A Question Regarding Paying Others for Mod Remakes

[Kurshok]

I've mentioned a few times before, I'm a big fan of old Half-Life 1 mods, especially the They Hunger trilogy. But the sad thing is, Half-Life is an aging game, albeit with a meme fanbase. Not many people in the newer gaming generations are familiar with these great games simply due to them being mods for other old games. So, I want to try and share that special, magic feeling I got going through the adventure in the County of Rockwell the first time with a new generation of gamers. But I'm not good at modding myself. My question basically boils down to, how much would I be looking to cough up in dough to pay a programmer to recreate the They Hunger Trilogy in a newer, more advanced engine?

[OrbWeaver]

The only person who can answer that question is the person who is actually offering to do the work. None of us can answer in the abstract because there isn't a standard rate for "modders for hire", and the scope and complexity of the task is not well-defined.

First you will need to find this hypothetical programmer (or team) who is able and willing to produce the game you want. Then they will tell you how much it would cost and you can decide whether you're willing to pay.

[cabalistic]

Usually, mods are a work of passion and love; that's why they are offered for free despite the significant time and effort invested into them.

But if nobody picks it up as their passion project and you actually want to pay someone for it, then you'll have to expect to pay a full salary. In your case, I'd say you would have to hire a team (a programmer isn't enough - you will need people to port or probably remake the assets for the new engine) and expect work for several months. So think about what salary you'd want to earn to have a decent living and multiply that by a couple of people and months, and you'll have a rough idea of what it'd cost.

[freyk]

In my experience, if you want something, you have to do it yourself. (For the first part)

So start the project yourself and then find people who are willing to help. (With or without costs)

How about going to work on an update of half life 2 mod - "they hunger again".

Or update one of the leaked alpha builds of they hunger - lost souls (also a mod for halflife 2)

https://www.moddb.com/downloads/they-hunger-lost-souls-alpha-and-beta-builds

Modddb

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Video:

 

Edited August 24, 2022 by freyk

[snatcher]

Ohhh... They Hunger... memories from the good old days.

No facelift would make it any better and no remake would make it any justice. It's perfection as is. It's a classic.

[Kurshok]

It's not just They Hunger. If I were to ever get filthy, stinking rich... well, I'd probably spend the money on charity, to be honest. But I'd save just enough to fund a passion project of bringing back good old games from my childhood into more modern versions so they aren't forgotten by future generations. I'd pay for remakes of Cthulhu: An Unspeakable Mod, Half Life Ultimate Redemption, Wanted!, Swiss Cheese Halloween 2002, USS Darkstar, and Heart of Evil. And that's just the Half-Life Mods! I'd see a true Thief Remaster, an exact remake but with a more modern engine. I'd bring back good old PS1 Games like Shadow Man, and I don't just mean that remastered version, I'm talking a sequel. I'd do a remake and sequel of Stubbs the Zombie, and Akuji the Heartless! I'd remaster all 3 Gex games in a remastered trilogy like Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot got. I got all these great ideas swirling in my head, but I'm stopped by a mixture of no programmer skills and, even worse, a lack of money. Still, the latter might be gone soon. I'm gonna try to get a job again soon. I applied at my local Burger King. Probably will take a while to earn enough money to pay a single dev for even a single level, but it's a start.

Edited August 25, 2022 by Kurshok

[datiswous]

On 8/23/2022 at 2:09 PM, Kurshok said:

But I'm not good at modding myself.

An other idea is to pay someone to teach you how to do it. You're not good, because the guides are not good enough to teach you how to mod properly and to keep your motivation strong while learning. This might lead to only having to pay one or two people for personal support. Just an idea.

Edited August 26, 2022 by datiswous

[freyk]

And how about following our video tutorials: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=DarkRadiant_Video_Tutorials

In my "early days" invested some time and money in buying a book about modding a specified game. I read it, then opened up the editor and changed files. Nowadays people can read wikis and watch howto videos.

If you want a book about TDM modding, read "quake 4 modding for dummies" and then our wiki.

