84 replies to this topic

[deltaepsilon]

To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed when SWR moved out but I got over it quite quickly because I've grown fond of this community and have stuck around just for that - the community forum is the only forum I spend time in! I joined because of ShockWave, and none of the other mods hosted here have ever interested me, but I'd be happy to have this forum continue to exist just so we're not splitting everyone up.

 Destiny, on 4 Jul 2010, 15:20, said:

We might need new members, but we certainly don't need more Masonicons...

That dude is a riot though!

[Kris]

 JJ_, on 4 Jul 2010, 13:08, said:

-----

We should also do something like what the Isotx team did to MidEastCrisis 1.5:


http://www.moddb.com/mods/mideast-crisis/d...tch-for-modders

That pack is seriously useful for beginner modders.

[Libains]

All I can say right now, is thanks, guys. I'm glad to see I've made an impact and that this has been taken seriously, and I'm glad to have seen this support as well - suffice to say there are things you have mentioned that are already being acted upon. As it stands, I have to go to work, but expect more from me later this evening.

Btw, while I am out, I would ask that you repost this to places where you deem it may be useful (in full length so people may comment on it there), such as Deezire, Sleipnir's Mystique, SWR, and more, and then leave a link here as to where it was posted. This is not a time in which I shall sit idly by and watch our community (by that I mean the modding community) crumble into nothingness, and it is about time we did something for the modding community greater than simply host and create mods.

[R3ven]

On that note AJ, I'll be posting this on a few small modding forums across the web.

EDIT:Link if anyone gives a care.

http://grans-product...php?p=9771#9771

Edited by Huhnu, 04 July 2010 - 07:22.

[Kris]

And heres a repost in my new home, Mystique studios:

http://www.mystiquestudios.com/forum/index...76.msg26097#new

Edited by Kris, 04 July 2010 - 07:47.

[Chyros]

Thanks guys, we definitely need to keep this haven alive. Yes, I think I may call it a haven.

[Ion Cannon!]

 Huhnu, on 4 Jul 2010, 8:21, said:

On that note AJ, I'll be posting this on a few small modding forums across the web.

EDIT:Link if anyone gives a care.

http://grans-product...php?p=9771#9771

I would also write some context about it, I would imagine most on grans have heard of FS, but I suppose its possible they haven't. Make sure you link back to here as well.

Can I also say i'm glad this has gotten so much attention. I was aware that in the past the membership would be largely silent despite wanting to voice their opinions, its nice this has changed.

Edited by Ion Cannon!, 04 July 2010 - 10:47.

[BeefJeRKy]

I myself feel a little bad for being unable to fulfill my duties as a global moderator even though these days, the forum as a whole seems to be running fairly smoothly if quietly. Alas RL work is nibbling away at my free time, and I'm finding it hard to dedicate time to FS over things like photography or days/nights out or Karate. I'm sure if the Admins offered me a red badge now, I would turn it down due to time constraints But I don't want to see FS die especially because it is the community section that interests me more than anything else even in the mod section. I want to see more exchange between all the related communities be it assets or ideas. Help us save FS, a model example of a tight-knit online community.

[Alias]

 Ion Cannon!, on 4 Jul 2010, 20:46, said:

Can I also say i'm glad this has gotten so much attention. I was aware that in the past the membership would be largely silent despite wanting to voice their opinions, its nice this has changed.

Too many people are afraid to speak their minds about these things. I can understand why, people can gain a pretty bad rep for doing it (myself for instance) but I do feel it's the right thing to do.

[Ion Cannon!]

 Alias, on 4 Jul 2010, 12:00, said:

 Ion Cannon!, on 4 Jul 2010, 20:46, said:

Can I also say i'm glad this has gotten so much attention. I was aware that in the past the membership would be largely silent despite wanting to voice their opinions, its nice this has changed.

Too many people are afraid to speak their minds about these things. I can understand why, people can gain a pretty bad rep for doing it (myself for instance) but I do feel it's the right thing to do.

Yes. but to be honest you didn't have the best way of making a point half the time. But that isn't related to the discussion.

Edited by Ion Cannon!, 04 July 2010 - 11:03.

[Dutchygamer]

Jordan made a good point about linking forums. Myself, I have 2 main forums: Project Perfect Mod (PPM) for TS/RA2 modding, and Fallout for Generals modding. At PPM we also lack updates for mods, and we also have a cold war between 2 mods (won't mention any names, PPM members will know which mods I mean). In other words: it ain't just this forum that is dying, it's everywhere. C&C is dying because we are modding old games, and when old members leave, there ain't much new ones because they don't like the old C&C series (whether you like it or not, Generals is 7 years old now). The new games are too difficult for new ppl to mod, and they ain't as flexible as the old ones (no simple 'saving-a-file-and-your-mod-works', but 'save-your-file,-compile-it,-hope-you-don't-get-an-error,-and-hopefully-your-mod-works').
Another reason C&C modding is dying is the lack of connectivity between forums. Of course, PPM has the Revora network, but in essence it's all the same: only TS/RA2 modding. Likewise, Fallout also has its connections with other Generals/TW modding forums. The main problem here is that PPM and related aren't interested in Generals and onwards, and these forums aren't interested in RA2 and backwards. Another example from PPM: someone has posted some new RA2 mod idea he's been working on for several months. He gets 50 posts in a few days. I post my Generals mod in a similar way as the other guy, and I get 5 posts in the same amount of time. Coincidence? I think not.

[Major Fuckup]

Thats why i try not to voice my opinions because because not many understand.

[Dutchygamer]

 Major Fuckup, on 4 Jul 2010, 12:16, said:

Thats why i try not to voice my opinions because because not many understand.

At least I try to explain my opinion...

[Alias]

 Major Fuckup, on 4 Jul 2010, 21:16, said:

Thats why i try not to voice my opinions because because not many understand.

Australians to tend to be overrepresented in the misunderstood department. It's happened a fair few times to me before too.

[Brad]

Quite frankly, am I the only one to think that the Command and Conquer modding community has already, well, died?
It is my opinion, really, that there are much more open and interesting games other than ZH (and the rest) to consider modding. Fair be it if you wish to imagine that the dead horse is still galloping, but really, it is indeed dead. Or at least dying. I really don't see a good enough reason to continue modding this series; personally I think that we, as a community, should move on.

Yes, there are several mods for ZH I would like to see released, wouldn't we all? But as of late I grow tired of being 'loyal' to what should be a dead community. I am fine to say that the remnants of the 'hallowed' community should be left to finish their projects, if they so wish. I am also fine to say that you can claw at the carcass, if you so wish; but really, when will you stop? When will we, as a community, move on?
Sure, our roots were in the series, the roots of FS, the roots of many other community, but they will also be our downfall; they will see us fall to the internet, hollowed out and crumbled.
FS, and others, are already making a move to move away from C&C, and if not they bloody well should.

Now, on to what we can do. We CAN, as a unified whole, jump a new ship. There are plethora of moddable engines, that are much more open access. Ones which we could eaisly move on to. We can already see FS attempting to move on (notably to Source (it is also worth mentioning here that while we say we host any type of engine, we don't actively seek them out hmm?)), but that quickly died down. That was left unchecked. That died.
What else will be left unchecked? What else will die?

This goddamned 'community' filled with power mongrels.



Now on to the FS-releated points.
Let me start by saying I don't care for elitist views of when the times 'were better,' when the days of your past saw you skipping through daises, picking tulips with your friends around the world. I care for a community, and in a community people come and go. Icons rise and fall. And the only reason elitists exists is because they like to hold on to a dead horse (I'm really using this too much, aren't I?) hoping to win a race. But the competitors are far ahead of us now. While FS will try to remain a tight-knit community, others rise and fall, while we stay void of new, bright things.
I'm not saying I want FS to turn into something like Revora, I'm saying I want a little more exposure to what could be a fantastic community, to what is currently a frail one.

Regarding the points of 'lazy' Admins. I would say I would agree. If I didn't. Now I don't know what goes on in all of the back-scenes, I only know of a few instances where I saw any form of 'laziness.' Maybe you've seen more, I don't know. Since you've named names, I'm going to offer my views on the subject:
TheDr: a relatively young Admin, I don't really know what he has done. Because quite frankly, I haven't seen him being given a chance (this is coming from what I, have personally seen), in my opinion is a very competent, and very eager admin, who has time restrictions (as we all do).
Codecat: Now, in regards to the rest of the team, he's ancient, and being ancient, I haven't seen him do much. So a bit of leeway on your 'admin laziness' point I might agree with here.

Effort needs to be put in, or you will see before you the curtains stripped away, the paintings of what you think is there destroyed, and the little community left dissipated.






"Thats why I try not to voice my opinions, because not many understand"

Well then, you're part of the problem. If you do not put effort in, not even a little, then you are part of the problem. This is a general statement, giving one example. In no way is this a personal strike.

[Wizard]

Evening all (afternoon actually). Interesting topic. I haven't posted around these parts for a while but this is worth digging my keyboard out of retirement for a moment.

First off don't think that it's up to the Admins to make things happen around here. There is a limit to what they can do, even if they were the most active sods on the internet. 5 people can't make a community do things. The community drives the admins to do things, and I don't mean "change this rule here, or do stop posting in SYD there". Members have never arrived here expecting to see what the Admins do. They come/came here for the mods. That has literally dried up in the last year, even with a small surge a while back. Now FS has barely anything to offer people who actually want to mod a 7 year old game.

That brings me on nicely to the next problem. Modding and ZH. Face facts, it's niche and there but for the grace of God, dead and/or dying. It worked quite well back in this alleged "Golden Era", when the game was the latest and best RTS out there. The next generation of gamers would rather play other games and spend less time faffing around in the code to make the changes to a game, they expect the developers to do it. Source modding is fun, but there aren't many people with the skills to do it and even less genuine interest here to make it viable. The literal rock that ES/FS was built on is now buried beneath the sands of time and disinterest.

There are a whole host of other issues connected with this including a lack of community content, a problem that one could quite easily point the fingers of blame at several members here for. The number of people that can and do are miniscule in comparison to the rest. Well the Admins could do x or y to generate some interest, that would be pointless given the fact that few play anymore and even fewer mod it.

Move on to something new? Pfffft, please?! ZH was the only game we all (99% anyway) have an interest in and all have a copy of. This community was and is a ZH one, but all these concerns stem from the fact that FS, along with a very small number of others, are riding on the back of an old donkey that really is on it's last legs. Although the FS policy was never to discriminate on the engine, there is not the same level of interest in non-ZH games as the numbers don't play them.

If FS is to continue it's life (and I hope it does), it needs more people to use it for what Chrizz intended it to be used for, ZH modding. More people need to take it up, try their luck, then try again. Whilst I was part of the Admins we talked and worked bloody hard trying to attract new talent to FS, but that was ultimately futile due to the fact that no new talent wants to arrive here with their game as all they'll get is lots of "nice work", "keep it coming" and the such like and no actual players of their games.

AJ has asked for people to come together and support FS, do it favour instead, open Finalbig, Gmax and Photoshop and make something new. It doesn't have to be the most original model on the planet, just make something, ask for some criticism, do it again, then release it to others to play around with. And whilst you're there, let others know how you did it so they can do the same.

[Kris]

 Wizard, on 4 Jul 2010, 19:45, said:

AJ has asked for people to come together and support FS, do it favour instead, open Finalbig, Gmax and Photoshop and make something new. It doesn't have to be the most original model on the planet, just make something, ask for some criticism, do it again, then release it to others to play around with. And whilst you're there, let others know how you did it so they can do the same.

Is this enough?



Yes, this is for my mod. But i'm going to release it as a public model as well, pretty much like what hunter did to his sentry drone from shockwave.

 Tactical_person, on 4 Jul 2010, 19:42, said:

Quite frankly, am I the only one to think that the Command and Conquer modding community has already, well, died?
It is my opinion, really, that there are much more open and interesting games other than ZH (and the rest) to consider modding. Fair be it if you wish to imagine that the dead horse is still galloping, but really, it is indeed dead. Or at least dying. I really don't see a good enough reason to continue modding this series; personally I think that we, as a community, should move on.

Well, the reason it's "dying" is because the members of the C&C modding community became too competitive and greedy. Yes, there are better and more interesting games than Zero Hour. But that doesn't mean it's not worth modding it anymore.

Just look at Sim City 4 for example, it has the same age of Zerohour and yet people still comes in and makes mod or custom content for it despite it's age. The community also is thriving even though there are other city building games that are better than Simcity 4. Why? because 1): people in the community is helpful, 2): provides free tips to beginner modders, 3): provides free assets for the public, 4): they cooperate and share stuff from community to community and so-on. 

With that, they attract new members to the community to share stuff they made.

Now look at the community of C&C games, it's the exact opposite. Some people shoot down aspiring new modders because the quality of their content "sucks" or a "ripoff from other mods" and so on. Not only that, people hunt down aspiring modders who uses FREE public models for their mods (Reborn for example) and the lack of free assets for the public because the members worries about copyright "problems" which doesn't even make any sense since mods are free to begin with and in the past, forums within the community attack each other instead of helping each other out.

Not only that, if a mod dies, they take all the assets with them instead of releasing it to the community to atleast attract aspiring modders.

In the end, mean people + no stuff to attract new members = a community in dire need of CPR.


If we get our acts straight or something, the community might thrive once again. But i guess this is too late...but who knows? 

Edited by Kris, 04 July 2010 - 13:15.

[Wizard]

 Kris, on 4 Jul 2010, 14:07, said:

Is this enough?

Yes.

New and a greater variety of free public models would encourage more people to mod, but that is only part of it. Releasing a model and/or skin is part of it. But more importantly now, is that you tell people how to do it. Kris, you, Zeke, Jordan and several other more experienced old skool modders are the exact people that the community at large need to help maintain ZH's popularity. Your wealth of experience and skillset are the very things that other people need to learn in order to keep ZH from becoming the National Winner than needs to be put down. I know that you've done so in the past, but what is needed are more tutorials (some very basic ones in fact) to show how simple it really is to take a game and make it your own. And let's face it, people are lazy, no one really is going to spend hours trawling the older sites to pick up the information needed and even fewer who are prepared to spend days experimenting to learn themselves. FS needs to be a base of knowledge to help those who could mod.

I suggested amongst the admins sometime just before AJ and I began collecting and archiving the tutorials that FS run an Asset Database. Somewhere that we'd store all of the Gen & ZH publically released models/skins etc with a record of the creator and dates etc. The idea being that we'd manage the (as you quite rightly put, supposed) "rights" to the assets and be able to identify who made what, when and whether anyone was actually ripping it off. The idea here being that we could categorically state who had created something and then act as the arbitrators if there were some sort of credit dispute etc if assets where used without authority. I suspect that this idea, which iirc was accepted for the future has just been put on hiatus due to other more pressing logistical issues that are needed to make it work. The bigger problem was convincing mod leaders and other artists to actually allow us to host them for use to anyone, as you have quite correctly observed, there is a lot of resistance for in the community as a whole (ironic as you can rip assets directly from any public mod anyway ).

Back to the FS points, please people. There is absolutely no point in suggesting that any number of people in the admin position need to do more. The finger of blame for any deterioration in or of the community should be pointed squarely at you, the members. Something I discovered whilst attempting to generate a mini revival of FS before I stepped down was how the Admins are seen. For some reason they are seen as community leaders, which is quite far from the truth of their actual job. They are community guardians, not your grand masters. They are here to ensure that the community flourishes, but they are not the source of it. Codecat does his job, as does TheDR. and the others. What their actual job is will be an enigma to most, but believe me when I tell you that they do it, have been doing it and always will do it. There have been times when even I have criticised some for failing to do enough, but ultimately that was way off the mark. They can't make FS bigger or better because that can only be done by the 4,994 others that make up the community.

Quote

We highly value community initiative, and believe that a community thrives on its members being given the opportunity to provide events and activities for each other.

