Jake

Idle Thumbs 246: Mesmerized, Process, and Anxiety

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Sorry this is late!

Idle Thumbs 246:

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Mesmerized, Process, and Anxiety

This episode contains three documented favorite words of Nick Breckon, age 3. Mesmerized: Jake tries a Vive for the first time and briefly forgets his friends, loved ones, and the world around him. Process: Chris spends more time with Just Cause 3 and his feelings become increasingly mixed. Anxiety: As Valve opens the Half-Life and Portal universes up to the community to make and sell expansions, we fret over the future of some of our favorite games. Plus we play Oxenfree, get excited for The Witness, and fall into the surrealistic adventure that is Nick's childhood.

Games Discussed: Just Cause 3, Oxenfree, The Witness, Half-Life 2, Portal 2, HTC Vive, Myst, Super Mario Maker, Blast Corps

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I can only assume this was the ad mentioned on the show, in reference to Chris Remo's Just Cause 3 muscle shirt PC game-athon.

 

Boy howdy this brings back memories. :)

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So as a forward this post is going to come across as kind of a downer about Valve in regards to the Source Engine modding scene but I do want to emphasize that Valve has done a lot of great things for modding as a whole throughout the years it's just the Source side of things has kind of gone downhill.

I'm not sure where to really start but I guess I should mention I've been apart of the Source Engine modding scene since 2008 starting with the original Portal before moving into the total conversion modding scene.

To start off it is worth pointing out the actual licensing deals that take place in order to get your mod/game on Steam if it is using the Source Engine. You can read Valves FAQ on it here, but to quickly sum it up, you can use any Valve IP you want and you can release on Steam and there is no fee so long as your mod is free but you must still go through the green light process (unless Valve waives it for you).

If you want to sell your mod on Steam (such as Black Mesa, Aperture Tag, and Prospekt (the Opposing Forces sequel))

  • Pay Havok's licensing fee of $25,000 up front
  • Get in contact with RAD tools and negotiate the price of using MILES and/or BINK
  • You can only sell on Steam and distribute through Steam unless you upgrade to a full engine license
  • You will have to work out a deal with Valve in regards to their cut
Releasing a paid mod on Steam is almost always a huge financial investment on the developers end unless something gets worked out with Valve. Also worth mentioning is the middle ware licensing increases depending on what platforms you want to release on. Source SDK 2013 compiles for Windows/OSX/Linux but that doesn't mean that Havoks $25,000 up front cost covers all three. Robert Briscoe, the guy behind Dear Esther, has a good blog post up explaining how he was blind sided by these costs and other problems.

To further complicate things Valves approach to the Source Engine modding scene since about 2010 has been that of a full time working parent who doesn't have time for their kids but they still really love their kids and they want them to know that. What I mean by this is out of the blue updates will happen and new interesting things will get added for modder use but Valve doesn't have the time to document them properly or stick around to help fix some of the other issues that have been plaguing the community. A good example of this is Vscripts which is one of the best additions to the engine as it adds the ability to write and execute squirrel based script files at run time giving mappers a ton more control and allowing you to easily create new game modes for games like Counter-Strike Global Offensive, however the documentation for it is bare bones and there is no tutorial or proper explanation of how you should use it.

If you wanted to make a Source Engine mod right now most of their documentation and a lot of older tutorials will tell you to download the Source SDK tool kit from Steam. Unfortunately that tool set is not only outdated but is completely broken since 2013 with no explanation, warning or how to work around it given. What made that issue even more pressing was up until that day that was how you launched Hammer, the level editor, for HL2, TF2, CSS and all Source mods. Luckily the community figured out in about a month that going forward from now on you had to dig into the games files and launch hammer from the bin folder. This was made more of an issue by the fact that at that time Source was going on nine years old which meant the most popular of getting started guides and videos who's creators have long since left the scene were now out of date and providing false info so anyone new coming into the community was left thinking they were messing up despite following tutorials that had thousands of views and comments saying it worked. To this day we still regularly get on various forums people asking what it is they are doing wrong.

On the other end of the scale though at the same time Valve released Source branch 2013 which has become the standard branch and merged the TF2, CSS, DoDS, and HL2 branches into one as well as provide HL2 and it's episodes content free for anyone to use in a Source mod as well changing it so you no longer were required to own a Source Engine game or even have one installed so long as you downloaded the SDK Base 2013. They also went ahead and discontinued all support for 2006, 2007, 2009, and the Alien Swarm branches.

