I'm very impressed with all the work that's being done here. Before I'd heard of this place, I was wondering if FFVII, VIII, and games from their generation were always doomed to look the way they were barring a full-blown remake. I'm very glad that there are so many projects being worked on, but unfortunately, nearly all of it seems very much out of my reach because I don't know programming.
I consider myself very well-acquainted with computers. I was working on their innards when I was three, I helped my dad install some early OCR cards when I was four, and am now hard at work passing my A+ and Net+ certs. But the combined facts that I kept myself busy with afterschool activities, there were no programming classes at my high school, and that I have little talent at seriously teaching myself anything have resulted in me not knowing a lick of C, Java or even Basic.
I tried to resolve this with CS I (Java) my first semester freshman year. Unfortunately, that was not a good semester for me. Many bad things ended up going on at once and I had to drop CS early on. Second semester provided its own unique, soul-searching challenges that prevented me from trying it again.
Now I'm a rising sophomore, and I'm going to give CS I a second shot. Assuming I have a strong enough interest and talent in it (my interest in computers may not extend to programming, after all), I hope to increase and hone my knowledge within the next year so that I can start to code something useful.
Now (finally) for the point of my post: How did you all learn the skills you did in order to successfully mod these games? What did you learn, and from whom? How much of your own time did you put into it, and how much work did it take to actively make a change to the game? I'm basically trying to see how everyone got to the spots they did, so I have some idea of what's involved.