hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4451.txt

Episode: 4451
Title: HPR4451: Game Modding
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4451/hpr4451.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:49:29

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4451 for Monday the 25th of August 2025.
Today's show is entitled Game Modding.
It is hosted by operator and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, you don't have time to play games all day.
Hello hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host operator.
So today I'm going to be talking about modding mainly around Nexus mods.
The reason I'm talking about this is because some people don't have a lot of time to play video games.
Mods can help with that and make that time grinding or whatever to be easier.
I'll first quickly go over what kind of the idea is.
Players don't have a lot of time and you want to get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of your games.
You can use Mods to help do that.
The tedious and the streamlined gameplay is what you want to do.
So instead of cheats and mods that break the game, these are cheats or mods that help you just get through the game easier.
They're not necessarily cheats or even glitches or anything like that.
So the first one I want to talk about is Grand Theft Auto and there's only a couple or even just one.
From when you have a younger kid and you don't want them playing Grand Theft Auto, you can install Family Friendly Mod.
Now it's fairly difficult to install nowadays if you're using the Steam version.
You basically have to have an old version of Grand Theft Auto, like several months old, six months old, whatever.
Steam will constantly update your games.
You essentially have to back up that Grand Theft Auto folder and I zip it up and that way I have a working Grand Theft Auto version that I can overwrite when Steam inevitably automatically updates your games for you.
Now if you don't have the Steam version of Grand Theft Auto, I don't even have to worry about that, but for me I had the Steam version and I was just using that to launch stuff.
I'll do another episode of the launcher that I use now which is Play Night at some point.
But I'll say Family Friendly Mod is less violent, you can do everything, you can kind of enable cheats, you can make hotkeys, you can bind key controls to specific cheats or hotkeys.
It's fairly complicated to set up, but it's fairly easy to just get working.
So if you want to just use it and there's default configuration files in there that tell you exactly, you know, oh, this isn't completely locked down.
All you can do is drive the cars and work from one car to the other and that's it.
And then you can slowly turn things on like exploding cars or maybe, you know, the cars people can fall out of cars.
So it's pretty very, very teleptation vehicles, passenger joining, automatic repairing of stuff, you know, friendly cops and, you know, this kind of like a safe way to play that game.
The only thing about violence is grandfather fallout 76.
So I've always kind of liked the followed games. They've always been decent at them.
Oh, I'm good. I've always been decent at them, but it's it's time time to create.
So there are some mods that I use and the things in the show notes, hopefully.
Big one is glowing items, things and it's kind of hard to see stuff and it's dark and I always turn the game all the way up and I still miss stuff.
So glowing items helps a lot of the basically materials for crafting glow, rare materials like screws and one of the other things, screws and springs.
So at one point in time I had like so many springs as it was insane.
Glowing items, glowing bubble heads, which give you temporary buffs and stuff, recipes and plans to glow and kind of glowing cap stashes and tens, glowing map fragments and ore glowing.
So when you collect these materials, they just kind of glow around.
I did the same thing for wood because I kept wanting needing wood so I installed a glow wood thing.
So kind of in the other one, interface space. So fast terminals, there's a percload out manager so you can find different perks in the game and it's kind of annoying to have them switch around manually.
And this is a, you know, you can have like 12 different things.
There's also like lock picking thing that's making it makes it easier for lock picking kind of a cheat sort of and helps you out with lock picking if you don't have a thousand years to get good at it.
That's pretty much it for the granted thought of wonder and I'll talk about kind of the advantages of all this and the dangers towards the end.
Schedule ones, the newer thing and there's a map mini map in that game, which is kind of a big piece that's missing from all that.
That's pretty much it for like the mods that I use.
I've played other games and had other little mods. There's a lot of mods out there for bypassing startup transitions or introductory introduction videos.
So you start a great thought when it takes a good like what 30 seconds to a minute to actually start the game.
So they have mods that like bypass all the startup stuff in the play, whatever. So you just get to go in the game.
So kind of like, you know, it manages.
So I'll talk about the mod managers and main kind of the Nexus mods.
So Nexus mods is kind of one of the big, big ones that first started out. It's kind of the largest modding repo in the world.
And there's like an endorsement system and ratings and people can put notes and it's very, it's very, very organized.
And it's also very complicated to when you start getting into mods, you know, kind of safe versus like sketchy third party sites.
