Forum Discussion
How would people react to a donations -> vr mods gig?
So I got a DK1 back in October and right away I hacked Morrowind to run on it with a modified DLL, but then halfway abandoned the project due to the small amount of people who played it, plus IRL stuff, and the fact that my DK1 is now obsolete and no longer exciting. I'm still planning on finishing it to some extent and it's already much better than any other Morrowind VR mod, but before, back when I was ambitious about it, I wanted to hack lots of different games the same way. Now, my problem is that I can't afford to buy another devkit (dk2) and I also can barely afford to take time out of my busy schedule to work on my hobbies, but I still REALLY want to bring some of the amazing games of the past into full 3D immersion like I did with Morrowind. Oblivion and Skyrim obviously, but imagine even things like Unreal Tournament 2004 (or UT99 even), or pretty much anything else that doesn't have and probably never will have oculus rift support natively.
My question is, how do you think the community would react if I had a thread where basically people could financially support the hacking of specific games they want to see supported, and I'd work on each one more or less proportionally to its number of supporters? Essentially, I'd be a one-man game-hacking service whose budget is both decided and provided by its customers. Would it be seen as some sort of unfair scheme, or would that actually be something the community would be interested in helping with? I can see it going both ways. In the past, when I made large mods (runecraft for minecraft, gravity hull designator for garry's mod), I got a bit of a community going first and then I put a donate button on the front page just in case people wanted to give me a push or show their support, and it worked pretty well to keep the mods alive for years. I don't know how it would work out here though, especially since I don't exactly have any sort of following on this forum yet aside from a few people over on my Morrowrift thread.
Anyway, I'd appreciate some feedback on how well or not well this plan would work-- I'd love to hack as many games as I can to work but it's just not in my best interest to do so right now, and I don't expect it to be so anytime soon on its own. Something like this would at least make it worthwhile for me so I could work on getting everyone's favorite games working on the Oculus like I wish I could. Idk though.
My question is, how do you think the community would react if I had a thread where basically people could financially support the hacking of specific games they want to see supported, and I'd work on each one more or less proportionally to its number of supporters? Essentially, I'd be a one-man game-hacking service whose budget is both decided and provided by its customers. Would it be seen as some sort of unfair scheme, or would that actually be something the community would be interested in helping with? I can see it going both ways. In the past, when I made large mods (runecraft for minecraft, gravity hull designator for garry's mod), I got a bit of a community going first and then I put a donate button on the front page just in case people wanted to give me a push or show their support, and it worked pretty well to keep the mods alive for years. I don't know how it would work out here though, especially since I don't exactly have any sort of following on this forum yet aside from a few people over on my Morrowrift thread.
Anyway, I'd appreciate some feedback on how well or not well this plan would work-- I'd love to hack as many games as I can to work but it's just not in my best interest to do so right now, and I don't expect it to be so anytime soon on its own. Something like this would at least make it worthwhile for me so I could work on getting everyone's favorite games working on the Oculus like I wish I could. Idk though.
27 Replies
- I'd say setting up a website for your mods/hacks and putting up a donation button would be a fine idea. You could also potentially package a bunch of hacks together and put it up on Kickstarter. Make a poll for the top 10 games people want to play with their Rift, then get funding for it, with stretch goals for any games that didn't make the cut. You won't necessarily get the same level of support of funding you would if you were planning on releasing a really high quality new VR game, but there definitely is an interest in making existing titles work in VR, so I think you could find an audience.
- Especially for better Skyrim support, I'd drop money on this. At least $20 if not more (for Skyrim support alone).
Or Oblivion for that matter (playing with the upgraded faces mod makes it almost like Skyrim in a way).
Edit: BTW OP if you do decide to start a Kickstarter (or whatever funding) for this, be careful how you set it up so that it's clear you aren't doing something weird and trying to profit off other peoples' games - make it clear that the people are backing in exchange for your (totally independent) work that just happens to run on top of these games. "Twitchmonkey" wrote:
You could also potentially package a bunch of hacks together and put it up on Kickstarter. Make a poll for the top 10 games people want to play with their Rift, then get funding for it, with stretch goals for any games that didn't make the cut.
Interesting idea-- I'd considered using kickstarter but couldn't think of any rewards for backers, although I guess it could be the usual "mention in the readme file" deal or something like that. I do like the idea of doing a top ten though, that stops it from getting to the point where I have to work on 30 things at once :P"n00854180t" wrote:
Cool, maybe there is a chance of this happening then. I really just need enough to pay for a DK2, the games people want me to hack, and a little bit for the trouble. So I guess that's $300 + 10 games x $60, which would be 900, and if I round it up to $1000 then that's probably about how much I'd need to hack ten games. If I cut it down to 5, I'd probably only need to ask for $700, if I did a kickstarter.
Especially for better Skyrim support, I'd drop money on this. At least $20 if not more (for Skyrim support alone)."n00854180t" wrote:
if you do decide to start a Kickstarter (or whatever funding) for this, be careful how you set it up so that it's clear you aren't doing something weird and trying to profit off other peoples' games - make it clear that the people are backing in exchange for your (totally independent) work that just happens to run on top of these games.
