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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

That’s an amazing project. It’s kinda sad that nowadays most AAA games are so locked down that the player will never get into modding.

For myself it started with Jedi Knight, and then eventually mods on the Source engine (CS:S / HL2). To me it’s a good way to get people excited about the possibilities of programming at a fairly young age.

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Nobody locks the games down. Most games with highly active modding scenes were never supposed to be modded, they all had to be reverse engineered or the source leaked. No tools, no engine modifications, nothing. DOOM, GTA, Mario 64, STALKER, Minecraft, the list goes on and on. Games like TES, ArmA, Quake, anything Source/GoldSource based are exceptions. And even then all major Bethesda games are heavily reverse engineered, the Morrowind engine got rewritten basically from scratch and the other games have a ton of fixes and sideloaded code. There's even an entire vehicle simulator (!) strapped on top of Fallout: New Vegas, which is absolutely insane if you know anything about its engine.

It all comes down to two things, player interest and the range of expertise/amount of work and coordination required for your mod to fit the base game. For example STALKER SoC has a lot more story mods than, say, Skyrim, because SoC is pretty janky: it has few animations and voiceovers are reserved to key plot moments, so it doesn't take much to match the quality.

Roblox commercialized that excitement. Kids now work directly for them and pretty much for free.

Modding has always worked like that. Mods have always been unpayed work for the benefit of the game community, which ultimately also works to the benefit of the game publisher.

In the past, Valve has hired some of their most longest-tenured employees from modding, although not necessarily on GoldSrc - Counter-Strike and QuakeWorld Team Fortress come to mind. (But of course never Richochet.) The Narbacular Drop team came straight out of DigiPen with a noncommercial thesis project as well.

A decent number of Mojang employees started out as Minecraft modders, and ConcernedApe hired one of the main stardew valley modders to help port code.

Yes but it’s typically a subset of players making/using them and not the cornerstone of the entire product. They also dangle the promise of making money in front of people, but when you dig into the specifics it’s actually very hard to get paid. You have to cross a certain threshold to even eligible for a payout even if you have accrued a little cash.

The relationship of kids making stuff (the vast majority with little to no compensation) for a private, for-profit company is incredibly direct. That’s why it leaves a sour taste for many of us.

Remember that Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod, before it was acquired by Valve. So modding work is only almost always unpaid.

(Same deal with DotA and Warcraft, in the Blizzardverse.)

If your Roblox game makes money for the company they pay you.

That's what the marketing materials say, and that's what they want you to think. In practice it's very difficult to break even on it, even if you have a "successful" game.

Playing Roblox at age 10 shortly after it launched is what inspired me to learn to code.

Modern Bethesda games, for all their faults, are still very moddable. But who needs these when we have Morrowind?

And same. Me personally, I learned Java to mod Minecraft. That's how I got into programming. Overall, I'd say modding is still in pretty good shape.

As someone who spent hours playing Jedi Knight with friends and lots of mods, allow me to say - thank you :)

That is how I became serious about programming. I played around a bit but I never really wrote anything useful until I started playing Asheron's Call. I learned C++ to write bots and other plugins for Decal (an embedded mod framework).

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