Bringing Together The Modding Community

It seems to me that, unlike some other mod communities in other games, the Arcanum modders are rather de-centralized and working on their projects alone.

Certainly it would take a load off of everyone if we all mutually contributed to each others work and furthermore involved individuals within HoL to do some of the more basic less advanced tasks such as dialog or voice acting....in the process, helping to train them on Arcanum's sometimes challenging (if not limited) editor/scripting/modding features.


It is rather surprising in the last 8 years no real modding team was formed for Arcanum (to my knowledge), as it has been for other games....say Thief or Fallout: Tactics. I'm also a little surprised there's no House Of Lords Mod yet, heh.


If anything, my point here is to open up mutual exchange of services between potential/current modders. You have a mod and you're good at mapping, so in exchange for mapping for my mod I do a little coding or scripting. It doesn't have to be a team working on one thing so much as a couple of guys working on a few improvements or something they'd like to personally see in Arcanum. I'm sure over the last 8 years, a large repository of ideas has built up in the Arcanum 2 forum.


I've gone ahead and sent out some PMs to individuals in the community to see if they'd like to at least work with me on some ideas and like-wise if I can offer them any help on theirs. From dialog to mapping to scripting to art.

This thread itself is just to publicly inform and to move the discussion out of my PM box to the mod forum.


Ventrilo info (for voice or text chat communication/discussion):

208.100.14.165
4348
whiterabbit

 

Would this sub-forum be using French as their official language? Because is so, it probably wouldn't be more lively than the original French forums, which seem to hardly be alive these days.

Then again, if they will start at the French sub-forum and occasionally appear in the English ones as well, it would liven up the place, so why not.

If we would do this and see that it works, we could try this with other major players as well. There seems to be a significant Polish Arcanum community scattered around here and there and so on.

 

I think that reason why such team never existed is lack of interest in modding and lack of (good) modding tools. Time to time, somebody very enthusiastic appears, do some modding, lost interest and leave community. There is only few people who are frequently bringing new stuff, like rroyo.

About connecting that communities: very unlikely to succeed, mainly because of language barriers. Take for example me and my shitty English skills. I'm happy to write one sentence and don't look like an idiot who was raised in caves.

I think that it will be hard to find somebody from those communities with decent English level. (Muro doen't take in account, he is too good )

Also what about Russian, Czech, Polish, German and other communities? You want to connect them all? :roll:

[whine]
About new tools, I think that there is lack of interest, take for example my tools: ArcVoice for voice acting, ArtGen for art making, MultiArcanum module, MatchMaker library for online playing and other stuff.

http://arcanum.game-alive.com/forums/vi ... ?f=11&t=51
http://arcanum.game-alive.com/forums/vi ... ?f=25&t=40
http://arcanum.game-alive.com/forums/vi ... =5&start=0

Almost nobody is interested in such stuff, so I wasted my time by making that stuff. (Also, many times, because of lack of support, I gave up with OpenArcanum project)

Thats why I'm constantly whining about lack of support and other stuff. I think that everybody asks themselfs, before they start making something: Why I would make something for less than 5 people? Isn't it wasting of my time? I think that mostly it is, and thats why I'm not making more stuff even I could, or release stuff that I have almost/already finished (like that ModuleConverter).
[/whine]

However, I think that your idea (about that communities connecting) is good one, and I think that you could try to establish some communication between those communities and TA. I won't probably encourage people in making more stuff, but at least it will make TA more active, I guess.

To Muro: phx.pl is nice community, I registered myself some time ago:
http://phx.pl/forums/index.php?showtopi ... hl=Crypton :thumbup:

 

I wasn't thinking about crossing barriers yet to connect the mod communities. Unlike my European counterparts, we Americans only speak two languages (on average)....thus limiting my ability to communicate significantly.


Right now, I'd like to focus here in TA. Getting people like DF, DE, Muro, Grossenwschamsm, Greaklin, Zanza, rroyo, and Charonte together and working as a team would be challenge enough, IMHO.


Maybe if one of them speaks French/Russian/Polish/Czech I'll see if I can get them to post on the other forums. Maybe we could cooperate on things that don't require a working knowledge of a foreign language (such as art files, mapping, scripting etc.)


Also Zero, your MatchMaker .dll is highly useful. I use it myself when not hosting network. I just don't think anyone over here at TA knows about it, or the other Arcanum communities around the globe. Your match-maker essentially revives Arcanum Internet multiplayer. I recommend posting your match-maker on the other language websites. Any new .dlls or other tools you come out with, you really should PM Dark-Fool and tell him about it is he can host it or perhaps post it here in the TA forums and then DE or DF will decide to post it up. I think it's more of a marketing issue rather than your tools being useless.



Although I haven't dabbled in art files, I also downloaded Art-Gen. Perhaps I can get rroyo to fill me in on how to work with art stuff.



So, on that note, Muro do you speak any other languages besides English/Polish?