Good advice, I'll keep that in mind. I've never done a kickstarter before so I'll definitely tread lightly :P
I also thought of maybe patreon but people would end up paying for games they didn't care about that way-- the way patreon works is you have patrons that have agreed to pay a certain amount whenever you produce a unit of whatever it is you make. The kickstarter idea with the poll sounds like a good one, though I'm not sure where to put the poll, or what site to use for it. Any ideas for how to do the poll? Ideally I'd like to reach as many rifters as I can, of course-- I guess I could find some poll website that lets people type in whatever they want and post it in a new thread in the same section as this one or something. I won't actually be able to work on it for about three weeks anyway so this would be a good time to get the poll going.- @superllama - is there a base framework you could build up that would jump start you on adding support to individual games?
If so, the way I'd set it up is so that the Kickstarter will pay for you to develop that, maybe 2-3 games (whatever comes out on top of the polls) supported out of the box, and then do additional popular games as stretch goals.
Maybe make it a subscription service or something ($10/mo) and just allow anyone subbed to get access to all the game support you have already done, and keep it after they've subbed for whatever games were available during their sub, but have it so they need to resub to get more/new updated game support. (If you do that, you could even have the KS rewards be certain lengths of subscription.)
That way you can fund ongoing development, people who want to buy once can do that and pay for updates later, and those that want to just have a consistently updated games support can just keep an active sub.
Dunno how feasible that all is in terms of your development requirements for this, but I thought I'd suggest the model for your consideration. - Well, every game is different in terms of the memory hacking required, but most games will still use a modified d3d9.dll that will generally be fairly similar with its function overrides. I suppose I could consolidate it all into a program that automatically downloads, updates, and installs the mods, but that would probably be a much larger undertaking. On the other hand, it would also allow me to push out fixes for games that still get updated regularly.
As for the subscription idea, I suppose it could be a viable model for ongoing support-- I hadn't considered the fact that unlike Morrowind, the games that people will want me to hack will likely still be patched in the future, which would require me to go back and fix the hack to work with the new code. I hesitate to force people to subscribe just to get updates though... plus they could just get them from someone else who subscribed unless I put some sort of anti-piracy in it.
I guess I could make a whole website for it, and code all the dll's to check for updates during DllMain, and have some sort of progress bar system on the website where it would show each game that I'm working on, showing how much has been donated and how much is necessary to add special features or ensure further updates and stuff. - So I'm thinking I could have a website with both polls to suggest new projects, and progress bars for each currently started project-- each project would have its own goal and stretch goals, and whenever the actual game gets updated and needs re-hacking, I'd have to add another small goal to it so I could keep up the work. Each bar would have next to it a download current version button (greyed out for unfinished projects), and a donate button to contribute funding. At the top of the page, there would be bars with goals for buying specific hardware so that I can make my hacks support them-- a DK2, maybe a Hydra or a STEM-- if people donated enough towards those that I could actually get one, then I'd try to add support for them in some way or another to all current and future hacks.
The thing about dll hacking is it's very frustrating at times to decode the game's memory map and even though I'm a pretty determined person, even I give up if the result isn't worth the trouble of sifting through thousands of values and decoding them. For Morrowrift, getting basic rift support working was reward enough because I loved the game so much, but even my love for the game couldn't drive me to fix some of the harder bugs without a significant amount of people begging me to do it. However, with donations involved, I'd be duty-bound to work as hard as possible and never give up as long as people are supporting me-- that's what has to happen for perfect hacks to be made.
And of course, the website would already have Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim on the page for people to donate towards-- and Morrowind would already have significant progress shown. The next goal for Morrowind would be fixing the bugs and adding better input and configuration (finishing it up really), whereas the goal for Skyrim would be basic support. Other new games that are suggested would also begin with basic support, unless I don't already own the game, in which case the first goal would be getting me a copy so I can work on it. "superllama" wrote:
So I'm thinking I could have a website with both polls to suggest new projects, and progress bars for each currently started project-- each project would have its own goal and stretch goals, and whenever the actual game gets updated and needs re-hacking, I'd have to add another small goal to it so I could keep up the work. Each bar would have next to it a download current version button (greyed out for unfinished projects), and a donate button to contribute funding. At the top of the page, there would be bars with goals for buying specific hardware so that I can make my hacks support them-- a DK2, maybe a Hydra or a STEM-- if people donated enough towards those that I could actually get one, then I'd try to add support for them in some way or another to all current and future hacks.
The thing about dll hacking is it's very frustrating at times to decode the game's memory map and even though I'm a pretty determined person, even I give up if the result isn't worth the trouble of sifting through thousands of values and decoding them. For Morrowrift, getting basic rift support working was reward enough because I loved the game so much, but even my love for the game couldn't drive me to fix some of the harder bugs without a significant amount of people begging me to do it. However, with donations involved, I'd be duty-bound to work as hard as possible and never give up as long as people are supporting me-- that's what has to happen for perfect hacks to be made.
And of course, the website would already have Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim on the page for people to donate towards-- and Morrowind would already have significant progress shown. The next goal for Morrowind would be fixing the bugs and adding better input and configuration (finishing it up really), whereas the goal for Skyrim would be basic support. Other new games that are suggested would also begin with basic support, unless I don't already own the game, in which case the first goal would be getting me a copy so I can work on it.
Seems like a good approach to me!- Sign me up for DK2 support of Skyrim and maybe X-Plane if OGL is not too hard?
Which games do you need to buy? I'll send you paypal to cover it. - I might be able to donate too.
