Game Mod Culture

The Stanley Parable is an experimental narrative-driven first person game. It is an exploration of choice, freedom, storytelling and reality, all examined through the lens of what it means to play a video game.

This Skyrim mod is actually called “Here There Be Monsters“, and it adds nine huge sea monsters into the Ghost Sea to the north of Bethesda’s chilly realm. But I’ve focused on the Horkers because, well, just look at that screenshot. It is a giant beast with a huge tooth. Look, though. Really look. See? He’s not a beast. He’s just a thing that society deems to be big and scary. And so he acts as society imagines he should, and tusks everything and everyone. To be fair, he is part of a society of angry Nords fighting dragons and in the midst of a civil war. He should probably move somewhere nicer.

The Raspberry Pi is a low-powered mini computer with a 700 MHz ARM11 processor. You can safely overclock it to 1 GHz. But if you want to get really crazy and go higher than that you might need a custom cooling solution.

Or maybe you just want to build one because it’d look awesome. That seems to be the driving force behind this water-cooled “Wet Pi” project from bit-tech forum member Phame.

CryEngine 3, Crytek's top-tier game engine that made Crysis 3 look so pretty, can be handy modeling streets, disassembled cars and entire cityscapes.

If you like this project, please vote! http://www.instructables.com/id/YaHookah-The-computer-you-can-smoke/

A modder by the name of ‘Bacteria‘, a.k.a. ‘BacMan’, has unveiled possibly the most impressive feat of engineering we’ve ever come across, a mega console that combines a total of fifteen (yes, FIFTEEN!) retro videogames systems into one. It is the result of three years of love, blood, sweat and tears, and has our gobs well and truly smacked.

Dragon fights are 'events' which are triggered periodically in the upper level regions of the Guild Wars world. There is a bit of regularity to them. Though the don't spawn exactly by the clock, they are available to spawn within a limited time window. Apparently, the Guild Wars beginning mod. community is on to this. For quite some time I've heard people refer to two sites: Orrmaps and Dragon Timers. Orrmaps is a resource map, server specific. Here's my Tarnished Coast map. Yes, it's specific to me and my finds. I started it on the weekend, whilst running with Tychem and Nizwa so it doesn't cover all the area that I've actually ranged over in the game. The other browser-based mod is the dragon timer, Guild Wars Temple (I don't know why either). It too is server specific. These are the timers for our server. This page has live count downs to spawn windows. Now the GW2 people have limited your ability to get a chest to once daily on the special events, because the chests have rare drops usually. But still, it's great to know when to start posting up for Claw of Jormag, for example.

Mobile-social game developer Sneaky Games will be changing up the traditional multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre’s formula with Arena of Heroes, a MOBA game featuring turn-based gameplay and cross-platform play between PC, Mac and iPad.

The MOBA genre originated with the hit game mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) for Blizzard’s PC real-time strategy (RTS) game Warcraft 3. In MOBAs, players control one “hero” unit and duke it out on a game map which features three “lanes,” where each team is tasked with pushing to the opposite side of the map and destroying an opponent’s base.

The game has been in testing for a little over a week now, and we've already had 5 versions and multiple hotfixes, eliminating a whole slew of map bugs, crashes, and making huge strides in optimization and reducing the memory used by the game.

As far as giving an older game the Source treatment, GhorsHammer's gmDoom port project is probably the quickest to elicit a "Holy %)#@" out of me since Black Mesa.

The Foundry is a content authoring tool that allows players to create their own quests and campaigns for others to play. Using the various features available, Foundry authors can create unique content, make custom interior and exterior maps, and build contacts and dialog tailored to their storytelling needs. When they’re ready, authors can publish their quests for all players in Neverwinter to experience.

There are very few limitations when it comes to the content an author can make in the Foundry. Whether it is a quick rescue of a drunken dwarf in the Chasm, or a deep delve into the history and lore of the Forgotten Realms, authors can create an array of different quests. We support this creativity with tools that allow you to customize the look and feel of everything, from friendly contacts to the critters players will fight. Our costume editor allows for nearly endless customization of every person or thing you’ll come across in a quest. Within the quests you can really tune the experience for players by having elements of your quest be special for players with specific skills. And this is just the start; there is so much more that can be done with the Foundry. ...

Managing your mods for your favourite PC games is never an easy task but perhaps the GMOD tool from Olympus games could help.

The GMOD rteam want add further support to the system for more popular PC games including Diablo 2, World of Warcraft, Torchlight 2, GTA4, Natural Selection and more. The tool syncs your mods up with the latest versions, there’s mod browsing tools and even resources to make your own mods.

Olympus are looking for $70.000 and there is eighteen days to go until the Kickstarter closes. So far $12, 627 has been pledged from 106 backers. If you’re looking for something to handle your mods then you can check out the Kickstarter page now.

While there are plenty of different tools like this, most of the time they handle a single game so having multiple tools is a pain in the backside. This could be a good solution if you like your mods.

When we released our very first game, Game Dev Tycoon (for Mac, Windows and Linux) yesterday, we did something unusual and as far as I know unique. We released a cracked version of the game ourselves, minutes after opening our Store.

YouTube user "Chris Gallizzi" successfully modded Skyrim with Oculus Rift support using Vireio Perception Driver, according to a video posted on YouTube.

The two-minute video demonstrates one-on-one sword combat and traversing the snowy environment on horseback.

"It takes some adjusting depending on your sight..." said "Chris Gallizzi" in response to a commenter's question if the technology really does cover users natural FOV. He went on to say that he was near sighted "so i had to adjust the FOV from 100 to 110 to make everything seem correct [sic]."

Vireio Perception includes support for games such as Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead and Mirror's Edge. Last week, virtual reality specialists, Virtuix, released a video of someone playing Team Fortress 2 with an Oculus Rift and a Virtuix Omni treadmill.

Since the first video games came out, there have always been people who would dive into the code and change things to improve, change or add new content. These new versions of the game are called mods, and they are an important part of pc gaming today.  If you look at many popular modern games you will see a huge, thriving mod community. But lets go back a bit, and look at how one game series has become known as one of the most modded video game series ever. I am of course talking about the ever popular Elder Scrolls series, which have always had large modding communities since the first game, Arena. So why exactly do people mod these game and are they good for games success?

It's here! After lots of packaging, tweaking, and testing, we're rolling out the new Torchlight II editor - GUTS. In this action-packed update we have some important information on what exactly GUTS is and how it can work for you. You might want to bookmark this page for later. Ready? Here we go!

In this presentation, Alex Champandard talks about using behavior trees to create responsive yet purposeful decision-making and control systems.