I was wondering if there was anyone else on Omnimaga who has ever made mods for games?

I've modded Civilization 4- a great game mainly because of how moddable it is. The developer, Firaxis, released the source code for the game's DLL, which allows modders to change mostly everything save what's hardcoded in the EXE (the graphics engine and a few other things), and provided Python as a built-in scripting language.


I know there was an older thread about this but that was about games with impressive maps/mods, not people who make them.

Oh, and I'm not really sure if this goes in the Computer development forum or this one, but since the previous topic about modding was here I thought I'd post it here.

I've never modded games per se. But I have used cheat engine to screw with them. On the old Destination Saturn for DOS, I think I gave myself unlimited lives and ammo and such.

I also have this demo program that only runs for 20 minutes and then it closes. So every time I run it, I go into memory and change the dec to inc. That way my time counts upwards.

Sadly not much myself. The closest thing to mods I did are some F-Zero custom tracks you patch with a F-Zero 64 ROM

Yeah, I saw those in the archive and they looked cool. But I'm a PC gamer, not a console gamer, so I wouldn't be able to try them.

I think of ROM hacking being a bit different from game modding because of the platform- when I think "game modding" I think PC (or Mac or Linux, of course), and when I think "ROM hacking" I think consoles. But it is pretty similar.

I've modified the AI for Star Trek: Armada.  Although it "cheated," it's very hard to create a descent AI on Armada, so many people enjoyed it

Is this your mod? There aren't too many Armada 1 files on Filefront, and this looks the most similar.

I've played both Armada games but I never tried mods for Armada 1 (mainly because there aren't too many and I've had trouble getting the game to work on Windows 7- or maybe it's just that my disk is a bit damaged).

I might as well mention what my own mods are, since I brought the topic up. You can find my Civilization 4 mods on my user page at civfanatics.com, a website about the Civilization series with a large downloads database (where you can find almost anything related to Civilization, including mods much better than mine).

I've been modding Civ 4 for about a year now, and major projects I've worked on include:
-A wild west total conversion for Civilization IV Colonization- a game that was basically an official mod built on the Civilization 4 engine
-An expansion to Final Frontier, the space total conversion that was created by Firaxis and comes as part of the Beyond the Sword expansion pack
-A new ice-themed civilization for Fall from Heaven 2, a massive fantasy total conversion mod for Civilization 4

Basically everything else on the page is related to one of those three.

I never played Civilization. Is it like Warcraft and Starcraft where you can build bases and armies then destroy the enemy base?

Kind of. It's a TBS, not an RTS, so obviously it's a bit different.

Instead of building bases, you build cities. Each city can build buildings, train units, and work the countryside. As a city grows in people, it can work more land, and thus produces more yields. Buildings can do things like allow you to build a unit, increase yield production of a certain type, etc. Cities then produce culture and espionage. Culture is, basically, the region a city controls (the more culture it produces the more land it will control). Espionage lets you spy on other players (obviously).

Cities also produce research (you can allocate how much money you're spending on research), and the amount of research being produced influences how long it will take you to discover a technology. A tech allows you to do various things, like build buildings and units, build improvements on the land that produce more of a certain yield, etc.

Winning isn't just wiping out the enemy, you can also dominate a large percentage of the map, you can complete the Space Race project, you can make a diplomatic alliance, etc.

That's an extremely simple summary, of course, and it's based on Civ 4 (Civ 3, 2, 1, and the upcoming 5 are all a bit different). If you want to find out more I recommend you check out Civfanatics.

Aaaah I see, thanks for the info.