11
votes
Accepted
How to encourage players to not lessen their own gaming experience with mods and cheats?
A very common method is to disable achievements when gameplay-affecting mods are enabled or cheats are used. Players want those achievements. But when they are using overpowered mods or cheats, they ...
- 122k
6
votes
How to make Unity game moddable with scripting in a friendly way?
A somewhat blunt approach would be to let modders write C# code and then have your game read & compile those scripts, using them as though they were code the game was built with.
This has some ...
- 136k
6
votes
Balance an RTS to make a unit twice as good
Any unit against a certain type of unit with a particular DPS will have a specific TTK, or Time To Kill. You should balance your unit around that TTK, which is calculated as ...
- 926
6
votes
Accepted
How is it possible to mod a game whose source code isn't publicly available?
This question/answer is designed to be a community effort. Feel free to improve some aspects of it.
How a game can be modded when the source code is not available is a really broad topic.
It will ...
5
votes
Remove or skip splash screen from Unity Free/Personal game binary for modding
A morally and legally sound way that can be openly discussed on a public forum like this one is to contact the original developer.
If you meet with such circumstances, chances are the game is one of ...
- 9,955
5
votes
Accepted
Remove or skip splash screen from Unity Free/Personal game binary for modding
It is possible to skip the Unity splash screen without manipulating any of the game files using a tool that accelerates the execution of a process.
Cheat Engine (be weary of bloatware during download ...
- 189
4
votes
Accepted
How to make a game people can mod?
There are 2 primary approaches to this:
Make your game open source. People have access to the source of the game and can make changes to the code.
Design a modular game. For the modules you want to ...
- 9,955
4
votes
Accepted
How do I prevent modders from creating malicious code?
You cannot prevent it (in situations which are equivalent to running arbitrary native code supplied by others).
You can:
curate the mods
screen submissions with a scanner
restrict your API as much ...
- 12.5k
4
votes
Accepted
How do I let people make Steam Workshop mods for my game?
The first thing you need to do is familiarize yourself with the Steamworks documentation.
Searching for "workshop" from the documentation homepage will bring up the references for the Steam Workshop ...
- 12.5k
4
votes
How to identify performance issues with large numbers of mods?
The issue is often death of the thousand cuts, each mod has some overhead that you cannot get around from the mod-dev's side. This is not helped by the unofficial [redacted] contest of how many mods ...
- 7,599
4
votes
Can I bring features of an Android game into another Android game?
Is it possible to replicate ...
These are two different software. Software like these can change a lot from version to version. So you can't assume that you'll be able to "copy-paste" code ...
- 16.4k
3
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to not pack asset files into archives when building a Unity game?
This process Unity uses is called "data baking" and it accomplishes a lot of useful things for your game:
It converts the textures into appropriate sizes for your build target (scaling huge or non-...
- 136k
3
votes
Balance an RTS to make a unit twice as good
I am modifying an RTS game (Rise of Nations) and want to make a unit twice as good and expensive as it's previous version so the balance is unaffected.
Without context, this goal is meaningless.
In ...
- 14.9k
3
votes
How can I create and load models with additional information?
This is not going to be as easy as you think it would be, because only the Unity Editor can load Blender files. When you import a Blender file, it is converted to Unity's internal format. This is the ...
- 122k
3
votes
Why aren't game mods allowed to talk to the outside?
Apart from cheating:
Security issues!
Most of the times, mods are installed without thorough review regarding trustworthiness of the creator (who can be anyone, as opposed to a studio), so it would ...
- 172
3
votes
Accepted
How to create a new civilization mod for Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition?
I do not have this game, cannot test if it works correctly.
I suggest the open source tool Advanced Genie Editor 2019. (github repository).
On the linked website it says:
Advanced Genie Editor
...
- 27.5k
3
votes
How to create game database editor interface like Age of Empires' AGE
All the tool does, I'm pretty sure, is unpack some data files (XML serialization is easy to set up), present it to you in a readable format, and pack the files back up again when you hit the save ...
- 784
2
votes
How can I check if player is an operator in Forge?
Using EntityPlayerMP#canCommandSenderUseCommand(int permLevel, String commandName) might be a way to find out if a player is an operator.
- 69
2
votes
How to make Unity game moddable with scripting in a friendly way?
You could do it like Kerbal Space Program does it: Allow your game to load AssetBundles at runtime by having it read config files which tell it where and in what way the assets in the bundle are ...
- 122k
2
votes
UNIT_SPELLCAST_START event, spell names, localization issues?
The answer is yes, this will be a problem.
I found files from many addons that contains localized spell names, here's one such example - https://github.com/laytya/Libs2/blob/master/Babble/Babble-...
- 141
2
votes
Accepted
Potion effect never wears out
I haven't actually implemented a Minecraft Mod. This answer is a bit of speculation, based on some old tutorials.
Your method onItemRightClick will be called twice. ...
- 27.5k
2
votes
Accepted
How can modders decrypt a game's files?
When you want to use encrypted asset files in a game you developed, then the game executable must be able to decrypt those files. That means that somewhere in your game exectuable you must embed both ...
- 122k
2
votes
How to add a fallback font to an existing Unity game?
One workaround for Wine is to copy Segoe fonts (Segoe UI symbol for this code point) to Wine.
Unity Editor manual mentions "hard-coded global list of fallback fonts" but does not tells the ...
- 143
2
votes
Are moddable apps allowed in the Apple App Store?
This isn't legal advice and I haven't published a moddable game in the Apple App Store.
Adding mod support appears to depend on how you implement it and possibly on the nature of your app. The ...
- 12.5k
1
vote
How to know the adresses an editor modifies while saving a file
You can look at the date modified stamp on files to figure out which ones have recently been written to. Windows's search features will let you search a group of folders to find all files modified ...
- 136k
1
vote
How can I start the race from a checkpoint with GTA 5 Map Editor?
It seems that you only can manually spawn at each checkpoint but only with your default vehicle! This means at transform races it will sadly not help you! Very uncomfortable at all..
In general this ...
- 121
1
vote
SMAPI add warp to existing map [Stardew Valley]
Until someone finds out how to solve this problem using the build in warp property, i came up with my own solution. It isn't as nice but i thought i am gonna share it with you if someone has the same ...
- 21
1
vote
Remove or skip splash screen from Unity Free/Personal game binary for modding
try this:
Create a runtime script(not an editor), and paste the following:
...
- 11
1
vote
Accepted
How can I read values from a running instance of an existing game?
The least brittle strategy, as mentioned in Ilja's answer, is to use the game's own modding interface.
As to the question in the title, there are OS-specific APIs to read another processes memory ...
- 9,039
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible