Yeah but it still started of as a hobbiest mod and thats just the point I was trying to make, mods can still be a decent way of getting into game dev. And a lot of tripple A studios like Epic, Crytek, Valve and others give you a plus for knowing there tools and pipeline.
It also teaches you to deal with a massive codebase and modifieing it, it is quite a bit different working on your won home project then working in a massive codebase.[/QUOTE]

When it gets down to it, modding is just a special case of coding for a 3rd party game engine. The only real difference is that modding reuses alot more than when you start with a 3rd party engine. In a way, modding is a smarter approach if your game fits within its context, as you -should- spend less time tweaking the engine than creating your variation. Of course, there are exceptions to everything, like making $ off of your mod may be difficult or impossible if you dont own the rights to do so (i.e., one usually mods for fun or prestige and not for profit).

Modding vs actual game and engine programming. I think it's a question of immediate scale you are exposing yourself to.

With modding: you can almost immediately jump into a finished engine/game and tweak stuff around and learn within that framework. Actual learning? might occur wth a decent framework to toy around in.

Game making: you cannot jump into this and write the next quake. You will more than likely be best off making small flash games or hell, dos/shell prompt text games to start with.

Modding is fine, but does it really give you the tools to build your own game? yes and no, you may be able to change the gamecode completely to your own game, but if I recall most licenses fr modding, your game is not something you can sell standalone, hell in most cases, something you can't charge any money for at all. In most cases, modding means your exposure to the public will be limited to the subset that owns the underlying game.

In this day and age where you can sell small games, VERY small SIMPLE games over the internet fr $1 (provided people like it enough), I see less reason to want to start game programming by throwing months into editing a commercial game engine's scripts/moddable source than ever. When you have such a big engine around, you will tend to want to make a big Game mod and that will take time. In the end, is the learning enough of a reward for your time?

Who knows, in that same time frame you may have been able to make the next angry birds super simple 2d flash game and sold 10,000 copies on itunes...(could happen...)
and 2-3 other small predecessor games.

One of the best pieces of advice I've read is that your first game will suck, probably your second and third too. Each game you make will improve your skill set and help you hone in on being able to make that really great game tooling around in the back of your head. Why waste all that time making ONE big MOD that barely changes the boundaries of the game the engine was built for.