[HN Gopher] The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-ye...
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The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game
Author : nxobject
Score : 107 points
Date : 2026-02-24 20:11 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| Insanity wrote:
| 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.
| gww wrote:
| 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).
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| snowram wrote:
| Roblox commercialized that excitement. Kids now work directly
| for them and pretty much for free.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| nxobject wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 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.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| 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.)
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| If your Roblox game makes money for the company they pay you.
| recursive wrote:
| 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.
| post-it wrote:
| Playing Roblox at age 10 shortly after it launched is what
| inspired me to learn to code.
| thadt wrote:
| As someone who spent _hours_ playing Jedi Knight with friends
| and lots of mods, allow me to say - thank you :)
| sevenseacat wrote:
| Love this so much, as a long-time Morrowind fangirl.
|
| (And yes, I've played TR quite a bit!)
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Love these projects. Both the quantity and quality of the content
| added are really impressive.
| Unaimend wrote:
| TR is probably one of the best mods ever. I prefer their work to
| the newer Elder Scrolls entries
| anthk wrote:
| Similar to Deus Ex with GMDX (no, the high res textures from one
| of the mods were atrociously bad with nonsense Hanzi/Kanji
| everywhere). It expanded the world with little touches here and
| there making the environment more believable and the game would
| still run under 64MB video cards at 800x600 with ease once you
| got 512MB or 768 to run the improved environments. Yes, the game
| would perfectly launch under 256MB... but, let's get real, 512MB
| of RAM are the bare minimum to run GMDX at the lowest playable
| settings (800x600).
|
| The Nameless Mod was a great game yo play too, with tons of
| details to explore.
| clarionbell wrote:
| Modding is one of the better ways to get into coding. I myself
| have fond memories restoring cut content to Fallout: New Vegas.
|
| It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among
| game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard,
| in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad
| either. But nothing since then.
|
| Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying.
|
| Recently, CD Project did make some moves in that direction, but
| nothing close to what Valve is offering.
| bombcar wrote:
| Factorio has _phenomenal_ first-party modding support I 've
| heard - https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/
|
| And of course, I wonder how many programmers today owe their
| jobs to Minecraft modding - Java modding is amazingly well
| supported, even if not always directly by Microsoft/Mojang.
|
| 1.7.10 for life!
| sdsd wrote:
| I wondered if this would be about PokeMMO, which I've recently
| started playing. Basically, they made a commercial Pokemon game
| by gluing the first five ROMS together, and they get around
| intellectual property by making players supply their own ROMs
| (which they assume you've acquired legally) for copyrighted
| assets.
|
| It's incredibly fun. I'm pricklypears2 if anyone wants to play
| together. And if the devs read this, please add Mimikyu somehow I
| beg you <3
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Based on the title I thought this was going to be about Star
| Citizen.
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