If we're talking the old community, HKS, though only to a limited extent (my current campaign is the most major work he's done in like 5-6 years). I don't think I knew you back then. JademusSreg also does some modding presently (though I hardly knew him back then either), but like most "modern" people I currently converse with, I don't think he pursues a major personal project. That's a bit of an interesting subject, but outside the scope of this thread. Some people I knew from back then I had outsourced some stuff to for modding I had held contact with either until semi-recently (DarkPrimus, who disappeared) or still have contact with (non-community members generally). But none who did any of their own mods.
Meanwhile, how many people stick around that haven't touched a mod in forever? Just about everyone currently on CC staff with the exception of Oracle who expressed interest in an sc2 project, paid someone to make a cinematic, and allegedly paid someone to do some ingame assets. Offered to pay me for voice acting, then promptly vanished. Next up is RCX whose last ventures are Wc3-era in which he was the sole truly major active person on the site in forever. We have a few people on the forum who did sc1 work in semi-recent times, though. How many people who were once modders but then vanished, never to touch modding again? The list is beyond recount. Just like the sites that hosted them, the vast majority of our old community gone and long forgotten. Oh, I think we have a newer staff member who does Sc2 stuff, but I don't know him, so I don't count him. :3
SEN? I don't count maps as mods and they were all youngbloods from what I knew.
It's funny how many people thought sc2 was going to revive our community, and how immediate and sudden those thoughts were abandoned the second the editor showed up. I remember we had a ton of old faces show up I hadn't seen in many, many years. I doubt I'll ever see any of them again now.
How is Unreal 4 compared to the UDK? I know they added some new Blueprints thing and such to it. I'd love to get into it, but I don't know programming, so... regardless of how my current sc2 endeavor goes, I hope to focus on Unreal exclusively in the future.
The competition for generic company positions is insanely high here, and most companies who may be looking for editor experience are generally looking more for Unreal, CryEngine kind of experience. Of all the people I've known who had any involvement with modding, only a select few were ever hired - and not because of any mod experience. One was hired because of a recruiter in his college (hired for QA), one was hired for casting wc3 (now esports manager at riot) and one I think was IT (and quit after some years, from Codemasters). All the rest moved on. I often get the impression that most western companies don't know what modding actually is (clearly Blizzard doesn't, since they didn't even make an effort to support big-scale projects in sc2 at all), and modding has become more and more niche with most people who posses major skills moving on to actual game SDK's. That, and most game-specific toolsets can't really be applied to other games. Some methods and concepts can be at best in most cases. Sc2 has an advantage here in that Galaxy is based on C to an extent.
From that it sounds like, in China it's much more likely for people to get noticed. Here, mappers are a dime a dozen (in regards to all games as a whole, I know sc2 is very small) and almost none of them really stand out from one another, plus you have an immense sea of cheap labor coming from cookie cutter college classes. Anything of note in most companies generally requires existing industry experience on top of it. That may be different if you have exceptional UDK/etc skills, though. I have not looked too indepth into the market for people with game SDK skills. It's probably just as saturated. I personally had quite a few job offers, but they were from my voice acting and graphics galleries and were never related to any of my mods.
I think if Dota 2's editor is just a retooled Hammer toolset, it would be far more beneficial to familiarize yourself with it than sc2 if your end goal was commercial-applicable skills.
/edit
I am not familiar with the European game development scene in regards to modder recruitment, though. Most modders I know are European but none have spoken about the companies there, so I'm not sure about that.
Yeah, those are very common here. I see it all the time. Starcraft 2 is a very good example of that, especially when it was first announced.
Usually if I am looking to get into something I do a lot of random perfomance testing and personal research and then look up specific inquiries. But I'm not a programmer, so certain subjects are too advanced for me to get into, so it can be hard to judge some aspects of things because of that. For example, generally many things that I want to do in a game can be achieved by reverse engineering. But since I don't know how to do that, I plainly can't do what I want. So I have to look elsewhere.
Yeah, I've been modding a long time, too (starting 1999 with brood war/age of empires). Almost everyone I once knew is long gone and I haven't heard from them or of them for nearly a decade. Only a few diehards remain, and only a single one still does any form of modding. Unfortunately, people coming and going is simply a part of online communities, especially ones as niche (and often times demanding) as modding. I don't think the success of any given game is necessarily the sole responsible factor for that. Yes, a lot of people I knew got excited about sc2, returned, discovered the mess the editor was, and then just disappeared. But they weren't the kind of people that were going to make a project in sc2 regardless of how good it was. Most of the games I have modded that were considered failures or very niche tend to be those that had the longest-standing communities behind them. That's why I don't try to build ties around any single game, I build general production relationships when possible (so if something doesn't go right, no one has a reason to just vanish).
