I’ve been daydreaming about creating libre mods for proprietary video games that I’ve played as a kid and I would like to hear opinions on whether or not that is something worth pursuing. On one hand, a libre mod might distract from future libre game alternatives. On the other hand, it provides resources to potential libre alternatives and makes people more aware of libre culture. I would love to hear what people here have to say about this.
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So, the focus of the mods would be non-code related asset creation. I’ll definitely post to OpenGameArt if I make anything worth putting there. While there are plenty of good moddable libre games, ReTux and SuperTuxKart come to mind, there aren’t good equivalents to 3D platformers like Super Mario 64 or Sonic Adventure. Since the only coding I want to do is making playtest scripts in python, I thought that making a libre mod would make the creation of such games easier while helping to show people the value of Creative Commons licensing. The traditional audience of players certainly wouldn’t care about the licensing but other modders that work on large-scale mods may appreciate additional assets; that being said, I think you’re right about it being pointless overall. Modders probably wouldn’t move over to libre games and I could just as easily make assets for libre games or upload assets directly to OpenGameArt.
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Please do it. Having libre mods on proprietary stuff is still better than having proprietary mods on proprietary games.
When I install Minecraft mods I always check if I the mods are open-source before installing them.
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I think I’m just going to make libre mods for games regardless of license; as long as the assets are libre and portable, I think that people will be able to benefit from them. However, I do see that doing so isn’t a very effective way of getting people familiar with libre culture overall.
I would like to give some additional context that wasn’t included in the original post. I wanted to create libre mods because I felt they would help familiarize people with libre culture while also providing assets to libre games and their corresponding mods. After watching a video where two people shared their distaste for current libre and open engine games, I think I might be approaching the issue wrong; maybe a game is to a modder the same way a DAW is to an artist. The people that listen to music wouldn’t want to use a DAW so they aren’t really the audience. Maybe libre games should be trying to pull in modders as their main audience as opposed to gamers and free software enthusiasts. Of course, the main issue with that idea is that many people that would appreciate the ability to use a libre base wouldn’t want to release their own stuff as libre; for that reason, the culture would have to change around either libre games or traditional modding. Since I believe that releasing libre mods would help to change modding culture overall, I’m going to go ahead and do that.
(Note: This was originally going to be a response to SnowCode but I feel like it works better as its own post.)
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I was thinking more about the large scale mods for games like Super Mario 64 but your point still stands. Even in my ideal scenario, it’s unlikely that modders would transfer over unless the company that made the game clamped down on all modding activity; at that point, I wouldn’t even be able to make libre mods.