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While I like the idea of changing the shape of the map during the game I think the point about player created content falls flat. There's significant modding,

• jiggy2011 14y ago
  The problem I tend to have with user created maps in RTS games is they often don't work well with computer AI at all. The AI in these games often relies on certain "trigger points "on the map for example "try and hold this area", "try and attack this way" , "build a base here" etc rather than having a truly generic AI. When using user created maps these points are often either not put in or are not used in a way that is not as tested and thought out as those that ship with the game. This results in AI that either sits there and does nothing or will just play very badly on a particular map. Of course most advanced players are not interested in playing against AI, but it is a good way to learn a new game or to try a particular technique etc.
  • lmm 14y ago
    Real AI is hard. It's not that developers don't try, it's that they can't make it better. About the best the developers can do is give players access to the same interface they have. If you look at the StarCraft community you see amazingly complex AI scripting using what's fundamentally a very simplistic trigger interface. But it's only the top epsilon% most polished maps where the creators put in all the effort needed to make that work.
    • b0rsuk 14y ago
      Magarena and Unity of Command may not have a true AI, but it's still very good. Have fun checking them out. Unity of Command is an old-school looking hex-based WW2 game. Magarena is a free program to play Magic: The Gathering. It has a few downsides and doesn't deal with fuzzy logic, but most of the time it plays like a bastard. If you underestimate it or hope it doesn't notice something, you'll regret it.
      • jiggy2011 14y ago
        AI always seems much better in turn based games than in real time games. I guess because turn based games are more able to say "stop everything until I recalculate all of the path finding" whereas a real time game has to deliver so many game updates per second and will maybe have to run AI in a separate thread which might not yield a good solution until the AI has already had to make a decision based on stale information. Chess AIs are often scary good for example and FPS AIs are notoriously dumb.
        • b0rsuk 14y ago
          When you bring in FPS games, keep in mind single player in most of them don't treat AI players as first class citizens. This is what C-Evo developer calls "AI liberation". Examples of FPS games with decent AI are Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The latter also has the best bots to date, I think.
          • jiggy2011 14y ago
            True, UT had reasonable AI but it did always seem to perform much better on deathmatch where it could just run around shooting things than on CTF maps where you could quite easily camp outside of your base and just snipe it when it tried to come in. Of course AI is getting better now that we can offload stuff onto other cores without tying up the game loop so much.
          • thaumasiotes 14y ago
            I don't know to what degree the UT bots qualify as AI players... their strategies are coded into the level, not the bots. (disclaimer: I read guides to making UT levels, but never actually made one. Details may be misremembered. However, the fact that two levels with identical topography might be treated entirely differently by the same bots (owing to different bot-path placement in each) doesn't leave me filled with awe at the bots' decision-making.)
            • neumann_alfred 14y ago
• jere 14y ago
  >Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc. Just a few anecdotes from the FPS genre: Team Fortress was a Quake mod released in 1996, Counterstrike was a Half Life mod released in 1999, and Natural Selection was a Half Life mod released in 2002. It's pretty amazing all these are still around in incredibly polished sequels.
• ANTSANTS 14y ago
  I don't know how it compares to the modern scene, but there was definitely a large amount of RTS modding and mapmaking going on long before 2005. Particularly for the old Command and Conquer games, which were much more accessible to modders than modern, full 3D titles. It's much easier to plonk down some 2D or isometric tiles, carve a vehicle model out of voxels, or edit the "ini files" of those games than it is to create a similar experience with a full fledged 3D modeler and modern toolset. It may not have really been programming, but modding Tiberian Sun and making simple websites from plain HTML were my childhood "I can make the computer do what I want?!" moments. They were such limited environments, but the ease with which a kid could do interesting things with them really opened up new worlds to me. People talk about the "little coder" problem a lot. I wonder if it's better to start a child with "making your own pong," so that they are confronted with actual programming from the beginning, or to give them a powerful but inflexible tool so that they can do impressive things right off the bat, before starting to think "why can't I do this? If I had made it, it would be like this..."
  • DanBC 14y ago
    Level design, with the possibility of adding scripted features, seems like a good start.
  • willvarfar 14y ago
    Wow, just wow. Remember Will's voxel editors? There's a smaller scene today still around, e.g. MegaGlest. And Ludum Dare 25 is next week. Ping if you want to join in or playtest something by some really old C&C modder hands ;)
  • ceejayoz 14y ago
    > I don't know how it compares to the modern scene, but there was definitely a large amount of RTS modding and mapmaking going on long before 2005. Particularly for the old Command and Conquer games, which were much more accessible to modders than modern, full 3D titles. It's much easier to plonk down some 2D or isometric tiles, carve a vehicle model out of voxels, or edit the "ini files" of those games than it is to create a similar experience with a full fledged 3D modeler and modern toolset. I recall giving Tanya the cruiser gun via those .ini files. Good times.