:)
A friend of mine is playing an awesome mod for medieval (Darthmod) and I thought that it's time to ask the community on how people can do that, I mean in a technical sense, to mod 'closed source' games. Is it reverse engineering? Of course, it depends on the game and some are made for being modded, but come on, it's like so many years that we spent in the crazy world of mods, and I never stumbled on a satisfying explanation on how someone who is modding starts to hook into the engine? I mean, there are mods out there, that are clearly inhumane and fr*ckn genius and I have no idea how they did that.
It depends how the game is made. Sometimes a game just blindly checks for some resources and you just replace or add stuff to that directory. Sometimes a library can just be decompressed/decompile to normal files and some games like TES just provide the working ground to mod a game.
But usually a big mod just gets made by some people coming together with a idea that fires up there passion. It's just how far you want to go to change something.
Also some games just have the luck of a developer taking his time to create a tool. Like Boris Voronstov ( http://enbdev.com/ ) that create the ENB series so that everyone can modify there games for better look and add new looks very easy or people from mod the sims that create tools so other people can start modding.( https://www.modthesims.info/ )
It just a form of hacking and only thing that holding you back is that you don't know how long it will take to get there and that you will give up before you start wasting time your own time.
(I don't own Medieval so i cant check the files)
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in order to learn more, you could take a look on the excellent Elder Scrolls modkits, the witcher 2 and 3 modkits. These games had modkits for the games rekeased pretty early on. just extract your game files and take a look at them.
Another interesting tool is me3explorer, which is basically modkit for mass effect 1-3 created by a bunch of enthusiasts.
Back in the day game mods were just text files to edit like a config file. Then the textures and models were right there for you to modify and re-convert back to the game's format. Harder games just put all that stuff into the executable itself to prevent tampering but that really didn't stop everybody. Also putting images and models it in basically an archive format didn't stop it either.