So it's more safe to download from necessarily from from Nexus or the vortex mod managers that it is to kind of go on third party site or go wherever I was.
So you're kind of more or less safer than you can. And they also have things like mod packs, which we might talk to about two areas.
It's a collection of whatever which can be dangerous. I like to pick out the ones that I want.
I don't want to go whole scale because you know, I'll talk about the dangers, but you can kind of screw up the game or have some overlapping or different versions.
And you know, you have this version of a DLL and that version of the game and it makes it craps out.
And then you have the troubleshoot, which mod is working, which one is, which is easy to do with the mod manager.
Which I'll talk about in a sec. So kind of like one click mod installation and updates. It's like a its own kind of UI.
You can change the order. You can have different profiles. So if you have one set of mods that doesn't work with this game very well with this other set of mods, you can switch back and forth.
So like if I wanted like a fallout setup for for for attacking or or you know shooting and in that type of stuff, then I could have a profile for that.
And then I could have another profile that's just for gathering and stuff. So it could make everything glow and whatever.
So you can have different profiles for the same game essentially.
And the mod manager vortex is the mod manager will help kind of help fix stuff. So if you're missing dependencies, if it breaks or something, they can kind of guide you through that process of fixing it.
And the way they work is symbolic links or hard link. So they'll symbolically link or hard link different paths having to do with each game.
A lot of these a lot of these things say you know put this in you know put this folder in the in this other folder over here to turn on the mod.
That's how 90% of them are nowadays. So mod manager does that quickly and without eating up this space by doing symbolic links and hard links.
So if you load a profile, you might have you know 10 different mods and it will symbolically link those dynamically.
So that way the actual game folder is never actually messed with. So if you click disable everything, the theory is, is it everything that's going to be inside of there and able to now you can make custom mods that kind of manage all that for you.
But I just sometimes there's third party mods that I have to install to make other ones work and it ends up you know making my game folder different than it should be right modifying that game folder.
You know it's that we talked about mod packs. It's kind of a correlated, curated selection of you know the best in the safe time and all that stuff.
And it's kind of pre-tested for different versions too. So when you're in vortex, I'll say this will work for .30 version of this game.
And they you know usually have a guide on how to do it and tell you what the problems are and kind of everything. So you'll get you know that advantage.
Now you know the also the disadvantage areas that you know might have outdated mods in it. It might you know cause some crashing. They're my conflicting. They're going to give you a performance hit.
So some of these are visual mods and if you have you know maybe a gig card or six gig card and you can't an older card and you turn in with one of these mod packs that could kind of slow things down.
Then you've got kind of like other things like steam backing up all your stuff and you know when you do a steam verification.
That'll mingle some stuff for you possibly too. So steam could be annoying in the way that it does its thing.
I've had success me sipping up the entire game folder which does take a considerate amount of time if you do it with like high compression.
So kind of you know it makes it easy to update the mods if there's updates for the game and then the mods crash or cause the game to crash.
More text will help you manage that and I think it's like a one time payment of like $15 or something that it's like a one time fee.
But yeah they'll help you with kind of the installation and stuff in the notes and kind of you know the whole point of it is just making the game easier to play.
So if you find something annoying in the game like the transitions when the game starts or you know you need a better crosshair or whatever and you're not playing competitive multiplayer game that has to check all these hashes.
Then I would look at mods and if you do like a game and you have some frustrations in it there's probably a mod in there you know for that.
So there's also like YouTube tutorials there's you know Reddit for kind of looking at stuff up and then you know if you really have get into it you can get into specific mod discord for each individual game.
So that's pretty much it I'm going to put some decent notes in the show notes.
You know and you want to you want to just kind of start with baby steps so install one mod make sure it works understand how the symbolic linking works and maybe talk to AI and try and figure out how that works for your system and whatever.
That's pretty much it. I hope you guys play more games I'm going to do a show on play night which is a UI for all of the launchers all the fame of the big ones and it's a single point that you can do everything and you can remote with sunshine and so basically I can use my phone and play any game anywhere in the world without having multiple launchers and having to do multiple things.
It's just like a one-click deal so that's going to come eventually but I'm going backwards here and this is an older one that I've wanted to give you for quite some time.
Appreciate it dig it easy and if you haven't recorded a show you know save us all and record something save us all some time.
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