![G o o d [Good]](/emoticons/g_o_o_d.gif)
handful of other community members as well. Hope to see you there!
As you guys know we've
slowly but surely been adding badges to the community forums which can
be seen on member profiles. This system exists as a fun way of helping
member's get recognition for what they do. Thus far deciding who did and
didn't get a badge was up to the administrators, moderators, and the
f-HK members. But we're opening the floodgates and are going to let
everybody have a say in who gets what badge. All you have to do is
head on over to the Badge Nominations thread
and make a post saying who you'd like to nominate and which badge you
think should be given to them. At the end of the month we'll take a
look at all submitted nominations and assign the new badges to one
member in each badge category. If no members are nominated for a
specific badge then that category will not have a new member for that
month. Also keep in mind that a member wouldn't get a modding badge
just because he made one prop for The Movies, despite how many
nominations were received. If the nominations do not fit the criteria
of the badge then the nominations will not be considered. In order to make sure you're familiar with all the badges here are all the badges to choose from when nominating your fellow forum-members. Please keep in mind that some badges are not present; not all badges can be obtained by nominations.
And there you have it. So head on over here and begin posting some nominations! |
- The 
- The Disciple badge is given to members who have shown a keen interest
in every corner of the Lionhead community. Instead of posting in just
one or two forums this member can be found posting in just about every
forum and subforum in the community. A prolific member indeed, keep in
mind that a Disciple must also do more than just post in a variety of
forums; a Disciple is still expected to make sure the posts are
on-topic and non-spammish as well as helpful where applicable.
- The Fansite Webmaster badge is given to members who own and run a
fansite for a Lionhead Studios game or Lionhead Studios in general.
The fansite must be run with some measure of quality and regularly
updated to qualify for this badge.
- The Lurker badge is given to members who very seldom post but are
online perhaps more than the average member. There's no exact science
to it but anything more than 5 posts a month would be a rare occasion
indeed for a lurker.
- The Member of the Month badge is given to members who have proven
themselves as contributing forum-goers. Perhaps somebody has done
something above and beyond what is expected of members or helped in
some manner or another that could be considered more helpful than
average; this person then would likely qualify for the Member of the
Month badge. At the end of the month this badge will be replaced with
a Past Member of the Month badge.
- The Modder badge is given to members who have shown a keen interest
and talent in modding Lionhead games; the best of the best of modders.
- The Naughty Member badge is handed out to members who have
continuously broken the rules and caused a bit of headache for the
community. A mark of shame this is definitely nothing to be sought. 
- The Oldbie badge is given to members who have been members of the
Lionhead community for years. While the definition of who meets this
criteria is not set in stone it is generally handed out to members who
have been in the Lionhead community much longer than the average
forum-goer.
- The Techie badge is given to members who almost live in the User
Technical Help forums. Such members are constantly helping other
members when it comes to errors, bugs, installation problems, etc.
A Pyramid The trend so far in the history of modding for The Movies is that there are usually a handful of advanced users who have the patience to sit down, manually read through files with a hex editor, and work out how they're put together byte by byte. Then, normally those same advanced users have to write tools or scripts so that people can modify or create new versions of those files. Because the pressure is on to push forwards and start on the next type of file, the next big milestone, these tools are generally quite rudimentary and require a special sort of user to be patient enough to work out what the developer actually intended. On top of that, those users have to learn how those files actually fit into the overall scheme of things, how they interact. Those users have to work out where to put them, how best to distribute them and what supporting files need creating in order for the game to load these new objects. There are often discoveries to be made here, and all this required knowledge can make the task of modding quite daunting. A subset of those users go on to write tutorials for less involved individuals to make their own content and the knowledge is passed on, but generally the theme is that if a user wants something custom done, the request gets passed up the pyramid until somebody is found who is capable of fulfilling it. Supporting all this effort are the users themselves, people who use this created content in their movies and keep the enthusiasm of the modding community going. What we eventually realise, is that as the amount of knowledge is increased at the top of this pyramid it becomes harder to push forwards into new territory as the time needed to pass this knowledge on to new content creators also increases. From time to time, people will leave any community - and when those people are at the top of this pyramid, a lot of knowledge loss occurs. It can take months for replacement technies to take over, as they have to start at the bottom and work their way up. A Solution Yesterday, The Movies Editor (MED v1.0) was finally released to the masses as a free tool for performing most of the "simple" operations such as editing sets/props/costumes. It handles the creation of all the necessary secondary files and the release has been aimed at the people who ordinarily wouldn't consider themselves capable of modding. This is a change of direction for modding and if you're considering giving it a go you'd be well advised to give the documentation a read. The Movies Editor is much more than a simple tool of course, the aim being that anything currently possible manually will be implemented inside MED in an easy to use fashion. To that end, The Movies Editor shouldn't just be viewed as an application. It is a platform which has been created so future ideas have somewhere to be realised. No longer should it be necessary to know everything in order to get content created because if it's worth doing once it's worth doing properly. The MED-API should be released at the end of the week along with its own documentation, allowing other developers to extend the functionality of The Movies Editor through plug-ins or just using the API in their standalone tools. If you're interested in being one of these developers then head over to DCModding and join the forums because the todo list is a mile long and isn't getting any shorter as time passes us by. The future Now we finally have a platform to build on, we'll move forwards onto the final hurdles of modding research, scenes and animation. Sorry it took so long, but sometimes these things happen. |
Quick Intro I'm Rob Ashton and I do not work for Lionhead. I'm a software developer currently working for The University of Reading and in my spare time I've gotten heavily involved and helped write unofficial tools for the Lionhead Community. I've been asked if I want to write some blog entries on these matters and because I'm an egotistical narcissistic type I figured wahey, more attention so why not!
