game devs you really hate!

    I don't get this steamworks shit either. Valve would never be as successful without Counter-Strike and the mod community, who brought exposure to an already outdated engine at the time. And now they give minimum to no support at all to the community... maybe some marketing "genius" thought they don't need to rely on their community anymore, which is of course a big mistake.

    Distributing 3rd party mods on steam would bring the community together and reward the hard work we have put into these mods. But that also gets into legal problems, as they would indirectly make money with games that should be free (it would significantly increase half-life's sale in my opinion).

    Quote from hessi

    actually they were faster than i would be be

    Nice ! :wink:

    By the way, even if some of the VALVe's team belong the Quake2 modding community, I don't mind that VALVe wants to give to Source engine modders the opportunity to make high quality games like them. They don't want to share with us their tools and their experience. I mean they're professional, they had to earn their life, to manage their studios... So yeah it's pretty lame to share toys there and there around fucking deep folders but what do you want to do ? If you feel that their support is bullshit, just switch. Moreover, both VALVe's engines are from Id Software's Id Tech 2 engines and they have worked so hard to develop their own tools, so they aren't oblige to share their knowledge for free. I think that the Source SDK is enough and if you want more, do it yourself. No pain, no gain.

    I've emailed some developers who worked on HDR games (as Jess Cliff for DoD:s) about the splitskybox program and they had never replied me ! What can I do ?

    - Nothing !

    I dislike Valve for one basic reason: they don't do very much.

    In the meantime before their next Half-Life, they simply buy the next popular mod, maybe tweak it a bit, and release the next version with a price tag. They bought Team Fortress, they bought Counter-Strike, they bought Day of Defeat, they hired college kids to make Portal, and Left 4 Dead is little more than a cash-in on the recent Zombie mod trend.

    I always wonder what the workflow is like in the SDK versus what they really use at Valve. Surely it can't be as backasswards. It took me half a day to figure out how to compile a model, and that's only because we have 3rd party tools (thank god for wunderboy)

    After ep3 is over they need to just build something completely new from the ground-up, because Source is going to be ancient by then.

    I don't think they'll build anything new from the ground up again considering the amount of time it took to produce Source. Maybe we should all map for the new IdTech5 when it comes out. Plus Idtech5 is still running on OpenGL 2.1 as IdTech4 so I can't wait to see what Carmack can do with OpenGL 3.0. If he doesn't retire after this Engine like he said he's going to.

    Quote from JohnC

    I dislike Valve for one basic reason: they don't do very much.In the meantime before their next Half-Life, they simply buy the next popular mod, maybe tweak it a bit, and release the next version with a price tag. They bought Team Fortress, they bought Counter-Strike, they bought Day of Defeat, they hired college kids to make Portal, and Left 4 Dead is little more than a cash-in on the recent Zombie mod trend.

    I started typing up a spirited reply but after reading your post a few more times I couldn't make myself believe that you were being serious.

    Quote from Seldoon182

    actually they were faster than i would be be

    Nice ! :wink:

    By the way, even if some of the VALVe's team belong the Quake2 modding community, I don't mind that VALVe wants to give to Source engine modders the opportunity to make high quality games like them. They don't want to share with us their tools and their experience. I mean they're professional, they had to earn their life, to manage their studios... So yeah it's pretty lame to share toys there and there around fucking deep folders but what do you want to do ? If you feel that their support is bullshit, just switch. Moreover, both VALVe's engines are from Id Software's Id Tech 2 engines and they have worked so hard to develop their own tools, so they aren't oblige to share their knowledge for free. I think that the Source SDK is enough and if you want more, do it yourself. No pain, no gain.

    I've emailed some developers who worked on HDR games (as Jess Cliff for DoD:s) about the splitskybox program and they had never replied me ! What can I do ?

    - Nothing !

    Educating your community in your tools, and making sure that they can work fine, without bugs or other crap, is really going to help your business. Unfortunally most companies seem to have forgotten that.... That includes Epic.

    A community that is up to date with the technology, creates a great pool to hire people from for those companies who work with the technology. It also spawns many community tutorials and all, again also useful for commercial purposes, and high quality mod releases are great publicity for your game, community, and tech.

    Valve would win more from releasing their own tools and giving away their secrets, than sticking to them so hard.

    It would be a shame if the problem is not resolved, or pc modding itself might just die. Quake modding doesnt mean much anymore. Unreal may be really succesful as a commercial thing, no one mods the thing, no one plays either... And then all there is left is Source which now also seems to be getting to the end of their line...

