is very motivated about the project, everyone gets along with eachother, you've got the more rare people to find on your staff (coders, animators), and the idea is not too far-fetched as to the point that you are taking somewhat of a gamble.

Quote from marque_pierre

Some times you suspect mod teams start, just as an excuse to model guns and futuristic cars. But an environment can tell a lot more about the flow of the gameplay, and it is a much larger and significant effort.

Well, sometimes mod teams are looking for someone to do that.

Quote from marque_pierre

Any comments on this outfit?http://%7boption%7d

Will they make it? Do they have solid people on board (I wouldn't know...)?

Their style is fine, very World of Warcraft. They seem to have the talent onboard, but whether they have the vision, determination and organisation to bring it all together is anyone's guess.

Quote from marque_pierre

Any famous players or modding veterans on their team?

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This week Kukyona from the Half-Life 1 mod Wizard Wars joined our team. He's a very experienced coder, and will be the lead coder for Kingdom Lost

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Khalid Al-Muharraqi, one of our team artists, has an article about him published on (the prominent computer graphics network) cgnetworks. He's finishing up a healer model for Kingdom Lost in his free time. The story (below) is about himself and his 3D project "Hunting-Toy" where he juxtaposes styles and influences to create a modern day recreation of a hunting bird.http://www.cgnetworks.com/story_custom. ... 2586&page=

Not bad at all.

I think Fletches number 4 is the most important. IT'S GOTTA HAVE A SOUL.

From their staff section:

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ShameYaniv (unknown) Putting Warez on FTP

I would say no to something like that, but offcourse you can always remake it.

Quote from -Stratesiz-

Mods usually fail at level design. For me, level design is everything. You can have mediocre models and other visuals as long as the playability and level design is great. I don't really care about concept art as it doesn't really tell anything about the mod itself. Weapon models don't really tell much either. The two aforementionned are rather common as the main media content. Mods that have only such content to display will fail.Both mods fail to show decent level design content. Judging by the previous work of the LDs for the first mod it will fail.

My opinion is exactly the opposite, and its free!! A good mod (multiplayer) is fun even in a hollow box with 2 players. The maps can add alot but the basics of the mod r more important. Then u build the map around it.

Ive mapped for 2 mods, leaded one and then refused hundred of thousands, because they were all going to die.

Quote from marque_pierre

Here is another question. Don't know if it just me or what, but there seems to be a lot of modding outfits that will ask you to use whatever you already have in your portfolio. Like reuse it in their mod. That's gotta give you a very patched and ragged mod, artistically. Anybody else heard of that?

I would say it's fairly standard for a lot of mods. Historically, mods were originally divided into two groups: total conversions (TCs) and partial conversions (PCs). CS and DOD would be TCs. They doesn't use any original HL content (well, maybe a few old textures in some maps). Rocket Crowbar and Sven Co-Op would be PCs since they use a lot of HL's original content.

It is really easy for PCs to use previously made content. Usually their mods simply overwrite previous code, meaning old maps would be compatible (i.e. you can use your HLDM maps for Rocket Crowbar and you can use your existing TFC maps for Wizard Wars). So mappers who already have solid content in one particular realm might be asked to package their maps with a mod like this. It's sort of a mutually beneficial thing. The mod gets some quick mod-specific content for their initial realse, while the mapper gets their map some more exposure with no additional level tweaks or compiles. The thing is, a lot of these types of PC mods will suck, so if you plan on doing this, make sure the mod doesn't suck ass.

Now, TCs are a different story. TCs usually need mod-specific content to make use of their gameplay and entities. In these cases, the mapper is going to have to go back and tweak their map to make it compatible. This is actually fairly common, even if some mappers have a bad view of it. Mappers tend to like this because it means they can inflate their resume with another map with little work involved. Mods still lke this because they can usually get some good looking maps for initial beta releases. The downside is that maps don't always port well between two different styles of gameplay.

For some historical perspective, cs_siege was originally a TFC Hunted-style map. It actually won second place in a PC Gamer contest if I remember correctly. Now when CS was coming out, N0th1ng ported it to CS and it ended up becoming one of the most popular maps for a hell of a long time. But you can still tell that the map probably wasn't designed for CS. Similarly, FLF was populated by "cs-reject" maps for the longest time. Most of the popular FLF maps were originally maps created in the old CS forums that never went official. FLF kind of acted like the minor leagues for mappers at the time.

So, no, porting old content is not out of the ordinary. It's been around since modding first started. But when deciding whether to port old maps, I'd say still apply the original rules. IF you think the mod sucks or will suck, then don't associate your work with it. If you think it's cool, then go ahead.

it takes skill to be old and bored

Heh, flf_vogen was never a CS map ~ So not ALL of FLF"s maps were CS convertions. But what fletch says is true for the most part. My god though, my forest CS map was the BEST.

I´d say many mods die because of an immature mod leader.

Any comments on Terminus Discord? And yes, I am the team leader.