It's been done with the beta, not the final game. I wanna see'em in the final!

Nice! But will there be some kind of editor to create/edit abilities and such or only textfiles to edit in notepad?

If there will be no "official" Editor(s) for .entity files I may create my own.

Try downloading the tools in this very thread!

Sure there are. Crimson Editor is the best one, as are Notepad++ and some others. Saying there needs to be an "official" text editor is silly.

ahahah oh wow

EaW's community was ruined by people who thought they could "code" by changing a couple weapons stats, let's not let that happen here

You'd be surprised. The ones who thought they could code diluted the community to the point where there was a bunch of vaporware mods and then decided to shit-talk anyone who disagreed with them about what could be done with the xmls. It was really a bad situation and only a couple mods survived intact. There's no reason .entity editing needs to be any simpler, I've made a thread for minimod requests so if someone wants something simple done and doesn't want to do it themselves they can simply ask there.

hey SD,
checked out the mod tools last night and the tutorial is great as is the whole package. so glad you guys took the time out for us. but i have small issue:

WHY DIDN'T YOU POST IN HUGE LETTERS ON THE MAIN SITE HOMEPAGE THAT THESE TOOLS WERE OUT?

i mean come on! i lost a whole 3hrs or modding time because of that . but seriously you guys are doing great work and i hope to see some more tools and options to mod built into future patches....which i already know they will be because you guys are awesome!

cheers

I'll throw in my hat for a complete listing of ActionTypes and such - I don't need a fancy GUI editor to connect the dots. It'd be faster in some ways, but doing the nitty gritty yourself always gives you more knowledge and experience on how things really work

Here here for the ActionTypes and other such constants!! I'd personally rather have a complete PDF saying how it all works than the tools that do it for me. We can build those.

And Binksy - that piece is explained in the PDF, but I'll still place it here. The IDS files you are talking about are not like the other entity files we all know and love. They are refering to a string tag that is in your english language file (which is plain txt and not binary). Inside you can modify the individual strings or add your own with their own individual IDS. Just make sure that if you add any to change the string count near the beginning of the file and that each ID is unique. You will need to copy the entire strings folder to your Mod directory before doing this though so you don't mess with your vanilla copy of the game.

Has anyone found out how to fix the starting location so that it isnt random, so "Player-0" in the text file corresponds to a single player?

Its a command line utility -- just use a dos window (you can open one using "CMD" in the run dialog box) to run it.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll need to get help from someone else.

Well, I have heard great things about blender. It is free. Only thing I personally dont like about it is the horrid UI but others seem to like it.

There is also XSI Mod tool which is a free version of XSI. Havent tried much of it, but it looks to be a great program.

The commercial products are VERY expensive so it might be better to get one of the free ones if you are only going to do a few models.