Mortal Human

Posts Tagged ‘game modding’

GTA San Andreas is the best game for modding, hands down. The reasons are many, but first I will talk a little bit about other game engines. Maybe you are coming over from Unreal Tournament or Source games – this is a whole different world from those!

Let’s take Unreal III for the first example; When you mod that, unless you do some really extensive stuff, the only thing you’re going to be able to do is create arena maps and have death matches in them. The beauty of game modding to me is what the game offers to would-be indies or industry hopeful. Read the rest of this entry »

This beard is itchy, I should have stuck to the mustache. I look horrible and am totally uncomfortable. No, I didn’t join the Movember contest (and you’re too late), but I did put away the razor and tell people about this spectacle, this month about male health awareness. A spectacle not because it is absurd in anyway, but because it does raise the question “What about us?” and I can say so much about it, too.

Anyway, I was just reading about Movember, and I thought I’d pass on the wiki link for Movember to you before talking a bit about ideas I have, it really is a pretty interesting history.

I have been playing around with the idea of HD Vice City again, and really, the workflow is fast and simplistic – it leaves complete room for just the replacing of models with higher definition ones. I flipped Starfish Island in-game to San Andreas in 15 or 20 minutes, though incorporating the level of detail models one-group-at-a-time was then left over as a pick-at-it process.

Ever since the idea came about, it has become more and more clear that Rockstar will likely do Vice City again. Which is awesome. It will be larger, and more amazing than the first. I’m not making changes to the old Vice City in my tenative ideas, though. I just want to push the SA engine to what it can do with the old layout, if possible.

Liberty City II is a really awesome and driven mod, but I don’t plan to take “Liberties” in Vice City HD if I really go through with it – I want it to feel 1:1 with the old map, but much more detailed than the hardware of Vice City’s time allowed Rockstar to achieve.

It is an enormous undertaking, but one that I know from the contact form, some comments, and traffic data of this very site that a lot of people would enjoy. Dropping this post to get feedback on the idea from the modding crowd.

Moniter57 is busy at work, perhaps with some others (and if so let me know) but I haven’t been around modding GTA for a while. The sixth video for Liberty City II was shown to the public on the 11th, and now I’m posting it 7 days later as a refresher for my friends and readers here.

You may remember when I wrote about Liberty City II back in July while intending to help with it.

I became uninspired pretty quickly, and it changed my mind about doing a Vice City HD mod as well. At least, I don’t want to do such a thing alone.

That is sort-of what makes this project so special is that the bulk of everything contributed to this mod, including vehicles, have been done by Moniter57 on his own, throughout his free time. Like I said, I would no longer dream of doing a remake of higher definition on my own with the other things I have on my plate and intend to add soon, so what makes this mod so awesome is that I know what it takes, and Moniter57 is doing brilliant things:

IV Multiplayer is a new third party modification for GTA IV. This is awesome. If you’ve already spent some time with SAMP or MTA DM (1.0.1 is out!), then you know what this could mean for GTA IV on the PC. The catch? I don’t know much about it yet. Here’s a quick beta test video, though. A few players testing with some vehicles:

That’s, again, awesome. Crude as it may be, how many can say they remember the excitement they felt the first time they saw the car jitter around in Vice City’s multiplayer betas? I’m sure each of us have that giddy feeling again now, especially after being disappointed with the multiplayer that was offered in IV when their community had already given Rockstar such a great example of what GTA Multiplayer is, or what it should be (COMMAS!). Rockstar delivered quite an original and unique-to-the-series multiplayer experience in GTA IV, but this mod shows exactly what they forgot when they were designing their experience: The community that would play it. Their community.

Don’t get me wrong because I’m not saying that IV isn’t the greatest game published this gen, thus far, but when I play games, I’m still playing San Andreas, online, with a lot more players, a lot more activities, and a lot more fun – and my computer runs IV fine. The single player experience is awesome. The lack of mod tools this time around, the lacking multiplayer, when compared to what arguably was made by amateurs in the third party SA mods, that’s what keeps me in San Andreas.

The third party multiplayers are just better – let’s hope that this time around it gets noticed and Rockstar will be inspired. They’ve already gotten more outspoken in their community with a complete revamp to their site, modders have to be next, right? No? Whatever. I guess the community will do it on its own.

What can you guys tell me about IV-MP? And how do I get onto the forums again? I lost the link and the logo doesn’t work.

UPDATE: It works when you visit the iv-m.com redirect for some reason, anyways, here’s a direct link: http://forum.iv-multiplayer.com/index.php

UPDATE2: Works from the main top-level now.

SA Liberty City II

While I’m not yet sure whether I will embark upon my own New Vice City, I have begun to help Monitor57 with his project, San Andreas Liberty City II. Over the past few days we managed to use DropBox to organize a bit of a beginning flow since until now Monitor57 had been going at it mostly alone.

A few others are helping, Read the rest of this entry »

The New Shell Of CJ's Place

A coop modding project has begun at GTAForums and is off to a good start with some friends and I already fleshing out the beginnings of an overhaul to the Johnson house from San Andreas. We’re utilizing DropBox as a collaborative platform and it is definitely up for the job.

As you can see by the post, we devised this as way for people to jump in and start networking more tightly as a community. An oppotunity to learn from each other. Maybe some will only browse the files, look at their various stages (we’re observing a naming convention), and learn from them. That’s okay, that’s a part of it. Read the rest of this entry »