[oskar123]

Originally Posted by gap

Hi oskar123, nice question, my personal answers (I would be curious to know the opinion of other forum members though), are lack of modders and lack of a finished model editor.

Talking about the first point, you might have noticed that most new threads in the SH5 mod workshop section of this forum, are neither about new mods nor requests of support/information on the modding of something new, but rather requests of new features and/or requests of help on the usage of other's mods. The fact that some aspects of the game seem to have progressed a lot during the last years, while others didn't, is probably caused by the fact that some old modders who, in months and years of patient digging in the game files, had developed an insight of SH5's scripts, code, 3D format, etc. are no longer active now, and no one took over their work in the meanwhile.

One of those modder is TheDarkWraith, the author of many mods still used by the SH5 players, and coder of the only editor we have so far capable of handling GR2 files, the files where SH5 models are stored. Unfortunately he left when his brilliant tool was still far from perfection, which means that object-importing is still a pitifully slow process and with many limitations, and he didn't disclose the source-code of his tool, which means that a programmer wanting to "challenge" the secrets of the (proprietary) GR2 format, should start over from scratch instead of keeping on TDW's work

You may not be invested yourself but I'd be curious to know: what stops us from simply copying models from SH3/4 (other than the low poly count)? Format issues? It seems to me that the TWoS mod adds a few new ships to the game, so it's clearly been done before.