An extensive interview with lead promod developer Ryan 'raf1' Palmer, discussing the idea behind promod as well as his thoughts about future of competitive Call of Duty 4.

by _evan


The Call of Duty 4 (CoD4) community is in a state of flux with the European summer LAN's lingering dangerously on the horizon and the rejection of Clanbase and its Eurocup recently, you'd be forgiven for thinking that CoD4 has started to stagnate, a community waiting for something to happen.

Ryan 'raf1' Palmer is one man whose taken it upon himself to push the competitive community forward, he does however present quite a problem for both me (as an interviewer) and the community, the good sort of problem though. He's one of the first competitive mod' developers whose relatively high skilled, having just been accepted into invite along with his Tetris team mates. He's also a personal friend of mine, and in theory should know exactly what the competitive CoD4 community wants from its 'promod', I'm not so sure however.

For those who don't know “promod was designed for two reasons. To unite the European competitive community behind one standardised ruleset, and because development on 'PAM' - the current competitive mod has stopped, something was needed to fill the gap.”

When asked why so many rulesets had developed independently, he said “the main difference with CoD4 and the other titles [CoD and CoD2] is the difference between the stock and competitive game. In CoD you could join a server and do exactly the same things as you would in a match. CoD2 was fairly similar, CoD4 however isn't. The guns behave completely different in the stock game, have different damage, and you've all these perks like airstrikes, grenade launchers and so on.”



But what's wrong with these perks? “Features like airstrikes and grenade launchers make the game easier for the 'casual' player who isn't focused on developing their aim or game sense. Things like martyrdom in the stock game would help one of these casual players if he likes to run around a lot, but keeps dying. In the hands of a highly competitive player, features like this become too lethal and have to be removed. A good team using the grenade launcher for example could make it impossible for you to plant or defuse either bomb, without first clearing every room on the map while ensuring people don't get around.”

Have their been any incidents where people have gotten it wrong though, perhaps removed something too quickly? “The 'Deep Impact' perk was initially used and thought to be good. Once people started using it strategically however the bomb became impossible to plant. It became very hard to move around the map due to all these 'pre-learnt wallbangs'. Taking it off meant wallbanging can still be done and you often frag through walls, but you've to play the map much more dynamically, reacting to your opponent instead of just learning a few obscure spots to prevent people planting and defusing.

Instead of just changing perhaps the round time, you have hundreds of features to selectively consider and eventually dismiss. That is why this game in particular has such a great variation in rulesets. You've your hardcore competitive players who know what happens when a feature is abused, but then you've your league admins who cater for the casual player and prefer to keep some of these features in.”

“I don't believe things have been removed too quickly. Things have been removed piece by piece when they're found to be too overpowered, especially when the rulesets were unstable at the start. Of course there is some bias, the majority of people using these rulesets came from CoD2. I don't believe some perks would make that much difference, but I'm happy to play it that way regardless.”

Who has the right or ability to judge which game features are removed though? “The majority of players in your skill band. I don't think it would be right for the LAN players to change the game for the public players, but I also believe those public players shouldn't have a say when it comes to LAN features, if they're not attending those LAN's.”

What are the separate skill bands? “Well the game is made of tiered stages, you've your public players who don't even know what a clan is. You've your people who've started to get into clans but just play on public servers - but might for instance find martyrdom a bit overwhelming and have turned it off. You've your lower tier ladders which will be made for those still used to perks and that style of play. Then you get to ClanBase which tries to appeal to the majority of competitive players. Finally you get your endgame; LAN's, qualifier and invite tournaments which naturally will be made of the best players and teams.”

So which tier of player are you going to cater towards then? “Promod is specifically made for the average and above competitive community. I am not changing the game for a huge amount of players, but I am tailoring it to the requests of LAN and tournament players. The mod is being designed specifically for two upcoming summer LAN's to use. I am using the majority opinion of the players in those LAN's to make it.”



“I'm mostly happy with the rulesets as they are now, and especially with the upcoming promod changes. They've their faults but no one is going to find a truly perfect ruleset. I will add though, some things only come out over time. Adding stopping power to the ruleset at the time was fine, everyone played with the ak47 at the time. Now that more and more people use the SMG's, it [stopping power] has been found to be a little overpowered. Some things have been done about it slowly though, such as reducing the limit to 2 [SMG's per team].”

