I recently had the distinction of representing Petrolution at the Universe at War Community Preview Day out at Petroglyph's studio in Las Vegas, Nevada. As the sole modder to attend, I braved 100 degree heat, showgirls, and Elvis impersonators to get you the inside information on the modability of UaW. With the taste of Sin City still in my mouth, I'm here to report on those findings.

So let's get to it; I'm sure the single most important concern modders have to be asking about right now is when the official tools will be released. Those tools are so essential to the foundation of a strong community that it's just imperative that they're out as soon as possible. Of course with Empire at War, we had that three month delay in between the time of the game release and the release of the map editor and we still did alright for ourselves. Well, I'm pleased to announce that the official tools for Universe at War will be available to modders the day of the release! So start planning out those mods now, because you will be able to start in on them right away.

Now if you were reading closely, you should have noticed that I kept using the word "tool" in the plural. That was not a mere grammatical mistake: there are multiple tools in the works for Universe! Of course there will be the classic Terrain Editor that we got with EaW and FoC, but there will also be two more tools that are totally unique to anything that Mike.nl or any of the other fans have done for Alamo.

The first of these is a data miner tool that will allow you to process reports on your XML files. From what I understand, this will give you a functionality similar to what SQL does for databases. So let's say that you wanted to compare the health values on all of your units. If you were doing this for EaW, you would have to open up multiple XML files, search for the health tags, and write the values down somewhere. With UaW, all you need to do is open up the data miner, tell it what values you're looking for, and it will parse through all of your XML files and get them for you!

The second tool is really the crème de la crème of modding; the one that was sorely missed for Empire at War. The second tool is a UI editor. With it, you will have full control over the interface of Universe at War. This tool alone should eliminate so many of the major restrictions to modding that were present in EaW: 2 build tabs, 26 build buttons, 2 unit abilities per unit. Not only that, but it will also open UaW up to the possibility of mods for genres other than RTS.

I know modders will be happy to hear that Petroglyph has made every effort to make Alamo more data-driven (opposed to hard-coded) for UaW. While I didn't get a chance to look at the actual files themselves, I understand that many features, notably abilities, are much more flexible now that they are expressed in LUA. The quasi-XML aspects of the AI and story scripting from EaW have all been converted into LUA as well and the hardpoint system has been greatly expanded to accommodate for the complexity of the Hierarchy walkers. You will be able to mount hardpoint on hardpoint on hardpoint to come up with any number of interesting combinations for units.

Overall, I felt that Petroglyph has really done an expert job of listening to the core concerns of the modding community and addressing those issues in UaW. When the game is released, you can be sure that it will support a rich and diverse mod scene.