    I agree with you Hourences. It seems to be a growing trend to release half-arsed sdk kits these days, I remember the days when the sdk was what made a game i.e. Unreal, Half Life and Quake 3. Now look at this generation of games being produced by the same studios, Valve, Epic and ID. You all know about Source's sdk and from what i've heard about the UnrealEd 3.0 that Epic released to the public it sounds like a crashy nightmare (I can speak from experience that they have much more stable builds than this) As for ID - I guess we have the doom 3 editor, which to me at least, is as unappealing as the outdated engine it was built for.

    The worst thing is these devs were once the strongest for supporting their modding community and now I dont see any interest from them after they've released their buggy tools.

    Remember the "Make something unreal" competition? valve's deathmatch mapping comp etc etc?

    I agree with Hourences that if this trend continues it will certainly be the death of pc modding, and a considerable loss for the gaming community.

    Quote from Hourences

    Quake modding doesnt mean much anymore.

    You are *so* banned from terrafusion

    Even though this thread was just a thinly veiled platform for hessi's rant, I agree with his angry, sexy self. I also agree with those who chimed in to say that Valve has dropped the ball on putting out stable versions of Hammer and the other tools for about the last 2-3 years. Every few months I think "it'd be really fun to do some Source editing again" and I go get the latest version of the tools and make sure everything is ok and I have all the right command line switches set only to be disappointed every single time by a woefully broken toolset.

    Valve needs to understand that the very basis of their current success came from a time when there almost no updating of the tools. Because of that, Hammer ran solid as a rock and people cranked out maps and mods like I crank out a [CENSORED] in your [CENSORED] like a chimney sweep.

    I also agree with JohnC's assertion that Valve really doesn't do much anymore. GabeN seems more interested in buying up all the talented teams and individuals to work at Valve, yet they don't seem to be doing anything other than rehashing the same old shit. I was actually really disappointed with the Orange Box save for Portal and the Peggle demo. HL2 Ep2 was buggy as shit, poorly balanced, and not really all that compelling. TF2 is a letdown in that it's simply TFC with all the cool shit taken out. Valve really hasn't done a good, proper "game" in the epic, old school sense of the word since Half-Life 2 and judging by the way they've talked about episodic content and their displeasure with 2-3 year dev cycles, it doesn't sound like anything great will be coming down the pipe any time soon. (I hope I'm wrong though!!)

    unpopular opinion>

    Getting back on topic...while it's true that the majority of level editing tools are prone to crashes and other weirdness, especially when dealing with larger levels, I make it a point to criticize Valve because out of DoomEdit/Radiant, Sandbox, UnrealEd, and Hammer, Hammer is the only one that consistently has core functionality broken. That blows my mind because Hammer is the only one of those that actually gets updated more than once or twice, if at all.

    Well Quake really is kind of dead, no? Mod wise.

    An underground hardcore group of enthousiasts doesnt count, as every game has those, even the original Doom.

    Unreal Editor runs very well, only the GOW version was messed up. Problem with Unreal isnt being that it crashes, it just isnt supported well. Months after release the official documents and tutorials are still not public (how hard can it be to change that user flag?), and in general the modders seem to be getting the new tools years after the pros got them. Long ago I remember how Epic invited the best modders to their office, and gave them presentations and all, they involved them in the whole thing, cared about it. I do not see that happening anymore, they distantiated themselves. The same is prolly true for iD and Valve. Its getting very closed off and ivor tower like, while you need the opposite if you want a lively scene of amateur enthousiasts.

    so all we can do about is, is just wait in these forums and wait for somebody to read our rants, who has the ability to change things in business?

    i dont know how may maps for the games we talked about are avaible, but lets jsut say there is a decent amount of maps that are played frequently and have a good quality. so dod:s comes with probably like 30-50 maps that are fun playing. of course the graphics can be cheap, but i remember some maps that still were lots of fun to play (dod_ludendorf bridge as an example). counter-strike:source probably has 100 or 150 good maps. some were really special ones like de_wanda for example. full custom content and shit. so an average map takes 4 months from start to end. weekends probably with 10 up to 20 hours work while the reglar work days might end up with 3 hours maybe. so thats at least 25 or maybe 35 hours a week! that amount times 4 for a complete month and again times 4 for the 4 months ends up with 400 or 560 hours. if you would recieve a low sallery like 15 euro an hour this makes saves each company at least 6000 euro per map. and even if certain maps look worse than others, this could be a realistic average. so valve saved approximatly around 180.000-300.000 Euro for dod:s maps. wouldnt this money at least be worth put into developing tools so those guys who work for 0$ are still motivated? Valve will loose if they don't change but as long as i followed the game industry every game developer came to a point where he totally fucked up. Atari, Westwood and many smaller companies (with like 10-20 employees).