I would hope that most people would see mutual work as a thing between them and other modders and not necessarily care about the game itself in that case. But I understand we come from two entirely different styles of thinking as well.
While you could construe recommending something that turns out badly as irresponsible, it should really be up to the person developing the project in the end to determine if the game is right for them (and thus bear the responsibility if it doesn't work out). A lot of people told me to go with Unity, but I won't ever touch Unity. I tried to develop projects for Sins of a Solar Empire and the limitations held me back every step of the way, causing me to waste years upon years of nonstop work. But that was my decision. I think seeing it as simply providing a perspective and some information is healthy enough, you shouldn't bear the responsibility of what people choose to do with that information.
Hoping to earn a living on modding is very often a hopeless venture all in itself. Even if you produce a lot of 3d graphics and sell them on sites like Turbosquid, ultimately modding is a personal venture and should always be seen as such. Else, only disappointment awaits.
I agree 100% on all points. However, I think that, as a map/mod developer, it is futile to care about the popularity of any given game, release platform, or own project. See the engines as potential avenues for your work and nothing more. Whether or not some game succeeds monetarily or popularity-wise in competition to other games doesn't really matter to the end user as a content producer. At least, it shouldn't, as that is a dangerous mentality to work by and will certainly make your development life miserable. The best games I've worked with are the ones you wouldn't have expected to be facilitating big TC projects (Diablo 2, Age of Wonders 2, Brood War, etc) and generally had no actual custom content communities (I don't count Brood War map community because I didn't make maps :3).
That terrain gif looks a lot like how NWN does terrain. A lot less powerful than sc2 currently, but it may be some configurable thing. Loved the gui editor for that thing, hated how hardcoded/restricted it was. Couldn't get into Source, though. Didn't ever seem like the engine could facilitate my kind of project.
complexity of galaxy editor deterred many potential mapmakers
Complexity =! difficulty. Don't tell anyone, it's a secret. Hundreds of hours is a drop in the bucket for any project, that alone will deter most casuals regardless of game anyways.
If we're talking the old community, HKS, though only to a limited extent (my current campaign is the most major work he's done in like 5-6 years). I don't think I knew you back then. JademusSreg also does some modding presently (though I hardly knew him back then either), but like most "modern" people I currently converse with, I don't think he pursues a major personal project. That's a bit of an interesting subject, but outside the scope of this thread. Some people I knew from back then I had outsourced some stuff to for modding I had held contact with either until semi-recently (DarkPrimus, who disappeared) or still have contact with (non-community members generally). But none who did any of their own mods.
Meanwhile, how many people stick around that haven't touched a mod in forever? Just about everyone currently on CC staff with the exception of Oracle who expressed interest in an sc2 project, paid someone to make a cinematic, and allegedly paid someone to do some ingame assets. Offered to pay me for voice acting, then promptly vanished. Next up is RCX whose last ventures are Wc3-era in which he was the sole truly major active person on the site in forever. We have a few people on the forum who did sc1 work in semi-recent times, though. How many people who were once modders but then vanished, never to touch modding again? The list is beyond recount. Just like the sites that hosted them, the vast majority of our old community gone and long forgotten. Oh, I think we have a newer staff member who does Sc2 stuff, but I don't know him, so I don't count him. :3
SEN? I don't count maps as mods and they were all youngbloods from what I knew.
It's funny how many people thought sc2 was going to revive our community, and how immediate and sudden those thoughts were abandoned the second the editor showed up. I remember we had a ton of old faces show up I hadn't seen in many, many years. I doubt I'll ever see any of them again now.
@abvdzh: Go
Yeah. Absolutely.
@KorvinGump: Go
How is Unreal 4 compared to the UDK? I know they added some new Blueprints thing and such to it. I'd love to get into it, but I don't know programming, so... regardless of how my current sc2 endeavor goes, I hope to focus on Unreal exclusively in the future.
The competition for generic company positions is insanely high here, and most companies who may be looking for editor experience are generally looking more for Unreal, CryEngine kind of experience. Of all the people I've known who had any involvement with modding, only a select few were ever hired - and not because of any mod experience. One was hired because of a recruiter in his college (hired for QA), one was hired for casting wc3 (now esports manager at riot) and one I think was IT (and quit after some years, from Codemasters). All the rest moved on. I often get the impression that most western companies don't know what modding actually is (clearly Blizzard doesn't, since they didn't even make an effort to support big-scale projects in sc2 at all), and modding has become more and more niche with most people who posses major skills moving on to actual game SDK's. That, and most game-specific toolsets can't really be applied to other games. Some methods and concepts can be at best in most cases. Sc2 has an advantage here in that Galaxy is based on C to an extent.
