jmquigs

On the flip side, it could also convince executives that they need to cover up security breaches as much as possible.

ModelMod: modify art in games

https://github.com/jmquigs/ModelMod

I posted this as a "Show HN" a few months ago. It's awesome because for the vast majority of commercial games, there is no way to customize the art, since the Developer doesn't provide an end-user art pipeline. There are older programs that allow texture customization, but as far as I know, ModelMod is the first program that lets you snapshot models, edit them, and the reload the edited version in game.

Currently I'm working on CoreCLR support (a lot of the code is F#) and experimenting with pixel shader transplants.

I don't know about 100K, but for my 5667 line project, a recent nightly build takes 8 seconds to build on my 2012 macbook pro (4 core 2.3G i7). That is with up-to-date external crates that aren't being rebuilt.

Typecheck happens early, with borrow-checking following soon after, so you get feedback on errors fast, and thus only end up waiting when the compiler is happy with your code. Still, it may be an issue for people who like to do TDD or need to do a lot of run-time verification.

For a big project you'd probably need to split it up into multiple crates to "emulate" incremental compilation, at least until it is supported by the build system.

There are some things I like about Go:

1) really fast compilation speed

2) goroutines

3) gofmt

But I learned F# after learning Go, and it felt like I was walking out of Plato's cave. Its hard to use a Go-like language after using the ML-style features described in this post.

Most modern static languages shift the debugging from run-time to compile-time, which is a huge win in my opinion, but Go does not do this. You don't even need to go "pure functional" to get the benefits (as in Haskell), Rust/F#/OCaml are fine.

The article talks about how jellyfish create areas of low pressure in front of them to pull them forward. I wonder if top human swimmers can do something similar.

Phelps, for example, has an unusual cadence in his freestyle stroke at the end of the 200IM. He takes two strokes and then pauses for a brief period; its like a polska rhythm. Maybe some part of this is creating a void in front of him. Its visible in this video (around 2:03 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cjwuJiwevo)

Yes, its just cosmetic. Hacking the grenade count is what I would consider to be a gameplay mod, and there is a third category, UI mods, featured in WoW. With some overlap between them.

I think people who pay for games should be able to do all types of mods, but developers often think otherwise, or, maybe they just don't have time to build mod support into the game.

I never tried it with minecraft. I'd have to guess no. I think minecraft optimizes rendering by batching geometry up into big chunks. These wouldn't be very useful as the basis for mods. Could be wrong, though.

Vert/prim count was the easiest way to do it. It doesn't require me to checksum vertex buffers or anything like that. I'm hoping to add texture checksums as a secondary key, so that you can get some control over instancing (just modify your character's head, for instance).

Author here. I use it mostly for character mods, just like I show in the videos. I'm a pretty typical "programmer artist" though, so my mods are primitive.

I've also used it for removal. For instance, some games have your character wearing backpacks and the like, which annoy me. So I delete them.

I'm curious to see what real artists will be able to do with it. I'm hoping I can get some better demos from them.