Everyone knows that the biggest thing about GTA Modding is maps, more commonly known as a Total Conversion in the GTA modding world because “a new map = a new GTA”.

Especially these days where you have the episodic content and plenty to do in Liberty City – the fans who like to tweak their GTA experience hunger new locations to defile as Niko, Luis, or Johnny. Maybe even Tommy.

With Rockstar predicted unlikely to release another GTA until 2012, this is certainly a much needed bonus for those of us who play on the best games platform, PC (I’m not for sale).

It took 2 long years for someone to get there, a lot of doubt until Shadow-Link started, and a lot of beers before he finished, but he’s cracked GTA IV collision model formats and can put them back together. He’s scripted an exporter solution for “3D Max”. It is in the polishing stages and I am told that anyone willing to wrestle with R.A.G.E.  should expect the ability to do so within a week.

I know, I know, we’ve heard that before. This is different. There is some work to do with the hashgen for those who know what it is and some cleaning up of the script – it won’t be long now. Take that Kotaco, filtering my comments out. >_< Shadow-Link, congratulations, this is GTA Modding history. Everybody else, let the polygon kingdoms commence.

It only has a few different things you can do: Load a model, pick some edges, tap ‘c’ to cut those edges, and watch the evil 3D duck goat wizardry take place on the UV view panel just to the right of your 3D view-port. Cut something you didn’t mean to cut? W. You got it, Einstein: Weld.

It’s not new on the scene, but you guys deserve to know about it if you don’t already have this monster secretly hidden away while you swear three ways from Sunday to your boss that you pelt unwrapped that purple man staff, painstakingly, over the course of a week locked alone in your office. You unwrapped it in 5 minutes and you know it, can’t fool me. I can see lies.

It is worth the download, and this short walk-through of all it is capable of is worth a watch:

Whether you relate because of games, selection, or simply the evil associated with Xbox Live, I’m sure you can appreciate it. Thanks to my friend JostVice for linking me.

A false sense of trust, a stolen idea, and it got executed like two inexperienced puffs would. Aww, are my wittle feewings hurted? Yes, yes they are.

I explained to them my ideas, which they lopped right up, and screwed up a good domain.

Within a week of discussing with them My ideas, they deleted me from their Facebook, and made an announcement on their Facebook that they were doing this. Their twist on it all is that instead of a community based application, the assets come with ridiculous, unenforceable, “single game only” licenses.

Little did they know, I am a big fan of Infinite Unity 3D and their work with the community over there, so I saw them share the news that the unity prefabs idea was going forward without me. I confronted the tornado twins about my unity prefabs idea and all they had to say was “Oh our people handle things, sorry if you got thrown under the bus along the way!”

What if someone threw you under the bus? And I am running you over, then, too. And backing up. Unity Prefabs was my idea. You took it, and you ruined the domain you beat me to buying for it. Owned. Whatever. Win some, and lose some. :)

I wasn’t going to say anything about my Unity 3D Prefabs idea, I was going to just let it go, I shouldn’t have told them, right? My own fault, I wished them well even – and they ignored me. Did your people tell you to do that too? Well, the more I watch them butcher the idea, the funnier it is.

Unity Prefabs. See you in the search results, powder-puff twins. You owe me an apology, at the very least. Sure, I might just be mad right now because of the fact that not only did you steal it, but you did it wrong, but Unity Prefabs could have been better, and I could have even helped with so much other things you fail at on the web. You screwed me, and you know you did. Unity Prefabs was supposed to BENEFIT the unity community, not milk your little tutorial audience.

I was in favor of it too, you know. I even hoped, there might be some products that I would buy because of some decent way of selling them. Until you continued to ignore me. Well, Unity Prefabs was a good idea, maybe you will find some success. Best of luck to you. I ain’t mad at ya.

The price point is nice, though.

My thoughts are this: Oh, that’s pretty. Really. The new deferred shading in Unity 3.0 has, I assume, allowed for the new effects you’ll see after the jump to IU3D.

If you are reading this and confused, Unity is a game engine. An easy to use game engine designed for rapid development of prototypes and full scale browser, pc, and mobile games. It has been expanded and is about to be on consoles.

My question to the Unity developers is this (and I will eventually get around to asking or seeing if it has been asked, but if anyone knows and sees this, let me know):

Are you still going to deny real time shadows to the Unity basic license? The more I think about it, the less I like your engine. I am pretty sure you have a large enough userbase at this point to delimit the free version and offer support and things of that nature to the paid version owners.

$1500 is a lot of money to ask, really.Especially when I would much prefer to share profits than buy a license. Food for your thought, I’m not pirating the program, and I’m not paying you 1500 US dollars for a game engine when Unreal 3 is [comparatively] Free.

