[link590o]

It's something I've always been curious about. I've seen a few games where someone has written a modification for it so that it changes certain graphical elements of the game. For instance, making things have special lighting effects.

Just so that you have a more exact idea of what I'm trying to learn how to do, I am playing a game called Stronghold. I'm not sure how familiar you are with it, so here's a brief overview. It's a medieval real-time-strategy game. Build a castle, get a food and gold economy going, build an army, and either attack or defend kind of thing. The textures they used however for things like mountains, grasslands, swamps, or basic water look bland. I was essentially wondering if perhaps I could edit the textures to make them look more realistic. If this means writing in certain bits of code, or taking bits of texture code from another game or what have you, I would like to learn. It'd be great if I could modify this game so it looked slightly better.

This is likely very involved technically, so I also need to know if I need a certain code editor, or a compiler, or something that will allow me to sort through and edit the code. I was wondering if anyone had any clue how to write a mod that edits textures. Or failing that, does anyone know of where I could learn this type of coding?