I want to import a game that’s already been built into unity so I can edit the files and lighting to make a mod for said game.
however despite searching youtube
and google
i could not find a thing
please tell me or give step by step instructions on how to do it
That’s not possible. You can only open the project if you have the original project files.
what kdgalla said. games built in unity are not the same thing as unity projects that can be opened in the editor.
ah
well is there like some file converter or somthing?? if not then oh well
Nope. Its first use would be to hack popular games and reskin them. If mods were allowed then ask the game developer to allow you to access those tools. If not then you wanting to find such tools is suspect and you are in the wrong place to seek them. These folks make their living developing.
Yes, there are programs that can assist with extracting resources like the code, but I’m not going to point you in their direction for the simple fact that if the developers don’t make tools available for modding chances are you don’t have permission from them to do it. Without permission you can get into legal trouble.
Well no, the whole point is to prevent people from doing exactly what you want to do, get access to a game’s assets and source code. The source code and assets are owned by the company who made the game, and spent a lot of money creating them, why would you get to easily import their stuff into your own project?
I wish modding was viewed more like it was in the old days. Back in the 90s, I’d modded Doom, etc. and then in 1999 I started modding a game that wasn’t made to be modded (Fly!). I’d picked it up on a whim and started changing clouds and graphics, etc. and posted the mods online. My mods caught the developer’s (TRI) attention, and they included them in the follow-up special retail version of the game (Fly! 2K).
The mods were such a hit that at TRI’s request, my wife and I signed a contract to work with them on the sequel (Fly! II), which gave us enough money for me to quit my job at a mainstream game studio so we could start our own game company. If it hadn’t been for me screwing around with things I “wasn’t supposed to” and the developers being cool about it, I never would have been able to start this whole indie career off.
All of the games we’ve released are moddable in some way, either with custom tools or otherwise, and I always try to encourage anyone who wants to to make whatever they want for them. I think it’s an important skill to learn how to dig in deeper and figure sh!t out. The modern day idea of “don’t touch this!!!” kind of bugs me, to be honest.
Nowadays if you even fart in the direction of game source and assets you dont own, you go directly to jail 
Joking ofcourse, but surprising how different these things are viewed now!
You can do the same thing today, in case of unity game it is possible to even alter gameplay with ease.
It is also possible to rip the resources too, just not reconstruct the project.
However, back in the day, people were less likely to try to steal the codebase and resell it.
Thats true, before easily accessible and free commericial game engines like unity and unreal (unreal after it went publically available, not the old way of doing things) it was waaaay less likely to happen.
Now anyone and their dog can get access to the tools to reconstruct your game, if they want to and have the know-how.
That’s true, but I also believe that as a society we now focus too much on “security” and not enough on “freedom”. And I think that leads to stress and distrust and a confining of creativity and sharing and freedom, all because someone somewhere might do something bad.
If someone takes one of our games and straight up starts selling it elsewhere, then that may affect our business and if so then that’s where the law can help us. There’s no sense in me worrying about it ahead of time. I’ll deal with it if/when it happens. That just makes me stressed out and less creative, more likely to spend time on preventing theft than on encouraging fun and creativity.
Games are bigger now. Is it hard to make them moddable?
And in many cases, certain assets aren’t owned by the company who made the game, and they couldn’t legally redistribute them outside of a finished product even if they wanted to. How many games have made all of their own SFX?
That’s a huge topic, and discussing it would require more swearwords and curses than this board allows.
But yes. Once upon a time some dude founded a movie studio, and the movie studio kept increasing legal protection range for copyrights through the power of lobbying… which eventually led to overbureaucratization of anything that touches intellectual property.
If my memory serves me right, originally duration of copyright protection was 30 years, after which point it could be remixed and adapted into different work.
By the way, the name of the dude was Walt Disney.
I think so, yes. Games aren’t as “system-based” anymore (particularly in the AAA space), which makes them in many ways much harder to mod and do anything interesting with.
Therein lies the rub.
Hah! Ain’t that the truth.
I think there’s also a factor that they don’t want you to be able to mod your textures because then you’d have no need to buy them from the in-game store for $1.00 a pop.
Tools exist to build Unity projects from built Unity games, but the output project often has a lot of issue. You would need to go through and repair broken code, YAML etc before you get anything usable. It’s quite a advanced thing to do that requires a decent lower-level understanding of how Unity works.
As I trudge into old codgerhood, and being a hyper-creative with little regard for the money ethos which ebbed and flowed while I focused on output for much of my life, I have learned two things sinking into my skull. I understand what my WW2 vet father meant when he told me from the time I can remember that I was too smart for my own good. And second. It’s all just business. Nobody really gives a damn. Nobody is gonna pat me on the back for those ethics and I will still have bills to pay.
Indeed.