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What do you think makes a good modding tool?
In essence, as a user, what are elements of a good user interface.

Anyone have any really nice modding tools to share?
Doesn't matter what game, as long as it does what it's made to do: mod stuff.

Things that I think would make a tool a nice tool:

-nice user interface
-easy to use
-"fast"
-can do "great" things

Once you figure out a format, it's just a matter of putting things in the right place. So I really don't care that it actually reads/writes the format correctly. What anyone should be really interested in is how the program was made for the *users*

The programmer typically has no interest in the game itself unless that's what her intent was in the first place. But there will definitely be a decent audience that will be using it. It doesn't matter whether your tool can crack the most complex formats; as a user, I only care whether I can do the stuff I want to do, and with ease. Any less and I would probably call it a crappy program simply because I can't use it. How superficial is that?

A lot of modding tools I've come across are simply too hard to use.

Sometimes it's just unintuitive (maybe because I'm a windows user?)
Sometimes it's just awkward.
Sometimes it's just not flexible at all (poor design on the coder's part, oh well)

Of course I realize that creating a really nice UI is a challenge on its own.

As an extension, perhaps we should be moving towards a more standardized modding UI?
Is something like that even possible in the first place? Every game is different. Different script formats, different model formats, graphics, etc.

But then again, they're all just resources. An archive is just an archive. Maybe structured differently, but it's still an archive. You put stuff in, get stuff out.

A model might store a million things, or it might just store one or two. Capturing this level of information would not be possible with a single, rigid interface, but if you abstract away those details you can get a probably get a nice extensible interface to work with.

Anyone can write a program and a way to interact with the program (maybe just one of those black windows that only take text commands or a rough window with some buttons here and there), but it takes a lot of skill to get a decent interface that just screams intuitive.

Like even functionality for drag-and-drop opening files should be pretty standard but many, many tools require you to push all sorts of button and menu commands.

Good modding tool its a tool can give you all the power to edit a game fully, but mooding need be categorized in something areas, if you are talking abouth a game i can talk abouth lots of games, i have experience moding something games like Mu Online and Ran Online, Btw i moded characters in Dragon Ball Special Forces game.

I take by reference Mu Online coz i have tool to mod all the thinks i need to mood, do this i need 2 Tools Only, MU ONLINE PENTIUM TOOLS an MU WORLD EDITOR.

Mod a game need be categorized in something areas, you need see first wath you want to mood.
Interface for users like you and me are only the posibilty of edited 3D Models and Textures, btw Skills in game are dificulty, do this you need also coder training.

MU ONLINE PENTIUM TOOLS
Made by the only man i see in years can made a conversor from smd to bmd format, .bmd format its compresed format, this can contain animations and mesh. and its very easy to use.

MU WORLD EDITOR
I personally love this tool, with this you can put any object you want in one map and edith all you want on this, can put animated objects brigthnes areas, terrain, tiles, height of terrain, etc etc, and u can enter in game and test the thinks you made.

MU ONLINE PENTIUM TOOLS ITS FULLY PROTECTED BY HARDWARE KEY LOCKED.
MU WORLD EDITOR 3.0 ITS CRACKED TOOL I CAN GIVE YOU IF YOU OR ANY ARE INTERESTED.
Only send a pm and also i can give a guide fully via teamview.

A tool may allow you to edit everything there is for a particular game, but it might be too hard to use, or "could be better"

What makes those tools nice to use?

Good graphic interface, Easy to use, Efective to edith all u need in game.

This for me its a good modding tool.

What makes a good modding tool is a "GO" button that when you press it, it reads your mind and does everything for you, and makes you toast.
Well that's what people expect it to do anyway.

The most important thing with a modding tool is how easy it is to improve it and change what it does.
You don't need the tool to do everything, it's better to have 2 tools than a single overcomplicated one.
Second is built in instructions, alt text is always overlooked as a simple method of explaining what things do.
The user interface just needs to be neat, easy on the eye, alot of unaligned text boxes looks ugly, is hard to interpret and awkward to navigate.

You could standardize some parts of modding tools, think you would need a built in form creator that loads it's layout from an archive, you could even have a basic form editor so uses can change what they edit or make new one to share.
You wouldn't need 3D or animation editors though, there are better tools for that, conversion yes, model editing no. Most things you can edit simply like changing textures and materials can be done with text boxes. Sometimes you do need to show people what they are doing so graphics panels will be needed, they don't need to be in the main window though, it's quite easy to bring up another.

I would like to see a 3D loader that can load unknown file structures using a basic scripting language, say give it offset, data size and skip values for vertex information. Also like to see a proggy that can take a per vertex animation and provide an approximation to the bones, but that's way complicated.

It might be better to ask people to vote for the best and worst modding tool they have used (mines going to be in with the worst).

Ok so I recently downloaded a GUI tool for unpacking/repacking Loong's resource archives.
http://www.progamercity.net/game-files/ ... actor.html

While it displayed all of the files in a nice directory structure, there were a couple issues I had while using it.

1: It was GUI only. Ok, maybe not that big of an issue for others, but I prefer command-line for certain tasks.

2: Extraction path. This was your standard windows "which folder would you like to save this to?" and it presented a really ugly dialog that displayed only the folders, and didn't have any support for adding a new folder. Unless everything I did was on the desktop or something not too far from the root drive, it's a quite pain.

Any sort of saving should allow me to just quickly specify the path directly without having to browse through my directory list (I don't have complex ones but I still don't want to click 5-6 times).

I think that's one of the biggest problems I've had with a lot of GUI tools; some people just use standard open/save dialogs but they use the really ugly one that doesn't let you enter a path..

Start talk abouth bussines, if u can made a mod tool for this game http://mmohuts.com/review/loong you can made your hown private server, i can only help with moding in 2D and 3D interface to made good changues and looks not like the original, but this can take a Year Maybe.

Maybe email the guy and ask for the source or an update, don't think dialog boxes can be changed that much with resource hacker.
Never used that particular dialog, standard open/save dialog is really all you need, though saving the current directory with the program settings on exit is always a nice thing to do.

Google image search for 'worst gui' is pretty funny.
You know sometimes we do it for a laugh, an error console that just said 'ooooops' is always funny.
An 'errmmm?', 'I know', or 'do it later' button would be funny, how about a 'wait' button that uses the system timer?