I finally reached the burnout stage with modding just over a year ago. I realized that modding gave me the same frustrations that my real world work gives. I also came to the realization that I could never replace my real world income with a mod. I do continue to mod games, but only for personal use as computers and games have advanced beyond my needs.

I would like to see a thread where modders could vent there frustration about the simulation they trying to learn, or the frustration they have with dealing with the end users of there mod.

I have considered returning to my old projects, but I wonder if that only proves that I am an idiot.

it'll most likely get shut with a few post for its long use of obscenities and murder threats! Theres nothing as stupid as the "general public" whether on the PC or in the real world

One thing is absolutely essential to modding = a VERY thick skin! Also do what you want yourself and never try to please to everyone (cos you never will), if people complain it should have X and be more like Y, just tell em to stuff it or do it themselves!

Britt..I understand the frustrations you are experiencing,,i have a friend from EAW that does a lot of modding for EAW and he gets upset a lot,,,but just to let you know there are some who appreciate all the efforts and hard work you modders put into your work..Thank you for the work you have done and the enjoyment I have gotten from using some of it...Best of luck to you M8

While not a modder, I gave up making missions for flight sims, especially DCS, because they get broken after updates.

I mention DCS, as I had a nice little Black Shark campaign I built with branching missions based on what a pilot did and some multi-player maps with triggers on them that was all ruined

Meatshield,
You are correct. It takes a long time to harden ones skin against the criticism of ones dreams.

Dart,
You make a good point. The people creating the code have to consider backward compatibility if they want to keep it modable. I had hopes to mod combined arms (even though it was outdated) but the confusion with the game engine said I should wait until the engine is stable. Unfortunately, my hardware is too old to even consider that game engine now.

rwatson,
The EAW community were the ones that helped me to learn that I do enjoy modding and to be ashamed (though still fighting) a mod war history (PE). They inspired me to learn how to make tools. Unfortunately, I had to leave after signing a different NDA. I still have respect for what every EAW modder created, though there are a few I would not work with again.


I would add some advice that Teut Wiedemann gave me ( and I paraphrase). Be cautious looking under the hood. If you see the magic, it can ruin the magic or make you addicted to tinkering and not playing.

I don't have the patience or the skills to be a modder but I have always greatly appreciated the work of modders. WIthout modders, I think the ArmA series would have died out a long time ago.

I have always had nothing but respect for the modders and skin makers in EAW. They have been impressively keeping at it for a long time and keep an old favorite running and improving.

I began my modding career with Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, then the Dynamix Aces series of flightsims in the late 1990s. I really got my hands dirty after Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe (or SDOE) came out. I helped to mod that sim for over 10 years, mainly involving myself with the WWI aspect.

The thing with any mod, is the community that surrounds it and the support of those members. Without that support and encouragement, I feel that modding is a futile effort. There is always something to fix, or tweak and one can suffer burnout pretty quick, instead of just playing the game you love. The SDOE community died off a while back as other sims came to market, and the modding slowly ground to a halt. That and real life has really gotten in the way for some (including myself)...

I still have many things I want to get into SDOE WWI (or FS-WWI as we in the SDOE community call it). I have many ship, ground units and aircraft 3d meshes that need to be imported and skinned. However, there is practically no one left to assist. That, and the tools available to mod SDOE are very complex, finicky, and a huge barrier of entry... So after many suffered burnout and gave up or moved on, there were no new ranks to step in.

I mod practically everything I own in life: cars, furniture, electronics, games, etc., and have huge respect for the modders that produce the actual content to mod with. And the work they must put in!

The last game I can honestly say I modded myself was Wolfenstein 3D, where I meticulously reprocessed every single bitmap image in the game to add a graphical filter to them... using a MS-DOS photo editor. It took a while. Looked awesome, though.


So mod on, don't mod on, but if you do, know we love you either way, because you've made us awesome stuff to enjoy.

Argon Still have FS-WW I on my machine and SDOW WWII good stuff there

Ah thank ya kindly! I still keep a few running versions of SDOE on my disks and fly them on occasion.

I agree, but the pit fall I have seen is that there needs to be someone who can temper the egos and expectations.