    I partially agree with your point Hessi but disagree with your figures. The release of HL2 coincided with me living and working on a boat for 3 years. When I wasn't at sea I was getting drunk and chasing women. As a result I became completely out of touch with game engines and didn't even checkout HL2 till several years after its release.

    Fist thing I did when I got a deskjob in late 06 was checkout the Source scene, downloading as many maps as I could. I was amazed that the thriving hl1 community had shrivelled up and died. Of the dozens (possibly hundreds) of talented mappers, few seemed to progress to the Source engine. I'd struggle to name 10 high quality CSS maps whereas I could name 100 for CS off the top of my head (I'm not into DoD:S though it might have a more active Source community than CSS). I'm now of the opinion that with the release of every new game engine, the entry level skills required to develop content raises. It's quickly moving out of the realm of a hobby, very soon the only people who do this sort of thing will be people trying to get into the industry.

    I'm also sceptical that custom content equates to money saved or adds to a games longevity for the average user. Browsing the server list, 90% of the servers are running a dust map 24/7, 8% office with only 2% miscellaneous (figures pulled out my ass). Custom content and continually higher resolution textures results in gargantuan file sizes, a single map can easily exceed 100mb and there's no chance of streaming that to clients through the server as things are now.

    Custom content was popular in the past because it was easy to generate and small enough to distribute. The only way I can see custom content being popular in the future is with the support of the developers. If they were to pick the best maps of the community and release it in an update patch it would increase the games longevity and negate the lazy/stupid gamer who couldn't be bothered downloading and installing custom content. This isn't going to happen but it would be sweet.

    Quote from m8nkey

    It's quickly moving out of the realm of a hobby, very soon the only people who do this sort of thing will be people trying to get into the industry.

    So damn true. I'm still working with the Build Engine because working on my maps and mods for the thing, is actually enjoyable and feels like a hobby. Although I'm learning the aspects of Source, I find it too much of a chore than a hobby. Lots to learn and improve, so little time. By the time I get any good with Source, it'll be just as old as Build is now.

    It hurts because Valve built up this bedrock of awesome support in the Half-Life 1 days when supporting the modification community was their ticket for success. But, at the end of the day, most companies wouldn't give you the drippings from their nose...

    Quote from Taylor

    It hurts because Valve built up this bedrock of awesome support in the Half-Life 1 days when supporting the modification community was their ticket for success. But, at the end of the day, most companies wouldn't give you the drippings from their nose...

    Because Half-life was made by moders for moders !

    Quote from Hourences

    Valve would win more from releasing their own tools and giving away their secrets, than sticking to them so hard.

    It will never happen with VALVe as well as Epic, and such...

    Quote from KungFuSquirrel

    Maybe Valve doesn't use Maya 8?

    As far as I know they use max (modeling) and XSI (animating)

    But there has never been a official plugin for xsi5 (only 4 and recently 6)

    Probebly for the reasons mentioned about workflow & time by others

    does it matter at all that Valve is still the only company out there that seems to care at all about supporting the mod and user content community? What other company out there is supporting much of anything besides the ability to make a few deathmatch maps if that? ( maybe microsoft counts now w/ XNA & creators club? )

    The assertion that Valve "buys up" mod teams and community talent becuase they are lazy just makes my jaw drop. How many opportunities have been provided for becuase of Valve's embracing modding? How many people on these forums right now are only working in the industry becuase of resources and opportunities that were provided by Valve? I know that I am one, and I could name you quite a few others right off the top of my head. Buying up talent? Valve is one of the only companies out there that makes it a policy to embrace and lift up the self-motivated modders and developers and give them a chance to do it for a living if they choose. How is that bad for ANYBODY? Fucking bastards found some talented students and gave them the chance to make a great game called portal, boy we can see how THAT turned out. It would have been much better if they had all gotten hired by random studios and put on work detail churning out the same rehashed shit that has been flowing like oil from the ground instead of being given the chance to construct their own personal vision of a game.

    I think that sometimes modders have a hard time seeing outside the mod developer bubble. Inside the bubble, things like the state of the tools, drama between developers, and the policies Valve choose are big issues. But if you stand outside the bubble and roam around on the larger game development plain, you start to see that it is still the largest and highest bubble if it's type floating around out there, and you start to notice that it's pretty unique.

    Valve is still putting that chance out there to amateur developers. You can argue about how they are managing and offering that chance, but the fact remains that they are the only major player out there offering that chance, or that even thinks that it's a valuable thing to do.

    If you think Valve's tools are bad, you should probably go try some others or try out some "from scratch" game engines. I think there would be a lot of stuff you run into that you had taken for granted with the source engine, buggy and annoying as it may be.

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