In CoD We Trust

The second part of the the two-part interview with Tally (from Rise of the Resistance and Tally’s World) and {PST} Joker (from the eXtreme+ mod) is up on the BASH webcast site. The episode is called: In CoD We Trust.

We called the episode by this title because we have to trust that Infinity Ward will finally listen to the community that will buy their new game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They did not hear us very well after CoD or CoD2 and they built themselves a terrible reputation because of this.

Up to now, IW hasn't had to worry too much about this bad rep. Sure the "cognoscenti" in the CoD world have all been atwitter about this apparent snub (no cognoscenti worth his Italian loafers likes to have his views ignored), but this hasn't stopped the game-buying-public from flocking to the CoD series.

Having said that, the Call of Duty community has never been as strong as those that formed around lesser FPS games like CounterStrike. Is this due to the lack of involvement with the community by IW and Activision. In my opinion - of course! It's in IW's interest to build this large community for their financial security going forward.

Well IW seems to have gotten religion (as they say in the south). With their pending release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, they have invited the leading lights in the CoD gaming world to an all-expenses paid trip to their studios, they've hired community scripters and modders, and they've got Rob Bowling (fourzerotwo) doing community relations.

Will this new glasnost-like approach from IW mean that the CoD community will grow? Or is this fuss all show from IW...a publicity stunt, perhaps, to sell their new game?

To discuss these issues, I bring on Tally and Joker, both leading lights (heck, they're not just leading lights: they're high-beams) to discuss the lack of communication.

Why hasn't IW made it a priority to listen to its customers?

Tally:

"...it's always been a mystery that IW makes these great games but they've been crap at community relations in the past...Grant Collier took us out to dinner and he was very candid with us. Grant told us that the reason for the lack of community response was that ... here was this very small company, Infinity Ward, in the days of CoD I, that grew into this massive organization...and they couldn't cope with the rate of growth. "

Is the new interest in the community a publicity stunt? Will they listen?

Joker:

"...they sat us down and said, here's what we've done, what do you think? And don't tell us we're not listening."

Will things change going forward?

Tally:

"...they've turned things around and this is a dawn of a new age in the relationship."

We also ask Tally and Joker to talk about the truce between the eXtreme+ guys and ww2x! What will the truce mean to the modding community at CoD?

Joker:

"...the war between eXtreme+ and ww2x was never a war that concerned me and frankly I didn't care...in the background I was always talking to Marc (ww2x). But I did start to see it affecting so many other people - people that were leaving our forums that were peed off. So I saw the community affected as a whole. Talking to Rudedog and getting a peace...this is a healing event for the community."

War is Over!

At exactly 12:21 UTC today, June the 30th, 2007 a truce was declared to the bloody flame war that existed between two bitter rival Call of Duty modding factions.

The war had pitted Tally (eXtreme+, RoTR) on one side and Wizard220 (and Mike Nomad's Raiders site) on the other. Both influential modders in their own right, these two code-artists let personal issues cause a rift in the Call of Duty modding community and then saw those issues drag that community into a prolonged and antogonizing war.

The truce was signaled by what has now become a historical posting by Tally on the Raiders own website. His attempt at reconciliation created immediate reverberations around the CoD world.

Here is but a small snippet of the post:

While out at the COD4 preview...I spoke with Rudedog at great length about where we thought the community was going, how it was going to shape up after the release of COD4 because IW is doing such a good job of finally listening to the community base...

It is a chance to forget all the old wounds that were created during COD2, for us to finally get a chance to move forward as one community together again. Standing shoulder to shoulder, and having bags of fun together.

This brought us around to discussing the division in the community that is created in large part to me and my war with the Raiders. We both agreed that the community cant take much more of it.

However, In order for this truce to have any chance of success, I MUST resign from the Support Crew. And this because, when all is said and done, I DID fake a PM, and whereas I had what I still feel was almost overwhelming provocation, it was still very wrong no matter what the circumstances. For that reason, and that reason alone, the only honorable thing to do is go.

...I was planning to go to COD4 with the intention of getting all the important site admins there to actually ban the Raiders throughout the community. To fight fire with fire. I had set up a summit meeting with everyone concerned, and the topic was going to be: "The Raiders: the final Solution?"

But, then, on the night just before I left for LA, the "Rise of the Resistance" site was hacked and decimated. All posts deleted.

My first reaction was anger. But, over the course of the night, and during the 11 hour flight out to LA, I started to feel a sense of shame - that my presence on the RoR team had lead someone to hack the site and destroy, not only my work, but the work of all those talented individuals that make up the dev team.

For the sake of community harmony, this feud has to stop. And stop now. Hence I will resign.

- Tally

This post of reconciliation was met with stunned awe and then accolades from Tally's fiercest critics - the folks at Raiders.

