$12256 / $11500
I likes me some Minecraft. I bought it for $10 back when it was in alpha or pre-alpha or whatever, and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of playing it. In the last half year or so, I've started getting into playing with mods and modpacks (that is, collections of mods that ostensibly function well together), which I feel add a lot to the experience and longevity of the game. While Mojang isn't the greatest about mod support (they've been promising and failing to deliver an official modding API for ages now) they're at least not openly hostile toward modders, probably because they realize that people who like mods are a significant portion of their revenue source.
On the subject of mods and modpacks, it's interesting (if somewhat annoying) to see the frequent fireworks that occur when someone distributes someone else's mod without asking, or makes a mod that mods a mod, or includes code that will crash your client (seriously!) if you're running a mod that that mod author doesn't like, or writes a really big mod that a lot of modpacks use and then doesn't have time to update it for months at a time (forcing people to either stick with old versions of everything else or delete their world and start over without those features in order to be able to use new mods).
Lately, this has become a reminder to me about why free and open source software is such a good thing; as a user, you're a lot less vulnerable to developer pettiness.
On one hand, it's frequently pointed out that people develop minecraft mods in their own time and without any type of payment, so they ought to have a right to control the distribution of those mods. However, when you get into deliberately crashing peoples' games because they're using some other mod that you don't like for whatever reason, that crosses the line into unethical territory, since you're now doing something to your users that deliberately causes data loss. This is doubly bad because most of the people using your mod aren't even aware of whatever petty squabble you may be involved in with some other mod author. They just want to enjoy their game.
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It's probably worth mentioning that there are some fairly promising FOSS Minecraft clones out there, but as of yet they fall short of either:
There are two clones that I'm keeping an eye on:
Both of these are free software and built with modding in mind, which is cool.
I haven't had much luck running terasology. My compy isn't that great :C
It should be noted that terasology uses the good morning craft textures whose license field reads "all rights reserved" so only the code is free and open
Didn't know that.
At least textures are relatively easy to replace. :)
I paid whatever paltry sum it was to play minecraft in its infant days. I played minecraft to death (at least for me) until I discovered mods, then proceeded to play those to death one after the next in rapid succession. I stopped about 2 years ago (I think) before the cake was introduced or books and enchanting and all that. I still fire it up occassionally to see what's new. I went back when they introduced the ender dragon just because it was a good ending point to say "I beat minecraft" but that was it.
I've somewhat recently run into frustrations with trying to use some of the minecraft textures for game content. I quickly gave up in favor of the much better and more clearly licensed LPC assets (which I adore by the way, thank you for the LPC contest bart!)
Thanks are fue to the contestants who drew the LPC constest entires and whoever did the base stuff(redshrike?) :P
Bart deserves at least as much thanks as we do. It was a collaborative effort and the organizers were working at least as hard as we were the entire time and they worked on it much longer too.
As for minecraft resources, what I've seen of that reminds me a lot of how ridiculously petty and self righteous people who rip and edit sprites from professional games can be. I avoid them both for that reason. Too much drama!
Making mods of closed source games usually has no future.
The thing is a modder donates his work to improve the main game without getting paid and the owner of the main game profits from it, but at the same time does not support or care about the modders and when they decide to make a part two of the game the old mod has become completely useless, so the modder would have to buy part two of the game and start again with his work, this continues all the time.
@Sharm:
As for minecraft resources, what I've seen of that reminds me a lot of how ridiculously petty and self righteous people who rip and edit sprites from professional games can be. I avoid them both for that reason. Too much drama!
Oh man. Yeah, it's unbelievable how many people I've seen demanding that people ask permission to use "their" (unauthorized) sprite rips.
@Duion
The thing is a modder donates his work to improve the main game without getting paid and the owner of the main game profits from it, but at the same time does not support or care about the modders and when they decide to make a part two of the game the old mod has become completely useless, so the modder would have to buy part two of the game and start again with his work, this continues all the time.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Quake and its sequels are some of the most modded games in history, and although the latest version of the engine is usually proprietary, they always GPL their code rather than abandoning modders. The Quake 2 engine, for instance, is used all over the place now.
Not related to mods, but related to Minecraft:
I think the whole Minecraft payment structure was a mistake from the beginning.
Imagine the following: Minecraft was F2P and had a monthly subscription. Every month there would be a big ol' update adding numerous of new content to keep people interested in playing, much like other MMO's and F2P games. Mojang would be able to profit from these game updates, since people are paying a monthly fee.
But instead people don't pay a monthly fee, they pay a set amount once. The problem is that Minecraft is such a creative and open ended game that it NEEDS new content to keep people interested. Mojang doesn't earn any money from these updates however, other than new people buying Minecraft (which honestly, with the millions of sales is getting a more slim audience every day).
Monthly fees cannot be introduced however, people paid for the game and suspected unlimited play. There's no way you can introduce DLC or a monthly subscription at this point.
Simply said, Minecraft needs the Mod API to stay afloat. Mojang should stop adding content theirselfs, they're bound to be doomed.
I would tend to agree with that.
Honestly, in comparison to the major mods that have come out, Mojang's updates to minecraft have been pretty underwhelming. The big thing about this latest update was horses, and modders have had horses for ages now.
I think part of the problem is that they may be focused on Xbox Live, which IMO has been nothing but a drain on the PC gaming scene.
@bart
The quake engine is an exception, it is almost the only engine that handles it this way.
@kenney
I think that it is the wrong way to try to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible. If I were the creator and already earned enough money, I would just make it open source and let people do whatever they like with it.
I don't necessarily have an issue with a subscription model as long as you're providing value and people who stop subscribing don't lose access to the software that they've already paid for. (It's worth noting that a program can be both free software and subscription based.)
