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This thread is for discussing mods development. My current goal is to learn C#/F# and Java by modding Lethal Company, Minecraft and Project Zomboid, since those are the games I'm playing. I find that modding these games looks easier than expected, since in most cases you can leverage the Reflection feature of both the .NET Runtime and the JVM to patch classes at runtime. I'm still trying to decide on a game that would require machine code meddling. Also I'm curious about patching N64 or PS1/PS2 games. Any modders here? What games are you working on and why, and what did you learn in the process?

>>40956 I work on DOW2 mods. I don't really touch content like 95% of the time. I make patches to modify the assembly so other modders can add cool content. I started working on this because I made simple mods when I was younger and DOW2 has some limitations I wanted to remove to continue development of my own mod. Will maybe get back to developing my own content mod one day. Learned RE entirely from smashing my face against the game until soykaf worked. Would recommend and do again.

>>40964 I should add I was already a hobbiest C++ programmer before and had taken some University CS courses before I started. If your goal is to learn programming you're better off writing simple games than modding. Modding doesn't teach you fundamentals as well.

>>40988 oh i'm already quiet okay at programming. i started to really dive into reverse enginerring this past year and was looking to take it to the next step.

>What games are you working on and why, and what did you learn in the process? I tried modding out some complicated shaders out of Mewgenics to improve performance. They were deliberately left in plaintext by the dev. What I did was mostly just returning the shader function in the very beginning of the shader. Made me learn OpenGLSL and even some Fourier Series stuff. Apparently the dev used it quite a bit in his calculations. Right now I am working on a translation mod for Petz 5. This is mostly just to learn DLL's, hooks, Ghidra and debugging. The target language normally needs unicode, but the game is designed to understand ANSI only. So I replaced the game's fonts with my custom ones, where I redefined the glyphs as I pleased. That seems to have changed most of the text, but for some fuarrrking reason there's a third pathway for fonts, which is what I'm trying to figure out currently. (I'm currently assuming it's Windows Menu HMENU thing of some sort that stores the font in hdc) Fortunately, I learned a lot about hooking and assembly-level instructions stuff. Unfortunately, I had to learn about GDI API nobody cares about anymore. My project folder is a mess (every hook is a separate file) and it could probably be refactored somehow, not sure yet.

>>40956 >PZ I tried modding PZ in java a while ago. Devs are still extremely hostile to it, because java gives you too much power and technically requires you to go through a bunch of loopholes to not infringe copyrights. The only supported modding API is through lua. Minecraft modding fixes this by using two layers: 1. Translate minecraft mangled classes/methods names to random strings 2. Translate these random strings to actual english names. Now the usable english names aren't technically from minecraft, instead they're generated from the earlier random strings that had nothing to do with the game. Nowadays, mojang publishes it's own mapping, but manually constructed mappings are still used, mainly because of legacy code that still needs to work.