Updating mods for myself. How much complicated could be?

[JuanM960]

Hi there, to be honest I really frustrate with the amount of dead or outdated mods out there (specially in a well know site), so I was thinking that how much complicated could be to update, patch, fix those mods by myself. I have experience with C#, so I think this could be a good reason to improve my coding skills.

I don't have any intention to get credit or rub in the face of the mod author for do their job (assuming that the mod author is not updating for laziness), it just for personal use.

Cheers.-

PD: I don't think it is necessary to clarify, but of course, I will ask for permission to the original modder before.

 

[Bloc]

The question is a bit too vague, the short answer is: Depends on the mod and mod owner. ( You can mention about the nexusmods by the way, it's not illegal. )
The long answer is: Not super hard - especially if you know why it's failing. There are usually three types of crashes happening in the mods.
1 - Some function signature is changed and it's not compatible with the game version ( Example, they changed TextObject constructor and suddenly all mods that are using it started to fail overnight ) This is fairly easy to fix. VS already tells you that this signature/usage won't gonna work and won't build - so you can check how TW used that method and change it. This type of errors usually take half an hour or so to fix.
2 - Mod is changing something in the UI XML files. Something on old XML file is not used anymore or not compatible with game's XML reader node. Again, depends on the mod but usually mods are replacing already existing GUI elements/screens so checking them side by side with your current native version should give you an idea.
3 - Mod is using Harmony patch or reflection and something changed in that patched method. This is usually harder to spot, especially if the mod has lots of patched methods in it. To check what has changed, you need to go deep down of the decompiler of gameplay code and fix it. Depending on the issue, this can be unfixable as well.
Also, you need to make sure that mod isn't obfuscated. Then it's really hard for you to understand what is failing and how it works.