GTA San Andreas Mods

GTA San Andreas was undoubtedly almost everyone's favorite game. No matter how old it is, it's still awesome. The nostalgia when I first played it when I was 7 years old was still fresh in my mind, especially when I'm still playing it for a while today. The things that make me go back to playing this game are the gameplay and the VERY customizable characteristic of this game. Basically, almost everyone with a know-how in programming can create a script that can "modify" the game without messing it up. They call it "mods" or modifications. I was very intrigued about this because the programming language used for scripting mods in this game is C#, which is a PL that I have learned just last year. I tried to check it out, how to script and all, but it felt like hieroglyphs at my first glance. To my observation, it's like C# fused with assembly. I also realized that the mods have a dedicated builder/IDE. It's called Sanny Builder. I tried to open a mod using Visual Studio 2010, but sadly it didn't open. For the mod's structure, it's pretty weird and the logic takes some minutes to understand. I want to learn it. Just to learn how scripting works and how the mod library and the game itself communicates. I know that mods are like things injected at the memory stream of the game, it's pretty cool and simple to see but I bet that I'll be challenged to understand it fully. Learning this can improve my know-how in the game development field (somehow) and prepare myself in every programming situation.

Going Down?

So what do these "mods" do? It depends on the programmer. If a programmer envisions a program that will make the character take a selfie that is otherwise not doable in the base game, then the program/mod will add that feature. There are actually thousands of mods in the net. Selfie, parkour, gravity gun (my favorite) were awesome add-ons for the game. Without them, the game will be like a stale bread. Dull and empty. The programmers who did these were awesome, too. Without their imaginative minds, there will be no mods. I actually look up to them and want to be like them someday. The game was never the same when I used the mods. It's cool and they've brought color to the game.

Going Up?

Oh, I almost forgot. There's also the skins. You can also change the appearance or skin of the character and it's pretty cool. There are also many of these out there. They're basically models from other games that were rigged into 3d model editor like Maya and 3DS Max to suit the GTA main character's skeleton or other peds' (the pedestrians the main character encounters in the game) They're a variety and I want to learn this too.

But first...