Qhimm.com Forums
Miscellaneous Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: dante66 on 2012-03-20 06:53:36
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I used to post on here around 2007. Back then, the two main mods were the Sephiroth mod and the remodeling of battle models to field. 5 years on, while there's progress and a lot more mods, does it seem quite depressing that pretty much all of this will never be completed and eventually the projects die, sometimes not even half completed or even getting past a second beta?
Its like this everywhere, and you can really understand why of course. Public mods that are done for free and requiring a team to do the hard stuff, combined with life and schooling and whatnot, so nothing ever really gets finished.
So why do people do it? Why does it continue to go on? I mean, there's people who obviously want to get in that line of work and this is how they do it but I mean in the grand scheme of things, even websites like GTAforums. Highly ambitious mods never get completed and they always just die until someone takes it over. I remember on a gta website, there was an ambitious mod for putting GTA III in the San Andreas engine and its still not done. People have moved to the IV engine, but yet the project still survives but its like its in a coma.
I'm not criticising anyone for mods not being completed, I understand. But don't you feel a little disheartened when mods you were excited for or even games years back are still not completed? It's such an immense feeling of disappointment.
Still glad to see qhimm.com is around though, and wish everybody well in their projects. It's just a little sad, y'know?
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My projects don't die. They get completed. The only way mine die, is if I die.
I don't quite understand which mods you are talking about, since all the ones I use I am happy with. Top most on the list is Aali's driver which has allowed us all to enjoy ff7 better than the psx and better than the original pc release.
I don't get disheartened at all because I am extremely happy with what has been done so far, and anything more is a bonus.
If you expected the sea to get parted, prepare for disappointment.
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Haha... there will always be someone to practice their learning skills via moding/programming... that's for sure! I have almost completely modded my gta4, i can assure you it is a top of the top remake, while it actually made me play it that I was criticizing those type of life consuming games ;). Well icelaglace doesn't give up with icenhancer mod like many other modders. Innovative ideas like multiplaying are still on as I can see and my only disappointment is that I can't get all those copyrighted models from Crisis Core :D I believe copyrighted issues in fan made remakes are the ones that prevent anything from going on!!! I'm straight against THAT!
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So why do people do it? Why does it continue to go on?
Because the new modders often don't learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Which is pretty much the story of humanity in general to some extent :D I've started about 5 mods with none of them finished, which is a pretty poor track record. I never showed them to the public though so no one was disappointed. Each time I failed and started a new project three things happened: my projects became smaller and more realistic, I planned more and skill set became better.
An analogy could probably be drawn between anything really, but perhaps a relationship is a good one. Most people don't end up marrying the first person they go out with. And each subsequent relationship will teach them more provided they're willing to learn from the experience (and acknowledge mistakes). Eventually if they're lucky it culminates in a successful, lasting relationship. You can't hit the ground running with a big project without experience and building that experience often results in failures along the way.
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As someone who's been working on a solo mod since late 2010 (albeit with a 12 month hiatus), I can point to a few factors:
- Software development is hard! And I'm not talking about technical knowledge. No, some of the biggest challenges in software development are design and analysis. Many teams rush into development with only half-thought concepts about how their product and their game is actually going to *work*, and inevitably they discover that something they thought would be trivial to design is actually rather complex. Worse, it might turn out that they made assumptions in earlier development that no longer hold water, forcing the team to throw out reams of code. That's extremely demotivating. I found this with Rebirth, and (god, this will sound big-headed) it's something I never really appreciated until I actually worked the software industry. So, so easy to make this mistake - and extremely costly when you do.
- Waterfall development. For those who don't know, 'waterfall' is the practice of performing all planning, all development, all testing and all revision in linear order, and only releasing the product at the end of that lifecycle. It's opposed to 'agile', where developers aspire to make regular small releases that are complete products in their own right. Agile delivery reduces the risk of a half-finished project getting shelved, because even if the team has to stop working early, at least *something* is out there. Unfortunately, a mixture of perfectionism, a fear of being slated on an unfinished product and the tendency to think of games as singular deliverables (unlike software, which comes in incremental versions) makes modders shy away from agile delivery.
- It's easy to underestimate complexity. Related to the first point. It's very difficult to imagine how long it will take to implement something in practice. And when things overrun, they do so considerably.
- QA is time consuming. When I was creating new scenarios for Rebirth, I typically found that playtesting for bugs took at least twice the time as writing the AI and putting the scene together. If you want to support multiple platforms or releases, you can look at squaring that figure.
- Working on an undocumented application is tricky. As we don't have the source code for the games we modify, we have to rely on reverse-engineering efforts. Some things still aren't known, and that means we use horrible hacks and unmaintainable kludges to get things done. These can harm us in the long-run.
- Finally: because thinking up a mod is (for most people) far more fun than implementing one. I've seen this all the time on places like ModDB - people who want to be 'creative directors' and spend their days thinking up cool stuff to play, but don't want to get their hands dirty. We can all imagine cool spells and creatures. But few turn out to be willing to spend hundreds of hours actually building and testing it.
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So we should be....depressed by the fact that we are able to extensively mod a closed source JRPG which is extremely rare, and that we already have tons of enhancements that make it loads better than the original game?
Seems like flawed logic to me. This is actually the only game I have made and finished mods for.
There are far more mods for other games that get announced and canceled then there are for FF7. It all depends on the people doing the mod, it has absolutely nothing to do with the game. Look at Black Mesa, most people think that's canned but the devs still post updates on the forums and work on it every week, but they choose not to flaunt their work around the internet like attention whores - because they are dedicated people and actually plan things out and are making the mod because they want to, whereas many other mods fall victim to big ideas without having a team that is willing to work around each other.
That's also what I like about this community. The work being done here is great, and they aren't running around posting on every general games forum of every site and ModDB saying "DIS WIL BE DEH BEST MOD EVAR LUUK AT TEH FEATURES!!!"
Anything that comes from modding for any game is great. Some people just make mods because they want to, and considering the anti-mod stance many developers and publishers for modern games take these days, the more the merrier.
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The only disappointment I've ever had in a public mod was Metroid SR388's cancellation or privatization, whichever. Either way it makes me sad it's not around anymore.
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The only disappointment I've ever had in a public mod was Metroid SR388's cancellation or privatization, whichever. Either way it makes me sad it's not around anymore.
It got cancelled? That's a letdown.
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It got cancelled? That's a letdown.
There haven't been updates in well over a year now. There is a thread on the AM2R site that discusses sr388 and some guy provided drawings (he's the artist for the game) that are supposedly for it and claims their programmer is now the guy who made minitroid. But whether any of that is true or if it's even being worked on at this point is anyone's guess.
Either way it makes me a sad panda. Even Shadows of Lylat seems to be abandoned
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Im like one of the biggest metroid fans there is but i just cannnot believe i have ever heard of this project *facepalm* the video demo looks so f***** good i want it!! :/