 

Maybe it will be good idea to create a new website dedicated to Arcanum and Arcanum modding? Multilingual, with own subforum for every language, but encourage people (via some message written in their native language) to post in English, even if their English level is poor.

It will be neutral ground, for all people from all communities.

btw, I can help with Czech, Slovak and Klingon

[offtopic] Thanks for the recommendations. (Its also good to know that some of my stuff was useful for you.)[/offtopic]

 

I have a smattering of German and French thanks to, respectively, elementary and high school, but it's hardly anything worth mentioning, really. I don't think either of that would prove good enough for me to even try to communicate with a foreigner in a language other than English (or Polish, would he understand it, but that's rather unlikely).

 

I'm not really sure that a new Arcanum modding site is entirely necessary, we've already got well-known setup here that's more than functional enough for a unified community if there was simply more interest in Arcanum.

The big thing with Arcanum modding I think is that you have to be doing it for yourself, you can't expect others to show an interest in what you're doing or how much work you've put into it esp. when other modders (practically the only other people that'd understand) are too busy with their own projects to do anything but offer the occasional bit of advice. Modding Arcanum can be frustrating and you have to be *really* passionate about your work to ever go through with it.

Perhaps an Arcanum portal linking all arcanum-related sites (regardless of language) together would be beneficial... That same site could also offer a development blog for modders which would facilitate in unifying the community by offering a singular site we could visit to download & read about mods.

Fact is, Arcanum is dying. It's getting old now and it will take a significant fan effort (such as my own or Crypton's project) to revive the community to the point where we don't have talk about these sorts of things. Not saying I don't enjoy Arcanum as-is; I do and I'll always be trying the latest version of A:WIP and so on but it's getting to the stage where that's just not enough to keep this place and the others alive.

 

As I have already said on another topic, I speak French fluently. My Spanish is very good. I have studied Russian for many years, but I haven't got to the point where I can speak it easily... Oh and I would say my English is so so.

I know nothing about modding, so all I could do is some translation between communities. Hope it's useful.

 

Yes, and I appreciate your offer. Just having the knowledge that your there and willing is quite sufficient.


Charonte, the purpose of bringing together differing modders is because we each have a particular strength. By exchanging the things we're good at for the things we're not so good at (or simply mundane things we don't want to do, like testing) we can account for each-others shortcomings. In so doing, we mutually benefit. That is a core advantage of such an endeavor, as compared with working alone.


Also: Arcanum should have died out long ago. But it hasn't. It's still here. So is TA. I suspect that we'll get several more years of activity out of TA before a re-assessment is in order.....I don't think the veterans here will be leaving anytime soon. So...there is still time to have a size-able user base for any released projects.

 

I'm fluent in English and Dutch, furthermore I have some basic knowledge of French, German and Japanese.

Skill-wise, you generally just have to tell me what to do, and I'll do it (if I have the needed tools). Except 3D modelling, which is something I haven't picked up yet.

 

It's amazing how little attention Arcanum has garnered from modders over the years, looking at even the basic tools provided by troika, the multiplayer functionality, and the diversity of the base game content.

From what I can tell it seems to be a lot more popular currently in Russian circles than English at the moment, but with the resolution patch and various improvements made to the game, I don't see why it has to die here just yet.

Finishing the multiplayer campaign would probably be a good step to re-introducing players back into the game (and thus modders) and I think everyone can agree that the campaign in Arcanum is still the meat of the experience. I firmly believe campaign coop with a bit more marketing could see a reasonable population boom in the future, as of right now, TOEE is on fire. But arcanum has atleast one leg up over TOEE, and that is native multiplayer support.

Looking around quickly, there isn't even a single mod for Arcanum listed on moddb, so it's not surprising there isnt a great deal of activity. There is just zero publicity.

I'm looking at re-translating the russian coop project myself(via google as I don't know russian) but sadly I've never delved into modding Arcanum so I can't identify what is really involved. It seems to boot in multiplayer and not everything is in gibberish so I'm hopeful. I'm going to test it a bit further before trying my luck with it or making promises.

3 days later (and yes this post was sitting here the entire time):
http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=16985

PS. the secret is to make the mods for yourself, release them for like-minded people; if you're looking for spotlight attention, you might want to mod something newer

 

Not sure really, my attention tends to drift quickly.

I have to admit I'm intrigued at random variables, I wouldn't mind making another MP specific mod that revolved around a survival theme.. but it wouldn't be any fun without random elements.

I will probably sit on the sidelines a bit longer, I have 3 or 4 mods to maintain; but if you're looking for help I may be able to provide assistance.
PM me with any details if you want the help, but I can't give guarantees since I know little about arcanum and even less about modding it.

I speak native english but I don't think I qualify for an english major. I do have MSN but I'd rather keep things around here for now.
My timezone is GMT+12 though rarely stick to normal hours anyway!