Ok, having now read the article, I can confess to modding two games: "Morrowind", and the MMORPG, "Risk Your Life".
Morrowind is self-explanatory. The game shipped with its Editor. Who wouldn't use it?
R.Y.L. was different though. It wasn't meant to be modded by players, nor was it legal to do so. There were many problems in the game, but the original developer went off the grid, taking the source code with them. This means all fixes came from the publisher, rather than developer, and not even they had access to source. With some experimentation I learned that I could change things simply by understanding and hex editing the game files. Granted, what I could do client-side wasn't much: replacing actors, moving or removing world objects, altering spell effects, graphics; that sort of stuff. In the beginning I did this only for my own benefit. Being client-side meant the changes only took effect in "my" game. For example, other players might see me walking through walls and houses that were not there in my game, or climbing a staircase would make it appear to them that I was floating through empty space. This was certainly an exploit. I used these changes in leveling areas to remove objects from my path, making the grind easier. I only did this to make my life easier though, never to make the lives of others Hell (PVP).
Later on however, I offered to help the local distributor fix a few rather annoying problems that despite constant requests for a patch, were never addressed by the publisher. They took those fixes from me and applied them server-side, then patched all the clients.
Morrowind is self-explanatory. The game shipped with its Editor. Who wouldn't use it?
R.Y.L. was different though. It wasn't meant to be modded by players, nor was it legal to do so. There were many problems in the game, but the original developer went off the grid, taking the source code with them. This means all fixes came from the publisher, rather than developer, and not even they had access to source. With some experimentation I learned that I could change things simply by understanding and hex editing the game files. Granted, what I could do client-side wasn't much: replacing actors, moving or removing world objects, altering spell effects, graphics; that sort of stuff. In the beginning I did this only for my own benefit. Being client-side meant the changes only took effect in "my" game. For example, other players might see me walking through walls and houses that were not there in my game, or climbing a staircase would make it appear to them that I was floating through empty space. This was certainly an exploit. I used these changes in leveling areas to remove objects from my path, making the grind easier. I only did this to make my life easier though, never to make the lives of others Hell (PVP).
Later on however, I offered to help the local distributor fix a few rather annoying problems that despite constant requests for a patch, were never addressed by the publisher. They took those fixes from me and applied them server-side, then patched all the clients.
