How to mod locally?

[azakhan]

I couldn't get a specific River City Girls mod I found to run and I can't figure out why just because it's a fitgirls repack (due to my circumstances) it is different? Nor could I find other any useful mods for this game. But my question is for games in general. I've text edited some game's files in the past but didn't know what to do with other files.

I really want to find some way of displaying the damage values through editing my own local files, I can edit River City Girls\RiverCityGirls_Data\StreamingAssets with a text editor but I don't know where to look to display damage. which file do I need to edit? I know how to open .json files but how do I open and understand/edit like assets, bank, and 'file' extensions? When I open River City Girls\RiverCityGirls_Data\Managed\Assembly-CSharp.dll with a code editor, does NUL mean true or false, if so how do I write true? Could I just add 'displayDamageOnHit' or "displayhitDmg"? Where in the doc would I place, and what would I add to make it work?

If anyone has useful links (in addition to specific advice) which would explain in simple steps I'd appreciate it, thank you.

 

[Joom]

Hate to break it to you, but using a text editor isn't going to be good enough to modify games, and each game is different due to the engine they use. Your best bet is to check out the source of any mods currently available for the game you wish to mod and see how they work. Like, 'NUL' means it's a value your text editor can't read (I assume you're using Notepad++, and you're seeing NUL because it's data that can't be interpreted as ASCII). You also can't just make up values and expect them to work because the game itself won't know how to interpret them since they aren't existing API calls.

 

[azakhan]

Hate to break it to you, but using a text editor isn't going to be good enough to modify games, and each game is different due to the engine they use. Your best bet is to check out the source of any mods currently available for the game you wish to mod and see how they work. Like, 'NUL' means it's a value your text editor can't read (I assume you're using Notepad++, and you're seeing NUL because it's data that can't be interpreted as ASCII). You also can't just make up values and expect them to work because the game itself won't know how to interpret them since they aren't existing API calls.

Oh ok makes more sense now lol, I don't know why but it would actually work in the 2 PC games I'd tried before and I assumed they all would, I guess they must have been the exception. So the source of the mods are the tools that the developer releases? Thanks for the reply

 

[Joom]

I just recommended to look at a mod's source (if available) so you have a base for reference. That way you can see what kind of calls the mod makes to the engine. Now, in the case of memory mods (cheats, trainers, etc), you're dealing with a totally different ball game as you're directly modding on the fly by editing values as they happen, as opposed to a file based mod which replaces a resource in memory before it's loaded. Some games have scripting interfaces, in which case LUA tends to be the language of choice (unless the developer incorporated their own proprietary language). In these cases, you can just use a text editor as you're just modifying a script. It's entirely dependent upon what game you're modding and what you're trying to do.

 

[azakhan]

I just recommended to look at a mod's source (if available) so you have a base for reference. That way you can see what kind of calls the mod makes to the engine. Now, in the case of memory mods (cheats, trainers, etc), you're dealing with a totally different ball game as you're directly modding on the fly by editing values as they happen, as opposed to a file based mod which replaces a resource in memory before it's loaded. Some games have scripting interfaces, in which case LUA tends to be the language of choice (unless the developer incorporated their own proprietary language). In these cases, you can just use a text editor as you're just modifying a script. It's entirely dependent upon what game you're modding and what you're trying to do.

Oh cool, helps to know that, thanks I'll look into it a bit more.