I wanted to know specifically how and who was involved in the promod development project and where the idea came from. “Originally promod started from two totally different ideas. 'Carlisle' was posting on TEK-9 about planning a modified PAM to fix a few things in the game, and 'Morg' at the time had the idea of a standardised ruleset, with only 3 modes (compared to PAM's 50 or so) - mr10, mr12 and mr12+overtime.”

“'Carlise' starting 'writing' but was unable to get it to work and asked for technical assistance. I looked into it but found it was quite deep and goes down to the problem that 'BulletWorm' - the creator of PAM for CoD2 had made it closed source [PAM], so it couldn't be edited by individuals. I had already complained to both him and 'GaretJax' - the CoD PAM creator at the time but nothing had been done since.” A reoccurring theme, at least for 'raf1'.

“'Carlisle' had the know how to edit an existing mod', but not to create one from scratch which was why I became involved. I basically had to re-write PAM from scratch, using the only copy released before the source was closed. This was a fair step back, as in this copy the maps were foggy and snowy etc. There was also lot of ambient noise and music. Climbing over walls would kill you from fall damage etc. I spent a week getting the old PAM files up to speed with the newest versions of PAM that people are used to, the size of the folder literally tripled, a lot of work has been done.

The development team as it stands - 'Morg' manages it, overlooks it, we send ideas back and forth. He gets votes going within the teams attending the upcoming LAN's. 'Carlisle' has moved onto the graphical side of it, working on the website and also testing. As for myself, I'm into about my thirtieth hour of script writing.”

Being the one most responsible for influencing 'raf1's' university course choice, BSc Computer Games Programming, and knowing how equally frustrated and ambitious he was not only to be a good player but to help develop PAM and fix CoD competitively, I was curious why he was taking responsibility now, and whether he saw promod eventually succumbing to the same issues as PAM had?

What makes promod any better than PAM before it? Surely you're going to run into the same issues where motivation becomes a factor in the ability to update the mod, or you're eventually going to keep the code private? “The code will be released as open source if the ruleset is adopted by the community. I don't believe in closed source code, when its a monopoly - the fact the games progress comes to a complete standstill without the co-operation of PAM shows this.” He gave a simple example to prove the point, “in CoD2, a modified version of PAM was released, only about two lines of code changed per map, however the difference in visibility was astounding. This is why competitive mods should stay open source in my opinion.”

Why were the previous releases of PAM kept closed source then? “'Bulletworm's' reason for closing the source (apart from eliminating competition) was that rogue teams could edit the code, so your bullets playing against them were less effective etc. This however has its faults - a rogue team who really wanted to do that could still find ways to edit the code. Also with it being closed source, when you auto-download it you cant tell if its modified or not.” To any competitive CoD4 player, 'Bulletworm's' fears surely must be justified given the recent 'bug' which resulted in widespread hysteria when playing anyone not known to be a veteran LAN player.

“Promod is far superior to PAM because of the new features it adds.” A bold claim, I questioned him on the specifics to which he replied “the ability to drop accidental pickups of the bomb has been added, server FPS 30 has been added, in reality it gives the game engine 50% more accuracy when it comes to moving targets and also much lower latency within the game, the server reacts to you roughly 50% faster too - which is about 13 milliseconds faster. Maps include changes that increase your FPS drastically by reducing physics calculations on random objects like bricks.” He admitted that his own FPS had increased by “over 20%”. “The new maps which PAM has not yet updated to remove fog have been included in promod, the controversial compass hack has been fixed, I've included CSS style weapon selection so you can quickly press a few keys to select your favourite weapon, knife registration has also been improved too”. He finished off by saying “the game will really change for the positive but the gameplay will be exactly the same as the tournament players are used to.”



An optimistic attitude but he was quick to point out that the entire project was only because of PAM's inability to keep up with the needs of the CoD community, “before the release of CoD4 I wrote to 'BulletWorm' and asked to take over PAM, as I knew his patience was dwindling towards the end of the game. He initially said he would think about it but on release of the game, I think he was drawn into the hype. He started to lose interest in the game, PAM updates became less frequent as a consequence. The last release was several months back - which was about half the age of the game as it is now.”

