[Eradicator]

For Quake engine based games (this includes the entire ID line above Quake, you could even trace it back to doom 1) the game code is held in a seperate dll or (in Quake's case a .dat file) while the engine code is in the exe. This makes providing support very easy. You just make the game code (now seperated into client and server side) available and keep the core engine code hidden in the exe. This includes HL which is based on Q1. HL2 isn't technically Q based, but it follows the same concepts. It wouldn't be that hard to simply make SAGE call certain functions from an external dll, but it seems they don't think its worth the effort. ID even made a new little scripting language (QC code) for mod support for Q1. It seems EA is now taking the mod community seriously for games that become succfessful such as BF1942. For BF2 they have even hired a team to manage the mod tools from the BF community and someone to over see mod support implementation. I guess they just deemed Generals a failed product or that it doesn't bring in enough revenue to deserve dedicated mod support.

[LordAxion]

EA is the classic "BIG CORPORATION SELLS LOTS GIVES RATS ASS ABOUT CUSTOMERS" company. The reason: they sell so many games and stuff that if one flops, theyre still making money. Think about it. Generals can flop, and they still have Pacific Assualt, BFME, multiple driving games, every single EA Sports game, etc etc to make up the loss. Westwood didn't which was why they patched all thier games on such a regular basis. EA doesn't release patches, they release expansion packs...

Westwood, if they hadn't developed a huge fan base, would have died. They were under incredible pressure to make sure gamers got thier money worth, or they would have never survived. If one EA game isnt worth the cash, chances are they wont even NOTICE because there's so little you can do without EA games. I would boycot them, for instance, but I love Pacific Assualt. Even though I know it wont get patched past the first month... sigh...

[Mishkin]

C'mon people... we ALL would like to see this, but it just isn't going to happen. Why? No, it's not because EA is lazy, and doesn't give a shit abpu CnC, it's because they don't need to. Seriously though, let's take this from EA position. They are rushing to get games out on the shelves, and why the hell should they inlcude an engine feature that doesn't even get used in-game? Any company would do that, not just EA.
Don't get me wrong, I don't love EA, I'm just saying that it's all about money. EA already did give us some features that they were planning on using, and then abandoned it....