Mmmmm. Modding.

So how is the impact to the budget for the creation of modding tools going to impact the final product?  I am all for increasing the accessibility of Modding tools (as I myself am not the best coder in the world), but I would hate for the retail version of the game to be negatively impacted.

Ah, that's good to hear. I didn't realize your other post on object oriented modding heralded a reallocation of the budget, but I can see that now. Thanks for this.

Months ago, there was talk of shipping without the tools. Is that still the case?

How technical will the desired modding tools make modding SCO?  

I can understand why there are going to be plenty of tools. You need a tool to:

- Import/create the ships from <<Insert favourite sci fi here>>
- Code the weapons your new race is going to need
- Script dialogue tree for when you encounter said new race
- Create unique Super Melee maps when your reaching the end of the story
- Generate the galaxy map and be able to tweek it by seeding various treats and tidbits across the galaxy.
- and so on and so forth.

The easiest game I have ever modded was Gratuitous Space Battles.  All aspects of the game was controlled by ini files which fed into the game. The downside was you were restricted to what the game came bundle with.  If you wanted to introduce a new mechanic were out of luck.

On the other side of the coin, I spent plenty of time modding Dungeon Siege making a huge range of "weapons /spells" through the script (Skrit). While Skrit was extremely powerful it had a much steeper learning curve.

I hope the modding will allow for changing the game mechanics to some degree as well. Most of the modding I have done is in Mount & Blade/Warband. While in concept it is easy to mod in, some of it is poorly organized which adds tedium to figuring out where something went wrong, but I digress. I was able to change some game mechanics around, albeit not the neatest, to add more ways to fire projectiles.

Will there be scripting of some sort that the game runs partially on, i.e. Mount & Blade, or will it just be resources that the game will load in?

Well it seems like an ambitious task

at least you guys are trying!

;D we don't see that in many recent games

I wonder with the potential modding capabilities being so ambitious, whether this means that someone might one day be able to recreate all of Star Control II within SC: Origins?

That would be pretty neat to see. heh

This is one of the things I've been most curious about: the community is inevitably going to spawn multiple fan interpretations of classic lore and I'm certain that remake attempts of the original will, for better or worse, be a dime a dozen. If ten people make a total conversion of SC2 in the new engine, who decides the de facto standard among multiple similar mods? Community voting? Will Stardock promote certain fan-generated content if it meets a threshold of quality like Blizzard does on Battle.net or Valve does on Steam Workshop, or will the community be more self-governing and curated by the users alone? I'd imagine something will separate the wheat from the chaff, just don't know what form it will take.

Taking this line of thought further, will multiple users be able to collaborate on a single mod initiative? Using the obvious example of UQM, it involved a lot more than just one person, so assuming a team wants to tackle a big campaign style project, how will they work together most effectively to combine skills and assets into a single mod?

I know it's still early to expect firm answers but I've implored the developers to address these broader questions for how the modding community will be structured in the past and am still looking forward to hearing something more about it.

The new object oriented stuff you're working on in addition to these modding tools I hope will allow the community to build upon the foundation of the game

I was actually wondering (maybe I missed it somewhere) if it would be steam workshop driven. I feel like that's the best way to do it these days.

I really like the way the Steam Workshop functions. Makes a good centralized location for mods and easy to install. The nexus is also good, but I think more people would use steam.