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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.

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> 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.

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.

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