I sometimes fantasize about mods that will never be, I research their technical feasibility, I've even started working on these projects a few times only to drop them a couple days later. Do you have ideas for great mods like that? Here are mine.
1. Run Pillars of Eternity dialogues through a specialized LLM that removes purple prose and infuses it with a livelier style.
The difficulty is that it'd be hard to create a good synthetic data set right now, but it's not impossible in the future. This is one of the easiest mod ideas I have.
2. Port VTMB to Unreal Engine and then make the combat less "RPG" and more action-oriented, like Far Cry 3, where there are RPG elements, but nothing so stupid like "I can't shoot straight because I only have 1 star in dexterity".
The difficulty is that there's no tools to read/export animations from the VTMB engine. Their animation engine is something custom, not Source-based. This makes the difficulty of the task rather gargantuan - requiring to step through the assembler, find the place where the animation keyframes are being read, inject custom code to export keyframe data. Even if you had spare money, good luck finding someone with the expertise for this and a desire to do this shit.
3. Port VTM: Redemption onto something similar to the VTMB, first-person engine. Enormous endeavor. Never researched its feasibility, just thought the idea would be cool.
4. Reimplement BG2 engine in UE5 and fully document it. I know about GemRB, but it's so undocumented, that it'd be easier to write a new one. I have experience writing 150+ pages of documentation for a game engine, it's not so difficult, so Idk why they didn't do it.
The weirdest thing is that it's even legal to use GemRB for your own custom games - the license allows it and they "encourage" you to try, but it's simply not doable due to total lack of documentation.
Anyway, with complete control over the code, modding would become the easiest thing in the world. Could make the game turn-based, for example. It'd require to make less combat encounters, but it'd be an interesting thing to work on.
1. Run Pillars of Eternity dialogues through a specialized LLM that removes purple prose and infuses it with a livelier style.
The difficulty is that it'd be hard to create a good synthetic data set right now, but it's not impossible in the future. This is one of the easiest mod ideas I have.
2. Port VTMB to Unreal Engine and then make the combat less "RPG" and more action-oriented, like Far Cry 3, where there are RPG elements, but nothing so stupid like "I can't shoot straight because I only have 1 star in dexterity".
The difficulty is that there's no tools to read/export animations from the VTMB engine. Their animation engine is something custom, not Source-based. This makes the difficulty of the task rather gargantuan - requiring to step through the assembler, find the place where the animation keyframes are being read, inject custom code to export keyframe data. Even if you had spare money, good luck finding someone with the expertise for this and a desire to do this shit.
3. Port VTM: Redemption onto something similar to the VTMB, first-person engine. Enormous endeavor. Never researched its feasibility, just thought the idea would be cool.
4. Reimplement BG2 engine in UE5 and fully document it. I know about GemRB, but it's so undocumented, that it'd be easier to write a new one. I have experience writing 150+ pages of documentation for a game engine, it's not so difficult, so Idk why they didn't do it.
The weirdest thing is that it's even legal to use GemRB for your own custom games - the license allows it and they "encourage" you to try, but it's simply not doable due to total lack of documentation.
Anyway, with complete control over the code, modding would become the easiest thing in the world. Could make the game turn-based, for example. It'd require to make less combat encounters, but it'd be an interesting thing to work on.