Wizard220, one of the original authors of eXtreme and Tally's fiercest critic had this to say on the raidersmerciless.com site:

Thanks for taking the plunge and doing this peace offering. Tally I would like to say I too accept my part in all this. I too can forgive and I too want the very best for CoD.

- Wizard220

The peeling of churchbells began shortly after Wizz's equally breathtaking post and the air is still echoing with their sounds across Callofdutyville hours afterwards as this piece is being written.

While the details of the peace will be hammered out in voice-to-voice comms between the two groups, optimism reigns right now that the Call of Duty community will come together as one after the release of CoD4. Perhaps the group will go on to rival the success of other large FPS groups like Counterstrike.

The fact that this truce occurred is no surprise to this reporter. I could hear the murmuring coos of peace doves in Tally's voice during my BASH interview two weeks ago. But the lubricant that started the engine of peace was surely the Community Event at Infinity Ward Studios this past week, when the major players of the Call of Duty community were gathered together for a major sit-down. Ostensibly, this event was supposed to be a showcase for Activision's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In practice, it became much more that that.

It is easy to hate someone you cannot see. It is something else to continue to hate that person after you have met them face-to-face and shaken their hands. That is what happened at IW this week. Meeting your "enemy", seeing that he is not that much different than you and seeking a middle ground is as classic a human behavior as it gets.

Clearly, all of us in the CoD world are elated at this news. Thank you Tally and your supporters. Thank you Wizz and your folks at the Raiders. And most of all thank you to Activision, who made this all possible.

Now, let's get back to playing some video games!

Mods at War: WW2X vs eXtreme+

In an act that is beginning to resemble more the end result of a nuclear fission reaction than the product of asexual reproduction, the Call of Duty 2 mod community has split.

While the split could have been considered a legal separation last year, I can tell you that it is a full blown divorce right now. The details of this conflict have come out as gory as any National Enquirer article on Britney Spears' rehab. The messy goings-on have descended into a war of words (the foul and four-lettered variety) in public forums all across CallofDutyville.

Name calling and ill-tempered scrapping aside, this article attempts to provide some of the history behind the latest CoD2 multiplayer mods that have arisen out of the split: eXtreme+ and WW2X. As well, we link to both mods so that you can download them and judge them on their own merits.

Ante-schism

I have told this story before, but the history of the eXtreme+ mod originates way back to the days of the CoD UO modification A.W.E, or "Additional War Effects" by Swedish CoD modding legend Bell.

When the CoD UO community realized the untapped potential of A.W.E., many of the scripters back then expressed the wish to use A.W.E. as a "jumping-off point" to bigger and better things. Wizard220, ace coder in his own right, expressed just such a wish and was amicably given permission by Bell to take the A.W.E. code and move it in a different direction.

The new modification became eXtreme ("A.W.E-eXtreme" at first), a term that Wizard220 to this day claims is his intellectual property. As an aside, this claiming of intellectual property by folks using pseudonyms who all skirt around the issue that the original copyright holder to most of the material is Activision is a concept that is hard to follow for those like myself who did not do well on their LSAT.

Wizard220 and his colleague, [RoS] Dragon, were major forces in developing the old A.W.E. modification into the new "eXtreme" mod and added many interesting twists to Bell's work. When Dragon left due to personal problems, Wizard220 (Wizz) apparently took over almost all the scripting.

At this point Wizz became sponsored, he had a website, two extreme servers under him and he was managing the mod.

At some point in this development, the COD UO gamestate limit of 32k was reached with the eXtreme mod.

Let me take a sidebar to explain gamestate. When a player or client first connects or a new level loads the server sends the client a huge message that contains all the values of all game variables for that level. This data is only sent once. Basically the problem is that at some point you can exceed a given allowable level (32K was the level on UO) and the server can crash.

By October 2005, Wizz felt abandoned by the developers of UO because they didnt upgrade the gamestate and he handed over extreme to another genius modder, Astoroth.

Astoroth then continued eXtreme for CoD UO until the final release and then switched over to CoD2, porting over work from the eXtreme UO mod to the eXtreme+ mod, which is what the eXtreme mod became known as. Wizard220 apparently helped extensively in this port, as witnessed by the fact that his name lives on to this day in some of the files.

Additional contributions over the past few years have also come from Matthius of the Admiral Mod and of course Bell who led the AWE development.

Marc, a bright and level headed modder from Holland, had become involved in eXtreme+ and was testing the mod on Linux servers. Between the release of CoD2 and the 1.2 patch he became an eXtreme+ Support Crew Member.

Astroroth's stewardship of the mod has become one of early promise followed by some confusion due to his virtual disappearance from the scene due to personal issues. The spring of 2006 marks Astroroth's last full-time involvement with eXtreme+ (about the time the 1.2 patch came out for CoD2).

