Modding

Discussion in 'Other Games' started by Tleno, Aug 14, 2014.

  1. Tleno

    Tleno Member

    Hey there, any folks here mod any games? Apart from Gaslamp games that is, seeing as it's pretty early to talk about CE modding scene and there's already a whole subforum for Dredmor modding.
     
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  2. Xyvik

    Xyvik Member

    I've modded stuff from CNC Generals, to BFME 1/2, to Half-Life 1/2, to New Vegas to Oblivion to Skyrim to...

    yeah, I've done a lot. Whatcha looking for?
     
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  3. Tleno

    Tleno Member

    Nah, just checking out what sort of modders we have up here.

    Anyways, I myself got experience with Skyrim & New Vegas modding, though most of my experience is with Starcraft 2 / Warcraft 3 and other minor RTSes, and I think the only indie I ever modded was Cortex Command. So that's that. :)
     
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  4. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    I've modded Oblivion and Fallout 3 -- mostly minor mods though, nothing big.
     
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  5. Xyvik

    Xyvik Member

    Mine tended to be pretty small too, except when I'd get these crazy ideas and spend hours upon hours working on them. My RTS mods have always tended toward total conversions, but FPSs are hard to do that to haha
     
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2014
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  6. Tleno

    Tleno Member

    Yeah! Well, I made several housing-related Skyrim mods including an entire fort and also a bunch of other different mods, with most popular for some reason being a mod that allowed you to do crazy random stuff with absolutely overpowered and gamebreaking items. Weird, eh?
     
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  7. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    I was a programmer/systems analyst by profession, so mine tended to mostly involved scripting and parameter tweaks, as well as one spell naming overhaul for Oblivion to make the spell names more 'logical' so that they'd sort in a more useful way. I have a talent for logic, but a deficit when it comes to anything graphical. I had a couple of mods included in some big mod compilations. I Also did some 'creative writing' for small team for a quest mod that never quite happened (I was invited to the team after posting a stupid little short story on the Bethesda boards).

    I did have one semi ambitious mod for Fallout 3, but it never got out of beta. The problem was that it depended on one of these mods that added commands to the scripting language, but the mod I depended on never worked right, and I could get no response from the team regarding when/if they intended to fix the problem (I documented the bug pretty well and was able to demonstrate it, but I kept getting ignored). I had a lot of plans for the mod but got stuck because of this one bug. It probably was the very last mod I ever attempted (not being able to finish it due to things outside of my control frustrated me too much). It's the only mod that I never 'finished'.

    If I could get the FOSE piece to work, I also considered additional changes, such as adding more recipes, support for DLCs and possibly other major mods, etc.

    If anyone thinks they can finish it they are welcome to try (unless the scripting mod is fixed, I doubt it's doable though).
    Haldur's Improved Workbench
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2014
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  8. Xyvik

    Xyvik Member

    While I follow on the logic, anything other than minor XML and LUA changes have always been beyond me, and that's why my grand ideas have almost always ended complete only in notebook form. Alas, I have few real talents except writing and designing...texturing can be a headache, and modeling...I can do simple, low-poly buildings and tanks pretty well, anything with hard edges. You start getting into smooth, animal-like and I'm done for. Also, animating hates me, and vice-versa. Lol.

    My most in-depth mod idea (never finished; see above) was a total conversion for Generals / BFME called The Sith War. Man, I still have about five notebooks filled with pre-test balancing notes, ideas, heroes, special units and abilities...one of these days I'll figure it out. Maybe.
     
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  9. Tleno

    Tleno Member

    Yeah, I got tons of notes too! Still keep scribbling stuff if I got any ideas. Even if you work all alone and know your plan will change bigtime eventually, during the production, it's still god to plan out the stuff, seeing as I spend less time deciding what to work on next when having a plan prepared.

    Also, as of lately, disappointed by need to wait more for at least some form of HD 4000 support of CE, I am trying to create my own small-scale colony builder map in Starcraft 2. Nothing fancy though, but should still be fun once I make the stuff work as intended!
     
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  10. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    Something I learned, not just from modding, but from programming, is that if you have a big project, break it up into smaller parts. While having a lot of notes is great, if you try to do everything at once, your project can become unmanageable. It's not just that you know what your destination is, but you want to plan the route to that destination step by step. It's a corollary of the KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid).
     
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  11. Xyvik

    Xyvik Member

    Amazingly enough, despite how incredibly complicated I just love to make things, I always seemed to have a clear-cut way of getting there; organized very simply in "A needs to be done before B can work, and then C needs to be finished so that D can be worked on."

    It's a bit of a misnomer really, but complexity tempered by realistic planning seems to work wonders for me in organizing my ideas. I even had a list, for Sith War, of every unit in the game and its current status, from concept to model to texture to animated to coded. Some of them got pretty far back in the day. I really do need to dig into those notes again, maybe plot something sinister for CE...
     
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  12. Tleno

    Tleno Member

    I also use MOSCOW (Must - Could - Would) rule/principle/whatever it is while planing things. Alhough I just can't resist fleshing things out even if they may change, it still helps with stuff.
    "Star Wars? In my Clockwork Empires?! That's more likely than you think!"
     
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  13. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    I made a bunch of mods for Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space. The best was Drives'R'Us: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=35857
    When Sea of Stars, the sequel to WW:RTIS, gets out of beta, I'll probably take a stab at converting my old mods over to the new game.

    I also did a little modding for Aquaria. My plotline was too ambitious though and it was taking forever, so I eventually broke it up into chapters, and then only ever got the first chapter polished up enough to release before I ran out of steam.

    Splitting things up into chapters seems to be fatal for me. When my personal copy of Interior Dremorating 2.0 got too big, I broke it up into submods... and then only ever finished two of the seven submods. (YTTG and all my contributions to the Swashbucklers mod started out in ID2.0.) I haven't given up on it, but every time I set aside a day for working on it, I end up sidetracked shortly into the process.
     
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