So, I haven't had much time to dabble with GG lately but I did toss together a super basic level and saved as a standalone. The reason is, I'm going to have several levels linked together by another, separate program which will manage them. My intention is to use that program to modify a number of the GG files including those in the entitybank, for example. After compiling, I was shocked to see the files are all encrypted! (Like I said, haven't been dipping into GG so much as of late so guess I missed this.)

Is there a way to compile a standalone withOUT encryption? This is really the key to my whole project and if the files are going to be encrypted, I'm gona end up killing it now.

Making standalone builds without encryption would violate media agreements between the artist selling media.
As encryption is the only thing that protects our media when a game is published. Bad enough we can not encrypt everything, scripts, music, it all.

I would build each level as a separate build and then link them with your external program that way.

Well that's actually the plan - but the external one is going to be constantly modifying those files so they will never be the same.

All I really need to do is access a few FPE files and change some data every now and again based on decisions made in the external program. So if I knew he encryption code, that would work as well.

I haven't really gotten deep into it yet but just as a rough example: Let's say in the external you select to equip yourself with an assault rifle and 10 clips. That info would just be dumped right into your character FPE rather than spawning a weapon and having to pick it up, pick up ammo, etc. I know there are other ways to do it but this was the plan for several other ideas as well. For example, you destroy a target in a sector on one mission. I don't want that item to be there if I go to that sector again so I'll just remove the reference .. but later if the enemy rebuilds it, it has to go back in again. For me, and for this design, being able to simply edit a couple entries in an FPE would work quite well across the board. The thing is, the game will have a such depth of customization that it would be impossible to make every conceivable combination. Even deciding from which direction to attack would require 4 separate exe's. But a little edit of the player spawn point and it's all done in 1.

I dont believe you will see un-encrypted stand alone builds ever.
To many of the store artist will not go for that. Leaves the objects open for piracy.

I would email your idea to lee@thegamecreators.com and see what he thinks about it, or maybe has another way of doing it, that would allow a third party program to access such info.

Mmmm ... gona have to map everything out and see if there's another way of doing it all.

Figured out how to do everything with scripts.

Excellent.