EA dropped mod support from their games almost a decade ago, long before they adopted the Frostbite Engine as their main development tool. For years modders have been asking for access to gain the ability to add to the Battlefield games.
Well, rather than gain access to the engine, one coder’s made their own engine that can edit Frostbite-compiled levels.
CaptainSpleXx has made an engine we can load in data from Frostbite maps. Within his editor he can then make alterations, moving and deleting buildings, changing textures, and, most importantly, recompiles the maps so they can be played in Battlefield 4.
His engine tricks Battlefield into receiving the altered map files, making the game think it’s an official patch. From there, on private servers, CaptainSpleXx is free to play his modded maps.
You can see a couple of videos of his engine at work. This first one shows Battlefield 4 map date being streamed into his editor:
As you can see he’s free to move, rotate, and scale the buildings.
In this video you can see that the recompiled levels can indeed be loaded into Battlefield 4:
There’s still a lot of work to be done on the editor and SpleXx is looking for people to contact him through Youtube to lend a hand, but this could spark off a new Battlefield modding scene.
However, it’s still to be seen whether EA will mobilise their legal team.