But as of late (2014-Present) there has emerged a new issue of Valve branching that engine into two beta branches, beta_test and upcoming. If you are using the newest version of the 2013 game code from their GitHub you and your users must be opted into beta_test on Steam, if you don't the game CTD's on launch with an error. Steam will not opt you into the proper one automatically. This is of course not a problem if your mod has made it through greenlight as it no longer depends on the user installing the SDK base those files are packed into your mod on Steam for you. But if you are having to distribute through a site like ModDB it means you have to make sure your users understand this catch and how to properly switch, however as we all know users are not always the brightest and will often blame the mod team for when it does crash on launch because they didn't follow directions.

Then there comes the problem of the tools and proper front ends for these tools. Unless you are wanting to just use base content in a map you have to use a series of command line executables and batch files. Luckily members of the community have made GUI front ends for these but since the big 2013 update a number have become broken and like the people who wrote the tutorials a lot of them have moved on. Biggest problem is the model compiling GUI, if you want to see a nightmare of an asset pipeline go look up how to properly get a model from Blender into the game and then remind yourself afterwards you have to repeat that entire process again if you want to change anything about the model.

There's other problems but I think you get point. In general it feels like Valve has sort of stopped caring about the Source Engine community except when it suits them either for good press or profit and I get it they're a company and they are looking out for themselves but at the same time they are burning bridges with Source Engine veterans. A lot of us it has reached the point where we feel like we're being taken advantage of since Valve has made it clear that if the community wants documentation, tutorials, proper tools, etc they can do it themselves. Anyway that's just my two cents on the Source Engine modding scene topic from this weeks episode, hope I wasn't too much of a negative Nancy.

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wazanator - as someone that has messed around with the Steam Web API I don't doubt for a second what you are saying about poor documentation, tools, etc. It is kind of crazy how much you have to rely on the community to figure out basic solutions for pretty straight forward useage.

 

There must be something in the air right now, because the discussion the Thumbs were having about corporations profitting from fan enthusiasm was the subject of an Ian Bogost article that ran yesterday. It even references Office Space as well.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/corporations-free-marketing-instagram/423465/

 

This is something I've always felt a little sad about when it comes to things like mods, fan fiction, cosplay, etc. where all this work and creative energy is put into some company's brand and acts as free advertising, and thus revenue, for these companies at great time and expense from the consumer/fan/worker. It's just a reminder of how screwed up intellectual property law is since it doesn't really benefit creative workers so much as it enriches people that write licensing agreements, and offers some crumbs to the workers.

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Also worth mentioning is the middle ware licensing increases depending on what platforms you want to release on. Source SDK 2013 compiles for Windows/OSX/Linux but that doesn't mean that Havoks $25,000 up front cost covers all three.

 

Whoa, that explains why as a lowly Mac user I will never get to play Black Mesa or Prospekt.

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As I'm listening to the episode, and Jake (I think?) mentioned his desire for a blue pallet Kylo Ren named Rylo Ken to exist - I naturally googled it as I listed. What do you know, the only reference I find is an article where some poor entertainment journalist has just typod his name as Rylo Ken throughout, brilliant :)

 

http://www.realtytoday.com/articles/64475/20151221/star-wars-force-awakens-spoilers-rylo-ken-s-dark-turn.htm

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Jake is mesmerized in portal world. He hears GlaDOS mock the size of Sonic's hand in his drawing. Wall panels drop away to reveal a sign: JUST VIVE.

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The podcast's conversation on derivative intellectual property is so interesting, albeit somewhat a retreat of a previous conversation specifically about Black Mesa. Jake's fanboyish reaction of anxiety about not knowing which works are the real works that he should take seriously is definitely a product of someone born several generations after strong copyright. Before then, almost since the beginning of human culture, "derivative fan works" were the norm, most usually continuing or redacting endings that dissatisfied fans. I taught Letters from a Peruvian Woman a few years ago, which was an eighteenth-century epistolary novel that incredibly popular but absolutely reviled for its final chapters (wherein the titular woman decides to reject Western civilization and the love of a man to live alone and spend her wealth on herself). Within months, dozens of works with titles like More Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Letters from a Peruvian Woman Revisited, and Letters of a Peruvian Man were out on the market and most outsold their exemplar. Likewise with so many of the works on Sherlock Holmes at the time.