A Story Once upon a time there was a company called Lionhead who made games. You may have heard about them, headed by the infamous Peter Molyneux and his cohorts from his Bullfrog days. One of the games they decided to make was a game called “The Movies” and among the many functions this game would have was the ability to make epic movies about anything people could think of and there was much rejoicing.
About two years before the game was released, there was talk about modding support for The Movies, about tools being released for people to create their own content for The Movies. Example models for 3DS max were released for the community to look at so they could see how best to make their own content for The Movies. The possibilities seemed endless and a large side-community grew up around being able to do this.
One of the main groups was a site called The Movies Workshop headed up by a nice fellow named Doc_Z. His aim was simple, to organise anybody who wanted to create modifications and content for The Movies under one roof and collaborate on large projects like packs of extra content for the rest of the movie making community.
Alas, as the release date drew near, it became obvious that this was no longer going to be possible. A crazy lawyer (who shall remain un-named) was going around suing games companies for corrupting the nation’s youth and the idea of enabling users to create potentially family unfriendly modifications was probably scaring the guys in suits. To top it all off Lionhead were working on two other games simultaneously and creating tools that the community were actually capable of using would have taken too much time. Inevitably we were no longer going to get the tools the community had been hoping for. Fingers were pointed, voices were raised and many arguments were had about it. People were understandably upset about it, but there was nothing anybody could do. Lionhead had set out with the best intentions but as often, idealism can only go so far in the real world. A few months before the game was released, Lionhead kindly released a tool called Starmaker to the masses who had pre-ordered the game and almost immediately the modding community started looking at the data files to see if anything could be done with it. People realised all the content was held in a large data file and that in order to get the content, that file was going to have to be opened up... Baby Steps While all this was happening, I was completely uninterested in all of it. I was playing Black and White on the internet using some code written earlier called Black and White Phoenix. I didn’t care for The Movies, I’d have bought it at some point and possibly played it but it was something I was simply just not interested in. So it was bemusement that I found a message in my inbox asking if I could look at this data file, “Dero, you can code, what do you make of this" I had a look and decided that it would be an educational experience to work out the format of this file, to work out how to get at those files and to write a tool for it. A couple of days later after learning how to use a hex editor (Gasp) and writing experimental code I released a tool to the community for pulling out the files and it was named “Star Stripper”. It was an awful tool and it barely worked but it was enough to get people by and I went back to playing games and working my other projects. There was much rejoicing. The tool was later renamed to “Pak Poker” as Star Stripper was a bit risqué for some people and sounded like it did something untoward and gave completely the wrong idea. Release of a Game and the formation of an alliance The game was finally released amid much celebration. Another programmer emerged named “Msaeluk”, or “Mark” and he decided to raise the bar by creating a costume editor. There was much rejoicing. I decided I was jealous of the fun he was obviously having spending hours in hex editors and we formed a partnership over at The Movies Workshop. We would go through the file formats one by one and work them all out, releasing tools as we did. The first big goal was models. Being able to put entirely new models into the game was a huge target, as the community had a lot of modellers in it all anxious to get their teeth into something. Over the course of the Christmas after the release, Mark and I went through a few sleepless nights whilst pulling apart the mesh files and slowly pieced together the means to get models into the game. He wrote a script for Blender and I downloaded the 30 day trial of 3DS max and wrote a script for that. The announcement was made that this was possible and there was much rejoicing. Mark had big plans, very big plans. He wanted to make a large, all encapsulating toolkit called The Movies Editor, or “MED” for short. He wrote a prototype which was dutifully released and there was much rejoicing. It became obvious that some 3D stuff was needed to view the content being created, and as I’d already written most of the code for a 3D viewer, development of MED moved over to me while Mark worked on more pulling apart more files and writing a more low level tool for helping advanced users get into the real guts of creating new content without waiting for the easy tools to be released. This tool was named Reshoot. Fast forward a couple of months and MED 0.8 was eventually released to the masses and I went off to prepare for my final university exams. I then got a job in the real world and was lost to the modding community for the next year or so. (There was much rejoicing While I was gone, both Mark and Doc_Z got ill and left the community too. In the power-vacuum caused by the loss of these larger-than-life characters, the reigns of code and knowledge were handed over to a pleasant chap called Grickey/Gleem/Glen. He took the modding community by the horns and kept people interested while the rest of us were off partying and ignoring our duties. Since then, Glen has looked after all the fantastic people making content for The Movies and provided a place for new techniques to be shared whilst fostering new talent to write yet more tools. Over the course of the two years since The Movies has been released, modding sites like 8EyedBaby and Skinshack have been hosting hundreds if not thousands of new costumes, sets and props created by overwhelmingly dedicated community members. There is an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction to be had when watching movies and seeing all the new content people have spent so much time creating, it makes all the late nights of code and coffee somehow seem worth it. There is a future for modding in The Movies, and that will be covered in the next blog entry if you're still awake after reading this. (Yes, it's true I still haven't actually played The Movies, sue me *don't sue me please, I'm poor. |
![Wink [;)]](/emoticons/emotion-5.gif)
![Stick out tongue [:P]](/emoticons/emotion-4.gif)
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Hello and a warm welcome to the Lionhead Community Members Blog! aka Former High Karma Blog The Lionhead Community Members Blog is written by and for the Lionhead Community Members. f-HK: On the old Lionhead Forums there was a feature called 'reputation'. Members could earn karma to raise their reputation and once they had enough reputation they became part of the High Karma group. This group of members has been given the chance to run their very own blog on the Lionhead Community website. Watch this space, more info and blog entries coming! Lionhead Community Team. |
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