Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
I've seen a few comments about the devs 'stealing' or 'poaching' ideas from modders lately, and just want to offer my thoughts.
So many companies are close-minded to what customers want, yet Firaxis, Blizzard, Mozilla, and others are supportive of their fanbase. These organizations have included much of the user-made third party development into their core program, or offered it through services like addons.mozilla.org. They know what people want - even if things aren't always perfect.
This trend should be increased, not discouraged. WoW's user interface has dramatically improved over the years thanks in large part to including many user-made addins. Dozens of mods in Civ 4 were added to the core game, even some modders were added to the core company for the final expansion. I'm thrilled whenever I see something added in a patch that might have been influenced by work I do.
Give fans the tools they need to create new content and run with it! There's thousands of people out there in the world willing to give it a try. We're still missing the c++ part of Civ 5's code, something that limits modding a lot.
More and more companies actively support third-party development beyond even providing the tools alone, to compensate for the thousands of hours of work involved and millions of downloads:
The cost of producing top-of-the-line computer games has skyrocketed in the past two decades. Games that used to be created by teams of five in 1990 now have teams of fifty or five hundred. Take the opportunity to provide third-party independent developers with the tools to improve the program, and fans will do lots of work for you. It makes customers happy and reduces costs for the company, a win-win!
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So many companies are close-minded to what customers want, yet Firaxis, Blizzard, Mozilla, and others are supportive of their fanbase. These organizations have included much of the user-made third party development into their core program, or offered it through services like addons.mozilla.org. They know what people want - even if things aren't always perfect.
This trend should be increased, not discouraged. WoW's user interface has dramatically improved over the years thanks in large part to including many user-made addins. Dozens of mods in Civ 4 were added to the core game, even some modders were added to the core company for the final expansion. I'm thrilled whenever I see something added in a patch that might have been influenced by work I do.
Give fans the tools they need to create new content and run with it! There's thousands of people out there in the world willing to give it a try. We're still missing the c++ part of Civ 5's code, something that limits modding a lot.
More and more companies actively support third-party development beyond even providing the tools alone, to compensate for the thousands of hours of work involved and millions of downloads:
- Apple has iTunes and the app store.
- Blizzard has plans for ways top-notch mapmakers in StarCraft can make a living from their work.
- Mozilla makes it easy for developers to set up voluntary donations.
The cost of producing top-of-the-line computer games has skyrocketed in the past two decades. Games that used to be created by teams of five in 1990 now have teams of fifty or five hundred. Take the opportunity to provide third-party independent developers with the tools to improve the program, and fans will do lots of work for you. It makes customers happy and reduces costs for the company, a win-win!
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This is missing from line 1363 in CityView.lua, which was somehow accidentally deleted a few months ago, and fixes the problem when re-added:
I think you get my point though... If Firaxis can't even fix that (to me that error is extremely annoying... maybe' its OCD, maybe it's the fact it was working fine in the first place and an uninstallable patch broke it), then what hope do we have of them fixing larger problems?