If you won’t change the model, you should at least make Unity 3 paid, and the current Unity Pro your free version. I would love to share profits on games made with the free version of your software. I have a very hard time even wanting to use it or hire some people to script me some things because of the lack of real time shadows.

It makes me much, much less likely to buy it if ever I was able to just blast 1500 dollars out there like that – because I don’t know how it runs, and I’m never going to try the “30 day full trial” – not when I know Unity itself if free, and when I know, I can’t do anything with whatever the trial shows me anyway.

Change your license, alternate your business model around just a little bit – I really think you should delimit the free version, and just make us pay you royalties on all games made with indie, because this opinion pretty much is the same across the board in the discussions I have had about it with others who share the drive, but find the offering to the average starter rather lacking compared to other, better, ways Unity could be leveraging itself.

Sorry if that pisses off Brett Seyler, I mean no disrespect, and sorry if Unity team is already planning offering more to the base Unity license (as well as thank you) (and also… Finally. :P). For now, I will blame EA.

Anyway, painting roads lately, tell me how you like them? Advice? Crit? All welcome. Are you a modder or open ’sauce game dev? Come play with us in making the first ever open source streaming game engine that comes pre-loaded with logic. We need Lua programmers, all artists are welcome, and C++ pros would be a god send to compliment our own pro.

The most interesting bit for the moment for me;

OALWrapper
This library is made almost entirely by our tool programmer Luis, who actually started out doing work for us on the OpenAL sound implementation. This library is simple and easy way of accessing the OpenAL functionality and was made since there is a strange lack of free sound libraries. This is also the only part of the open source release that we will continue to update and we hope that others will find it useful and contribute themselves!

That could be an easy way to plug audio into Grit Game Engine, a big thank you to Frictional Games for going Open, very awesome.

Define: Grit
backbone: fortitude and determination; “he didn’t have the guts to try it”

You can browse and liven up the game engine forum with your presence, or you can take a dive through the game engine wiki. Of particular interest would be the SVN instructions and first time users guide.

The list of driving physics explanations and examples is pretty exhaustive and probably the best in-one-place you’ll find right now. It’s 2 pages deep and an awesome source of info for me so far, hoping it will all apply to Unity 3 (I’m thinking it will)

There is information for car, plane, boat, even helicopter driving physics docs to be found. This will definitely help a lot of FPS controller prefab prisoners like myself.

Before I go, I want to see some demos by people who happen upon the blog? They don’t have to be in Unity format, but I’d like to see what you guys do! Feel free to drop YouTube channels for me to connect with, whatever – show me what my visitors have come up with :)

This blog is now a Page Rank 2 and in the Alexa Top 1,000,000 sites. How many web pages are there in the world? It’s hard to tell – and not all of them are indexed by Google and ranked by Alexa, but needless to say, this is one of the more important milestones webmasters can shoot for in the equity of their pages, is ranking up in these things.

My Alexa Traffic Rank just hit 999,586, so I am at the bottom of the pile – but it’s the good pile.  Feels rewarding and motivational, saying the least.

It took me a fair bit of time to get here to be honest; certainly it could have been faster but I did not spend as much time on this site as I wanted to. This site is not the average info site because I like to be opinionated and sometimes even controversial on it about the things I most enjoy; that is hard to do in a hard year such that I have had (won’t bore ya). This site turns 1 year old in May, by the way.

I started this one to just shoot-the-sh*t on now and then, but it turned out there are a lot more people into the same things as me than I thought. Over the past couple of years leading to this site, I hooked back up with some friends from the GTA Modding scene and made new ones who, we are all working on a game engine and game development community together, backed by the Grit Game Engine. It’s new but man does it hold so much promise, and with a high factoring of our new group talented. I’m glad to be involved with that.

What for the next year then? Well, right now I need to focus on being sure I can even keep the site up (hint hint)  and for certain I need to post more about all the great content I have found out there for Unity Game Engine, UDK, and lesser know (but should be!) game engines like Grit and so on. Thanks for reading.

Been working with friends on the game engine lately, and not much else. If you care to get news and tips on the engines I’ve covered or more, let me know you actually read this and are not just bounce visitors.

I would really like to know the visitors who come here, especially the little group who comes often…

“It’s like playing the real song!”…Ummm, No it’s Not… This is pretty much the death of being cool just because you can play guitar, let alone Guitar Hero, because every 12 year old is going to be better than most of you by the time they beat the first level.

lol guitar hero players, owned. Wannabe musicians, owned. Let’s see how many of those “Guitar Hero is the best game ever!” wannabes actually learn a six string…

Better yet, I wonder how many won’t mind being the nerds who “still play the plastic Guitar Hero games”.

That means there are 19 other Unity 3D video tutorials there, and if you are like me and have yourself into a lot of projects all the time, you appreciate bite sized interface tutorials and technology talks. I really like what I see with Unity 3D, across the board, I am really interested in the things it is aimed at, I like that these guys put their time into helping me to fit it in.

