Excuse my bad english ... it's not natural to me and I'm very tired ...

From what I've heard so far, and my smattering of knowledge of the process of making a game, Freelancer has been built to be extremely "moddable"...

The very fact that large scale changes can be made to the game through the ini files proves this I think... so little of this game is hard coded (this is a VERY GOOD THING and more companies should do it.. Kudos to DA for doing it right!) and that has to be for a reason... Good things will happen with Freelancer, I can almost guarrantee that! Either from DA themselves in the guise of patches and Add on packs, or through an official SDK release.

I just don't see why the game would have such an open architecture if that wasn't the plan.. the majority of games contain a lot of "hard coded" values that restrict the scope for engine adjustments without rewriting large chunks of the actual code, which is very hard for most modders to do as it requires some pretty indepth knowledge. The games that have had the most successful modifications have limited hardcoded values to a bare minimum, in order to make the basic game engine as malleable as possible. (EG you can make a racing game out of Quake!)

Cheers

Moog

(For those that care, I work in the Games Industry, so I do have an idea of how games get made)

I really wish I am totally wrong about that, but, an engine could be heavily moddable to allow a serie of releases/pack/addon, at the lowest cost for the company (hence the maximum profit). It could fit the MS way of thinking, but it would destroy the spirit of a true community. I really hope DA will, at least, support us with tutorial or documentations. If correctly done, this could give a incredible period of life to the game. A SDK can even double this period...

DA, please... Support us as we are ready to support you !

@Moog: Read a little here in the Editing Forum and you will see that there are way too much hardcoded values ... even some that appear in the ini files are hardcoded, at least they don't change if you change the ini files ... scanner range, for example ... other things seem to be totaly hardcoded ... like the random mission types ... so, please read before you write, or even better, try out to do something on your own ... you'll soon see that freelancer has some basic modding capabilities, but it's far from the id engines ...