So hard-code can only be altered using the source code?
I am really showing my ignorance by asking why does anything have to be hardcoded?

Because They need to define what things like skills do in the code anyway, so its easier to just do everything with them in the code then to do so in the code AND the editor. Things like skills are only used in one place, so why have their workings all over the place just to do one thing?

Being object oriented certainly is interesting, I agree.

The CS/CK is used to generate the game's content, but not usually it's mechanics. Bethesda uses the CS/CK to create cells and world, NPCs and dialogue, quests and scripts, items and spells, etc.

For example, the CS/CK is used to create a weapon — you can determine its type, damage values, weight, gold values, attack speed, name, enchantment, etc. etc. However, the concept of a "weapon", including things like "it needs damage values and a name and such" are all things that are hard-coded. This is because the game needs to know what to do with it — it needs to know that it can be equipped, and when it's equipped it goes in the actor's hand, and when the actor attacks it uses this skill and those damage values and it takes that long, etc, looking up the specific numbers as defined in the CS/CK.

So the hardcoded aspect defines what types of values a given object has, while the CS/CK allows you to change the actual value of each of those values. Ultimately, the only things that the CS/CK can edit are the things that Bethesda's content developers needed to be able to edit in order to create the game. To give an example from Oblivion, they needed to be able to create spells from various effects — but had no need to create new magic effects on the fly. It was easier for all of the spells to be created by using the various existing effects in various combinations. I'm sure at some points they decided to go and add a new effect — Reanimate for one, most likely — but that was literally a content developer e-mailing the engine-developer that he needed a new effect to be added, and the engine developer hard-coded it in.

This is generally a matter of what's worth it to Bethesda. Things that can be modified in the CS/CK are more flexible and easily used, but you have to design the tools within the CS/CK to make that possible; if you're not going to use that flexibility, it's a waste of time to code the tools.

For modders, altering hard-coded things requires reverse-engineering the executable, determining where the code that causes it currently uses is, and writing a hook to change that code. This is what SKSE does to add new scripting functions: it hooks the game's code that lists out all of the functions, and adds new entries to the list.

Hard coded vs. scripted may also be a matter of performance implications. Scripting languages are always going to be a lot slower than compiled C++ engine code, so if something needs to be done a lot, or is complicated enough to be time consuming it would be compiled in instead. Bear in mind that "time consuming" is defined on a different scale where if the game is normally running at 30fps, a piece of script that takes 33ms to run is going to negatively impact frame rate (this is a simplification, as the engine has a lot of other stuff to do each frame in addition to executing the script code, so even a much faster script could easily slow things down). Since spells (especially AoE) are often going to need to do lots of expensive operations such as collision detection, it may have just been easier to do the effects engine side to mitigate potential performance issues. This doesn't mean that there might not be ways to structure things so that these aspects are exposed in scripting, it's just that when working to hit a deadline, there may simply not have been enough time.

I am not sure what you mean by "third party tools". We're talking about tools which edit game data, are we not?

Perhaps you are referring to products from all the companies that get credits when the game loads up?

It's certainly true that C++ is massively faster than any script, but I don't think speed or performance was a major concern for most editable vs. hard-coded decisions. Certainly, the graphics engine, hit detection, etc., would suffer massively if it were written in script code, but those sorts of things would never need editing from within the CS/CK anyway so it didn't even come up.

What a script effect does once it's applied to an actor is typically simple; the existence of the SEFF effect in Oblivion confirms that it's not a performance issue, merely an issue of having to design the system such that it allows you to modify it with the CS/CK and is able to handle that kind of variation (hard-coding allows you to make some assumptions you can't with an editable system). See also OBME, after JRoush did take the time to write such an editable system.

Those companies and likely others, really. Again, examples from previous games include a NIF editor and a SpeedTree tool, that were not included in the public version of Oblivion's CS but existed in the developer version. But again, "plugin" is a poor choice of phrase, IMO, and would be a misnomer.

