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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
(And yes, I've played TR quite a bit!)
The Nameless Mod was a great game yo play too, with tons of details to explore.