“I was completely happy with CoD2 towards the end. I would've difficulty naming a change I would like to make to it. The only real problem was from the spectators point of view, it was too slow. I did however try and take some action earlier in CoD2, early in the game just like now in CoD4 it used 'sv_fps 20' whereas Quake [III] would often use 25, 30, even 40. I wrote to 'BulletWorm' with a few ideas of how to fix it, as you can't just change the cvar like in Quake, you've to change hundreds of lines of code for it to work. I asked if he would be willing to do it in the next release of PAM or if I could do it for him. He didn't seem particularly interested at all, but with the next release of PAM, guess what was included; an 'sv_fps 30' fix.”

“Playing the game actively with no one making these changes, I decided to make a bit of a stand on it. I have been doing a degree in Game Programming and decided to put some of it to use. Early in the game I was a beta tester for both the game and the mod tools. I was also in the Infinity Ward bug team - and found several major bugs - none of which got credited to me when fixed.”

He wasn't shy about claiming praise nor was he shy about criticising organisations which he felt were responsible for bugs. “I was the one who initially discovered and recorded the gunsway bug, I actually noticed it while at LAN [Mulitplay i32] a day after the games release. At the time though, I pulled out of playing the game for two months and someone else created a mod based on my findings to fix it. Funnily enough though, there are still several leagues with a fair amount of teams who haven't fixed 'gunsway' because they claim the bug doesn't exist.”

I questioned him about why companies and organisations would feign ignorance or refuse to fix bugs until they became a problem, and he was quick to give an example ,“I reported [to Game violations] that PAM was about to include a fog fix. They ignored this despite the fact I asked them for a few weeks to remove the dvar in preparation for its release. When it was finally released, hundreds of people kept getting kicked due to it. The IWD Sum/Name mismatch bug is really down to companies like Multiplay”, stating that it's “very simple and easy fix”. Though he was quick to mention that “spent three hours talking to them” and that “they're going to change how their servers work because of it”. Multiplay's change of tune may be partly to do with 'raf1's' increased profile because of the promod project or perhaps they've finally seen sense.

I asked him to be direct and he said “They feign ignorance for two reasons. They probably don't have the accuracy in game to notice the perhaps 10 pixel inaccuracy of the gun. The second is that I don't think they like what happens when a gun really becomes accurate in a good players hands, and he is able to compensate for recoil without the game randomly undoing his compensation.” It sounds as if they're trying to keep the game relatively 'friendly'.

One of the dominating area's when you really get to know 'raf1' is his relationship and ideas about PAM, I wanted to play devils advocate and see if he'd been somewhat quick to try and 'kill off' PAM. I questioned if PAM could've been switched over to his control and kept closed source, would've been happy? Or does he think that community driven competitive mods have to be open source and updated frequently? “I believe that any mod made for the community should stay open source as too many mod makers go inactive. If I had made PAM for CoD4, it would have stayed open source, competition is what drives the game forward.”

I was quick to remind him that promod would be released closed source though, to which he responded “the reason I will initially release promod as closed source however is specific, the game is drastically in need of a unified ruleset and I will push what I can to get this to happen. I plan on releasing promod with only one ruleset and 3 match modes. If I release it open source however, you can almost guarantee someone will edit it so that the advantages gained from promod can be used within the CB ruleset. My hope is that the huge advantages gained by using promod will help to unite the community.”

Isn't that a contradiction though? You're drastically limiting the scope of future 'modifiability' to either rulesets or configs, and granted that the promode team is basically made of invite players, do you not think that goes against the idea of a community mod remaining open source. Or do you see this is a necessary evil? He replied simply “yes”, expanding later to say “I do fully intend on releasing promod as open source in the near future, but for the time being the advantages of uniting the community far outweigh the 'possible' benefits of other people being able to use the mod”.

To finish off I questioned him whether he thought that perhaps the LAN organisers should be the ones driving forward the development since they've better suited to finding a 'balanced solution' in terms of a games 'watchability', offset against trying to make it as competitive as possible. “I think the competitive ruleset isn't necessarily bad to spectate. It's very fast because of sprint and the map layout, as well as the very fast guns such as the SMG's. I don't think 'easy guns' such as the LMG would improve the game from a spectators point of view really, and abuse of features would ruin the game from this point of view. If deep impact was kept, the gameplay would slow down drastically as people would literally just hide in cupboards until they hear the plant, and then shoot a premarked spec on the wall.”

Download Promod Latest Version :

http://www.mariannedemooy.com/geeklog/html/article.php/Promod-CoD4-Beta-league-PAM