Would the current failing of Gamebryo's rightsholders have any effect on whether or not we see Bethesda's .nif tools?

I'm not a lawyer; I could only guess. Probably not.

it is the same tool the developers used to make the game does this answer your question?

Some people (and their requests) think that the CK is the ultimate tool for everything that they will ever need!
But no...
It has it limitations and while being one of the bests Modder's Tools around it never will have the solutions to EVERY problem.

...If someone bet: Prior to the release of the CK... they win.

I think perhaps Bethesda is holding on to the creation kit for a few weeks so people will play the game as it's meant to be played. Also, better mods will come out now, I think because the modders will be spending more time exploring skyrim prior to modding with the creation kit. I think knowing more about the original game will lead to better mods than if the creation kit was released on day 1.

Honestly I can't trust them to make that call. On the first days of release, PCgamer put out an article about all the glaring, and to put it blunty, lazy issues with what is probably the best example of a PC port gone wrong. Bugs, we expect, but it seems like nobody cared to even playtest certain parts of the game. What's in store for the next installment with Bethesda's new philosophy? Did they just run out of time?

This is correct. It even had a name: "copy and paste"

@4am now I think you made a really valid point. The possibility of modding is almost always a game ruiner - we play it like, for 5 mins and then we open the CS and go into modding frenzy. THEN we save the plugin, start the game again just to find out the change didn't went exactly the way we intended, and close the game again to restart the CS. Then we...

... Oh, you get it. I agree that maybe giving us some time to get used to the game first (and actually give ourselves a chance to enjoy it the way it was supposed to be) can be benneficial for the modding community in the long run. IF there weren't so many [censored] bugs.

EDIT: @AmauriPavao: Sauda??es aceitas, cara.

Heh, no, that's not quite what I meant, but it's certainly close enough

I was referring to something more along the lines of the region generator, only for dungeons. Frankly I would have liked to have had access to that because sometimes your dungeon doesn't necessarily require hand creation and could be tweaked once a layout was in place. It would save a lot of time.

I can't speak for anyone else but for me "the way it's supposed to be" is very very very subjective. And if they're thinking they're doing me a favour by delaying CK, I'd like them to pretty please stop. I thank you for the flowers you're sending me Bethesda but I'm allergic to them so please don't n_n

But hopefully that's not the case and the real reason they're delaying it is much much much much much less trivial. I'm being kept waiting so I hope it's not for nothing.

Valid point too. I still think that a good, solid playthrough is benneficial to acquire some ground for modding ideas, but again, that's just me - though I do agree that the waiting can be a huge turn off.

On the wishlist section, I'd pretty much like they keep the character goodies we had in the G.E.C.K, with the ton of body slots, the possibility of assign specific meshes for each race, and the in-editor texture pack selection (not having to create a duplicate mesh just to change the color palette was damn nice).
Also would like if they take a step back and give us the option to assign a specific skeleton for each race too - those options together would contribute for great npc variety, and if the method of morphing body parts by scaling the skeleton bones still apply (and I don't see any reason it won't) I'm sure that combining it with the new facial scar/paints would create a really wide array of possibilities. For all of Bethesda's expertise in designing worlds, landscapes, equipment and interiors, they surely don't put much of an effort in character design.

DAO, DAO2 and ME series have a similar character creation system, but whenever the devs feel that a specific character is worthy of a unique, well-defined design, they go all the way and give it a custom mesh. I won't blame Bethesda by taking another route since their focus lies somewhere else, but I'd pretty much like having the possibilitie to do so for myself.

EDIT: Oh, and the improved character creator in the Creation Kit, of course. With all the crafty extra bits.

Performance and development time basically.

Things that are hardcoded will run faster as it is compiled to machinecode (Scripts are parsed at runtime or at best JIT compiled).
Hardcoding things is easier if the number of variations is small. (Making anything scriptable takes quite alot of work (The more flexible you want the scripting to be the more work you have to put into the engine) so it only pays off when you need a large number of similar things).