Video game modding is the process of alteration by players or fans of one or more aspects of a video game, such as how it looks or behaves, and is a sub-discipline of general modding. Mods may range from small changes and tweaks to complete overhauls, and can extend the replay value and interest of the game.
The Build Engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman, author of Ken's Labyrinth, for 3D Realms. Like the Doom engine, the Build Engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites to populate the world geometry with objects.
Source is a 3D game engine developed by Valve. It debuted as the successor to GoldSrc in 2004 with the releases of Half-Life: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2. It is most well-known for its usage by Valve, but the engine has been used both by small teams and individuals to create modifications of Valve games, and other studios creating distinct games, notably Troika Games' title Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Valve continued to create incremental updates to the Source engine after its 2004 release, most of which coincided with games created by Valve. In the late 2010s, Valve created the Source 2 engine to replace Source, with it publicly debuting alongside Half-Life: Alyx. The Source engine is most well-known for its advancements in physics, AI, and graphics.
Wintermute Engine (WME) is a set of software tools and a runtime interpreter primarily designed for creating and running graphical adventure games.
Squirrel is a high level imperative, object-oriented programming language, designed to be a lightweight scripting language that fits in the size, memory bandwidth, and real-time requirements of applications like video games.
Tremulous is a free and open source asymmetric team-based first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements. Being a cross-platform development project the game is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
The C4 Engine is a proprietary computer game engine developed by Terathon Software that is used to create 3D games and other types of interactive virtual simulations for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and iOS.
Cheat Engine (CE) is a proprietary, source available freeware memory scanner/debugger created by Eric Heijnen for the Windows operating system in 2000. Cheat Engine is mostly used for cheating in computer games and is sometimes modified and recompiled to support new games. It searches for values input by the user with a wide variety of options that allow the user to find and sort through the computer's memory. Cheat Engine can also create standalone trainers that can operate independently of Cheat Engine, often found on user forums or at the request of another user.
Whirled is a virtual world website and video game created by Three Rings Design. Its Open Beta stage was announced at the Game Developers Conference in 2007. It makes use of Adobe Flash as an applet embedded into the website while also having pages of HTML and JavaScript in a sidebar to allow players to manage their friends list and browse various categories of user-generated content. The concept is comparable to the virtual worlds in the PlayStation 3 game Home and Second Life, while also incorporating aspects of feed-based social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It pushed to make all content user-created, mainly with its approach to creative accessibility using Flash's affinity for 2D vector graphics and various web compatibilities to make it simple for players to upload a wide variety of content using simple, conventional file formats. Some examples of this include uploading PNG files to create in-game objects, and MP3 files to create a music playlist for a player's room. More advanced creators could utilize Adobe Flash itself to create more intricate and interactive objects, such as intricate player-controlled Avatars that Whirled became well known for.
Clonk is a single player and multiplayer video game series. The games feature a mix of the action, real-time strategy and platform game genres. Developed between 1994 and 2014 by RedWolf Design, the games of the series were originally released as shareware and became freeware and later open source software around 2008 and 2014. The game's community has since developed the series under the name OpenClonk. The series was compared and described as a mixture of Worms, The Settlers, Tetris, Lemmings and Minecraft. The game was noted for the easy game "extension" mechanic with an integrated editor and developer mode, which allows experienced players to create their own modifications directly into the game.
Stranded is a 3D action-adventure video game, developed by Unreal Software. The main goal of the Robinsonade game is to survive on a dangerous island and to find a way to return home.
Game Editor is a 2D game authoring package. It supports multi-platform development to iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, Linux, Windows Mobile-based Smartphones, GP2X, Pocket PCs, and Handheld PCs. Compatibility with these platforms is mentioned on Game Discovery, a popular site for game developers, among other software like The 3D Gamemaker, DarkBASIC, and GameMaker.
Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible software framework. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. Mono can be run on many software systems.
The Powder Toy is a falling-sand game originally created by Stanislaw K. Skowronek. It is now developed and maintained by LBPHacker, Simon, jacob1 and other contributors on GitHub. The Powder Toy is free and open-source software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.0. A total of 185 different in-game materials, each with custom behavior and interactions, are available in the game.
Keen Software House is an independent video game developing company based in Prague, Czech Republic. The company was founded by Marek Rosa in 2010.
Tcl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. It was designed with the goal of being very simple but powerful. Tcl casts everything into the mold of a command, even programming constructs like variable assignment and procedure definition. Tcl supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, functional, and procedural styles.
Based on Id Software's open stance towards game modifications, their Quake series became a popular subject for player mods beginning with Quake in 1996. Spurred by user-created hacked content on their previous games and the company's desire to encourage the hacker ethic, Id included dedicated modification tools into Quake, including the QuakeC programming language and a level editor. As a game that popularized online first-person shooter multiplayer, early games were team- and strategy-based and led to prominent mods like Team Fortress, whose developers were later hired by Valve to create a dedicated version for the company. Id's openness and modding tools led to a "Quake movie" community, which altered gameplay data to add camera angles in post-production, a practice that became known as machinima.
Minetest is a free and open-source voxel game creation system. It is written primarily in C++ and makes use of the Irrlicht Engine. Minetest provides a Lua API allowing users to write their own games and mods. It is cross-platform, being available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, some BSD descendants, some GNU variants and Android.
GDevelop is a 2D and 3D cross-platform, free and open-source game engine, which mainly focuses on creating PC and mobile games, as well as HTML5 games playable in the browser. Created by Florian Rival, a software engineer at Google, GDevelop is mainly aimed at non-programmers and game developers of all skillsets, employing event based visual programming similar to engines like Construct, Stencyl, and Tynker.