I started modding Panzer Elite (PE) while working on my unfinished CAD degree. I spent my break hours plotting the data points of the F18 3D model for Falcon 3.0. When the art for PEDG's Brit44 was created, I screamed how it was crap and could be better. We had 2 whole tlbs to work with. Needless to say, there was a mass exidus to Steel Beast. A few skilled modders, who were looking for jobs, stuck around until Wings Simulations was forced to sell to Nordic Games. I stay with PE because I still think I owe this game something. Had someone had put me in my place, I may have left. But, the project as a whole would have been better off.

Someone had mentioned editing tools and how they were (my words and poor spelling) quirky. That is very true. Panzer Elite has very outdated tools. I have updated them as I have learned. I have also created tools (readers would be a better description) as I learned tools and tool GUI in Delphi 7. But, I would argue that the old tools are easier to learn if your background is that of a curious player. A good example is the object editor for Panzer Elite. UV skinning did not exist at that time. With PE, you paint each 3D polygon individually. While the PEx game engine is capable of rendering UV coords. I stopped updating the tool as it is easier for me to skin a new 3D model by painting each poly. It is similar to 1:32 plastics. I have since studied UV skinning. It is great for the guys like Geezer and Tom Weiss, but it does not help the knob 3D modeler import there dream into there game.

There is a place for old school tools and the old school ways of doing things. Maybe you think it should be tought (spelling) in elementary school. Technology is only easy because people added there knowledge to the GUI. What would you do if all of this is lost?

Sorry, I have rambled.

OG, I also have respect for everyone involved with EAW modding. But like I said, there are a few that I would prefer not to work with again. That being said, EAW can be a mirror for my unforgiving feud bit BobR. I am just as guilty in mod wars.

I can relate to both burnout and frustration, as well as some other points by you and others later in the thread.

While I would not call myself exactly a modder, more of a tinkerer, I guess I am after all. Well an ex-modder now, that is.
I never made 3D's or more than 1 Plane skin (a 109E desert camo I 'borrowed' from an old steel panzers? game menu) but I always admired the work that went into them. It just wasn't my calling really.
I was interested in development.

My main modifying occupation was small mission scenario making and collaboration of a few ideas that lead to OAW and so forth for EAW use.
I did dabble with changes to some ground objects skins and terrains in EAW.

For a living I did PC technical work mainly and later worked at a famous game company but was in game support not Development.
Unfortunately having missed my opportunity for college programming I was not an up-and-comer!
Also I was older to begin with like most Flight Simmers here.
Old enough to have as a young child glimpsed a real live rusty WWII ship mine floating in on the tide in the harbhor near where I was born. Thus started my interest in WWII! (or did that begin in my last life? lol)

Creating a scenario theatre is very absorbing especially when one is invariably learning and testing new things in it at the same time.
Scenarios as humble as OAW Mission 1 (a simple Belgian threate airbase ground started missions) and later the 'Lake Mission' (fictional - set in the Swiss Alps) and my last 'BeachHell' / Pacifc Island led to more than a few discoveries.
Most of which were not directly exploited by me, but added to the overall efforts of people like Ralf 'Knegel' Kraeft and MrJelly and others 'ModiFlying' EAW.

The fact is 90% of anything I managed to contribute to EAW was not even made by me.

Of the mods I made on my own that never were seen by anyone but me that would about 95% of the work.

I, like probably most modders generated just tons of test files and ate up many gigs of space wading through the archiac and cryptic world of EAW files and information.
Later also with some EAW source code work also this continued. Eeven though I barely had anything to do with any actual existing code edits in EAW (just a few short lines really) I would estimate a good 80% of my disk space was somehow always filled with EAW archives of one kind or another.
(except now - I have xorcised the 'Demon'

Frustration for me had a lot to due with both archiac and odd files and lack of tools and just sheer amount of time and stupid little files and quirks, just like most Flight Sims probably have.. lol.

Not to mention the misunderstandings of various players and the forum at times, and etc.

I too admit my idiocy and foolish opinions and postings on certain subjects, etc... rants iow.

For over 15 years I on and off left and returned to EAW. Mostly off during the later half.

I started in 2002 and simultaneously both learned and discovered new things about editing EAW files or code and I did post a lot on websites and for EAW documentation also.

The real 'Hayday' of EAW was before I ever found it.
It was always amazing to me the fact that the mdders of a lot of EAW stuff figured out how to edit files by hex-editor and trail and error!
Later I discovered they had occasionally been passed hints from one or another of the old MicroProse programmers.. but still, it was amazing what they did with so little.)

Anyhew..

