*Nods pretending to completley understand him*

Rhyddin, you obviously know wtf you're talking about.

I'm willing to break my !!! and do very tedious, boring things if it means getting the game done.

Help?

Arf, I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be professional (when it comes to game mods anyway)

Just out of curiosity though I had a quick shufty at some of the customisation options for M2:TW and it does look like it's reasonably customisable (like Hanse said, there's a whole community doing it).

However, just setting the world map up looks like 10 image files (in .tga format) which map out everything including the land-shape, climate, transport network, tile types and textures (bump mapping for mountains). On top of which there's about 6 text configurations files, none of which is shorter than 1000 lines, which will need adapting to create a mod... and that's just setting the map up!

When it comes to changing character models - the thought alone scares me. M2:TW uses a system of body parts; as far as I can tell, each unit is comprised of parts of people, there's about a dozen different parts, that all have to fit together so that it can "randomly" generate the people in the unit (that's why they all look slightly different).

All those parts need mapping onto the skeletal animation system to create the animations (walking, running, dying etc) and I've no idea how many different animation sequences there are - in Half-Life 2 there's about 30 different animations per model (depending on the model), it's probably a few less in M2:TW but still. Doing 3d graphics requires some nifty software like 3DS Max (now owned by AutoDesk), available for a mere £3500 or so, or Maya (again, now owned by AutoDesk) for a couple of grand... or there's Chumbalumsoft's (great name I know) Milkshape 3D, which I used to use to tinker with Half-Life models, available for a whole €25.

If you really want to get into games modding you need at least 4 people, a coder (preferably a couple), a 3d artist for the models and a 2d artist and a map-maker (which is a skill in itself normally requiring some 3d skills, some 2d skills, some scripting skills and an understanding of what makes a decent map). Once you've got that lot together it'll still take you months to get anything resembling a complete mod together!

I'm not trying to put you off, but when I say there's a LOT of hard graft involved in games creation or modding, I mean a LOT... an awful lot of which gets really tedious after a while.

So let's not be too harsh on the buggers that put KR together eh?

Linky:
http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch
http://darkbasic.thegamecreators.com/