Contents
Personal info
So, I'm Pavel 'pakman' Kirillov from Moscow, Russia and I'm used to be a lead coder for TTM 2003 project.
I registered on Unreal Wiki to be able to participate in discussions here.
You may contact me by writing an email to me or by icq 14646900.
TTM info
TTM for UT-1 scored 9.5/10 at ModSquad, TTM2003 v2.2 scored 8.95/10 at Gamer's Dungeon and TTM2003 tied for first place in the "Best mutator" category of Make Something Unreal contest's Phase 1.
Since it's the only personal page I have at the moment, I'll take a liberty to put links to various interviews here, to keep'em all in one place :)
TTM interviews
- September 4, 2003 at KlanRUR
- June 24, 2003 at inUnreal
- June 11, 2003 at CyberFight
- May 12, 2003 at UT2003World (link broken, gotta fix it)
- Nov 07, 2002 at ESreality.com
- Nov 3, 2002 at unreal.xaos.ru (Russian)
- Oct 14, 2002 at ut-2003.com
Shoutouts to those contributors of TTM2003 project who are registered here at Wiki:
- 32_Pistoleta
- Boksha
- El_Muerte_TDS
One more thing
No matter what Wiki thinks about it, my nickname's spelling is 'pakman', not 'Pakman' :D
Making a popular mod
There're several things you have to remember if you're working on something, which, you believe, will be used somewhere else from your own PC. I'm not going to talk about *how* to make sometihng popular, as just 2 things comes to my mind here: get an appealing ideas and an appealing implementation of those. I, as a guy who "have been there", have some thoughts on related issues though.
Make it customizable
You might think your taste of how things in your mod should look/act/sound is absolutely "right" and is an only acceptable in the world. You're probably wrong if you're assuming anything like that.
Players like options, especially dedicated type of players. While an occasional user of your work or player of your mod may oversee tons of great options you have, a dedicated player will love that kind of attitude and eventually become a part of core supporting community around your mod. And core supporting community is something almost essential to make your mod popular.
Make it usable
Read a book on GUI usability or just take a look on any major software product there is. You'll probably see what's more comfortable to use and what's not.
I know it's kind of unpopular among Unreal-modders to do extensive GUI for mod's features, as it's "boring" and "not creative" and stuff. But, if you want to make your mod loved by community, think about making the way of managing it as nice and usable as possible. Quick example: by mere adding GUI front-end to your settings, instead of just telling in the readme "edit your ut2003.ini that way" you're at least doubling number of server admins who'll manage to actually install your great work.
And here we come to next point.
Make server admins' lives easier
The key to mod's popularity is it's massive online presense. Your mod may be great offline only thing, but if it isn't on somewhat big part of servers, there will not be massive supporting community behind it, thus it will not be anywhere popular.
To get your mod on the servers, make sure the server admin's live doesn't get more painful that it was before your mod arrived. Make a simple installation procedure. Make a FAQs list on server maintance issues. Get ready to answer the same question 10, 100, 1000 times, even if you believe it's stupid question.
In a few words, care about server admins.
We, techy guys, sometimes have some issues with writing a easy-to-read instructions. In this case get someone from core supporting community (but not from mod dev team) to make readme file. That way you'll ensure it's understandable to a common user/player.
Default settings
As we've discussed already, your very own personal taste could match your friends / mod members preferences, but there's no telling it will match general public preferences. If you made mod well-customizable, make sure the default settings are genereally acceptable. This is something to do during beta-testing. The default value of your settings should be made as generally acceptable as possible.
Aug 29, 2003
Guestbook
Tarquin: Hi, welcome to the site :)
El Muerte TDS: you're one week late ;)
pakman: Thanks and thanks! :D