First of all I have no idea where to place this.
Its discussing scenes but also editors.
Move if its in the wrong place please.

Now to the suggestion.
Ive noticed that the editors for the game don't allow players to fully mod the game.

All editors
-Creation of .rte files.
-Sprite creation or editing.
-Scans .rte files for related parts.
-Allows players to change the name of the parts in game, also changing any related .ini or lua files so no glitch's or crash's happen.

Actor editor
(feature ideas)
-Works exactly like gib editor, but requires built actors to need a head,at-least 1 arm "if its not a crab", at-least 1 leg "unless its a crab that needs 4"
-Has sub menus which change important values, and also has descriptions on the values.
-Test mode loads small map with sand,snow,dirt,ladders, and a jet-pack range.
-Test mode for crafts loads a tall map with a few vanilla actors, to test lifting capability.

Scene editor
This editor is good right now but should be improved.
(Ideas)
-Allows you add mission type items into the game without hassle.
-Map sprite editing.
-When done editing scene allows you to place the location,shows black X's at points where a scene is already placed and shows a red X at the place you'll be saving the current scene.

Weapon/Tool/Bomb editor
(Feature ideas)
-Allows players to select what type of item they are creating.
-Weapon editing has a value menu for quick editing.
-Tool editing has type of tool sub menu's supporting diggers,sprayers,etc....
-Bomb editor allows quick editing using basic prebuilt bombs. incendiary,cluster,fire,gas.

I don't think I left anything out, if i did i think you guys can improvise.

Hope to see better editors soon.

Well this stipulation right here makes the entire thing impossible.

As far as the rest goes, good luck finding someone dedicated enough, that's a lot of work.

Its not impossible its just really hard. Although i trust somebody can get this done. It would be one of the greatest things that make modding EASY!!!!!

Man, I'm 12 and I learned to mod just fine. It does not really matter if its hard. You just need time to learn it.

Instead of giving out close to impossible ideas about how to make modding easy, what about you go make something
in CC? Just experiment with .ini and eventually you will get it. Have fun.

Actually Im doing pretty well with the .ini and .lua files. Its just I hate to have to reload cc every time I test something and change some values.

Take off some mods then. I barely have more than 4 mods at a time, even when testing.

Make a dummy actor file, put all your code you want to fiddle with in it. Load the actor editor and the dummy actor. There's a button there for "reload actor ini" or somesuch. All the code, not just for the actor, will be reloaded and you can try it out in skirmish or w/e.

You mean i just reload and it reloads for the entire game?
Meaning Can i used things changed during the game and it will work outside the editor?

It only reloads the .ini that the actor's in.

Or any .ini referenced within that actor's code.
Which is why you add those lines in.

But does it let you leave the editor without leaving the game and play a skirmish with the newly reloaded data?

Yes, yes they do. So for example if you're testing a gun, which is in gun.ini, and you add a copyof dummy in gun.ini before you start the game, every time you modify the gun, you can reload it by going to actor viewer and looking for the copyof dummy and reloading that.
For .lua it's different though. It involves you pressing the tilde (~) key and entering this on the console:



And start up an activity. .lua don't run in actor viewer.
It's very simple, and if you got that Freetime activity it's even a lot easier.

As much as having some of those features would be nice, I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon. Part of the reason that modding is done through human-readable INI files is that you don't need a complicated editor, since you can just edit the files yourself. Some documentation would be nice to explain what exactly you're editing, though, and hopefully that'll happen one day.
The other issue is that mods can get complicated, fast. Most mods have copies of objects all over the place, or objects defined within objects (sometimes defined within another object). How would you visually represent that? Again, it's possible, but quite difficult to get something easy to use, and the end result would be an editor so complicated that you'd have to follow a guide to learn how to use it, which sort of defeats the point of making it easier to use.

As game developer i am quite familiar with the fact that just because it sounds grand that the results wil be able to measure up to the time and effort put in,as last bannana pointd out. So if an editor should be imprvd or added i would say finishing up the scene editor, you all knw what im talkng about and making a mision editor should be worth it. Mission making seems to be high class reservd 4 those who dare work 4 hours on lua, the problem i have with ths is that so much time needs to go into making that work that little efort can posibly be put in to improve general impresion. Leaving most misions bleak wistle many long hours were dedicated to it.

English is normally written like this, translated for anyone who didn't catch that.