New version of this map, a remake of hue from battlefield vietnam, the port being made originally from a friend of mine (fellow mapper Bry).
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Call of Duty: Source
Moddb.com is a website for team of modders to promote their mods. This is the place I have been looking at for a mod of the HL2 engine geared toward a world I am friendly with: the CoD serie and the MoH serie. I have been playing MoH since the Playstation release and it is an all time favourite when it comes to FPS with a WWII theme. I have since been playing vCoD (vanilla CoD), the expansion pack for it UO, CoD2 and CoD4. I had a go at CoD3 on XBox, but I was less than impressed. I have tried a few FPS on the side, but I consistently came back to this serie for the fun I have with it, even with the last instalment I played (CoD4) which changes the theme to a modern area (IE the weaponry was suddenly more forgiving with all those full automatic assault riffle and other added features).
Like so many others in the community I have been less and less happy with the development of the franchise (the first being run by EA, and the second by Activision). So many things have been left out. So many things are being implemented that should be left out. But I have no access to the code and modding for the CoD serie means that every year or so the current code base has to be ported to which ever new game is being released, as Activision is seeing this as a product to be pushed every 12 months. I won't even look at the modding situation in the MoH serie as EA has not only a bad reputation of after release management, but proved it many times over.
So I have decided to have a look for myself at the possibility to port MoH and early CoD games into an environment that is a bit more stable. The choice of the Source Engine is quite obvious for someone like me: in between a gamer only and solely a developer. I've heard so many things about the Source Engine that I have to see for myself. The good point about this engine is that it is modding friendly: you have access to the source code, it is fully in C++ and it is related to the Quake engine. I don't have to remind anyone that the MoH/CoD series have been developed from a modified version of the quake3 engine. So I hope I am not making any mistakes assuming that it'll be easier to navigate through that code than, let say, the UT3 one. And being a engine still in use for recent games (L4D being the latest) there is good hope that the support will be far greater, even if it is from the community.
So I've spend a day configuring my dev machine to have the following: a working installation of HL2, steam, HL2DM, VS2008, SVN to be able to go through the different explanation of the code I could find online. I am hoping to be able to make some progress.
Like so many others in the community I have been less and less happy with the development of the franchise (the first being run by EA, and the second by Activision). So many things have been left out. So many things are being implemented that should be left out. But I have no access to the code and modding for the CoD serie means that every year or so the current code base has to be ported to which ever new game is being released, as Activision is seeing this as a product to be pushed every 12 months. I won't even look at the modding situation in the MoH serie as EA has not only a bad reputation of after release management, but proved it many times over.
So I have decided to have a look for myself at the possibility to port MoH and early CoD games into an environment that is a bit more stable. The choice of the Source Engine is quite obvious for someone like me: in between a gamer only and solely a developer. I've heard so many things about the Source Engine that I have to see for myself. The good point about this engine is that it is modding friendly: you have access to the source code, it is fully in C++ and it is related to the Quake engine. I don't have to remind anyone that the MoH/CoD series have been developed from a modified version of the quake3 engine. So I hope I am not making any mistakes assuming that it'll be easier to navigate through that code than, let say, the UT3 one. And being a engine still in use for recent games (L4D being the latest) there is good hope that the support will be far greater, even if it is from the community.
So I've spend a day configuring my dev machine to have the following: a working installation of HL2, steam, HL2DM, VS2008, SVN to be able to go through the different explanation of the code I could find online. I am hoping to be able to make some progress.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Daft Music Industry and Greedy Pigs
Sorry for the Harsh title, but I had to put it down.
In an on going terror campaign from the music industry upon its consumers, many people and a lot more companies have felt down as casualties because of the stupidity of this industry to not to be able to embrace the advent of the new technologies brought by the internet. This is so true in the light of the most recent event (December 2008) when the RIAA officially declared not being interested any more at bullying internet user suspected of SHARING music files.
An article published back in 2002 (R.I.P. Audiogalaxy) retrace the life and death of an internet music provider that had been forced to close down because of the same inability or the RIAA's members to change at the same pace as the technology. Here is an excerpt that is very interesting:
"[...] As most people with a clue realize, it is extremely hard to filter digital media. Unless you have a person sitting there listening to an mp3, you have no way of knowing that an mp3 titled "unsigned band - lame song.mp3" is actually nsync's latest hit. At first we had simple text matching, but users are obviously smart enough to figure out how to rename files in ways that make sense only to humans. After increasing pressure from the RIAA, we actually went to an extremely complex system based on a checksum digest of the first megabyte of an mp3.[...]"
This is fact quite impressive to read that upon receiving almost inconsistent batch of data from the different copyright holders to compare with the files transferred on the network, those guys actually manage to do anything at all. But the solution is even more impressive. A more logical solution would have been to create a unique master database for every single track existing and to have a unique identifier per track based on the actual sound. This is something that is implemented right now (Feb 2009) in many software solution and available for free for personal usage and possibly under some sort of commercial licensing scheme if someone needs.
I surely hope the people behind those investment decision in the music industry for the past ten years are getting fired as it is a similar case of public pressure as it did happened for the printing industry with Gutenberg.
In an on going terror campaign from the music industry upon its consumers, many people and a lot more companies have felt down as casualties because of the stupidity of this industry to not to be able to embrace the advent of the new technologies brought by the internet. This is so true in the light of the most recent event (December 2008) when the RIAA officially declared not being interested any more at bullying internet user suspected of SHARING music files.
An article published back in 2002 (R.I.P. Audiogalaxy) retrace the life and death of an internet music provider that had been forced to close down because of the same inability or the RIAA's members to change at the same pace as the technology. Here is an excerpt that is very interesting:
"[...] As most people with a clue realize, it is extremely hard to filter digital media. Unless you have a person sitting there listening to an mp3, you have no way of knowing that an mp3 titled "unsigned band - lame song.mp3" is actually nsync's latest hit. At first we had simple text matching, but users are obviously smart enough to figure out how to rename files in ways that make sense only to humans. After increasing pressure from the RIAA, we actually went to an extremely complex system based on a checksum digest of the first megabyte of an mp3.[...]"
This is fact quite impressive to read that upon receiving almost inconsistent batch of data from the different copyright holders to compare with the files transferred on the network, those guys actually manage to do anything at all. But the solution is even more impressive. A more logical solution would have been to create a unique master database for every single track existing and to have a unique identifier per track based on the actual sound. This is something that is implemented right now (Feb 2009) in many software solution and available for free for personal usage and possibly under some sort of commercial licensing scheme if someone needs.
I surely hope the people behind those investment decision in the music industry for the past ten years are getting fired as it is a similar case of public pressure as it did happened for the printing industry with Gutenberg.
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