The seed for the idea behind this week's BASH episode germinated back in BASH 47. In that episode, my guest CoD-modder, and senior support staffer at mycallofduty.com, {PST}*Joker railed against all the secrecy and lack of communication that seemed to be the status-quo in the CoD modding scene.

It was Joker's wish to turn the Call of Duty modding community into something akin to an Open Source environment, where modders could share information and learn from each other.

One of the concepts we spoke about during that conversation - which extended well past our recording session and into the night was that we needed to extend a helping hand to the budding modders out there. The young and old alike who would like to try a hand at CoD modding.

Both Joker and I think that the future of modding in IW's franchise games lies with the new blood just coming into the scene. It is this new blood we would like to see develop into a true community. One that will participate and come forth and share ideas.

While many modders (mappers and scripters) do share tips and ideas - many have chosen to be quite secretive about things in this arena.

This is not a compatible situation given that Call of Duty is way behind other FPS games like CounterStrike in community-participation. We need to play catch-up here.

And humbly speaking, we think that Mod Skool is one way accelerate this pursuit.

In today’s episode of BASH we recorded the inaugural session of CoD Mod Skool, which took place on Sunday the 27th of January. The audio is fairly raspy as the session took place on the low-bandwidth VOIP Team Speak program…but it will give you the idea of what goes on.

Joining Joker were some of his mates: Gixxer, {ASP}SniperOne, Patmansan and DoomSlayer. Folks that dialed us in on TS were from around North America and as far away as Italy and even Australia.

Topics included:

- How can you learn to script?

- How to get started with the CoD4 Mod Tools from IW.

- How do you view the in-game video files in the CoD4 directories. 

- How do you ensure CoD4 maps are compatible with the game

- Can you create female characters in CoD?

- How did the mycallofduty.com guys create napalm strikes?

- The differences between eInflictor and eAttacker

Plans for future sessions will include

- Step throughs of gsc files

- Step by step how-to's in Radiant

- And of course ... listener questions!

Hopefully, in the next session, you too will be in the audience! Remember to bring your questions AND your ideas too. See you next time.

Come to bashandslash.com for future details on the timing of the next CoD Mod Skool!