That being said, I'm not a fan of the idea of software as a service. Microsoft and Adobe are doing it this way, I think, because they can see the writing on the wall. With each successive release of Office, Microsoft provides less value -- in fact, Office 2000 is still a perfectly reasonable piece of software that does what most people need even now. The only way for them to get people to keep giving them money is to go to a rental model and take away access to their software when people stop paying them.
I started out as a modder, I ran a huge custom modded server for NWN, made random gen dungeons for Warcraft III and did a total conversion for Fallout 3. The fallout mod got me a C&D from gamesworkshop, which pretty quickly turned me right off their entire organisation. Whats the point of sinking hundreds of hours into something that'll just get you sued? Whats the point of suing fans for spreading your content? Its all just madness. Soon after that I stopped making mods and started volunteering for open source games instead. I recently did a modpack for minecraft, but it broke in the latest update, because they slightly altered their texture format, and I'll be stuffed if I'm going through and fixing thousands of textures.
Its typically much much harder to contribute to open source games than to mod-friendly closed source games. Firstly the devs want you to learn git and play their pushmepullyou craziness. Secondly the content pipelines are often incredibly fiddly, often requireing scripting knowledge just to get the simplest asset in game. And finally, its exceedingly rare for an open source game to have a world editor/mission editor, which means the barrier for entry is much much higher than for many closed source games.
If an open dev wants to attract modders, they should be making the barrier for entry as low as humanly possible. In minecraft you can edit your skin in paint and upload it directly through the website, and it shows up in game. A three year old could do that. Similarly, the most modded games like Warcraft III and the Elder Scrolls, have really simple but powerful editing tools, if we didn't have those tools, Tower Defense and DOTA might never have been invented. To my knowledge, no open source game has a level editor that is anywhere near that level. The closest we come are things like the Cube editor projects, like octaforge, which are pretty fun, but even then, they don't have visual scripting interfaces, so you literally have to be a scripter or programmer to add any interactivity at all.
The vast majority of modders have absolutely no idea what they are doing, and only started making mods because it was easy. Look at Little Big Planet, which has millions upon millions of mods made by toddlers, sure there is a sea of crappy ones, but there are also thousands of amazing mods, by sheer virture of odds and scale.
Making your game easy to mod isn't just about creating complex tools, it can be as simple as having your game check the texture directory for new textures at start up, rather than loading them from some obscure locked and repackaged library. The ammount of times I've been told I need to recompile the entire game just to change a texture... that is an instant turn off.
That's an excellent counterpoint, and one that I happen to agree with. In fact, I've ranted about it at great lengths in the past. If your modding instructions start with "open a text editor", you've lost most of your potential artists right there.
That being said, these minecraft mods I'm referring to aren't texture alterations, they're essentiall programs written in Java, which is one of the more beginner-unfriendly languages out there. I think the primary reason that minecraft has so many mods is that it's immensely popular.
Compare minecraft with minetest, which is built with modding in mind. If you compare ratios of community size to the number of mods, minetest (which has a small community) is actually vastly more successful than minecraft, partly because modding doesn't involve mucking around with Java. Sure, you need a text editor, but most modding of minecraft requires a decompiler.
@p0ss
Completely, entirely, and totally agree with you about the modding interface part of open-source projects. I've written light mods for a number of small-time games just out of curiousity (and quite frankly just to see if I could). By far, the hardest games to work with are almost always open source projects.
I'm working on a Flash game right now so I don't have aspirations of making a map editor or other utilities. If this game is even mildly successful I'll probably move into a system-based language and proper game-making framework like Java and it's jwjgl or python and pygame (or some other equally fun languages and frameworks) to learn more extensively how to make games.
I'm a fan of python! So far it's the only language I've attemtped to learn that didn't make me want to bash my head against a wall. Having an easy to use language to program in definately makes a big difference to people like me who don't normally program and have no aptitude for it.
I think this discussion has taken a really interested turn. What would attract programmers like you to write mods or help collaborative open source projects? Are there any things you can think of that are automatic turn offs?
what do you expect from a bunch of 10-15 years old kids.
@vk: The modders are mostly adults.
I 100% agree wit p0ss and the others... good tools are really missing for most OS games/engines. That and the use of strange custom formats no properly working exporter for Blender exists or it only works with some long outdated version (I have literally about 5 different versions of Blender installed because of that).
However simple text files are not necessarily bad. Case in point, in Torque3D you have to set up really complex settings in the blender GUI to be able to export a model... Darkplaces or Cube2 etc on the other hand use simple to understand text files for the model configurations, which you can just cut&paste and slightly modify.
Which brings me to the other reason why open-source engines are hard to mod: lack of preexisting working-ingame content (script and assets) one can cut&paste and tinker with. This might be an even higher barier than the sometimes obscure but existing tool-chains as some of the commercial game engines suffer just as much from that.
Edit: single most lacking preexisting asset for 3D open-source games: humanoid rig with ready made animations one can just attach a new model to :(
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http://freegamedev.net
@Sharm
I'm a fan of Python too! It's one of the most flexible langauges I've encountered and it's low enough level that you can really drive some performance with it. When I first encountered it 3 years ago I was amazed at how easy it was to learn (trying to ignore that I've been writing software since the dinosaur age).
@bart: you are talking about physical age, behaviors you mentioned above are only to be expected from kids.
I may need to implement signing of game content for security reasons (i.e, since the engine supports a scripting interface I'd want to sign my scripts so that the users of my engine can't have their computer\savegame destoryed by some engine exploit via a mod script they download)
I think it is absolutely absurd people are 'attacking' other people's mods by exploiting the mod's interface to the game. That's really quite stupid.