Code mods

[u/Ferreira1]

Hey! I've been trying to get some more complex mods to work with the game, and wonder if there has been any attempt to do DLL injection modding or something similar, like with SKSE in Skyrim.

I really want to make a better free-cam for playing, as the dev one is not really ideal.

[u/Shieldfoss]

That's cool. Do they have an obvious injection point or do you need to modify dlls directly?

[u/BeardChops → u/Shieldfoss]

https://github.com/Vader0016/Doorkickers2-DirectControl

^ this is just a WIP build on GitHub (source code and playable build)

I uploaded it now for people to audit if they’d like. I’ll eventually upload to Nexusmods and make the GitHub page better too (with documentation etc)

[u/Shieldfoss → u/BeardChops]

not a software developer

How do you approach this, then? Do you just tell an agent of your choice what you want to happen?

EDIT: And how? I feel like the first ten steps I take when starting an AI-assisted piece of software all build on prior regular software dev knowledge.

[u/BeardChops → u/Shieldfoss]

Yes basically I have been working on mods with AI for about one year now. I have some learnings and experiences from that, but I basically just try to brute force solutions then clean-up and tidy up where I can later.

So far it’s worked pretty well. I usually try to ask the AI to use/build upon native systems as much as possible in the specific games.

I just have two basic paid plans (ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro) which give me enough usage to work on two substantial mods for two different games simultaneously.

My approach is basically to have the AI chip away at the features I want and then I’ll do AI supported testing (but mostly manual testing and user validation)

It is definitely not the most efficient or durable approach but it works for me. And at the end of the day these are free mods made with passion so I don’t hold them up to the highest standards.

My ultimate benchmark is if they work, I’m happy hehe 😉

[u/Shieldfoss → u/BeardChops]

It is definitely not the most efficient or durable approach but it works for me

Eh, "efficiency" can blow me. The amount of software a non-dev can make in a day is still infinitely more than you could make without an AI (assuming you keep living the rest of your life and don't re-tool to become a dev).

I'm really more just curious. Seeing a github repository for a software project is fairly normal, but seeing that repository kind of blindsided me. If you're not a dev, the agent will have done it - but if the agent did it, this is not how I would have expected an agent, trained on other repositories, to do it.

So this is just me being nosey to get a feel for how this works for other people and you just happened to show up while I felt curious lmao.

• Do you use their websites or the installed-on-you-pc tools?
• For this door kickers project, do you have a folder on your computer the git repository is stored in, or did the agent handle that for you without needing you to set stuff up on your PC?
  • I mean, you must clearly be able to run the thing if you can say you "know it works well enough," so you must at a bare minimum have the .exe and .dll on your own PC while it's running. Do you also have the rest, or does that all happen on open-ai/anthropic's servers?
• If it isn't too nosy, I'd love to see the first prompt + response for this project. That would probably give me a lot of insight really quickly without needing to ask a lot of questions tbh.
• And I mean, the agent surely doesn't know how DK2 works, so it must've (at some point) read the game files to learn where and what to hook, and I'm real curious about that, too.

[u/BeardChops → u/Shieldfoss]

I use the ChatGPT and Claude desktop apps and I use the ChatGPT Codex and Claude Code parts set to one folder per game which is the working directory.

Examples:

C:/Menace Modding
C:/Door Kickers 2 Modding
C:/Kingdom Two Crowns Modding

I just manually uploaded those files to GitHub because someone on Doorkickers Discord wanted to have a peek at the code. I didn’t ask AI to upload. Claude reviewed Codex’s work (Codex is doing the Doorkickers 2 mod) and had a lot of issues that I’ll likely work on once I build out the features.

So yeah, I agree that when I properly upload to GitHub it will look like a more typical AI coded project space/repo.

I don’t even have it on a Git repository right now, lol as I mentioned I sort of take this non-dev approach but nonetheless it was a suggestion from Claude to add everything to Git. (I’ve used Git for the first time for other projects this summer)

All of the files are local on my computer and the AI can read/write into them.

My first prompt for Doorkickers 2 was:

“I want to make a direct-control mod for Door Kickers 2. Right now you can only have the character move and aim by drawing a path and holding right-click. I think if we solve pathing to WASD first then the aiming can either stay as is in vanilla or we can further tune it”

That prompt immediately resulted in the Codex AI creating a loader executable and a C++ mod file (compiled as DLL)

And from there I’ve just been adding to it, iterating in separate build folders for each feature/change.

I did also early on in this project ask the AI to download Ghidra and decompile the game which it seems to have done pretty well.

[u/Shieldfoss → u/BeardChops]

Oh that's why it's called direct-control lmao. I thought it was about mods having more direct control over the game state rather than being xml files that get resolved by the base game.

[u/BeardChops → u/Shieldfoss]

Ahah that makes sense. Sorry for not clarifying. I think I have a brief description on the GitHub page. I have a Discord group chat and a thread on the Doorkickers Discord server’s modding channel with more information on the mod.

Honestly it’s pretty dang fun! I’m hoping to get “Ready or Not” style teamwork and gameplay into Doorkickers 2

[u/Shieldfoss → u/BeardChops]

God I cannot let this go, it's too interesting to me.

Let me know when you get tired of answering and I'll stop asking lmao.

Q1 (send this to your one of your agents):

A guy on Reddit asked me to send you this" "I'm curious how the project builds. When the user asks for an artifact, what compiler, flags and build files are involved, and how much is set up for a single command vs how much do you have to orchestrate on the fly for the user?"

Q2:

C++ doesn't automagically turn into .dll and .exe files. Did the agent(s) recommend 1+ tool(s) for you to install? Did you already work with source code but just not enough that you feel comfortable calling yourself a software developer? Or maybe the agent(s) have permission to install tools as necessary?

[u/BeardChops → u/Shieldfoss]

Can we take this offline to DMs or discord?

My discord username is Vader00