Videogames modding comunities

Although i've created maps only for doom2, i'm strongly interested in modding communities.
So i wonder which videogames from the 1996-2000 era still have a strong community of mappers.
Why 1996-2000? Because i love old videogames.

Bye!

Build Engine Modders never seem to go away, they all hang out in and around the 3DRealms forums. Half-Life 1 Modding Community Seems to be alive and well too.

Wolf3D is a lost cause of old fogies and meme loving kids with the worst maps and engines, more stingy than Doom3
Doom is surprisngly active and caring (and most notably the id community with the most furries probably due to doom's demon setting)
Quake only has a few quakec coders left, mostly newbies, most of the vets have game industry jobs, and the mappers are purist (they never take advantage of engine features)
Quake 2 is fussy, rarely any new maps coming out and if it does come out it's a simple box map for a few select servers. also no one models for q2 anymore.
Quake III Arena has some unmemorable arenas popping up nowadays and the modding has turned into "LETS STANDALONE OUR MOD" often with SDK-breaching results. Oh,and q2's fussiness
Doom 3 is filled with visionaries that are a bit stingy
Quake 4 no one plays anymore (and mods are like very few)
Quake Wars only has the loyal people left, no one really mods it because of the whole megatextures thing
Duke3D is just a mere shadow of what used to be a creative community (in 96/97). Now it's just a focus on 'cool' and 'hip' because there's mostly devil kids there (thanks to dnf negative hype on putting the duke3d on their 'cool list'), all wanting to make a 'standalone game' that involves shooting zombies, copy Blood, copy GTA, etc.
Blood... oh don't make me laugh. Newbs that praise the game like the next coming of jesus and don't really map well for it and most likely don't even own it and often ask where the mapping tools are (thanks to stupid abandonware sites for providing it like it's 'free'. and the mapedit is on the disc fyi)

http://q3a.ath.cx/

Defrag is alive and well. 2 epic maps released just today.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe FTW

leileilol said:

Quake Wars only has the loyal people left, no one really mods it because of the whole megatextures thing

Uh. No if anything. Few people make maps and mods for it because of the ranked server folly where the majority of the community won't look past their precious stats and play unranked servers.

Megatextures are maybe used by 40% of all the maps made for ETQW.

leileilol said:

Doom is surprisngly active and caring (and most notably the id community with the most furries probably due to doom's demon setting

What does the demon motif of Doom have to do with the number of furries (myself included) in the community? I don't see anything furry about imps, demons, barons/hell knights/etc.

Mr. Chris said:
barons/hell knights

The legs? In any case, "furries" also include other anthropomorphic animal-like characters. Maybe in the middle ages those obsessed with drawing demons were the equivalent of today's furries :p

I remember reading in Master's of Doom:

"Doom was precisely the kind of game Adrian [Carmack] had always wanted to do: something that would allow him to exorcise his most nightmarish visions. Along with the others, he and Kevin [Cloud] dreamed up the most hideous creatures they could imagine: the Imp, a red-eyed Bigfoot-like beast with brown fur covering his muscles and metal spikes from his shoulders and arms; the Demon, a snorting pink bull with bloodstained teeth and horns; and, the meanest of all, the Cyberdemon, with a gun for an arm and a ripped-open torso."

BACK TO MODDING...

I know that The last three mechwarrior games (2, 3, and 4) all have very close-knit, yet open, modding communities. And since the games they mod are very good, you could always try them.

leileilol said:

Doom 3 is filled with visionaries that are a bit stingy

Does anything of that mean that it's collapsing? Visionary doesn't sound necessarily bad for mod production and stingy sounds like it can go off after they learn how to map. Or how?

Sometimes game modding can go very, very wrong.

Check out this little gem of a RTS game I and Jodwin were involved with at one time, and how downhill it went since we abandoned the project long ago due to different reasons: The-Battlefield Forum > Games > WARLORDS BATTLECRY SERIES

Yeah, the game's version in question was released in 2004, but the game engine was way older than that.

Thank you all for your suggestions.
This seems to be a well promising thread.

Modding communities seem to follow each one its own life... probably following the fortune of the game and the will of the mappers.

Age Of Empires seems to have still a faithful community... just not to remain restricted to FPS only.

Lorenzo

We got a rather nasty taste of the Blood community on here recently, but i did a little background research and some members of it seem quite sound. However there's some mouthy cunts in it, and they seem to be able to influence the rest of the community (whereas in the Doom community they'd just be laughed at). The worst one of them seemed to be one of "those" people that hates anime due to an underlying and badly-concealed homophobia and mild racism too.

There seems to be a fairly active community for the build engine in general though, and it seems fairly easy to edit in and pretty versatile too (easy ROR, see the map as you make it etc, for instance)

The only game i really mod for is Doom, though, so i've not had a properly in-depth look at other communities. Well except for following GTA mods a while back, just to see pretty screens. The GTA modding community consists of a hardcore minority of intelligent people who know what they are doing, and do it to a high standard, and then for every one of them there's at least 200 morons going "OMG TEECH MI HOW 2 MOD"

Mr. Chris said:

What does the demon motif of Doom have to do with the number of furries (myself included) in the community? I don't see anything furry about imps, demons, barons/hell knights/etc.

It's a leileilol post, don't read too much into the usual furry plug.

Don't forget Dark Forces. :) There hasn't been much modding recently but its starting to pick up again.

df-21.net

And for information on DarkXL: DarkXL Forums on the same site

There's also http://www.massassi.net if you're interested in Jedi Knight.

I would enjoy making/playing command & conquer (original not red alert) maps. I hate how the original was set up in that you can't idclip to any map and have to take an odd path from one map to the next, leaving some behind. The covert operations were more fun/challenging, but still some levels (like where you couldn't build stuff or only controlled one commando) were boring.
Never played age of empires but heard of it and maybe that's the next best thing, given someone above mentioned it has a modding community.

I'm part of a Commander Keen modding community which is still surprisingly active. Beyond that and Doom I don't follow gaming communities that much.

Anyone know how the Descent community is fairing nowadays? They, too, have a few fancy source ports knocking around now from what I've heard.