From my experience of the 4x games Space Empires III and IV and its excellent option to modify technologies, ships and buildings, I learned that modding is super. Does SiS have a modding possibilty? If yes, how is it implemented?

MOO2 was the best 4x game for me, my alltime favorite. But unfortunately it was not possible to mod anything. (at least not for me without programming skills) That was one of its few weaknesses and limited its replay value, because one had to trust the balancing of the designers. Eg. I can remember that I almost never used fighters in my ships because they used up too much space and were pretty weak. With a modding possibility fighters could have been adapted to be more in use.

Modding support is a feature I've been keeping in mind since the early days of the game's design.

Nearly all the game logic is implemented using a Lua variant -- and I'm hopeful that even relatively casual modders will find tweaking a lot of the game rules relatively straightforward.

That said, there's not currently anything like *documentation* that could explain to aspiring modders just how to navigate the massive piles of lua scripts in their install directory. And, at this point, I don't have much time to put together those sorts of walk-throughs. Eventually, I'd like to get a modder's wiki up. But, with so many critical things still to get done, I'm not sure when that may happen.

sounds cool. Do you intend (in maybe a future addon) to introduce a easy to use editor for weapons, ship systems, buildings and techs?

Because most of the data is in lua code rather than something like an XML database, creating an editor might be challenging.

Arioch wrote:Because most of the data is in lua code rather than something like an XML database, creating an editor might be challenging.

Yeah, our "tool chains" are a bit different than those you'd find in a larger game development project. Basically, we've been getting by with interactive Lua coding and a few simple plugins for Visual Studio and Photoshop. I'd be happy to release said plugins to any interested modders, but, again, the trick is finding the time to document them.

This sounds cool. I am bad with coding because never learnt and need to learn some to be modder/developper. Currently I am working on Kohan2 modding and some other "for me" harder games to try understand them but mostly I try specialize myself as designer. (2d/3d modelling).

Your games interest me too because I like this game type and I am also like space-things.