The Tornado Twins make it easier for me slowly work it into my brain while I can Octopus on 7 other things in the background. Worth every ten minute video tutorial tidbit, or your bandwidth back. Really, I can’t give you back your bandwidth, but they are good video tutorials. Go forth noble Unity 3D Googler, you go forth, and you watch them. You watch them good.

I do hope you don’t forget me, 5 years is a long time, we met after a recommendation from a new friend who I found had died before I even got to see his works. It was good to be acquainted, the pleasure was all mine, I can assure.

Have you ever looked at those sites with the screwed up videos and seen the atrocities that happen in the name of the beliefs that to this day have only been a source to divide the people of our world?

Motherf*ckers marketed diversity and dividends to the psyche and lied through the mouths of believers preaching unity knowing that in the end a credit crunch would further fracture the unity that no war driven nation could ever dream to truly provide anyway, pretend to be surprised about it. I want to turn the world on its side and make it question this shit.

You’ve got to pay the ultimate toll to cross this bridge, there is no coming back from a population of ego centric separatist pretenders unless the whole world molds to conform to that deformity of the human collective soul, super mortality is adaptable but separation is obviously not a fruitful state for any relationship, on any level.

Who the f*ck do I think I am, some ask. I have often wondered who the f*ck you think you are to question me or turn your nose to me in shock and disgust that perhaps things aren’t always the way some think that they are. That maybe there is a little more to those M Knight Shamamadldjslsna movies, that maybe someone out there knows what the f*ck we are and knows how to bend you not to. Or maybe I was just trolling. Really?

It is not quite a question of the chicken or the egg coming first, but for the record, PS3 is doing exactly what I said it would, episodes are coming to PC and PS3 at the end of 1 year exclusivity, Obama got elected, with Hilary “definitely not the VP but definitely on that fine man’s cabinet” – To keep listing how many things have come to light would make this paragraph as un-web-friendly as myself.

With what some of you know you’ve seen me say, only closed minds or denial in fear would prevent you to ask yourself how much of the other things I’ve said should not be disbelieved so quickly.

It’s not the kind of sh*t you can just brush off. I did throw in some stinkers once in a while though ;)

Personally, I would rather mod GTA than use the UDK. I’d use Unity if I was going to make an indie game way before I considered Epic’s “Make them do it Tim’s way” proprietary mess.

Besides, the Grit Game Engine is probably going to put the rest of internet independent game and mod development to shame, while being open source and free all-the-way.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share it for the less-serious hobbyists out there who just need some new frag maps or something to do between faps.

Unreal Development Kit needs a complete make over. For one thing, stop putting everything in one ugly unusable BSP editor (I really feel bad for people who think THATS how you make games in 2010).

If I wanted to be forced into a recompile every time I move a single freaking light, and do fake streaming if I want large worlds, and use old forget-worthy BSP, I wouldn’t lock myself down to your choice in licensing, that’s for damned sure.

Appreciate you “sharing” your technology, however, I hope you can appreciate what’s wrong with it and why you stand very little chance in this new market you have joined. The indie world is pretty much going to crush UDK unless you change the core entirely.

Grit is really young yet it already offers so much. You can build large open worlds in it and drive cars and planes with a full day cycle already. I don’t want to extend this blog posting too far, instead I would like to extend an invitation to come over to the Grit Game Engine sites linked above, join in on the forums, and perhaps the SVN.

Get involved and get in touch with us if you want to try out a binary/built version of the engine. We don’t expect everyone to be able to build from source, but there is no public built yet. If you want to try it out, though, we’re obliged if you’ll consider helping to develop it.

Word has it there may be a bit of a GGE Logo contest coming up soon ;)

Rockstar Games’ Agent

Agent is said to be sure to become Rockstar’s next big hit since GTA III – yes, that’s III, not IV – and if this video is any true indication of the quality that Rockstar North intends to achieve with Agent, then this is probably going to end up the reason I cave and buy a console.

Not much is known about Agent as of yet, but is this the title Sam Houser was talking about here? Is it empty Sony hype? Let me know your expectations for Rockstar Games’ Agent.

I could probably use some practice, but drop a comment on it here or on YouTube and let me know what you think anyway. Link us to videos you made with the GTA IV video editor :)

This of course comes as no surprise to me and many others who speculate our brains out in our over-enthusiasm for this, the greatest open world game thus far and of all time. lol.

I have very high hopes that there will be some kind of modding support added later on down the road – similar to the old Max Payne stuff but less tools… It’s such a waste when they could rule the modding and artist training world.

Rockstar put it all out on a Newswire post a little while ago, see for yourself: Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City Coming to PlayStation 3 and PC