Unit Editor

OrangeKinght, your fears are misguided, and more than a little elitist.

Well he has been involved in the supcom modding scene for 4+ years. Could just be he has a little experience in this....

Classic appeal to authority right there.

His experience in modding has no bearing on whether or not lowering the barriers to entry is a good thing.

You said yourself, everyone has to start somewhere, and if some Fischer Price 'My first unit tweaker' helps someone get the bug that is a good thing in my view.

Yeah but if it also stops people progressing further its a bad thing.

Zordon wasn't referring to my Modding skill, but simply to the fact I have been an active presence onj teh GPGNet Forums consistently for the last 5 years. I have seen Modding Rise, and fall for SupCom/FA. Also before it comes up, no I'm not a Pessimist, I'm a Realist, meaning I think on all outlooks and choose the correct one based on Circumstance.

There was a similar Pattern in SupCom Mods as well, Back in days of the Original SupCom(Before the Much Improved FA) we were still wrapping our heads around model formats and such so the easier and generally accepted way to make modes was reuse the existing units and via stat changes, weapons changes and mess with the over-all scaling creating "new units". And there were LOTS of mods around then, a lot of little ones too, with poor coding practices and cause a lot of conflicts(admittedly this was before the community could settle and produce the kind of guidelines for compatibility we still use today) and the fact is that very few modders every expanded beyond that kind of mod. As we worked out the Kinks for custom models we started a slow shift to Hacked models(Models made by rearranging an existing model's geometry) as the easiest Type of Mod, and over time again as more modelers got into the swing of things we transitioned into full on custom models and occasionally textures. And the things is, with each transition we lost more and more modders/modelers, not so much because of new difficulty, but because that was thier limit. It got to the point that within the last year only a handful of Mods in active development.

I'm not saying Uber should limit Modding to "pros", just than extending that to be within everyones reach is just as extreme, and to me, just as undesirable.

Mike

knowledge/skill has no value if everyone can has it.

There is plenty of info out there for anyone to learn, it's taking the time putting in effort to learn that's the real barrier. This weeds out the people that would not put any/much time or effort in to the mods they would produce.

yes 3d tools are getting easier to use. No this is not "the end of quality" stop being a luddite. New tools are always making art easier and people are always bitching about it being the end of quality.

This argument is kinda moot because lets be realistic - they're not going to make some "creature creator" that would take way too much dev time. They've already stated that PA will be very mod-friendly. They'll probably give us a two-tone color picker for your team, and apply that across your units. That said ... new skins would be a great DLC. Cosmetic only, most likely, to keep from ******* with balancing and to appeal to more people by theming your robots.

I'd love to see future DLC's (or create future mods) of full unit skins to be played with online. The devs could limit each unit's size with a bounding box, and whatever you want to build within and weight to their rigs you can plug into the game. They don't need tons of consumer tools, just an easy way to grab and drop the assets of the game. Swap out their unit geo with your own.... i dunno i'm an art guy not a technical guy

I do 3d animation for kids tv shows, and have done a bit of game animation. I know how to model in 3d, and while I don't know how to rig a character yet i can learn through tutorials ... where my coders at? I need tech people.

Has a modder thread started yet?

anyway, I'd like to do a mod that goes full toony. I'm talking loony tunes. Cartoon violence is the best kinda violence. I wanna drop anvils the size of continents. I want a little soldier that unholsters a gun the size of texas. A roadrunner type scout that zips along with cartoon speedlines.

Obviously i'm not going to make anything WB would sue me over .. i'm just using them as an example of cartoony visual style. Have a look at my demo reel and you'll get an idea of the kind of visuals I work in (keep in mind it's low budget tv. Mod work would be lovingly crafted hobby stuff)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF-vzWGA-ew/url

paulzeke, you mis-interpreted the purpose of this thread, we aren't talking about a 3D tool and there have been several General Modding threads already.

Mike

Anyone who stops there either has no desire or ability to proceed further.

You label yourself a Realist therefore you're correct!?
I hope you can see the colossal arrogance in that statement.

Nothing out exceptional or terrible there, people lose interest, but I bet some modders grew in skill throughout the refining process. You can't really skip to the end.
All I'm suggesting is something like the OP suggested is just a way of starting the process earlier, with a wider base, so at the end you potentially have more people doing it and the scene as a whole is more vibrant for it.

Should we stop selling paint brushes to people who can't paint because what they're likely to produce will be terrible?

The argument remains. Should people who aren't familiar or confident enough to get in to fiddle with attribute/value pairs be restricted from making a tank that fires just a bit further or moves a bit faster if that's what they'd like to create and share?

Only if the skins only show on your client, not to anyone else playing with you. The last thing I want is to have no clue wtf you're attacking me with because you're running a skin pack and everything looks different.

Plus I'd to see people with poor taste and a lack of ability in colour-coordination locked out of using this feature until they've passed a test. :roll:

Modding is what keeps a community alive, more than anything. Even the greatest game gets boring to most people if it never evolves, and modding allows that. As long as a suitable repository for mods is available, more mods (some of which are lower quality) is not a bad thing.

It was mentioned that these can cause conflicts, but a unit editor can precisely counter that point by making it impossible. And as long as the unit editor is not the only form of modding, it doesn't stop those who want more control from doing it the "manual" way.

If made from the start, it could also save Uber time, if they used it themselves.

Win-win as far as I can see.

ooshr32, you seem to have a bad habit of falling back to mis-interpreting statements and generally being dismissive of the actual point and trying to make me out to be a jerk, so I'm just going to stop talking to you.

Mike

I assure you if I have overlooked or misconstrued a point of yours it wasn't deliberate.
Please point the incidences out, but I'd appreciate your best efforts to do so succinctly.
It's easy to get lost in walls of text.

I have no interest or desire to make you out to be anything.
People will make their own assessments on your character based on your posts not mine.