Spirit

My friends, like Lazer said, Spirit is dead.

Let us all take the time to remember what a great mod it was! Who actually used it?

Spirit was massively under-used in its time. The forums were full of people who'd say, "Can I make a Garg with laser-sighted shoulder-mounted func_tanks controlled by grunts with headlights?"* Then Laurie would appear in a blaze of majesty and say, "Lo, it shall be coded."* Then nobody would use the feature.

I can only think of two releases that used Spirit features to good effect: Wilson's "big scientists" and my own "rolling boulder" map gmdm2.

For my own part, I owe Laurie Cheers many thanks for helping me with the development of gmdm2. I wish him every success in the future.

*Some slight paraphrasing has been carried out for dramatic effect.

Well, good for Laurie to get a job at Rare. I thought working at Revolution on Broken Sword 3 was pretty damn good, but damn, it's great he got into Rare. He's a cool guy and was a great co-worker during DarkTruths, and I wish him all the best.

But meh, I never really used Spirit that much. I was aware of how potent it was, but never really took advantage of it. :smile:

WHAT? dead? why? it was a great MOD! :sad:

Well, Remember it was in The Todgenast (Didnt spell that right) 1 and 2 wasnt it?

I wish him the best of luck tbh.

A great shame, if only I had got of my fat ass and learned to use it.

Don't forget that you still can use Spirit! The mod. is unlikely to develop further, but the full mod. and source code are still publicly available.

Spirit was never really 'alive' per se in the first place... Mostly it was/is just a level design tool that lets you say, "Hey, look what I could do if I wanted to," but as with what Gollum said, it never really got used. If you wanted to make a mod without a programmer involved, it would work, but trying to integrate your own code with it isn't a particularly friendly process - hence why, for example, NW doesn't and won't use it. The features it has that we would use can just as easily be programmed by our own team without the hassle of merging all our other stuff into it and getting all the excess stuff we'd never need or use anyway.

Same thing goes with the massive requests for its implementation that used to hover around the NS forums - simply too much work to splice in someone else's code into your own.

KungFuSquirrel said:
simply too much work to splice in someone else's code into your own.

As if I needed reminding :wink: shudders I won't be doing that again....

Wasn't it not multiplayer?

Erm, it wasn't multiplayer until I found an obscure modified version somewhere on the net that worked :biggrin:

Now multiplayer should be fine (I believe Laurie used this sourcebase for the later releases), although to be honest I never tested the latest official release.

http://spirit.valve-erc.com... dead?

asterix_vader said:
http://spirit.valve-erc.com... dead?

No, the website is not dead. But there probably won't be any new work on the mod. itself.

KungFuSquirrel said:
simply too much work to splice in someone else's code into your own

Shhh! Don't tell 2-bits! Hes using it as a base for The Omega Project coding!

Sorry I had to break you guys the bad news.

...

Bad news - As if to completely close this chapter of my life, my laptop hard drive has died. So now I have nothing from Spirit - none of my scripts, test levels, graphics or installer-making programs - except what's publicly available on this site. Blah...

s**t.

If the source code is publicly available, and people are out hacking it to bits, then he'll need to work out a licensing system pronto. Laurie, if you're reading this, LICENSE SPIRIT UNDER LGPL!! This will allow people to modify it and do what they like with it - as they do now - while at the same time making it impossible for a Big Company to come along and decide that they own it, because they made modifications. From what I see, there's no licensing agreements that are bundled with Spirit.

To be honest Des, great as Spirit is, I can't see why a Big Company would care enough to "claim" it. There's no money in under-used mods. for a 5 (?) year-old game.

You never know Gollum..Doom 3 could want to tone it down a bit :biggrin:

Spirit's over and done with. Theres not much you could add that would make it "better", without waiting 3 more versions for all the bugs to be ironed out.

Those UT skies never did work well, did they?

I used it and, after seeing what it was capable of i was impressed, but it was unusable if you wanted to make a serious sp mod.

darn ... I was making a map ... shiny floors ... skies ... (they work !) ... :sad:

Forceflow said:
darn ... I was making a map ... shiny floors ... skies ... (they work !) ... :sad:

Gah. How many times do I have to say this before people understand?

Spirit is "dead", but you can still make maps for it. They would be just the same if Spirit were "alive". The only difference is that you can't expect any new features to become available.