DICE says modern gamers would be unable to "understand" Frostbite 2 engine - by thiefinthedark
Yakoob on 5/7/2011 at 10:49
Pretty much been summed up already. As engines become more complex we see less and less mods. Compare the amount of mods for HL1 vs HL2 and both had equally good mod support.
Other thing to consider, with free engines like Unity or UDK, free indie outlets like steam, with more fragmented community (back in the day 99% of FPSers had HL1 installed so you could safely reach them with a mod, but today it is split between CoD, MoH, Battlefield and countless spinoffs/ripoffs), and with games now being "popular" for a much shorter period of time (HL1 was popular for like a decade, a CoD or Battlefield is popular for a year before the next one comes out), it actually makes more sense for indies to develop their own games from scratch, rather than resorting to modding existing ones.
Koki on 5/7/2011 at 11:44
Whoa whoa hold the fuck up. You make it sound like modern engines are simply too complex for modders to operate, which is bollocks.
The reason why DICE didn't make a user-friendly game editor is because there is no reason for them to make one, not because the engine is somehow so arcane that no one can get their heads around it. They don't need a map editor because they're making what, ten maps? And they don't need users to dig in the files either because they're making a competetive multiplayer game.
Significant majority of engine improvement nowodays is either graphics or physics anyway, which modders don't touch 99% of the time. So who cares about quasi-realtime radiosity?
CryEngine 2 was pretty fucking complex too and it didn't stop Crytek from making an editor which it was nothing short of brilliant.
Volitions Advocate on 5/7/2011 at 23:57
I have to agree with Koki on this one.
Also there is a big difference between a TC / Mod and just making some maps. There are plenty of great HL2 mods that aren't really mods at all, just really great maps put together with mostly stock assets. Like Minerva.
I bought AVP 2010 on the hopes that they'd release a map editor, and as much as I loved the game. I'm pretty much done with it. I dont play MP and i'm not going to spend the 10 bucks every 8 months they decide to release 3 more multiplayer maps. AVP2 had a huge community. Not so with avp2010.
They'll turn BF3 into more Halo / COD online crap. complete with 14 y/o kids trash talking you all the time. Not much of a community there.
SubJeff on 6/7/2011 at 00:23
if you guys are all so good at modding why are you posting in here and not make mods RIGHT NOW hmmmmmm
Jason Moyer on 6/7/2011 at 01:02
Because then we'd have mods that are actually completed and the universe would implode.
june gloom on 6/7/2011 at 01:11
quick let's get stitch in here to complain about how mods are a waste of time
Yakoob on 6/7/2011 at 09:56
So when's Citadel Conversion Project coming out?
Briareos H on 6/7/2011 at 10:47
You know what? I'm actually tempted to believe DICE on that one. The situation with BFBC2 and Frostbite 1.5 was terrible (
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-bad-company-2-pc/1350772-so-how-about-modtools.html) last year and it doesn't seem likely they suddenly made Frostbite 2.0 all user-friendly.
Quote:
Building all content for BC2 from scratch takes something like 48-72 hours on a normal workstation. Half that time is spent building common content (such as character animations), half builds level-specific content. [...]
The pipeline will normally crash about 2-3 times during a full rebuild.
You need to have Maya 8.5 (32-bit version) installed in order to convert any meshes. [...]
If there are content errors, you need to know a lot about the internals of the game engine to figure out what's wrong.
Finally, in its current form, the pipeline + editor expects some specific IT infrastructure in place (most notably the cache server and a Perforce server). If it's not there then the pipeline + editor will behave strangely. [...]
Both the pipeline and the editor takes in all content in its raw, original form. Anyone who is to build any content needs the full 80GB of raw data on their machine. We are not comfortable giving out all our animations, meshes etc in raw form.
We are comfortable giving out the processed data - after all, that's what on the game disc - but that data does not plug into the editor/pipeline at all. [...]
So how about just a map editor?
If it doesn't plug into the ecosystem above, then getting it to work involves some serious wrangling. Either it is a light-weight replacement for our existing editor - in which case all the challenges with the pipeline still remain - or it is a separate mode (think Forge for Halo). Developing an extra mod-layer that is sandwiched into the game would easily take 6-12 months.
Basically, no mod tools because their own toolchain is a mess with engine bits and external dependencies all over the place.
catbarf on 7/7/2011 at 03:48
Quote Posted by Koki
Whoa whoa hold the fuck up. You make it sound like modern engines are simply too complex for modders to operate, which is bollocks.
It's not that they're arcane and unapproachable, it's that the sheer amount of work required to do anything substantial with newer engines means they're only really practical for large teams. Textures and skinning are far more complicated than the wrapped pictures used in the Dark engine, level architecture is more than a rectangle with a few placed static objects, and new weapons need complex models and animations.
And that's totally ignoring the fact that has already been mentioned, which is that most engines nowadays are heavily dependent upon external software. It's an indisputable fact that modding is a hell of a lot harder (useless UIs aside) than it was ten years ago, and that includes even relatively simple stuff like map packs and skins, which demand a much higher level of detail than used to be acceptable.
