RE: Windows Installer for Xconq

[Hans Ronne <hronne@comhem.se>]

>> In standard industry terminonology, Modding encompasses writing game
>> scripts with game specific languages.  For instance, writing a bot in
>> Quake C.  If that's all you're doing, if you're not modifying source
>> code, then Modding is the canonically correct industry standard term.
>
>To amplify, the commercial game Counterstrike is nothing more than a Mod
>of Half-Life.  And it has sold more than Half-Life.

Indeed. Because it is a modification of Half-Life. Which is what mod really
stands for.

The point I was trying to make is that an Xconq base module is not a
modification of anything. You write it from scratch using certain basic
objects (units, materials etc.) but how these objects interact is defined
by you (through GDL). You have a lot more freedom that in traditional
modding, where the rules of the mod are rather narrowly defined by how the
original game was designed.

To follow your example, the people who wrote Half-Life had no reason to put
stuff in their kernel that was of no use in their game. The xconq kernel,
OTOH, has been written to be as flexible as possible and to provide support
for as many different types of interactions as are conceivable.

Let me illustrate with an example that was discussed on this list last
year. If you do a mod of Civ II, you are limited by a number of constraints
on the number of unit types, how they interact, even what kind of messages
appear during the game. One of the best Civ II mods ever written (in my
opinion) was Harlan Thompson's Lord of the Rings scenario. However, when
you play it you will get silly messages like "Your Gandalf has run out of
fuel and crashed" because the Gandalf unit took the place of the bomber in
the original game.

Civ III is better in this respect because an effort was made to support
modding, but it does not come close to what you can do with Xconq. If
anything, I would call Xconq a game engine, or a game design tool, at least
when it comes to writing new base modules.

Hans