First yes the Image above is someone merging assets in to mario. If you want to listen to someone explain the basics here is a video but I will talk about it more technically.
https://youtu.be/yGkjS0gFxnY This is the bear bones panic. It won’t create new mods.
Firstly these are old games meaning things were leaked modded and have years of moder notes. The main reason why you see them all over the place is because it has so much information on how to mod about them. In reality AI was just the final step of cracking the code literally. New games like Wolverine run on 1 FPS compared to others because of that on PC.
A guy just siting on a afternoon and saying “I’m am going to make this dumb mod and flood Nexus or ModDB with low effort mods” is not gonna happen. First it costs way too much with the models they use and second it takes a long time.
So to remove all the fear and speculation I am just gonna say blatantly nothing that is talked on the internet is true it’s just fear and fearmongering.
Now I will tell you how a mod is made for Skyrim and then how mods were made for Stalker.
Skyrim has tools and a lot of available ready to download for free tools that can be used to convert Blender files and other assets in to Skyrim. It has tools to modify the base code and it has de compilers and map editors now.
The catch is AI can’t make a good asset that you can just port. best case it has a good mesh, but you still need to remodel it, because the vertices are messed up. Rigging and animation are bear bones as well. So Everything regarding armor and models needs to still be done by hand.
The code is the only thing that gets more available but even with that you need to know how code actually works. What the hell is code and what does it actually do. Their is books on C++ and even the creator of it said you don’t actually need to know the code fully to work with it. Ironically Code bases have become so bloated that you need to use AI to actually explain what the hell are you looking at.
Que valve coder notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k238XpMMn38
Que Microsoft coder notes https://youtu.be/9dRSF1htY-4
So yes just fear mongering. Ai won’t make your mods but it makes it more available to do so. It can explain a problem and why something is happening because it understands the debugger.
Now Stalker. The X-ray engine and the Stalker code has been mith and legend for a very long time. Well not any longer because someone leaked the Xray engine partially.
The code is bad and people for a decade have been trying to figure out how to fix the game. If you add AI to the occasion it will break the game because writing “Fix code pls” isn’t really a instruction as the problems are many and a lot are even unknown because we don’t have the full code.
A-Life is so complex apparently that modern GSC can’t actually recreate it in Stalker 2.
So yeah it’s way more complex then writing “Make game pls” as a instruction. Like Name 10 AI games for example I dare you.
I think you’re underestimating what coding agents can do now. Maintaining projects, keeping them up to date and fixing bugs etc really isn’t difficult for them. A bigger issue I see is whether or not “vibe modders” will be willing/able to pay the increasingly high costs of these services
They tend to bloat codebases over time. It takes someone who understands the code to know how to use them correctly, and it often takes about as long to direct and correct them as it takes to just write the code, at least based on what I’ve experienced at work.
The step I’ve seen a lot of people skip when using these coding agents is learning what the code actually does, which includes learning all the libraries and functions being used rather than looking at a call and going “yeah that seems right” because it looks like it’s doing what it should. Without that, it’s impossible to maintain a codebase over a long time, LLMs or not.