[FireCrack]

I dunno, when i first looked at the half life SDK it seemed preety ****e, requiring seprate compilers and such to get working. Nowhere near even attempting to be as good as say, the Unreal mod development setup.

[Unknown Target]

Exactly; you have to jump through lots of hoops to even begin modding Half Life 2, while on the other hand, the Unreal Tournament series has a complete all inclusive SDK that's much easier to use. But you don't see them selling mods and claiming that OMG OMG OMG we're the BEST EVER (well, maybe they do, but not as bad as Valve )

[redmenace]

I think I am going to buy it at EB Games in may. I am looking forward to seeing how the Gman is developed. On a side note, I want to know what happened to Col. Sheppard.

[Dark Knight]

Personally, I'm more looking forward to Sin Episodes at the moment.

Edit: Sheppard became the General in the first Commander & Conquer

[NGTM-1R]

Then I'm going to have to call you dumb-assed.

FRED lets you do a lot, but it doesn't let you mod the game. In fact, until the source code was released, the only modding that could be done was changing assets (graphics, sounds, models, etc). Half-Life, on the other hand, provided an SDK that let you actually hook custom code into the game.

Which is, frankly, pointless, since almost no one can figure out how to use the thing. And more to the point, which is better: custom code capablity without a functional, easy-to-use "map" editor or a functional easy-to-use map editor without custom code capablity? One of them lets you actually do so something. The other just lets you make funny screenshots of the main campaign.

[StratComm]

Moreover, expecting users to actually add code to the game seems like an easy out to me.  What would be more appropriate to a modding community is an engine that is robust enough to take the content that they throw at it and run, rather than being tailored to a specific functionality.  I sure wouldn't be modding FS2 (and you wouldn't see more than one or two completed campaigns either) without the ability to change it without actually touching the codebase.