For our discussion, I’ll go with the character shadow resolution mod I implemented. Either way, as a modder you have to form a hypothesis on which APIs are probably involved, and then investigate its use more closely. I mostly simply use Microsoft’s dumpbin utility for this, while Kaldaien prefers Dependency Walker and specialized debugging tools. The first step is to figure out which API functions are actually invoked by a game.
This falls squarely in the area of reverse engineering, a topic whole books have been written about, but I’ll try to provide a quick overview based on a concrete example from Tales of Zestiria. Figuring out where and what to modify when to achieve a desired effect, without introducing undesired consequences, is where the true challenge lies. In any case, applying these modifications, while requiring some mechanical effort and familiarity with low-level details of how library function calls work, is really the simpler part of the process. The other part of the “fundamentals” equation is actually getting the mod code into the game process, which is generally accomplished either by replacing a library used by the game with a wrapper-as TZF does for d3d9.dll-or injecting it by other means. A fundamental tool often used for this purpose is minHook, which provides functions for relatively conveniently replacing API calls in memory. This means that calls to standard programming interfaces-such as DirectX or core Windows functions-are intercepted by the mod, examined, and potentially modified. With TZF, Tales of Zestiria supports ultrawide aspect ratios.Īs you might expect from the title of this section, all these improvements were achieved using API call interception. We’ll investigate these in more detail now. This leaves us with API-level interception and binary code modifications, which are the methods applied to Tales of Zestiria. jpg images to adjust textures all the way to reverse-engineering the custom binary file format(s) of a game. Of these options, editing a game’s data files is the most straightforward, though it can vary from simply modifying.
If modding is not officially supported, there are three common ways of modifying the behavior of a game despite that limitation: data file editing, API-level interception and direct binary code injection. However, as it’s the most well-understood and easiest form of modding to get into, it's not our target in this article. In general, gameplay modifications and content additions are far easier to accomplish when official tools are provided, and a truly staggering amount of content can result. What is possible through this type of modding and how it is accomplished depends completely on the types of tools provided by the developers.
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