ModCast Episode 04: "Now With 87.5 Percent Less Ken"

[Heraclitus]

Have you considered starting a thread on the GalCiv 2 site and our subforum to ask people to mail in or post suggestions of the best of the best mods or ship designs?


On a side note, my message was not recorded because of technical difficulties rather than my intoxication. I will admit that it may have been fortunate, since I don’t quite remember what I said.

[Elhoim]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
Have you considered starting a thread on the GalCiv 2 site and our subforum to ask people to mail in or post suggestions of the best of the best mods or ship designs?

Good idea

[Locutus]

Originally posted by N35t0r
They say that a PC CivRev version wouldn't be probable because it'll be a PC version of a Console version of a PC game... But there's precedent!

The Civilization Boardgame is, effectively, a boardgame about a PC game based on a boardgame!

Sorry, the Civilization video game and the original board game have nothing to do with each other, other than that they happen to share names Sid basically didn't even know about the board game's existence for most of Civ1's development and has certainly never even played it (or that's what he maintains anyway, there's a bit of murkiness with Bruce Shelley's background and past statements but that's a whole different story).

This incidentally ties in closely with the whole how-Call-to-Power-got-be-be-called-Civilization thing that we mentioned in I think ep 3(?) and I want to write an article on it some day, but that requires an entirely theoretical future in which I'm not completely swamped in other work

Originally posted by Fierabras
"...unless EA buys up Take2..." Nice topical comment, Wouter!

Rumours of that have been floating around since the T2 board changed IIRC (maybe even further back) and analysts have been predicting it for some time as well, so I figured this would come up some day Didn't think it'd happen this soon though I figured we wouldn't hear anything of it at least until GTA4 was out, which turns out is indeed what T2 would've wanted It's still a whole other discussion whether that means there will be a SMAC2, but that's indeed more a topic for PolyCast (and the SMAC forums, no doubt).

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Murg
My biggest complaint is that you guys don't seem to review the material you are going to cover before the modcast. Its hard to review something if you haven't tried it yourself. Its easy to check out the forum entries on it but Im hoping you gusy can provide more detail than that, especially about the mods. Play them, say what you like, say want you don't like, give a true review (not a Fox News review where they don't even try it first).

Secondly get the modders on the show. When you review their mod it would be great to have them talk about why they decided to go a certain direction and the things they like and don't like about their mods. I think that would be helpful to other aspriing modders and interesting for everyone to listen to.

Agreed on both points. I personally have played almost all of the mods we've discussed so far (at least the non-Artist Sketchpad ones, but I don't know the first thing about art anyway -- you may have noticed I tend to say very little during these segments, at least not counting the historical discussions ), although for the upcoming ep 5 due to circumstances I didn't have time to play any of them either. I know the other guys have played at least some of the stuff we talked about but there are definitely too many instances in which only one or even none of the hosts can say anything meaningful about the gameplay. The inherent problem of having a panel of modders is that you have a panel of very, very busy people We'll work on improving this though.

As far as getting modders on, that's definitely the plan. Beyond the first few shows (where we're still figuring things out ourselves) we've always intended to have a modder as guest on every show but we've had some planning issues. PolyCast guests are far easier to set up as you can invite just about anyone at any time and there's usually even several people online on the forums and IM as we record who we can and on a few occasions have invited at the very last moment to replace missing hosts/guests, but for Modcast these things need to be planned much further in advance and late cancellations are very difficult to replace, both because the pool of people to choose from is much more limited and because, as you point out, especially for the Spotlight we really can't discuss anything we haven't actually played in advance.

Good news though: we'll have our first guest on in episode 5 (although it was a very last-minute guest so I'm afraid we weren't as prepared as we should've been, so there's still a lot of room for improvement for the future, but it's a step up from not having guests )

Thanks for your offer to help I think for now it's still early and we're still figuring out our planning, so we'll see how things develop as they are, but maybe we'll take you up on it later.

[RobWorham]

Excellent stuff guys!!!!!

I listened to all four episodes back-to-back while doing the gardening today!!!

Very interesting listening, especially to someone who would like to dip his toes into the world of modding this coming winter......

Any chance you could cover a 'beginners guide to' type segment, and discuss the best tutorials for the various aspects of modding that are available, with links in the relevant Modcast thread to the tutorial in discussion.

After listening to this episode I spent the afternoon watching Kael's video tutorials and found them very inspiring!!!

Watch this space, but don't hold your breath.......

[Rubin]

Thank you for the kind words, GarretSidzaka

[DanQ]

Originally posted by RobWorham
Very interesting listening, especially to someone who would like to dip his toes into the world of modding this coming winter...... [..]

Watch this space, but don't hold your breath.......

[N35t0r]

Originally posted by Locutus
Sorry, the Civilization video game and the original board game have nothing to do with each other, other than that they happen to share names Sid basically didn't even know about the board game's existence for most of Civ1's development and has certainly never even played it (or that's what he maintains anyway, there's a bit of murkiness with Bruce Shelley's background and past statements but that's a whole different story).

Yeah, they're pretty dissimilar all right, I've played Advanced Civilization... But a couple of items just make me think Sid had played the game when he made Civ1

Originally posted by Locutus This incidentally ties in closely with the whole how-Call-to-Power-got-be-be-called-Civilization thing that we mentioned in I think ep 3(?) and I want to write an article on it some day, but that requires an entirely theoretical future in which I'm not completely swamped in other work

Yeah, I know. And Activision only got permissing to make one Civ game, hence CtP2 being just that, and not Civ:CtP2 (a fact often overlooked around the web)

Originally posted by Locutus
Rumours of that have been floating around since the T2 board changed IIRC (maybe even further back) and analysts have been predicting it for some time as well, so I figured this would come up some day Didn't think it'd happen this soon though I figured we wouldn't hear anything of it at least until GTA4 was out, which turns out is indeed what T2 would've wanted It's still a whole other discussion whether that means there will be a SMAC2, but that's indeed more a topic for PolyCast (and the SMAC forums, no doubt).

Hmm? I thought they had said, 'Sorry, no, come back when we release the new GTA'. Was there more news?


Also, if you guys would like someone to test a few mods and review them for you, I'll be willing to do so, as long as you don't dump a gazillion mods on me.