Thank you Hyperion for the most excellent level of hype I'm glad you're as excited about the possibilities as me. As others have already said, yes to everything you said (...except the first thing. I think LReid may take objection to that ;V). You can load whatever files you like, images can be loaded very easily the engine's texture API, models can be loaded as .objs thanks to Adam's obj loader, etc etc. If you have data that isn't natively supported by the engine, of course you can always just use the raw file access APIs to read it yourself if you understand the file format (the engine file API has convenient functions for reading binary fields single-datatype-at-a-time). Virtually anything is possible depending on how much effort you're willing to put in, and as usual, the good news is that we've already tried to make everything as easy as possible If you want to define manual systems, generator types, unique planets, space elevators, Dyson spheres, etc. etc. it is all just a matter of finding the right place to inject the right piece of code using your mod.
LindseyReid wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:35 pmBeta will be moddable, but we will not integrate user mods into 1.0. MyNameWuzTaken & Cornflakes, please forgive me X0
Just wanted to re-iterate and elaborate on this. We will use the beta as an opportunity to test everything, including the mod system, HOWEVER (and I have said this before), beta modders must operate with the understanding that the 1.0 release modding API is NOT guaranteed to be (and almost certainly will not be) backwards-compatible with beta mods. After release, I will make every effort to ensure that subsequent versions break no or as few mods as possible. Again, the understanding for beta will be "give modding a thorough test-drive, but don't spend ALL your energy making beta mods, because we still want you to mod at release!" This will be made abundantly clear to modders at beta time.
Thank you Flat, your approval of high-level decisions always bring me some comfort Appreciate the feedback. It is going to be very fun indeed
Victor Tombs wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2017 8:49 amI've just returned from a few days away from my reclusive surroundings to find you had posted a dev log, Josh. By far my favourite part of this post was "Side-Soliloquy: Why So Much Concern for Moddability?" The hidden part was a joy to read!
Thanks for some inspiring stuff!
Excellent! Happy to hear from you Victor, I'm glad you've not given up on me delivering that Freelancer 2 despite so many gratuitous technical ramblings Now that I think of it, I'm going to add "Freelancer Universe for LT" mod to my mental list of 'most-anticipated future mods'...it would be very refreshing to return to Planet Manhattan to do something other than drop off cardamine and alien artifacts...