How is SOM different (or not different) from what people do with PC games (mods)

[Holy_Diver]

[quote author=Holy Diver link=topic=689.msg9141#msg9141 date=1371940478]
[quote author=HwitVlf link=topic=689.msg9130#msg9130 date=1371892056]
coincided with it becoming standard practice for companies to release level editors

Modding has been around since I was a kid. I just haven't followed its development. I disagree though that modding negatively impacted "game making" software. It's just speculation. But modding was there before and was still there after. I think "game making" stopped because it was not commercially viable.
[/quote]
I didn't claim mods had a negative effect on game making. I said standard issue mod-making kits have reduced peoples focus on making freestanding homebrew type games. [/quote]

Well I took "bottom fell out" to mean the industry lost interest because they weren't making money. So I gave you reasons why they weren't making money. Namely that there is no way to make money with this kind of a product. The companies that did make these products really didn't think things through. In the case of SOM maybe it was more of a humanitarian gesture, or a bid for immortality, or maybe its makers just thought they'd do one last thing with all of the software they had lying around to see if it wouldn't make more money than was sunk into it. Which would've been only conceivable because the process of making SOM must have been a slapdash port of years of experience making KF games.

I actually have a significant amount of evidence to support what I'm saying, but I won't take the time to explain. It's not that I am busy. I just have other things to attend to.

I agree that mod tools detract from interest in making standalone game tools. Just like sites like sites like Facebook detract from interest in making informative independent websites. That is the major concern expressed in the top post. So it did not occur to me you were making the same point again as if you didn't read the top post.

As far as the question in your topic: SoM is a mod. The only difference is the label people may slap on it. Plenty of "mods" created totally unique games. And in spite of what you have posted in several places, SoM's user agreement specifically prohibits distribution or reverse engineering of SoM or its components. I'm the one who sent you the ULA text where it said so, so I'm surprised you missed that. The exe's also have built in copy protection and it violates US federal law to bypass that.

To the contrary. I always stress this point. It's the only restriction placed. However I don't think it says "reverse engineering". It specifically says disassembly. Which is boiler plate for all software since that breaks the parameters of the copyright. Coffee (a Japanese SOM user) wrote to From Software and received an encouraging reply saying that reverse engineering is fine. Deciphering file formats has always been legal as far as I know. And I suspect if From was asked about dissasembly for the same purposes the reply would be the same. Emulation is also legal. So disassembly done for no other reason than to extend a product is equivalent to emulating the product with extensions.

Official mod kits often let you remove the entire original game and make something completely new just like SoM. So SoM is a mod and many mod-kits are game making engines if you want to call them that. Such distinctions are just meaningless labels to me. It's like discussing what to call the type of brush you used to paint a picture.

But words have meaning. SOM is closer to a game platform in my mind. It was developed and released as such. So that's patently obvious. The only extent to which you could liken it to a mod would be where it might place limitations on what you can do game mechanics wise. If it was more of a traditional graphics engine I don't think that would be good for users. It's a "game maker" so for that reason its slightly closer to a mod. But we can't just go around calling everything a mod. You might be able to call some especially open ended mod-kits game maker kits. But I don't think it works both ways.


But this thread is not supposed to be about definitions. I made it just to see if I couldn't gleam some insight into how SOM stacks up against alternatives namely including mods. Like one could imagine that if there was a game to end all games, and it had a very rich mod-kit. Then why make anymore games in that genre when new games can just be made with its mod kit for ever more?