 

I think Chris put it best when he was troubled by the new development for how it's reshaping fandom in a way to put more money into companies' pockets, where hitherto these things were free and mostly disregarded by companies. I think more derivative works are generally a good thing, because they give people with less creative ambition a venue in which to express themselves and because they generally heighten the discourse around creative works in a way that benefits everyone somewhat, but the monetization of other people's hard work because they don't technically "own" the ideas that inspired it is... troublesome. I say that derivative works are a good thing, but I'm not entirely optimistic about the consequences of them being sold under implicit license.

 

Also, we all had a laugh (haha) but Luuuke isn't canon. He was created as an April Fools' Day joke by Timothy Zahn to troll fans who thought that his clone Luuke Skywalker (by analogy to the cloned Jedi master Joruus C'baoth) was named in a dumb way and he should feel bad. I know that typing all of that out is a bit hypocritical after making a bit of a big deal about how "canon" is bunk, but I can't let it pass again!

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Also, we all had a laugh (haha) but Luuuke isn't canon. He was created as an April Fools' Day joke by Timothy Zahn to troll fans who thought that his clone Luuke Skywalker (by analogy to the cloned Jedi master Joruus C'baoth) was named in a dumb way and he should feel bad. I know that typing all of that out is a bit hypocritical after making a bit of a big deal about how "canon" is bunk, but I can't let it pass again!

And Zahn's books aren't even canon anymore :(

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Jake's hypothetical palette swapped Kylo Ren reminded me of somebody I met in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

 

So one of the NPCs in SWTOR is this Kylo Ren-looking guy (although he was designed long before Kylo Ren was even a gleam in JJ Abrams' eye) named Darth Marr. In the game's timeframe, Marr is one of the leaders of the Empire and represents the colder, more rational side of the Sith, and is probably the single most prominent Sith NPC.

 

On my Republic character, I queued for a dungeon and was put in a group with a player who had dressed his Jedi Knight in Marr's exact same armor, except dyed white instead of black.

 

edit: also i guess jango fett is basically a canonical boba fett palette swap

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The podcast's conversation on derivative intellectual property is so interesting, albeit somewhat a retreat of a previous conversation specifically about Black Mesa. Jake's fanboyish reaction of anxiety about not knowing which works are the real works that he should take seriously is definitely a product of someone born several generations after strong copyright. Before then, almost since the beginning of human culture, "derivative fan works" were the norm, most usually continuing or redacting endings that dissatisfied fans. I taught Letters from a Peruvian Woman a few years ago, which was an eighteenth-century epistolary novel that incredibly popular but absolutely reviled for its final chapters (wherein the titular woman decides to reject Western civilization and the love of a man to live alone and spend her wealth on herself). Within months, dozens of works with titles like More Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Letters from a Peruvian Woman Revisited, and Letters of a Peruvian Man were out on the market and most outsold their exemplar. Likewise with so many of the works on Sherlock Holmes at the time.

I think Chris put it best when he was troubled by the new development for how it's reshaping fandom in a way to put more money into companies' pockets, where hitherto these things were free and mostly disregarded by companies. I think more derivative works are generally a good thing, because they give people with less creative ambition a venue in which to express themselves and because they generally heighten the discourse around creative works in a way that benefits everyone somewhat, but the monetization of other people's hard work because they don't technically "own" the ideas that inspired it is... troublesome. I say that derivative works are a good thing, but I'm not entirely optimistic about the consequences of them being sold under implicit license.

Also, we all had a laugh (haha) but Luuuke isn't canon. He was created as an April Fools' Day joke by Timothy Zahn to troll fans who thought that his clone Luuke Skywalker (by analogy to the cloned Jedi master Joruus C'baoth) was named in a dumb way and he should feel bad. I know that typing all of that out is a bit hypocritical after making a bit of a big deal about how "canon" is bunk, but I can't let it pass again!

I will write more later but my issues are different from the ones you prescribe to me with that (interesting but not totally applicable) history lesson on copyright and fandom.