The one thing I had hoped for EAW was that tools would be built with GUI's. For example for mission making. You see EAW was never really a 'finished' game.

(EAW had a long development history and began years earlier. It almost never left the studio. The first whole team effort was given up - and the project incomplete for some time. It was mostly abandoned at one point until the final program team with TK managed to patch it together like a bygone war fighter and fly it off regardless!)

EAW didn't really have a 'Mission Maker' tool that ever made it into the Game Menu. Actually it did have a very incomplete buggy one and several other tools we found later in the code artifacts.
Also EAW offline missions were / are very static since even the game engine itself was hardly completed well.

I attempted some crude tools which were better than hex-editing, and there were some from the past efforts of people like DOM and P.O.Prune, Charles Gunst and so forth.
But really it was Tony 'MrJelly' West who led the way and built the tools it has today.

Yes I sympathize with other gamers who may have well had it worse, since so many old games had even less to work with and more cryptic files even than EAW!
(Hey at least we had a Win95 era win32 executable and DX6 - 7 era (barely) technology..

However the thing is about any project is the more you build the more you change.

Its almost inevitable IMHO that most programs / games or sims will 'break themselves' eventually.

Or they fade away with the users. It is the nature of things..

Anyway I could ramble on and on..

My biggest regret about EAW is just the same as life:
One really can't see the 'Good ole' Days' until they are gone!

btw:


Umm.. I would submit to you that you already know the answer to that one.

I for one am not returning having done so far too many times already for one life. I have to be moving on.

Take Care, Mates and I wish you well!

- Roy (aka RAF_Roy, FsFOOT)

Lot of EAW in this thread! EAW was my first dip into any sort of game modding as well. Skinning, screens and then a bunch of us did the Nachtjaeger campaign. The worst thing i realised about modding was it was hard to go back and enjoy the game as you once had because the flaws stood out a lot more and you realised you could change things if you wanted to put in the work. Sort of makes you lose the magic a bit compared to just playing the game and having fun. Great game and great buzzing community back in the day. Il2 then CloD was awesome insofar as the FMB was just light years ahead of EAW, it was like chalk and cheese and far less time invested for better results, but like Dart said, updates breaking triggers etc got a bit tiresome lol. God talk about bloodshot eyes and lack of sleep. I swore to myself after burning out making missions and maps for CloD that i wouldn't muck around with another game like that again..i just like to play what we get given these days and download other peoples work. Modders are freaking awesome.

One of the things that I found that would cause a lot of friction, is the community deciding on what content takes priority. For example: In the early days of modding SDOE, I wasn't very good at creating aircraft 3d meshes (I'm still not by the way!) I could tweak them, add details and assemble them in the game engine, create their damage model and flight model, create a mission set for them, the game menu GUI artwork... However I could not create an aircraft 3d mesh from scratch. Because of this, I offered my assistance to 3d modelers in getting their creations in-game. Thus (and I was totally fine with this) I went along with whatever they wanted to create. However I found that some community members got a bit annoyed when the 3d modelers wanted to do a particular aircraft, and not something the community decided on, or something that was more appropriate for the over all picture of the sim.

The only major snag I've run into in the past with mods and certain games is multiplayer compatibility. There were some games that would not allow you to play online unless everyone had the exact same mods installed as well as the same mod versions. It could be a pain if you were wanting to play with a large group of other players.

Ah yes! SDOE handled it this way, so we had "online standard" mod packs.

I forget who pointed this out to me. It is there hobby time. You should let them enjoy there hobby. I know it is contradictory to my argument that the group needs a focus. You explain it well.



After years of modding together, Slomo (god's speed) and I realized most of the "quirks" of PE MP were caused by terrain mods that all of us though could not impact MP. This is why I think that the Launch Pad and Jelly's MP are both valid solutions for EAW MP play. I know it is a pain for the end user, but your enjoyment is reliant upon strict file compatibility in clinet/client MP

Meatshield,
So far, your vision is wrong and the thread has progressed well.
Though I did not expect it to become EAW focused, I am not surprised since this is SimHQ.


I am a firm believer in this attitude
But, if you are the old guard, you have to temper you willingness to teach the curious modder. I think I am TWI.

I need to get my PE install working again with all the great mods that have been put out for it. Last I tried on my Win7 machine, it just crashed after the mission was launched.



Yes, as soon as it starts to feel like a job, I think the magic is lost...