The actual post (
direct link) quoted in the OP is a little longer than just that quote; one important bit that is missing it "I don’t have the patience or motivation to continue working on a game that doesn’t inspire me."
I can’t very well speak for @granthes but one thing I’m sure about is that he didn't write this because modding TS4 was
technically more difficult than TS3, so you shouldn't be afraid of that. I believe it’s a mix of not being very interested in (the current incarnation of) the game and hostility from other tool creators .. it’s very sad that he left, but I understand how one wouldn’t want to pour a lot of time into making tools for a “boring” game only to be bullied. But you also need to see that this quote is by someone who writes (or wrote) tools, not a “modder” in the sense of using said tools to create content; that’s a different perspective.
For me personally, the game itself makes the biggest difference currently, but in a positive way: I never really liked TS3 and most of what I remember about TS3 modding is how tedious and un-fun it was .. what I’ve done for TS4 so far is often technically quite similar, but I find it a lot more rewarding now since the result goes into a game I actually
like to play =).
Another positive difference would be the support from Maxis that we have now which I find hugely helpful. Being able to ask about stuff and actually get an answer certainly doesn’t make anything easier per se .. but it saves a lot of time and frustration when it comes to figuring out how things work.
On the downside, the only open-source multi-purpose tool (s4pe) seems to be currently unsupported – I don’t think this was ever the case during the TS3 era. No idea what’s going to happen with that, but it certainly slows down development for everyone when this doesn’t get updated =(.
That’s the only general aspects I can think of, right now .. other than that, whether “modding” is easier or harder depends mainly on what you mean by “modding”. XML tuning for instance is a lot more powerful than in TS3 (i.e. you can do more stuff just by editing an XML), but the editing itself is exactly the same thing for all I remember. Body meshes are more complex but the meshing itself isn’t any different for all I know; object “recolours” seem to be a bit of a PITA since they seem to involve full clones; texturing doesn’t really compare since it’s much more similar to TS2 than TS3 (masked layers vs full textures); scripting I wouldn’t really know but from what I gather it seems more approachable than in TS3; worlds are completely different (there’s no tool for them but OTOH there smaller and more modular, so *if* they get figured out making one world would be a much smaller task all in all than with TS3); and so on and so forth.
To get a better idea what any individual task would involve, you could try checking out some tutorials to see whether it seems feasible for you?
