The latest release of Call of Duty has been out now for a couple of weeks here in the states. The mod community has been hard at work to develop solutions to make the game competitive. One of the modders at the forefront is Stephen "MavLP" Groat of x3o gaming.

Groat was able to compile what he knew about the CoD4 engine, and come up with a playable mod to release on the launch day. Referred to as DAMN:WW, his mod is based off of the CoD4 Mod, DAM. While Groat was able to beat everyone to the punch so to speak, by releasing his mod last week, the rest of the modders haven't been far behind. Ryan "raf1" Palmer has also released an alpha version of his competitive mod, called promod. And with PAM's lead developer working hard on his release, it won't be long until there are three choices for a competitive mod.

With the ensuing competition between the mods, GotFrag got in touch with DAMN:WW's developer to discuss modding in general, as well as everything from CoD5's guts to the feedback he has received thus far.

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To start things off, can you please introduce yourself to our readers?

My name is Stephen Groat. I am from Canton, Michigan which is a suburb of Detroit. I am a student at SchoolCraft College working on my associates Criminal Justice degree. I go by the alias MavLP and I play for x3o gaming. I used to play for MoBdeep during the summer and Eximius, better known as 51 in the winter of '08. As for coding, I took two years of programming in high school. I tinkered a bit with the cod4 script files throughout the year. Only after the last CEVO season did I really start coding for CoD:WW. That work is now DAMN:WW.


What goes in to making a competitive mod like the one you just created for CoD5?

What goes into making a mod. Well, theres a few things that you have to have before you can even think about scripting or modding. You have to have a pretty good grasp on coding in C++. You must be able to solve problems well and have a lot of free time. Now what went into making the DAMN mod was many months of work. Originally I was just making a wepaon mod for CoD4 around the time of the big European LANs.(August-ish) I was toying around with the guns making them actually have recoil and kick comparable to CoD1. Later I started to want to do more than just that. I wanted to be able to mod the game totally so it is basically a clone of cod1.

Fast forward a few months to around a couple weeks before the release of the CoD:WW demo. I had gotten rid of the idea of cloning cod1, and decided that movement and recoil are just two things that cannot be changed in a game. I made a bunch of interfaces that were transferrable to CoD:WW, along with many scripts like a fade to black script similar to CS, and my healthbar script. When CoD:WW came around, it was just a matter of porting the work that I had done for CoD4 and fixing it so it worked with the new game.


What drives you to spend your own personal time and talent on creating a mod? Do you receive any sort of compensation for all this?

Well time was never really an issue for me, since I have PLENTY of it. There was nothing going on with gaming for me after the last season of CEVO, so there were a few months of downtime. You could say I just had nothing better to do. What really drove me to make this though is from experience with what happened at the launch of CoD4. Coming from a totally different game(bf2142), I didn't really know what do expect at a launch of a game. I noticed that a lot of decisions like keeping in lots of perks, and listening to the majority instead of the people who knew how to make a game perfect to competition made the game really slow on the launch. People were debating on things such as keeping in juggernaught and steady aim instead of making every player the same. I didn't want to go down that road again with CoD:WW. Promod did an amazing thing by forcing the best ruleset onto everyone, even though there were many decisions I disagreed with. I just wanted to start off CoD:WW right, and give this game a chance to get supported by a major tournament such as MLG, CGS, or any big CS circuit. I don't really receive any compensation though, this is all done by me for nothing but the chance for the game to last.