Marc took the reins at eXtreme+ after Astoroth's absence.

Tally, from the U.K. and a well-known modder (now of the RoTR project) came aboard. Joker, a Californian also started to take on more responsibility.

Just after version 1.5 came out (approximately in January of 2007) Marc left the eXtreme+ crew. Apparently he arrived at that decision due to a post from the perennially absent Astoroth, which he did not take to be believable:

"A big reason for me to leave Astoroth's site is because he posted recently in the closed moderators forum that he will be back AT SOME POINT."

- Marc

The Schism

The reason for Wizz's departure from CoD2 is perhaps as mysterious as his reappearance. We are now fast forwarding to 2007 and his return initiated a tug-of-war over the work that, some may argue, he handed off years ago.

Wizz had returned and the threats regarding "pulling the plug" on the "extreme" name, the "eXtreme+" mod and the "extremecod.com" website began appearing in many forums around the community. Wizz was back and he wanted eXtreme!

Questions of who owns intellectual property began to outpace scripting questions on those same sites.

The upshot of the schism is the new world order: there are now two camps in CoD2 modding and each have direct lineage to the original UO mod from Bell.

The new eXtreme+ crew

The eXtreme+ camp, who pitch their tents at extremecod.com, have uber-modders like Tally, Paulo88 and of course Joker. In my opinion, the "new" eXtreme+ modifier should apply to all mods put out by this group from version 2.0. Joker has taken the bull by the horns with Marc's departure and with Paulo88 by his side created version 2.0. Having said that, it was a bit of a hard go. We covered this in detail in other BASH...the blog articles, but originally version 2.0 was supposed to be version 1.7!

Numerous bugs put an end to 1.7 quickly. Once the bugs were squashed, 2.0 rose from the ashes.

You can read all about eXtreme+ in the many posts we have had here on this great mod:

eXtreme+


The WW2X crew

The new upstarts call their mod "WW2X". The mod is caretakered at the moment solely by Marc. Nedgerblansky, while not a modder for WW2X (he looks after A.W.E. along with Oddball) does participate indirectly. Marc has borrowed some of Ned's code/gametypes for WW2X.

The home of WW2X is raidersmerciless.com

Interestingly, Wizz may have finally relinquished the name "extreme" as clearly indicated by the group's new mod name WW2X. The "X" in the name is the only common letter - admittedly, it is one sexy letter and I can see why it has been kept. Having said that, it was Marc who came up with the new title:

WW2X is a name i came up with... parting from extreme i couldnt very well name it extreme2 it would cause too much confusion. Without really deep thought i decided to name it ww2x this you could see as: world war to the extreme or world war 2 extreme...whichever you prefer.

- Marc

Wizard220's role is not all that clear in light of the new WW2X landscape:

Wizard220 doesnt code for ww2x.... he doesnt code for cod2 period.... because of the lack of support from IW and the crapy out of the box code.

- Marc

It appears then that his reappearance on the scene may have been to settle some personal grudges rather than to take the mod back. I cannot completely confirm this, it is just an opinion.

The arrival of Marc, working more or less on his own has had an immediate effect on the direction of the old eXtreme+ mod. As Marc states in a raidersmerciless.com posting:

One of my first modifications to the mod will be the dvar handling...1280 is the max amount of dvars cod2 can handle and extreme is closing into that big time.

Thanks to Nedgerblansky who developed a new method to circumvent this (drm) im now in the process to make extreme work with that method...and i must say..its working great......with the settings i normally use on my server i already saved 400 dvars.....which means..more features can now be added in the mod again.

The DVAR solution is critical to any future upgrades and it was implemented in the Feb. 2007 release of WW2X (v 1.6)

1.6.0:
Changed from default dvar handling to DRM dvar handling method
Changed ranksystem, now 13 ranks again but combined with 5 rankicons
Added knives that can replace the pistols (not throwable yet)
Fixed IHTF spectating when dead bug
Brought back the possibility to use healthbar with healthregen (3 options)

Biggest and most important new feature is the DRM dvar handling.
What does that mean?....more features can be added to the mod ..not bothered by hitting the dvar limit cod2 has.

Note DRM dvar handling became available soon after in June 2007 in eXtreme+. One can only assume that despite the appearances, the modding communities are closer tied than would be believed from the forum flamewars.

In short, the WW2X mod is a combination of A.W.E, A.W.E.-eXtreme and some of the "Merciless mod". A.W.E and Merciless of course are unsurprisingly maintained at the raidersmerciless.com site. Undoubtedly there is a good smattering of eXtreme+ in there as well due to the presence of Marc.

