Why and How some offline single-player PC games are almost fully moddable while other are not moddable at all ?

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Is it strictly a developer decision to allow thier games to be moddable or not ? And how is it achieved ? Are moddable games “coded” differently than non-moddable games ?

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Moddable games usually have an intermediate scripting language in which the scenarios and behaviors are expressed. It is relatively easy to manipulate and learn through trial and error compared to compiled low level machine code that might also have copy-protection. The script operates on concepts that are closer to what then player sees, such as “move character to these coordinates”, rather than “load value into register A from a memory address”, “multiply it by register B”.

Developers of moddable games may have themselves released annotated examples of parts of their assets, as well as specifications for some internal formats. Games that are not moddable might employ protections to deter hacking, such as checksums and encryption. This could be done because the company wants to profit from selling new content for real money.

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