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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

I still think he should just allow custom assets to be used. He has a dedicated fanbase. Dedicated fanbases will go out of their way to create and improve content if given the chance. Just look at games like dwarf fortress and minecraft. I don't know much about his games, but it seems like, especially with a kickstarter backed project, allowing custom assets would be the best of both worlds. He could release his game with its 'cheap bastard art' and fans would step in to make their own art. Which might help actually get him some new fans without any extra cost. Some people just like to customize things because they can.

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I like that idea. But of course developing and marketing that capability would take time, and so would be another kind of risk (albeit one that could pay dividends for all future games).

It wouldn't take much. Just having the assets loaded at runtime instead of being hardcoded should be enough to get some people started. Though, I have no idea how his engines work, this may not be feasible but it seems like he could do a minimum of something, offer no support and still get some benefit.

The original Exile games had tilesets that just loaded from .bmp files, so he's done it before.

I remember making little Exile "fangames" in Clickteam's The Games Factory as a kid using those assets.

> It wouldn't take much. Just having the assets loaded at runtime instead of being hardcoded should be enough to get some people started.

I'm not familiar with Jeff's code, but I do work in game development, and something like this would likely be a huge undertaking, and would affect pretty much every aspect of the game.

Optimisation #0 for loading times is compress a gigantic pile of stuff into a giant binary blob, and index it at runtime. Undoing that to support custom content would be a huge time investment on any of the games I've worked on.

Anything that Special K mod works with will let you replace a texture after it's loaded, even with no developer support.

Right, but replacing textures at the d3d level doesn’t really constitute a game supporting user content.

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