[SOLVED] What's basic principle behind making mods?

[Vaibhav_Rai@]

Lately I have been playing some old games, I love the gameplay and story line. I am not a game developer but was thinking of using my 3D skills to make the graphics of the game better. But as I said I'm not a game developer so I need help. I don't want to do much, just higher poly models, and better textures and lighting. Thanks

 

[gamerk316]

It depends. The basic principle is simple: Just overwrite the texture models with higher resolution ones. The problems however can be many:

1: Some game engines (and most old ones) simply aren't capable of displaying higher resolution textures.
2: For older titles, textures may be in some obscure format (especially if not using an open engine like Unreal)
3: For most older titles, game assets are stored within the executable instead of in external files, making it almost impossible to mod them.

Newer titles are much easier to mod since assets are usually in well understood formats and are external to the main executable. Older ones...not so much,

 

[hotaru.hino]

If you want to replace the assets used in rendering, then you're going to have to know how to make said assets, so you need to know how to create 3D models and images suitable for texturing a surface. But keep that on the back burner, because you also need to know how to inject said assets into the game. This not only means knowing what format the game is expecting the asset to be in, but also where that asset is stored in the game's files. The latter part is easier than the former, since most games these days package things up into archive files and assuming there's a way to look into it, you can usually replace the asset in question in the archive file with what you want.

Either way, there's a pretty large hill to climb if you want to create your own custom assets and inject them in the game.