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| Interview with
the creator of AdminMod |
Updated by - mode6nine - Friday,
20 July 2001
Recently we had a chance to catch up with the creator of the widely used AdminMod
for Half-Life servers. It was a great pleasure communicating with him, and
here's what he had to say:
mode6nine:To start off, why don't you tell
the readers a little bit about yourself. Who are you, what do you do for a
living, I'll leave what you want to share up to you.
Alfred: I am a young research engineer working
for www.dsto.gov.au. I am also a proud australian :)
mode6nine: How long have you been coding game
mods?
Alfred: For about two years I guess.
mode6nine: How did you start?
Alfred: Admin Mod was my first serious project.
mode6nine:What inspired you to write AdminMod?
Alfred: People kept bugging me for RCON access
to some hl/cstrike servers I ran. I thought that there had to be a better
solution to the problem :) I had been using BW-Admin (http://bw-admin.sourceforge.net/)
on my quake2 server, so I new that there had to be something better.
mode6nine: How long has AdminMod been in development?
Alfred: About 1 1/2 years. The first release
was version 0.72 on 2000-03-14 :)
mode6nine: How many hours of work go into a
new release of AdminMod typically?
Alfred: It really depends on the type of release.
It took hundreds of hours between version 1.0 and 2.0 due to the structural
changes and additions. The jump from 2.10 to 2.50 also took hundreds of hours,
due to the extra functionality that was added. A bug fixing release is usually
the result of 10-20 hours of coding and testing, we like to release early
and often :)
mode6nine: What has been your biggest set-back
in developing AdminMod?
Alfred: I don't really remember any big setback's.
Before MetaMod was introduced it was a major pain to develop new features
and support new mod versions. I also don't enjoy releases where I have missed
major bugs, but it usually only takes me a day or two to release a fix for
them :)
mode6nine: How much longer do you plan on developing
and supporting AdminMod?
Alfred: How long is a piece of string? We (the
Admin Mod team) believe that the project is currently has all the major features
that you could want. We want it to keep its focus on Admin functionality,
so you won't see anything like bots tied into the mod. However, we are continually
developing new scripting functions, fixing bugs and tweaking interfaces. The
database side of things is being worked on for example, to make it easier
to manage busy servers.
mode6nine: If a new game engine comes out that
has such widespread sucess as the half-life engine do you think you would
work on a version of AdminMod for it?
Alfred: It really depends on the game engine
itself. Admin Mod requires a special type of functionality to operate. For
example, we cannot implement it under Q3A (more specifically with the qvm)
or under Unreal Tournament. We are certainly planning a HL2/TF2 version, and
we are currently lobbying Valve to provide a clean 3rd party API interface
to make Admin and Bot development much simpler and cleaner.
mode6nine: Looking through the list of commands
available through AdminMod I've noticed some "fun" commands, what made you
think to add things like disco mode, and glow mode?
Alfred: It wasn't me I swear ;) Most of those
command were added by Jaguar and Dio, those guys have a great sense of humour
(just look at the llama command ;). It also helps people remember that its
just a game, and hey should be having fun.
mode6nine: What exactly is this admin_llamafy
command? Or do I want to know?
Alfred: Ahh, that one is easy. When we started
we had a habbit of calling annoying users "llama's". So Jaguar went ahead
and made a llama command. It really humbles those jerks (and you just undo
it with admin_unllamafy).
mode6nine: What do you see as your greatest
accomplishment with AdminMod?
Alfred: I think there are a few great accomplishments.
One is the number of servers running Admin Mod. The other is the community
that has been built around the mod. Its amazing how many people help out on
the forums. The final great thing is the scripting engine. Adding it wasn't
my idea, but it was the best choice I ever made. You should see range of scripts
that people have written!
mode6nine: Do you know how many servers currently
run AdminMod? And why do you think so many do?
Alfred: About 1/3 of all half-life based servers
(HL,TFC,Cstrike,Firearms,DoD,...) run Admin Mod. That amounts to about 4,000
at any one time of the day, and about 15,000 people. Each release gets about
100,000 downloads, so I suspect that around 50,000 servers actually run the
mod at some time. This makes Admin Mod the second most popular on the net,
just behind cstrike. More people play on Admin Mod servers than play on ALL
the Q3A servers out there!
mode6nine: Is there anything else you'd like
to tell your readers?
Alfred: Admin Mod is a tool to let the admin
customise their server to how they want the gaming experience. I also want
to thank the team behind Admin Mod, without them (they know who they are)
Admin Mod could not have become what it is today. I think it also provides
a good example of the powers of Open Source and gaming :)
For more information you can visit the AdminMod website at http://www.adminmod.org.
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