What is the IESDP?
What are the IESDP goals?
How to contribute to IESDP?
Who are contributors of IESDP?
When the IESDP was created? What was its history?
Are IESDP creators hackers?
Can I put information, tutorials from IESDP on my web page?
What are the research techniques?
What tools are used in research?

The IESDP (Infinity Engine Structures Description Project) is an effort to research the workings of the Bioware Infinity Engine(R), and act as a collective resource for those interested in such workings.

To provide all possible information and assistance for add-on /add-in/ Total Conversions authors/developers and editors that use Infinity Engine as the base.
To provide information and assistance for tools programmers.
To research requested information.

If you've found something new, spotted a mistake, or written something you think belongs here, feel free to post it on the IESDP update board . You will be given full credit.

A lot of people that spent their valuable time on doing research, testing changes, writing descriptions and tutorials. They are listed in credits section and also sometimes they are pointed on other pages like File Formats descriptions.

Please, check the Site History page.

No, the hacker from definition is the person that tries to damage, destroy other computer systems. As for legal/license issues I have put note on this site that whatever shouldn't be here will be deleted if proper owners of any data request it for me.
The BioWare corp. or any other owner hasn't requested anything like that so far. The all legal data is put in appropriate section called Legal Information.

If the respective authors will agree then, yes. The all rights to IESDP design and several tutorials are reserved for me - it is just good to ask me through email for reference to author of given part of IESDP or in case of my articles (usually they are not signed by my name) asking for my permission.

The main methods used are:
1) Empirical research - change something in an analyzed structure and check how the situation has changed within the game.
2) Logical analysis - we consider some amount of examples of some structure (for example 10 files of the same type but describing some different objects, like 10 different areas files). Then we focus on some structures inside them finding similarities and differences drawing conclusions about structure and supposed functions from logical argumentation, finding general rule for some effects.
3) Analyzing source code of the game engine - not available since source code is not available for our research.

The basics:
More advanced: