Gameplay mods?

[Soul Reapir]

hello guys, ive been browsing the mods available for this game, and I must say, im not that impressed. I mean there are great uniform and weapons mods, and loads of scenarios, but what about full fleged gameplay mods? Like cover animations, smarter AI, Infantry pathfinding, new tactcs, if possible ragdoll physics, and im really surprised that no complete overhalls of this game have been done, like Isreal wars, or even made up future wars. Is this because the game isnt that modifiable, or is it because the fanbase isnt that large? thanks for your time.

[flamingknives]

The game is not modifiable to that extent.

[Wengart]

I would love if it were, just for a chance at a Warhammer 40K mod.

[ChrisND]

Is this because the game isnt that modifiable, or is it because the fanbase isnt that large? thanks for your time.

Here is what you can modify in CMSF:

- User created scenarios, campaigns, and quick battle maps. The editor used to create these cannot be modified.

- Textures and .bmp files.

- Sound files.

- Text I believe. May be wrong on that.

That's pretty much it.

[stikkypixie]

hello guys, ive been browsing the mods available for this game, and I must say, im not that impressed. I mean there are great uniform and weapons mods, and loads of scenarios, but what about full fleged gameplay mods? Like cover animations, smarter AI, Infantry pathfinding, new tactcs, if possible ragdoll physics, and im really surprised that no complete overhalls of this game have been done, like Isreal wars, or even made up future wars. Is this because the game isnt that modifiable, or is it because the fanbase isnt that large? thanks for your time.

I have never encountered a (mainstream) game where you can modify it to that extent. Usually it's textures and weapons stats. And the occasional scripted bots. Could you point me to one, I'm curious what people can do.

[Soul Reapir]

wait, so youve never seen a game that can be totally overhalled into a differant game? check out the elder scrolls Oblivion, one of the most modded games ever, also the Battlefield games have somme really cool mods. oh, and Medevil 2 total war, was recentlly overhauled to be set in a lord of the rings world! its really cool taking over middle-earth as orcs!

[Wengart]

If you can make new skins and change stats you can make a new game. Of course there are a few other things you might need , but those are the important ones.

[Redwolf]

Download a hexeditor and get cracking.

[19Kyle72]

I'm sorry to say that the kind of "deep" modding that you're hoping to do isn't yet, and most likely, never will be possible with the CMSF series. There are upsides to this, but I don't have the time to get into them now. However, I am a huge modding enthusiast (done some work myself in those regards), and I start getting "itchy" when I think of what I would LOVE to see in this game, such as night vision devices, aircraft, wreckage props, etc., etc. This community is very devoted, and I have no doubts that if their hands were untied we would've seen a whole slew of "deep" mods released for this series by now.

Oh well. I can always dream...

[orwell]

BFC DOES encourage competition, get coding.

[Pandur]

i dont know what you think, TES:IV for example isnt compareable, heck all the games you named are not comareable, heck this is still combat mission and iam glad bout that.

all the MP games you named have probs with cheats as far as i know, battlefield is the first one there! i dont want to see any single cheat in a CM game ever, and for CMx1 there was just this freaky methode wich cant be bothered with by any mass of people so iam really glad the game isnt more then opticaly modable, like skins... .

on this one iam 100% with BFC, keep it as is.

[Tuomio]

Modding simple games like battlefield is pretty straightforward.

;AK47

;Punch 70

;Weight 80 'Russian ****y wepon!!11

;M16

;Punch 60

;Weight 50

Its just rock-paper-scissor with prettier graphics. Things get ugly when you have to completely ditch gameplay aspects and start thinking how platform X actually performs in real world (not just in Wikipedia article).

Thats where battlefield engine says no to your modding attempts and 2-hour attention span of BF fan is greatly overdue.

[stikkypixie]

wait, so youve never seen a game that can be totally overhalled into a differant game? check out the elder scrolls Oblivion, one of the most modded games ever, also the Battlefield games have somme really cool mods. oh, and Medevil 2 total war, was recentlly overhauled to be set in a lord of the rings world! its really cool taking over middle-earth as orcs!

New animations? New AI routines? Made by people who bought the game? No not that many. But then I've been playing the wrong games.

[zwobot]

The Operation Flashpoint franchise has a very active modding community. There you can have new models and textures, config mods which change AI behaviour, script addons which change AI behaviour, new animations, complete conversion mods and many more. Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault are among the most open games there are, it is more like a sandbox game.

Personally I have never seen much need for this amount of modability in CM games but it might be nice to have. But it won't happen unless Battlefront decides to let it happen which is very unlikely I believe. One of the main reasons is cheating issues which was already mentioned before. I'm sure there are more reasons for Battlefront not to allow it (maybe fear of losing sales or something like that) but that's only speculation on my part.

[Noltyboy]

The Operation Flashpoint franchise has a very active modding community. There you can have new models and textures, config mods which change AI behaviour, script addons which change AI behaviour, new animations, complete conversion mods and many more. Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault are among the most open games there are, it is more like a sandbox game.

Personally I have never seen much need for this amount of modability in CM games but it might be nice to have. But it won't happen unless Battlefront decides to let it happen which is very unlikely I believe. One of the main reasons is cheating issues which was already mentioned before. I'm sure there are more reasons for Battlefront not to allow it (maybe fear of losing sales or something like that) but that's only speculation on my part.

I doubt its "sales based" as being a moddable game would surly help sales. What i think the problem is that its difficult to make a game easily moddable especialy for a small team like BFC's.

[cabal23]

I have brought this up multiple times in the past and BF just doesn't want to go there. Imagine being able to mod any army in the world. That would make this game huge. BF disagrees and that is fine because I love the product. But this game would be hugely marketable if they made it inclusive of all armies around the world. Something the mod community would gladly do if given the opportunity. The potential for creating conflicts all around the world is so viable, but I think they are very protective of the code and integrity of the programming itself. maybe BF would weigh in on this. As for conversion to space games like WH40k, I have a feeling the mathematical computation the computer uses to figure hits wouldn't match up to the current programming. Keep the conflicts here on earth and you have infinite possibilities. Other games would do that better..I don't know maybe Dawn of War, the game that was already made to simulate 40k.

[19Kyle72]

I don't think that there's any serious question on whether or not moddability influences sales: it increases them. I bet that just over half of the titles that I've ever purchased were primarily for the mods that were made for the game. And it certainly was a factor in regards to my purchasing of the collector's edition of the CMx1 titles, as it came with the best mods released up to that time.

I can see how moddability can create headaches beyond just cheating for multiplayer engagements. One of the chief complaints about the Unreal Tournament series is that they're so moddable that a universe of servers are setup, and each one has its own collection of mods activated on it. In the case of UT, this really did have an impact on parsing up the community into a horde of smaller groups instead of several large communities that interacted with each other in a regular and predictable way: something that most businesses crave.

Predictability is safer than not. I'm not saying that's a reason for why Battlefront does what it does, but I can understand it to a degree. If one wants to develop a community that's focused on a theme, and that theme is a "vision" of one's product, well then...

Allowing robust mods also certainly extends the life of a game's playability. And while on one hand that's a good thing for a business, on the other, businesses also rely on built in "decrepitude" (a term I readily steal from Bladerunner), and extending the life of a product past one's desired start date for purchasing/focusing attention on a new product is something that I'm sure is to be avoided. It's a Catch-22; one wants to develop a memorable product that seems long-lasting, because it generates fondness for a brand.

Well anyway, I could go on all night, but I have school work to do, so...

[Pandur]

i think 19Kyle72 got it exactly right. rFactor is another example of a large community total fragmented into miniature pices. its quiet horrible, to find a server to play on is impossible for me. and once you got used to one, they gona change mods a week after that... . imagine this with CM, a few great mods, many good ones, and a hell lot of crap flodding the CMmod sites, and everyone plays one of these. try find a MP game in that sourounding.

[TheVulture]

I doubt its "sales based" as being a moddable game would surly help sales. What i think the problem is that its difficult to make a game easily moddable especialy for a small team like BFC's.

The problem is that it only helps sales once. Sure, they could make CM:SF so that you can mod new vehicles, weapons etc. in to it, change TO&E And it might improve sales, although I'd be very surprised if it gave them even an extra 50% sales, to be honest. And as cabal23 mentions, before too long you'd have every modern army in the world modded in to it - at which point, you really don't have much to sell by way of modules, or any other way of generating more revenue. Which means that over a 3 year period, you have considerably less revenue from the game. They are trading off extra up front sales vs repeat sales of modules to a smaller install base.

I assume that this is because they've looked at their market data and research, and figured which way to go. Steve has said before that the moddable version, according to their figures, is great way to get people saying "CM:SF was a great game. Too bad the company folded...".

[Battlefront.com]

Every time this comes up we go through the same exact discussion and the same exact arguments. From our position here are the following consistent answers I've given out over the last 10 years and will continue to give out since none of them have changed:

1. It will fragment the community.

2. It will royally screw up debugging, tech support, and anything else where a customer's comments are relative to whatever Mod they are using. We have enough fun and excitement with people using "bad" Mods which cause unintended consequences.

3. It will not help our sales, and will in fact likely kill us. We are a niche company and we'll never have mass appeal. In fact, if we got ourselves mass appeal it would be because we aren't making CM any more since CM is inherently anti-mass appeal. There's a blurry edge between us and the big markets, and we're quite content to "save" some people from having to play the same FPS/RTS games over and over again

4. Why do people always highlight the big successes in the market place and say to us "see, you can be just like them!"? Why not point to the much larger number of market failures and say "they had modding and they failed, so maybe modding isn't the prime determinant of sales?". Those big FPS/RTS games are forced to redo their graphics engines each and every time they release because the content is disposable. In theory they lose nothing by people replacing their content because when they come around with the next release everything is going to be different. The ones that have enough money to do so, that is. Tons don't go to sequels despite modability because they don't get enough sales.

5. We have a long, proven track record of taking risks and staying alive as a company. We have lasted longer than pretty much anybody that has ever made war/strategy games. Some could claim that we've been lucky, but there is no such thing as luck in this business. Even if there were, it's pretty nuts to think that a company could be around 10 years simply because every time it does something it gets lucky. Which means we come to the inescapable conclusion that we must know how to make and market wargames since that's really the only reasonable conclusion to arrive at. You guys are welcome to quit your day jobs (like we did eons ago) and prove us wrong any time you want. We would like to see what happens

People must remember that apples games can't be compared to oranges games. Might as well tell us that putting CM on X-Box 360 will make us a massive success just like my personal heroes at Bungie. "Yeah, Halo went onto the X-Box and they became super stars". The fact that they had a great game is important, but they became what they are because of massive budgets and a type of game which lent itself well to that platform. Saying X, Y, and Z FPS/RTS games did this or that means nothing to us, not in terms of gameplay or in terms of sales.

Bottom line is that our asses our on the line here, and this is a definite no-go for us.

Steve

[cabal23]

Well spoken! Sorry you had to weigh in on this once again. Very few game companies have conversations with their customers and explain the why and why nots. This is why BF has my money for life as long as they keep making amazing games. Through all the heated debates BF always has a solid, understandable answer for everything. I don't know how the games can get any more amazing than they are. Keep on rockin in the free world BF.

[flamingknives]

While faintly off-topic, I feel the need to weigh in with my opinion on just how awesome a WH40K game with CM levels of fidelity would be.

It needs to be true to the background rather than the board games, in the same way the CM tries to be true to combat in the relevant period rather than preceding games covering the same subject.

The chances of BFC ever doing is a shame, as it would be really, really awesome.

Did I mention that it would be awesome?

[Soul Reapir]

you guys have come up with good answers, again Im new to CM, so I did not know of any of this, so no need to complain of how many times you have explained. but the truth and matter is, modding is a type of art, and should IMO be implemented in every game so players can share thier "art". Im sorry but too many wonderous things could be made with the CM engine to pass by.

[19Kyle72]

Yeah, I hear you, but again, as in my Unreal Tournament example, there is a downside to allowing too much to be modded. I think that Steve did an excellent job of explaining their position, and it's one that's difficult to argue against because, well, they are, in my own opinion, mostly right.

One of the reasons why the whole Unreal Tournament thing has stuck in my head so deeply is because I became an avid player of an infantry simulator that was a total conversion of the UT engine. It was known as Infiltration, and that mod broke more ground in first person tactical shooter history than any game before it, and I can imagine that will ever come after it. And "No," I'm not exaggerating, it was that deep, that immersive, and that almost-overwhelmingly "real." CounterStrike "god" players (aka "bunnyhoppers") would show up online and get their butts handed to them, and the ironic thing is that it wasn't because of a cheap Infiltration gimmick; in fact it was the exact opposite. They were getting walloped because that's all they ever experienced, gimmicks. When they walked into a world of substance, they couldn't handle it. They could learn to deal with it, but the overwhelming majority of them just didn't have the patience to learn or the attitude to be humbled. Which, ironically enough, is why I immediately admired the Combat Mission series.

The downside to my playing Infiltration is that I came in at the end of its golden age, and it was common to hear online the more august players bemoan how there were so many "crap" UT mods out there, and how they wished that the field could've been condensed so that Infiltration could've had more exposure, and thus grow a larger community to keep it going.

Does this sound familiar? It's almost the exact same position that Steve has expressed. Don't get me wrong, I do want my cake and to eat it too, but these guys are correct in saying that it'd wipe them out if they opened the game up too broadly to modding the game's "guts." They're smart. They design challenging games. And the one thing that I've grown to recognize is that they realize that they have an intelligent collection of players who are dedicated to give their products a hard run.

And there are solid reasons for that.

In my time around here, I've never felt, nor observed, anyone being squandered. I don't know if this makes sense or not, but it sounds like you've been following the modding scene in many other titles like I have, and if that's the case, then I'm confident that you've seen contributors/players squandered. It doesn't happen often, but I just haven't seen it happen around here. And I think that's due, in large part, to the culture of those who hang out around here.

Not to toot our horn too loudly, but I certainly feel like I've had my share of the Big Named megamillion dollar budgets games, and really, they've hit a brick wall in so many ways. And it's a wall that they created. Almost right from the start, they've brainwashed an enormous portion of the population into believing that if something looks "flashy" and "AWESOME" that it has to be "good." And the most truthful answer is, "The hell it is." And too many mod making teams have been sucked into this lie, so the majority of them are focused on amplifying the flash, while not really instilling it with any meaningful substance.

Battlefront has that in spades. And I'm happy to live with that.

I will still miss tasting that cake, but at least this way I won't get any cavities.

:-D

[flamingknives]

Infiltration was awesome (that must be my word for the week). Interestingly there was a big hoo-ha while I was playing it when one of the modders introduced a cheat in one of the weapons packs.