deadite4

I think that information is a bit off. I recall reading from their own website(when it was still up) that from the beginning any form of 'release' needed to be approved from gearbox(or not approved) and that they new this. Publicly they put it on hold because as they continued to work on the project they still couldn't get an official release approval from Gearbox who wasn't saying yes or no. Unfortunately the mod team's site isn't up anymore as this was all explained there and they even said not to hate on Gearbox. Gearbox was just going by their initial agreement that they can work on it, but a release would be ultimately decided by Gearbox. What really hurts fan projects in the end is when a fan project, or fans of the fan project, go on a rampage with boycotts or other attempted outrages at an IP holder. If every time a fan project is given a friendly "OK" to work on an IP, and then fans hate on the IP holder at some point in the future if that project fails or has it's "OK" taken away then it makes it even more difficult for IP holders to grant free use of their IP in the future. It becomes more risk of boycotts or bad press than is worth it. /rant

What kind of optimizations. We are always looking for improvements

That's because it's still insanely popular to play. Up until DOTA 2 and TF2 went free to play it was the #1 most played game on the Steam network for years. Even now it always resides at #3(with dota and TF2 at 1 and 2). The game is genuinely still widely played so it's not surprising it still has Moddb profile flashes bumps simply because of its fan base. Then Counter-Strike source sits at #5! ^^ and this is at 6 in the morning! http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Yeah I decided to give the new one a whirl(have used the first version quite a few times!) and have the same .dll issue that I don't get on the original I'm still using. This tool has been great by the way. Very handy.

Still crashes on me, I just don't get any errors now. I initially had some type of write/permission error I believe. now it just crashes. I've just gone back to the D3 particle editor since unfortunately.

Yep

It honeslty depends on what your projects goal(s) are. Is it for community, or simply to know people are playing(and hopefully enjoying) your hard work? While verbal/written feedback is great and we all eat it up when we get responses from the small people who want to talk, a large part of our personal gratitude is simply knowing lots of people are playing our hard work. "Download Statistics" to one person is is simply a statistic, to others it's knowledge that X amount of people are seeing and playing years of hard work. Plus there are members on our team who are using this project as a stepping stone to the industry and portfolio builder. So it's important (to me especially as resposible for public relations) that I can spread the project out to the most amount of eyes as possible. They've all certainly earned it. I guess that is really the question. What gets you guys feeling like it is worth your time. Is the knowledge that people are simply playing enough? Or do you need verbal, personal recognition to feel justified. For most of us at Hexen, people simply playing is quite gratifying. The small percentage who want to engage in community is sort of the frosting on the cake(and we do love it when it happens, don't be fooled!).

From another team whose main focus is a game, and secondary as a base that other people could hopefully use to build small missions(there is still a small hexen 1 mod community) I can say this. It is much easier to advertise "A New Game" to the general gaming public than it is to advertise "A New Toolset with Fan Missions". The largest chunk of gamers don't care about the tools or random fan missions. You can reach the swath of gamers who just play games with a campaign. You will never hear from this group of people, they won't join your community, they won't contribute, but they will play if it's easily installable, and advertised appropriately. The TDM community is far larger than the Hexen community. We are lucky to have 1 post a week on our public forums but on our last(only) release we distributed some 10K downloads in the first few days and hold a pace of about 1K per month currently. We are lucky to hear back from 0.25% of those people but people are indeed playing the game. They just have no interest in the community as of right now. I have a hunch we, Hexen, can change that with our next extended campaign, standalone, and toying thoughts with some type of mulitplay. Long story short - the mass of general public like free games and they typically care less about tools or mods. Make your mod a game, more outsiders will care.

Good call. updated. Thanks. Offer to assist is still open, btw. We are down to just 22 warnings in our console as standalone and half of them are related to the missing player model.

Has there been any discussion on adding the "Doom Stuff" ability to the particle editor? so you can view your particle as test model, projectile impact, muzzle smoke, and projectile smoke?

Ignore that. Was a permissions issue strangely.. Sorry for the spam.

Is anyone else actually able to save a particle? Keeps crashing on me every time I attempt it.

If it's ok I'm going to list the bugs in the particle editor as I narrow each one down definitively. I'll just make a new post here when I narrow a new one down. First thing I've got. The particle editor does not load a material if it precedes itself with "material". Example: The editor won't load this material: material hexen/serpent_projectile { The editor does load this material: hexen/serpent_projectile { Both ways are acceptable in id tech 4.

That would be awesome. I know I'm considering the tool for creating new particles over at hexenmod as opposed to the built in editor. After some more trial and error, 1 potential culprit at least first appears to have a relation with materials that use a time/table. There's more to it than just that, but that's at least 1 thing I've been seeing.