Totally agree about Teamspeak, yeah. Mass comms like that is a nightmare in most situations!
Regarding your other points, I think you've been a bit broad with those strokes and the slippery slope argument is a bit of a red herring. I'll offer my take on it for your consideration...
This is the slippery slope argument, and I don't buy it. It usually ends with someone saying "won't someone think of the children?"
I mean, I don't buy the idea that the average user, who is capable of editing a text file, is going to go on to mess with the rest of the game. Of course there are people who do tinker with other game files, and in many cases that's a really good thing, which the developers themselves (id, Valve, Epic Games, etc.) very often encourage. I learned so much by tinkering with games like Quake and Half-Life as a kid. That's one of the things that turned me onto 3D modeling and programming, which I still do to this day. But that comes with the inclination to do so in the first place, whatever the reason might be.The files themselves reside in completely different scopes. The core data files are encoded in a rather impractical format (.ovl maybe?) that requires some work to unpack. Contrast that to something like Quake 3's .pk3 files, which are basically zip files with a different extension (e.g. you can open them directly in Windows Explorer as of Windows XP). I'll call that "data space", which means that nothing's directly editable with a text editor. You're looking at a hex editor. The configuration files, on the other hand, are located in what I'll call "user space", e.g. in structured folders within the game's folder structure. The user can see them, and get to them by simply navigating into the folder. They're in plain text, in XML - a format specifically designed to be intuitive to understand and edit. And, unless they're particularly sloppy programmers, some level of data validation will performed by the game when the file is read. In fact, the last patch had a specific mention that they've made the game more robust when it has an invalid/badly edited config file.
Multiplayer games have been doing file validation in some form or another for well over a decade. Being able to enforce consistency/exemption on specific files has always been part of that. Typically that'll be a checksum validation, but there may be further steps involved. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the ED game launcher does exactly that every time you open it - that's part of how it checks for updates. It downloads any files that are new or don't match the template on the server, thus meaning you only download what you need when there's a game update, rather than the entire game. Obviously it's not a flawless system, but it's by no means easy to fool either.
Moreover, in this specific case, we're talking about graphics configuration files. I'm sure there are a few examples, but I'm pressed to think of a case where editing the graphics configuration will give you any advantage/exploit over another player in this game, beyond maybe low frame rates causing lag
When the HUD modification was originally discovered, one would have to re-edit the config file every time the game updated (for reasons explained above), but the lovely devs very kindly added an extra file - the GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml file, which remains untouched by the updater. Again, correct me if I'm wrong here, but that was a specific nod to all the CMDRs who were changing their colour schemes.
Finally, and forgive me if this seems like pedantry, but the old fashioned way would involve editing config files. It was mandatory with some games. I'm thinking back to the DOS era here. I guess you meant in the sense that you just play it as it comes. Like I said in my last post, that's totally understandable. I just thought your reasons were a little heavy handed. Here's to hoping that we get the options sooner than later. [up]
The most valid reason not to tinker that I can think of is user error. I've been thinking that the thread could do with another update to spotlight alternative ways to change the HUD colours without editing the files. drkaii's EDProfiler is a perfect example of that. More to follow...
TL;DR version: get your secretary droid to summarise it for you.
