antti wrote:The current rules were made with reverse engineering -style modding in mind and to limit people from spreading our source code around and such. And those rules are likely to stay in place regarding reverse engineering in the future too but since modding and level editing "the official way" will be technically a little different, we can probably apply different rules there.
We'll take a closer look at the guidelines and terms of use closer to the editor's release and I don't think there's any reason to panic yet: we simply haven't just gotten the chance to think the issue through yet.

It might be nice if it were possible to have the game use loose (or more recent) files in an 'override' folder if they are present. In theory a mod could include just a replacement texture for an official model... Blue snails and red Ogres and such. But I think the current rules would prevent even an altered color palette because AH made the original artwork. A user would have to draw their own from scratch ~and still match the UV layout; reinventing the wheel; making re-texturing an onerous task.
An [impractical?] alternative that would not break the rule is an overlay texture that includes only the changes to the original art. Users could draw over the original art to create a "patch" texture a like this: >>
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj12 ... verlay.jpg
*(Obviously I cannot distribute the Ice_lizard_dif DDS to show how it looks, but if you paste this image over the Ice_lizard texture in Photoshop, and set the layer to Overlay, you can see the effect; and it works).
If the user could distribute just that with their mods, and have it affect the original texture... that could be a win/win solution for all.
If it could be made to work that is; but how? Either the textures could be combined from both originals before the game begins (like some sort of [automated] mod-prep phase when installing the mod), or the engine could patch the original texture in ram when the game loads. I don't know.
** Here is someone's interesting post about an overlay algorithm. >>
http://www.gamedev.net/blog/862/entry-2 ... g-overlay/
****EDIT:
What if the mod package installer were to allow the user to flag some textures as Patch files, and the installer automatically extracted the (named) original texture and wrote (to disk) the result of the two textures combined? (If need be... extracted the original mesh and rewrote
that to disk with the reference to the new texture in it instead of the old one; Some games hardcode that information into the model.)