Programming desktop tools and stuff

[Hi P]

This topic completely baffles me, there are people out there programming all sort of tools, the most common that comes to my mind are the ones for modding games, that somehow extract, decrypt, replace files, etc

 

How do people learn to do such things in the system? what knowledge is required to do so?

(I'm not specifically talking about modding games, that's just a very common example)

 

Because I highly doubt said knowledge has nothing to do with being, for example, a Full stack developer or something like that (correct me if I'm wrong)

 

Thank you

 

[DevBlox]

Not hard at all. You open files, read them,  decrypt/unmarshal/deserielize as needed, and you can use the data in your program. You do whatever operations you need, and serialize/encrypt/marshal it and write back to a file. Games use archives usually, that you can read and extract data from, just like game engines do. Rarely anyone bothers coming up with their formats anyway, sometimes you can just open them with an archive program outright and take what you want. Front end is just another API, like Windows Forms for example. You put it all together and you have a tool.

 

If you have some sort of specific archive, that developers rolled on their own, you figure out how it's put together, write a decoder, and just use it in your tool.

 

You move and copy files around the same way as you do in the terminal, except that you use API/syscall counterparts.