The latest version(1.7) for the WW2X mod for COD2 is available now. Here are some of its features.

WW2X v1.7 Features
---------------------
- Deployable mg30cal and mg42
- Fire and gas grenades and sticky bombs. Sticky bombs are not as sticky as you would think. They only stick to a ledge or anything that physically sticks out.
- Turret overheater
- Mobile mg30cal and mg42: 2 mobile mg's per team...one that you can carry around and fire or this new deployable one.
- Range finder
- Landmines
- Vote menu limiter/delay
- Throwable Knives
- Parachutes
- Weather effects
- Server redirecting
- Tracers
- Ambient planes
- Disable stock map fx
- Clan specific welcome messages and voting options
- Bleeding and bleeding messages
- Ingame statistics board
- Livestats
- Movie mode
- Spectate/death/end/stats/voting music
- Announcement sounds
- Teamkill detection with different punishments.
- Server messages
- Welcome messages
- Disable minefields
- Server/Clan logo text and/or picture
- Sprinting
- Map voting: map/gametype callvotemenu handles 180 maps
- Customizable killcam time
- Healthbar
- Random maprotation
- Playerbased maprotation
- Maprotation error correction
- Painsounds
- Deathsounds
- Checking and renaming of duplicate player names
- Anti camping system
- Extended obituary messages
- Turret abuse system
- Disable deathicons
- Disable nadeicons
- Disable stanceicons
- Disable weapon drops
- Disable grenade drops
- Disable pistols
- Disable objective points
- Disable damage feedback
- Disable/Force crosshair
- Disable/Force crosshair enemy color
- Disable health regeneration
- Colored smoke grenades
- Headpopping
- Helmetpopping
- Damage modifiers
- Unknown Soldier handling
- Blood splatter on screen
- Cold breath
- Change gravity
- Change speed
- Healthpacks/Medikits
- Mortars
- Tripwires frag and smoke grenades
- Remove bodies and sink bodies
- Ammo limiting
- Weapon limiting
- Dvar to stop clientside exploits
- Spawn protection
- Selectable secondary weapon
- Turret disabling
- Rotating MOTD
- Command monitor
- Weapon drop on arm/hand/leg/foot hit
- Forced autoassign
- Taunts
- Player model limiter
- Laserdot
- Bulletholes on screen
- Ranksystem with rankicons
- Ammo crates
- Panzerschrecks
- G43 Sniper
- Weapon class usage option
- Enemy weapon usage
- Grenade warning
- WMD contol (option to set a rank that allows you to call in airstrikes, mortars, artillery and napalm)

Gametypes
-------------
- Last Team Standing
- Last Man Standing
- Hold the Flag
- Individual Hold the Flag
- Domination
- Onslaught
- Capture the Flag back
- VIP
- Classic Headquarters
- Conquest

New Gametype:
- ESD

Side by side comparison

Where it counts, a quick scan of WW2X 1.7 and eXtreme+ 2.0 features will undoubtedly indicate that there isn't much to choose from between these two mods. The big differences in my opinion are in the gametypes: WW2X has ESD and eXtreme+ has Liberation, Hitman and round-based CNQ and CTF.

I am not surprised by how similar the two mods are on paper. After all the split has only occurred recently. I'll be more interested in the directions these two groups take their respective mods.

BASH will keep an eye on them so stay tuned!

Conclusion

Competition, we are told, is very healthy for the consumer. Competition in the CoD mod arena is no exception.

The only thing that worries me right now is whether there are enough software modding resources (i.e. the scripters/programmers) to carry out and sustain these two mods in the CoD2 community.

As for the bitterness in both groups...

Clearly, the folks in both camps are excellent at what they do. Many of them have "type A" personalities: opinionated, passionate and strong willed. These traits are typical of true artists and creators. As in any other human endeavour, groups like these do not stick together long. Differences of opinion are created and people go their own way. Each camp has its leaders and each camp has its followers. The laws of nature could have predicted this rift well before it happened.

I only hope that both camps stop their bickering and get back to what they do best: write scripts so that my fellow gamers and I can play new and improved modded versions of online CoD2.

Late Breaking news:

After posting this article I was informed of some very good news. It appears there may actually be a truce in the war of words between the WW2X and eXtreme+ camps.

Apparently there have been olive branches exchanged and there is a peace offering on the table. Both groups have expressed the desire to put the ill will behind them (which apparently involved personal issues rather than technical ones) and move on - they have even said they may help each other out.

As Marc says:

Hopefully now we can coexist in peace together again.....and they even unbanned me from the eXtreme site.

Wow. That's how intense this little war had gotten. Of course it helps when there are level-headed folks out there willing to put the player ahead of their own ego.

Good luck to both groups - we'll be watching (and playing) their efforts!