I want to do a space rpg were you shoot things and explore. You are looking down upon the planetary plane. The background would be a starry image called from a bmp. The player''s avatar would be another bmp called from outside the game. The planets and stars would also be called from outside the game. This way people can take an image editor and change what their ship/avatar looks like. It is like how civilization 3''s graphics are done. Can anyone suggest a way to do this. Which programming language would be easier to achieve this.

Well, that depends on how fancy you want it to be. Take a look at Ambrosia Software''s Escape Velocity series from several years ago. They used a sprite animation toolkit that allows everything to be easily editted by any user. It''s all Macintosh stuff, but with a copy of ResEdit, you could basically remake the whole game. They later made a plug-in editor which made it even easier, but you didn''t really need it.

Also, look up ExoBattle, by Matt Burch (one of the original Escape Velocity guys). It''s a 3D space shooter, but it''s open-sourced and draws all models and textures from outside the game. You can do all kinds of neat stuff with the graphics there, and all you need is the capability to produce .3dmf files. Again, it''s Mac-only, and tough to find, but if you just find some of the code, it might help you out.