These sequels are born at the most pessimistic out of dissatisfaction that Valve isn't continuing their stories themselves, and at the most optimistic out of people's excitement to make things using things they love... And then selling them out of the storefront created by the people who made the original. I think that's different from a dissatisfied public telling their own stories in an earlier, looser era of copyright. Many of people who told me the stories I loved are still right there in the building, actively involved in the goings on at that company, and now they are choosing to sell fan made stories derived from their own creation from their own store. Half Life and Portal are both games with sequels and spinoffs and other merchandising, but they didn't feel like Franchises or Universes or other modern Big IP Designations, but now they do to me, in a way that feels really strange, because the new work is being created by the fans but sold for profit by the creator and rights holder. Other than the fact that fans get to enthusiastically play with worlds and characters they like, it seems like the worst of all worlds. Valve doesn't make the games I think they are great at making, and fans can only claim ownership of, and play in, the world if they do so through valve's store.

Maybe we agree more than I thought.

We do I think, except for the part where you wise saged me at the start of your post.

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Also I was referring to Luuke but it's hard to communicate the number of u's verbally

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Also I was referring to Luuke but it's hard to communicate the number of u's verbally

 

Maybe if we interpose a pause or a tongue-click between each U?

 

Anyway, it looks like we do agree. I was reacting mostly to your obvious anxiety about where to put these fan-produced Valve spinoffs in your memory palace, about which I'm sympathetic but try to be mostly rational. I personally feel very uncomfortable with companies providing the tent for fans to make derivative works based on their properties, but I don't think there's a better solution immediately presenting itself in this age of (ineluctably) strong copyright, especially now that more compassionate arrangements like the "gentleman's agreement" between corporations and fans in Japan have begun to break down.  It used to be that creators died or moved on to different projects, making room for derivative works, but now it's definitely the nature of running an organization and a business shaping that decision with Valve... yet they're still content to pick up pennies here and there letting fans do their work for them. It's a very weird place to be, and I'm unsurprised that my thoughts about it are so unstructured. Sorry!

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I have fond memories of playing Sven Coop after school with a buddy. In hindsight, the maps I remember playing didn't really use the presence of multiple players for anything interesting, they simply included so many endlessly respawning enemies that having more people around was the only realistic way of dealing with them. Players also got infinite respawns, so you could theoretically still play most maps on your own or with just two players, it simply took a lot longer to achieve whatever goal the level had since you would get blown up after the tiniest bit of progress. The most coordination maps tended to ask of you was pressing two buttons on opposite sides of a room at the same time to open up one of those horde areas.

 

Going back to it now, I am also reminded that a lot of map makers latched onto the parts of Half Life that are least interesting to me, namely the soldiers and the shooting thereof. A lot of the custom maps seem to favor the weapons from Opposing Force, which are just so much more boring than the weird Half Life guns, except some maps give you a mix of both and it's just immediately a mess. I can't fault people too much for not making their levels more visually interesting than empty canyons or empty corridors, but I really don't understand why they don't fill that space with something more interesting. "You are a soldier, go shoot other soldiers" is a really common theme in custom maps and it's so boring. Half Life soldiers also just feel like one of the weakest points of the game mechanically. You can't really evade their attacks like you can with headcrabs, zombies, bullsquids, houndeyes, etc., but the game came out before the age of cover systems, so in the end it's just one of those things where you point your gun at them and hold down fire until one of you falls over.

 

With that in mind, I have a few recommendations for people who want to try it.

 

Stadium, one of the included maps, contains an arena area accessible by teleporters and consoles that allow you to fill that arena with friends, enemies, and friendly enemies. This isn't as mindblowing as it used to be, but if you want to see AI respond to other AI it can still be pretty interesting.

 

Garghunt is one of the more restrained maps available: There is a starting area and there is a big pit, which has one of those big flame-shooting, foot-stomping green giants from Half Life in it. Because you don't have to deal with a million enemies in this scenario, it frees you up to strategize (like one player distracts it, one player searchs for weapons) and then be delighted and frustrated by how well your plan works out (or not).

 

Apache Battle (named helebat in the map list) is another map that basically has one big enemy instead of a million little ones. You start in a tower with supplies, there is a helicopter flying around outside, and on the other side of the canyon is a stationary rocket launcher you can use to destroy it (although like in Garghunt, the thing just respawns, so there's not much fanfare to winning).

 

Phobia is one of relatively few custom Xen maps, so it's worth a look for having more interesting enemies and environments than most. Then again, I just replayed it and immediately got stuck.

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I'd describe Sven Coop as Warcraft 3 custom maps but for Half Life, if that comparison makes any sense.