Now it costs you only time, to do it. That you can also "create".

Edited August 27, 2022 by freyk

[OrbWeaver]

Here's a job on Freelancer.com (formerly Rentacoder.com) where somebody wants a programmer to create a very simple OpenGL demo rendering a single piece of terrain.

https://www.freelancer.com/projects/opengl/opengl-tutorial

The average bid so far is $522.

Consider how long it will take you working at Burger King to save up a spare $522 to spend on a programmer to write code for you. Then consider how much more complicated it is to create an entire mod, vs writing a simple OpenGL tutorial to render a single object. This will give some idea of how much money you would need to save to make this in any way viable.

And this is just the bottom dollar bidder on Freelancer.com who will do the least amount of work possible and produce absolute garbage code just to get the lowest bid in. To have the work done properly you'll be looking at one or two orders of magnitude more money.

[freyk]

Ow wow, Thats an nice site for you, to make some money for paying your mapper, Kurshok.

Because there are some tasks on there,
if you know solutions for it and get the task, you can make easy money for it.
(And get experienced, so you  dont have to flip burgers. )

Like this one:
https://www.freelancer.com/projects/articles/need-github-documentation-project-maker-34485787

Where the jobposter needs a Github article author,
to convert a 13-chapter document to an single Github page.

Here you can notice that:
they didn't read the Github manual,
didn't do a google search to "mark the software solution down" (hint).
Or don't have the time, to do this all themselves.

So, you can do it for them. Ka-ching!

Edited August 29, 2022 by freyk

[revelator]

updating games from my childhood heh should not be to hard as the first ones i played was on the spectrum zx 80 -> most were text based hehe. one of the few graphical ones was pong which was a black and white ping pong game with two bars one in each corner standing in for bats. Maybe updating it to a color scheme hmmmmmmm...

but since you mention it should probably be possible to add some more umph to the original they hunger using xashxt which is the modder extension for xash3d, supports shaders / bumpmapping / advanced particles fresnel etc. 

[lowenz]

Meanwhile Entropy Zero for HL2 ported to Entropy Zero 2 (see in the workshop) ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/1583720/Entropy__Zero_2/ ) 

 

EZ2 is really recommended to HL2 enthusiasts.

Edited October 15, 2022 by lowenz

[Kurshok]

Someone actually updated They Hunger into They Hunger: Relit! It adds more weapons and an Infection System where you get harder to kill the lower your health is.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Kurshok

[revelator]

someone familiar with the quake engine should probably take the time and update xash3d with MH's vbo and shader driven code from remakequake, lately the code has made it into quakespasm as well (yep it is that good). it fixes practically all the gripes with the quake engine like seamless skyboxes, water effects, and a whole lot of nastiness with how planesides were calculated (was one of the big ones if you wanted PPL lighting). It is also uber fast and if someone took the time i have the code for some rather ingenious DOT3 bumpmapping developed by me and MH which uses a clever way of getting light angles to bumpmaps (in the old days you pretty much had to use PPL to make the bumpmaps look right but this was seriously heavy work on quake which only supported ambient originally so we had to use hacked entity lights coupled with PPL untill we developed this).

[revelator]

As for the clever way of getting the light angles for proper bumpmapping normally (atleast in the old days before shaders etc.) you had to use per pixel lighting to get proper moving light sources, quake did not support anything but ambient at the time which were static lightsources so some of us got crafty and hacked together real entity lights using per poly collision as a model. The result looked insane but it was really i mean REALLY heavy to run (tbh i doubt any card today could run it at 4K resolutions without going up in smoke and embers, no not even the 4090 ti). This was ofc not nice so we brainstormed it for some time and came up with an idea to use the players position to calculate the light offset, the result was quite a game changer at the time where the old code could barely run at 30 fps at 800x600 resolutions the new code could run it at several hundred frames per second at 1980x1200 on a geforce 3. I tried out the old engine on my current 1080 ti card and i actually had to limit the framerate it ran that fast.