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A lot is possible by doing yourselfTake a look here: c:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Mad Games Tycoon 2\Mad Games Tycoon 2_Data\Extern\Text.
The text files are editable.
Want new genres? Already possible. Want new NPC game names? Already possible. Want to change names for real life names? So many mods do that, although they all seem to feel the need to add extra luggage, ruining their usefulness. Here's a bit of what can be done:
More NPC companies:
https://i.imgur.com/cuOIPAM.png
More platforms:
https://i.imgur.com/VmPEiI6.png
https://i.imgur.com/ge4SSAO.png
New "Genres":
https://i.imgur.com/VdgOwsh.png
You can also add more topics, make it so all employees have names from one single country/region (my company's always in Japan, my employee names are Japanese) or change the distribution of hardware pieces through the eras so it makes a sliver of sense.
The main change I wanted to make since day one, and which is relatively easy to do, is to make it so the PC and the Mac stop being the huge, purple elephants in the room they are in vanilla. The developer refuses to fix that bug that makes those two platforms appear with T9 tech in the eighties, so the only way to fix it is through modding.
Just in case, what I did was creating one 'copy' of PC and Mac for each tier, with era-suitable active users (no "150 millions in 1983" antics,) which are taken off the market the moment a new tier of PC or MAC shows up, hence stopping those two (PC specially) from being "The Only Platform You Need" through a good bunch of the game's progression.
Anyways... Modding is already possible, and for many aspects of the game which can change how the game plays. You'll need to know some programming to be able to do pointless crap like noclipping or giving your employees 9999999 skill (you only need 70 skill if you know what you're doing) or making the grass white and putting your ego on display in the main menu.
90% of the things I have in "my" modded files are from other mods of the game or mods for MGT 1 (yes, you can 'port' parts of mods from MGT 1, as images and some of the data can be mauled into being usable for MGT 2.) The rest of it are data/images from the net. I simply took the things I needed from several mods, mashed them into the existing "vanilla" files and have been making maintenance to them for months now.
Sometimes an update that might have looked small to "vanilla-only" players meant spending a couple hours editing files. For example, when the 'how this file works' part of many of the text files was added, relatively recently, it made me waste quite a few hours modifying my own files to make them fit the new file structure. It did absolutely nothing for me as I already knew all that added info, but I still had to modify my own files to insert those chunks of (to me) useless text just so that many of those files continued to function properly.
I am not, by standard definition, a "real modder," as I do not do it for others. And since I technically "steal" from "real mods," I can't (actually it's more like "shouldn't") divulge the data I used to create my own modded files, which gives me a perfectly good excuse to not share them.
If it sounds like I'm trying to scare potential modders from modding, it's not the intent, but without the proper crutches (a mod API, or dog forbid, Steam Bloatshop support,) modding is a thing for those who are willing to spend varying amounts of time making sure things work.
* Edit: Not being "mysterious" I just honestly can't remember what things I stole off other mods by now, been screwing around with modded files for this game for about two years.
Modders tend to be the worst for making mashups or monstrous creations using bits of other mods. Sometimes it will be to learn how something is done, sometimes out of curiosity to see what happens, sometimes to ensure compatibility with something we've made, or just because we can. You'll actually see a mod get released that alters mechanics, and then a short while later a load of modders will release re-balanced versions or mods that are based around it. They'll usually require the original mod anyway, so the original is still getting the recognition and publicity.
The other advantage is a modder being able to see if you're doing something wrong, even if you're saying merge file A with file B. We'll generally know what various things will do, and any funky interactions, and you'll find modders will occasionally pipe up and recommend doing it a different way.
It also benefits the community as a whole because it can also start a discussion about modding or encourage people to try something different. I'm not sure if the editable files was by design or a happy accident, but it's part of the reason I've continued playing. If it had been a case of being stuck with what the dev decided then I'd have lost interest.
This game's structure makes what I can edit pretty self-contained and errors within it being easy enough to spot for one person (whose last fully learnt programming language was MS-Basic,) Heck, the most difficult thing I had happen was images not working, and that was because I was too quick to assume the image type was the only thing that needed to match.
I also tend to not care about "wrong" when it comes to game balance, unless it affects things in game-breaking ways (see: cheap hardware or too high total active user count for NPC platforms.) I have files where all features give x10 what they normally do, and other files where they give only one third. Modding is all about "why not" for me. I even had fun testing and trying to make an abandoned mod work. It had around 170 tech tiers, for some reason, which very definitely made the "why not" side of me smirk. It quickly became clear to me, why the mod was abandoned - trying to balance the game around more than ten tech tiers is already messy, going for ten times that (and 1000+ platforms) was simply "what overkill has nightmares about."
Than the next [ID], or one new entry in an other file.
Over time you get a feeling what works.
Otherwise, the tags in existing genres within that file tell you what you need to have, and IMO are quite intuitive - I was modding those files a long time before the headers explaining what each tag does were added. So yeah, just trying and seeing what happens is a good method - as long as you know how to fix whatever crazy bugs are caused by your experiments.
Right now I have a "small" project - adding games from old home computers (the gaming systems of my childhood) to the NPCgames.txt and NPCIP.txt files. Done with the ZX-Spectrum and the Amstrad, working on Commodore games now (a lot of games overlap between these three, which saved me a lot of time already,) and I'll tackle the Amiga, MSX and maybe even the Texas Instrument computers too. I'm nearing 4k lines in the NPCgames file. Maybe later on I'll look at the 90% of missing games from the NES, SNES, Master System, Mega Drive and other old consoles.
Wasting hours adding entries to a file that does not need to have more entries than it has is its own kind of fun for me. Being able to see its effects in-game later is just a bonus.
However, adding things without knowing what you're doing can cause the game to become unplayable until the files are fixed/re-installed. Intuitive as it is, people who lack proper care for grammar will have a hellish time with modding these files. One misplaced letter, one skipped ID, can cause your game to have no games for the NPCs to choose at all.
The one instance when the game can "break" just by adding things, is if you add way too many things and your computer isn't up to the task. This game is a real CPU devourer, having things like thousands of platforms or hundreds of NPCs can, in late game, cause some noticeable slowdowns, and some windows can take seconds to open. I used to have around one thousand topics, if they were all researched (either manually or automatically with Sandbox) then that window could take up to five seconds to open, which made choosing topics a chore. Nowadays I am happy with just a little over four hundred topics. It's more topics than I need, considering I mostly go for "Magical Girls" and "Anime."
Edit: As for the "dice roll" that happens every weekend, it gets recalculated whenever the week changes, and it also affects things like the job listing, contract offers and publishing offers. So if you really want to "cheese" things, save before a weekend, see if you get the contract/employee that you want, and if not, just reload the save and let the week end again, and you'll get a different result.
It's basically the same method by which 99% of the X-Com players have the achievement to finish the campaign without losing a single soldier - just keep re-rolling until the aliens don't kill anyone that turn, rinse and repeat. It's also a monumental waste of time, as you can easily beat the game (both X-Com and this one) without resorting to those methods.
Then I looked at the files and went "Wait the Texas Instrument 99 isn't in there? And where are the Dragon-32, TK-90 and the Game & Watch?" and then I looked at the topics and the first thing I actually added to the game was "Magical Girls" because I could.
Although while I do have a lot more "genres" in most of my playthroughs (32 at the moment, could have a few more but it's annoying to add references to them to the games files,) I also have a modded genres file I use once in a while that has less genres, because the vanilla genre list already has a lot of "non-genres" IMO. (FPS/TPS are action games through and through, RTS is just Strategy+Action.)