From that it sounds like, in China it's much more likely for people to get noticed. Here, mappers are a dime a dozen (in regards to all games as a whole, I know sc2 is very small) and almost none of them really stand out from one another, plus you have an immense sea of cheap labor coming from cookie cutter college classes. Anything of note in most companies generally requires existing industry experience on top of it. That may be different if you have exceptional UDK/etc skills, though. I have not looked too indepth into the market for people with game SDK skills. It's probably just as saturated. I personally had quite a few job offers, but they were from my voice acting and graphics galleries and were never related to any of my mods.
I think if Dota 2's editor is just a retooled Hammer toolset, it would be far more beneficial to familiarize yourself with it than sc2 if your end goal was commercial-applicable skills.
/edit
I am not familiar with the European game development scene in regards to modder recruitment, though. Most modders I know are European but none have spoken about the companies there, so I'm not sure about that.
Yeah, those are very common here. I see it all the time. Starcraft 2 is a very good example of that, especially when it was first announced.
Usually if I am looking to get into something I do a lot of random perfomance testing and personal research and then look up specific inquiries. But I'm not a programmer, so certain subjects are too advanced for me to get into, so it can be hard to judge some aspects of things because of that. For example, generally many things that I want to do in a game can be achieved by reverse engineering. But since I don't know how to do that, I plainly can't do what I want. So I have to look elsewhere.
@Renee2islga: Go
Yeah, I've been modding a long time, too (starting 1999 with brood war/age of empires). Almost everyone I once knew is long gone and I haven't heard from them or of them for nearly a decade. Only a few diehards remain, and only a single one still does any form of modding. Unfortunately, people coming and going is simply a part of online communities, especially ones as niche (and often times demanding) as modding. I don't think the success of any given game is necessarily the sole responsible factor for that. Yes, a lot of people I knew got excited about sc2, returned, discovered the mess the editor was, and then just disappeared. But they weren't the kind of people that were going to make a project in sc2 regardless of how good it was. Most of the games I have modded that were considered failures or very niche tend to be those that had the longest-standing communities behind them. That's why I don't try to build ties around any single game, I build general production relationships when possible (so if something doesn't go right, no one has a reason to just vanish).
I would hope that most people would see mutual work as a thing between them and other modders and not necessarily care about the game itself in that case. But I understand we come from two entirely different styles of thinking as well.
While you could construe recommending something that turns out badly as irresponsible, it should really be up to the person developing the project in the end to determine if the game is right for them (and thus bear the responsibility if it doesn't work out). A lot of people told me to go with Unity, but I won't ever touch Unity. I tried to develop projects for Sins of a Solar Empire and the limitations held me back every step of the way, causing me to waste years upon years of nonstop work. But that was my decision. I think seeing it as simply providing a perspective and some information is healthy enough, you shouldn't bear the responsibility of what people choose to do with that information.
Hoping to earn a living on modding is very often a hopeless venture all in itself. Even if you produce a lot of 3d graphics and sell them on sites like Turbosquid, ultimately modding is a personal venture and should always be seen as such. Else, only disappointment awaits.
Had a good chortle.
@Renee2islga: Go
I agree 100% on all points. However, I think that, as a map/mod developer, it is futile to care about the popularity of any given game, release platform, or own project. See the engines as potential avenues for your work and nothing more. Whether or not some game succeeds monetarily or popularity-wise in competition to other games doesn't really matter to the end user as a content producer. At least, it shouldn't, as that is a dangerous mentality to work by and will certainly make your development life miserable. The best games I've worked with are the ones you wouldn't have expected to be facilitating big TC projects (Diablo 2, Age of Wonders 2, Brood War, etc) and generally had no actual custom content communities (I don't count Brood War map community because I didn't make maps :3).
That terrain gif looks a lot like how NWN does terrain. A lot less powerful than sc2 currently, but it may be some configurable thing. Loved the gui editor for that thing, hated how hardcoded/restricted it was. Couldn't get into Source, though. Didn't ever seem like the engine could facilitate my kind of project.
Complexity =! difficulty. Don't tell anyone, it's a secret. Hundreds of hours is a drop in the bucket for any project, that alone will deter most casuals regardless of game anyways.