If it's a case of "We don't have a Python programmer," then try Lua or any of a half-a-dozen other off-the-shelf languages, or even your own in-house language, if you need familiarity. C programmers transfer readily to Lua.

Next time use the edit button instead of triple posting?

And changing something to python should be really simple... python is very very easy to pick up if you are a programmer.

Anyways, I will probably not buy elemental if this feature is not going to be added in, but it sounded like a sure thing...

Frogboy has said that he's going to do this. It is indeed a case of "We don't have a Python programmer" but he's planning on going on sabbatical for a while and learning Python, rather than settling for a less preferable language.

That won't be happening until Frogboy feels that the game has been improved to adequately address the userbase's concerns, however.

Also, this information is fairly old, his plans regarding this may have changed. In particular, he might be more willing to take the sabbatical earlier, now that Kael is coming aboard.

That was like a month ago. It's not a priority, sure, but that doesn't indicate that it's dropped. Just that nobody's been thinking about it in a while.

Also, Frogboy did mention that he was still planning to go on sabbatical just the other day, although nobody talked about Python at that point, it was just an aside.

W00t! Those are the mods I want to see. Not too excited about content mods and those that merely fiddle with existing mechanics.

Thank you, Frogboy. I appreciate knowing this!

My guess would be that you would have fairly good access and could make many types of game with the engine, but I am fairly certain that Stardock would retain rights to it (ie. no selling unless there is a deal with Stardock).

Anyway, sounds promising.

Best regards,
Steven.

It wouldn't be necessary to touch the low level functions such as gfx display.
In fact, access on that level would create instability and even security issues...

Being able to fully alter / access / alter the UI and game logic is really all it takes.
In many "modable" games there are just too many brick walls and insufficient access to the UI so you get too many crude workarounds.
In WOM modders can already insert custom variables to units and such and use them in calculations. There is just no way to alter how they are used (much less displayed) in a big way.

Personally, I wouldn't mind messing with the engine source code.

Nope, I don't remember anything like that.

Since Elemental is going with Python and not Lua, I would ask whether the devs are going to consider all the work Google is doing with the Unladen Swallow Project.  We all know how slow FFH can be on huge maps with all that Python code in Civ IV.

Would be nice to use the latest and greatest version of Python to get the best possible speeds for large mods.  Reading up on the Python forums it seems that Unladen Swallow in fact might be being merged into the default CPython build anyway.  If so, YAY

Edit: see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/

I will not go into technical stuff, but in short, its not ready for production use (it even does not pass CPython's tests suite), and will not for at least one more year. Besides, performance gains they achieved right now are far less significant than they expected. There was some GSoC work done on it, but its still not enough.

I am interested too.  Kael and Frogboy, what do you say at this time about the OP's modding request, just after the release of 1.1?

Best regards,
Steven.