Meltdown
From Radiant Age Wiki
This is a mod for Starsiege: TRIBES.
Created by keen at the time due to both Renegades, Shifter, and Insomniax being the top three mods in existence, and sharing most of their weapons and general gameplay. Since keen (Operating under then-name Mega Man 1024) was tired of this, he created an entirely new mod, Meltdown. This mod was created November 1998, and went live May 20, 1999. The creator's name then changed to DynaBlade. This project at time of posting has been around for 10 years.
This featured a completely different, and in his perspective, futuristic combat scenario more aligned to Tribes' existing timeline. After a short time, several fans of the mod began pouring in, and a Geocities site was created to allow downloading of the mod outside of e-mail. The entire mod, and keen's future, started from this one mod.
Contents |
Official spinoffs
As time went on with the development of Meltdown, some changes were made that did not suit the entire playerbase.
Meltdown v1.x
With Instant Action reviving the original Tribes at PlayTribes.com, it was decided that Meltdown Classic will make a return, simply as Meltdown. This version of Meltdown will be known as Meltdown v1.x, the first release being labeled v1.0.0 - signifying it is a new and rebuilt version It will feature bug fixes and possible optimizations, while leaving gameplay intact.
No news of PlayTribes becoming a reality has been sent for several months, and this project has been declared dead.
- Current version: 0.8.0 beta
Meltdown
The original Meltdown was where MD was originally headed, a more balanced, tactical strategy game. This did not do as well as MDC (Meltdown Classic), however it did pave the original framework and code style for the eventual Meltdown 2. This branch of Meltdown was where the majority of keen's coding knowledge was formed, while messier ideas and concepts were placed in MDC. While ideas were mainly placed in MD or MDC, the developmental ideas came from a completely different mod: Project: Eradicator.
- Last released version: 3.2
- Note: Any version past v3.2 is not the original, and is most likely a clone or spinoff.
Meltdown Classic
This version was inherently more popular, due to it's more unbalanced, and as such, faster paced gameplay. The majority of the players of Meltdown preferred this version for that reason. It features fast-moving heavy armors, laser chainguns, and a medium armor (Magnetic Ion) with infinite energy.
- Final Version: 1.16
Meltdown Arbitor
This version was keen's attempt to support both a clientside and serverside version of Meltdown. This was more of a Meltdown Classic with custom models and sounds added. This project, however, did not get very far and failed. Not many know of this mod however, and it's obscurity and large file size prevented it from becoming widespread in the original Starsiege: Tribes era.
- Final Version: 2.0
Clone and ripoff modifications
Other mods at the time before source protection copied the mod, copied and cloned Meltdown; most notoriously Defender's set of mods.
HellZone / Meltdown Holocaust / Meltdown Hell
This one-sided rivalry once started as a simple cloning of Meltdown Classic, by the aforementioned and turning it into "Meltdown Holocaust". After receiving several hatemails about apparently renaming my mod into a holocaust, I decided to research and get to the bottom of the matter. After correcting him and redirecting their efforts to him, he promptly changed his ripped copy of the mod to "Meltdown Hell". He continued on this name indefinitely, as I initially didn't care, but as he began eventually stealing players, I threatened him (emptily) with litigation. He began to place credits on his mods to "DynaBlade" to avoid any direct legal action. Versions of this show up as Meltdown v3.3
In Tribes 2, he attempted to create a mod on his own, under the name HellZone. This failure apparently granted him with the opportunity for someone (an ex MD2 dev team member by the name of Uranium-235) to steal Meltdown 2 v1325's source code and give it to Defender, causing the spawn of the badly modified and horribly executed "War200X" series of mods. At present, War2001-War2009 exists, with a hardcode ban to MrKeen existing in the code. More information can be found on Meltdown 2's page.
Meltdown X
These mods were created by an unknown outside group attempting to bring back Meltdown. Very little information is known about this group or person. Several mods appear giving credit to a group or an individual. Versions of these mods usually show up as v4 or even v5 "The final chapter".
Backdoors
As many people know, the original Meltdown had a backdoor installed in it, which was a common practice for mod makers in that time. This was a method to which keen could access super-admin status on any server to kick off cheaters. This backfired however when the first incarnation of the backdoor was found by other modders, and was quickly used to destroy Meltdown's credibility. Due to this, and Tribes 1's inability to discern between player names, many doubted the real existance of keen, to the end that he was often questioned for verification. This is often referred to the "Endymion" incident.
Once this backdoor was changed to a much more cryptic system, it was again broken due to the mod's open source nature. The backdoor was removed from all subsequent versions, even after code protected versions existed.
Meltdown in other games
Meltdown has been ported, or planned for other games as well.
Meltdown 2
Meltdown 2 continued this trend, and went on to be one of the better mods for Tribes 2.
Meltdown 3
Meltdown 3 was initially a project started mid-2004 to build the next version of Meltdown on the Torque Game Engine. Plans fell through due to administration and other issues, so this game has since been cancelled.
Download Link
- Meltdown Classic v1.16 Final (released May 5, 2001)