 

There are some really great maps, but there's also a lot of fun in playing a terrible first person Mario 1-1 remake. It's just interesting to see what happens when all conventional game design wisdom is thrown out the window, and then puzzle through the creator's insane logic with a bunch of confused friends.

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Do the people making paid Valve mods not get any of the money?

 

Yes they do but it's not as much as people think.

 

I'll use Prospket as an example. The game costs normally $9.99. Valve first takes a cut for the game selling on Steam which is meant to be under NDA because the amount may vary depending on different factors but people leak their percent quite often these days so you can estimate it to be about 30%, after that they take another cut for you using their I.P. which puts their total percent over 50% (Garry Newman talked about it in regards to Garrys Mods sales figures), and then the studio gets their cut.

 

It used to be the case, I'm not sure if it still is, but Valve would offer to pay the Havok engine license cost on the condition that they get all of your cut from sales until it is paid off in this manner. Your studio would still be responsible for paying RAD tools.

 

So to do some ballpark estimation:

 

Prospket is $8.99 right now. You start in the hole at $25,000 along with the RAD Game Tools cost. Valves taking at least 30% of your sales for just using Steam and probably an extra twenty to thirty for using their I.P. Right now according to Steamspy they've sold 3,226 +- 1,235 so we'll wish high and say 4,500 units. That starts out at $40,455 but Valve takes 50% of that leaving you with $20,227. That's not even enough to pay off Havoks licensing. That's not bad numbers to start at though seeing as this isn't his main source of income and it will sell more units over time especially during future Steam sales, however if you were a small studio team and you were relying on this being the game to kickstart the studio you're going to be sweating bullets like Outerlight probably was and look what happened to them  :sad:

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I jumped into SvenCoop yesterday and played a map I hadn't seen back when the mod was first around. At the very end of the map, a little credits text popped up and said it as made in 2015! That made me really happy to know that people are still making levels for it, and it makes me want to dust off those tools and make my own level (I was big into Half Life map making when I was 13, but being 13 I was also terrible at it).

 

Like Deadpan said though, it's not a very complex game. Most maps are either just massive waves of enemies, or they're obtuse puzzles that you have to get right or are unable to progress. For example, SvenCoop (the original map that the mod is named for) has a section early on where you have to push a wooden crate out of a tunnel and into an elevator. If you don't bring the crate into the elevator, you'll be unable to progress and forced to restart the server. All it takes is one person who doesn't know this to run into the elevator and hit the button, and everyone is stuck.

 

In the case of last night, that person was me. I haven't played this mod in a very long time and I made everyone angry.

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Yes they do but it's not as much as people think.

 

I'll use Prospket as an example. The game costs normally $9.99. Valve first takes a cut for the game selling on Steam which is meant to be under NDA because the amount may vary depending on different factors but people leak their percent quite often these days so you can estimate it to be about 30%, after that they take another cut for you using their I.P. which puts their total percent over 50% (Garry Newman talked about it in regards to Garrys Mods sales figures), and then the studio gets their cut.

 

It used to be the case, I'm not sure if it still is, but Valve would offer to pay the Havok engine license cost on the condition that they get all of your cut from sales until it is paid off in this manner. Your studio would still be responsible for paying RAD tools.

 

So to do some ballpark estimation:

 

Prospket is $8.99 right now. You start in the hole at $25,000 along with the RAD Game Tools cost. Valves taking at least 30% of your sales for just using Steam and probably an extra twenty to thirty for using their I.P. Right now according to Steamspy they've sold 3,226 +- 1,235 so we'll wish high and say 4,500 units. That starts out at $40,455 but Valve takes 50% of that leaving you with $20,227. That's not even enough to pay off Havoks licensing. That's not bad numbers to start at though seeing as this isn't his main source of income and it will sell more units over time especially during future Steam sales, however if you were a small studio team and you were relying on this being the game to kickstart the studio you're going to be sweating bullets like Outerlight probably was and look what happened to them  :sad:

 

I have no authority, but I'd say you should probably email this as well as your previous post to Idle Thumbs. I would love this to be discussed on a podcast.

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found this, has like 8 views at ths time, but as they said, looks like someone solved The Witness in 5 minutes like Myst:

 

I didn't watch to much for obvious reasons, but if what I looked at is legit, this will be passed around rather soon.

 

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I would perhaps put that video inside spoiler tags out of courtesy, dayeight. Someone might click without reading what it is.

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