I am still evaluating Esenthel, which I really like very much...

I am a little confused about how to implement a moddable game. From what I see EE2 (differently from EE1) loads meshes using UID and not asset name, but I might be wrong.

Ideally I would like the user to be able create a new game object using EE , say an aircraft, and every user should be able to use it in the game (basically that's what modding is about)

Apart from loading a serialized mesh, I do not need scripting capabilities, only XML file reading which already there.

I am really confused about the workflow to do that, I am pretty sure the answer is there but maybe some expert could point me in the right direction...

thanks
Fred

Hmm not sure if you really can do it without the person modding to own a copy of EE2.0 themselves.

Thanks Scarlet,

I don't know if this Greg reply is relevant for modding using the editor itself, actually they are not creating a new game but adding content to an exising one, in EE 1 you has the mesh importer, probably it was easier to ask...

http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...p?tid=5804

You wouldn't be able to use the editor to create a truly moddable game. As Scarlet said, the end user would need their own license of the editor. Even then, there isn't any way to get assets out of the editor for external use, to load by filename for example. The end user would probably need your original project files in order to include their own assets and compile, which obviously you wouldn't do.

To create a truly moddable game, you'll want to use Visual Studio to program your game, optionally with pluggable DLL's. If you did need scripting, then you would look into integrating a scripting language such as LUA (you can find some posts on the forum about this). Esenthel Script is not a scripting language. It is C++ with a few tweaks and can't really be used by your end user to mod your game.

You'll also need to create your own tools for converting/creating assets (i.e. meshes, skeletons, textures, materials and such) into the formats EE supports, so you can work with them as filenames (rather than UID's). This will then provide a workflow that both you and the end user can work with to mod the game. EE 1.0 actually has all these tools, but unfortunately you cannot get EE 1.0 anymore, which is why you will need to create your own set of tools. Unless EE 2.0 has tools added to it in the future that allows this.

Thank you Fatcoder
Maybe Greg can think about allowing the use of ee1 tools for modding, I think also artists cooperating in a project will not need to have the full editor but a simple tool for creating meshes , materials that then the developer could put in game either through the editor or at runtime.

I remember having seen a project for Ee1 binding Lua to the engine, in case anyone needs it I can dig my files.

If you want people to be able to do a full mod-new models, levels, texture, code, etc, fatcoder is absolutely right. If you want to allow the player to do some basic XML scripting and playing with existing art assets, 2.0(and 1.0 as well) will work fine as is.
It would be nice, though. to see Esenthel expose some asset import and conversion classes in 2.0 for easier access to more advanced modding.