They aren't here to make these events for you, you have to do that yourselves. And in the last 2 years the community has lost that drive. SWR leaving was behind it to some degree, but it isn't the whole story. There are plenty of people here that can provide content for the community to the same levels of care and skill that we have seen in ShW. People just don't anymore. I put aside a huge pot of cash for you guys to use for some competitions, off my own back and initiative. You didn't seem to want to have that at your disposal, so I spent it on the servers instead. I spent hours trying to convince the other admins that I would pay you to make more tutorials for the community and after being told it was (rightly) pointless, I gave up. It shouldn't be for the admins to tell you how it's going to be and what needs to be done. You need to do it yourselves, then tell them it needs to be done. I forget the times we asked you for ideas and got nothing. 5 people asking 4,994 and yet people still seem to blame Admins for not doing things. How is that logical???

I once, quite strongly, vindicated an idea where you lot ran the show and let the admins have a veto on whether or not something, could in practice, be done. It wasn't agreed with because everyone else at the time didn't see the need for it because that is what should happen and is ultimately redundant. Why not use this kick-in-the-arse of a topic to make something happen now? Go grab ZH, play it, work out what wants changing then try it yourselves?! Don't do what the rest of the internet does and wait for someone else to do something, spend hours flaming the crap out of them for it not being good enough, only to have done nothing yourselves.

[Zhao]

 Wizard, on 4 Jul 2010, 16:29, said:

 Kris, on 4 Jul 2010, 14:07, said:

Is this enough?

Yes.

New and a greater variety of free public models would encourage more people to mod

just made me want to return to learning how skin models again :3

[Wizard]

 Aaron:Wii, on 4 Jul 2010, 16:52, said:

just made me want to return to learning how skin models again :3

Which is totally the point.

[Whitey]

I hate to side with Tactical Person, but Generals is now over seven years old. It really does feel like it may be time to move on, doesn't it? I spent the greater portion of my teenage years playing and modding C&CGZH. It is a fun game, it is easy to mod, it is so accessible. But perhaps that is why we haven't moved on. Hell, if I had a PC that could run some newer games as smooth as I can run ZH, I'd have moved on quite some time ago.

You think that we can gain new members and build the community by making new models, but where are these members coming from? They don't just spawn. Younger folks aren't going to buy a seven-year-old game to play and mod it. They'll go for newer games, they'll grow up around those games, and then perhaps they will become stuck on those games.

The way I see it, either we start keeping with the times or we acknowledge that efforts to expand this modding community will be relatively futile and move from there.

I hate to sound pessimistic, but I can't see it going any other way.

[Wizard]

 Boidy, on 4 Jul 2010, 17:01, said:

The way I see it, either we start keeping with the times or we acknowledge that efforts to expand this modding community will be relatively futile and move from there.

Ok, go learn Source modding and come back when you're good enough to make any expansion or TC on your own.

Wait, don't have the time? Or the inclination? I doubt anyone else does. This community came together because of ZH, it's what is known, loved, even if it it should be left in the knackers yard, but there aren't going to be many games available for you to do the same sorts of things to and as easily as Gens/ZH for a very long time, nor will there be the base of knowledge at FS to do so for even longer.

[Whitey]

Yes, this community. But this community isn't going to grow very much at all. It had its time, and that time really is over.

What I'm suggesting is that once this

"but there aren't going to be many games available for you to do the same sorts of things to and as easily as Gens/ZH for a very long time,"

game comes along, jump on it, don't let it pass by because of an old love for ZH.

Edited by Boidy, 04 July 2010 - 16:09.

[Wizard]

 Boidy, on 4 Jul 2010, 17:08, said:

game comes along, jump on it, don't let it pass by because of an old love for ZH.

By all means wait for someone else to bring you a game that you all love, play and want to mod. Should be a fairly short time considering over half of the members here have troubling running ZH on high settings, there is a very mixed based of members that play very different games and that one hasn't come along since 2003 that EVERYONE loves.

Or, do what we've done best since 2005.

[Whitey]

Again, members here. But are not those members going away one by one? Isn't that why there is this trouble here? I love ZH too, just as much as the lot of you. I still want to see it more active. But this community is waning. We can try to postpone its diminishing, but expanding it just isn't incredibly realistic unless there is some way to totally revolutionize the game.