Silent, normally a Grand Theft Auto modder, played Yakuza 0 on PC recently and loved it. What he didn’t love, though, was the game’s lighting, which at launch was kinda busted, so he decided to get into the code and fix it himself.
This is normally where a lot of these kinds of stories end. A modder tackles something, overcomes it, we all enjoy the results and get on with our lives. But what’s often missing what can be the most important part of the process: gaining an understanding of just how much work actually went into the update.
In this case, Silent didn’t actually “fix” the game’s lighting. He began the process and had some success altering the code in some captures, but before he could actually work towards implementing anything developers Lab42 Games (responsible for the PC port of the game) dropped an official patch that came in and solved everything ahead of him.
Rather than let that be the end of it, though, Silent blogged about the whole thing, detailing his initial research before cracking open the official patch and comparing it to how he was going to go about things so that we could all see what a modder’s poking and prodding can actually look like.
Even if you don’t understand all the technical stuff going on, it’s still a really interesting read, and makes you appreciate stuff like the Nier updates fans are putting together even more.