It was nice to see a stretch goal dedicated to the editor. As someone who has had a high interest in it since the first Kickstarter, I just wanted to share my own personal feedback on what I would like to see if we reach the target and indeed get a couple of developers devoted to it. I highly encourage others like Baardvark and SniperHF to chime in here as those who seem to have progressed the furthest with fully completing a mod. Burgee too if he is still around.

1) Compatibility

Creating a standalone adventure with a modest amount of playtime at decent quality will perhaps take an average minimum time investment of somewhere between 8-12 months (just judging by past experience with NWN/DA and having dabbled in the DOS toolset). If I'm going to invest that kind of time, I'd really like to know that my labors are not going to end up in vain because of changing interfaces or deprecated versions of the game. This was the primary reason for halting my efforts with D:OS. When Larian went AFK after the initial batch of information, I had a sneaky suspicion that the modding community was going to get orphaned, and it has. It's not just because the editor is 'complicated', it's also because there is little confidence that any work invested will see the light of day if Larian keeps moving forward without any communication about, or consideration for how its decisions will impact people working with the editor.


2) More building blocks, less reliance on your campaign scripts

This kind of follows up on the compatibility issue, but it would be helpful to have better building blocks that are not inherently tied into your main campaign systems, which are more susceptible to change and consequently break our own mods when they do. Take a look at the work done for the standalone project template to get an idea of the kind of fundamental building blocks that could help people begin with a template to build their own mods.


3) Modularity

Help modders help each other by making it easier to integrate multiple mods and import/export individual components. Share with us your best practice suggestions on how you integrate perforce into your workflow so we can model our own source control sharing into our projects.


4) Hang out with us from time to time

It would be nice if we could have a post in the modding forums now and then to verify when we have understood things correctly, acknowledge those items most needed by the community, and get some kind of handle on what changes, if any, are coming to the editor.


5) Features

I put this last because it's so obvious, but I actually don't think it's the highest priority anyway. I know a lot of people have expressed their desire for the toolset to be more friendly, but that is probably going to require the greatest amount of effort on your part and if the aforementioned items are not done in conjunction with that effort, I don't think it will have much of a return on investment anyway.


I'm looking forward to what the others have in mind who have invested time with the original editor. Thanks for your consideration, and I hope we meet that goal!

You know, the return on investment is bigger than you think.
I mean, more user friendly tools for the community would also benefit us working on the game.
For me, it's a win-win.
The Divinity Engine is pretty much the same as what we use to create the game. Which, I can concede, can be pretty hard to handle at first when you are not a professional.
Having a dedicated team for this would probably be pretty cool for everyone outside and inside Larian.

First off, I'm stoked that Larian is showing that they care about modders by dedicating not one, but basically two whole stretch goals to them (since, IMO, the DM mode is basically a form of modding). Thanks Lar!

Agree with the points and the order of importance. Compatibility is a serious issue, though it's probably quite difficult to ensure that older versions of things don't break in the updated engine. Just look at the Shadowrun Dragonfall scene. There's lots of UGCs, but it probably would've been even bigger if patches didn't constantly break the campaigns, especially ones quite different from the main campaign. But now that there's Shadowrun HK, the community might sort of get split up between people who want to stick with Dragonfall, which probably won't be updated anymore (but who knows?), or people who want to move on to the HK editor, which has a number of improvements. However, I think DF campaigns are still fairly compatible with the HK editor, so that's good.

And, co-creator of the standalone mod template here, I am inclined to agree that an official version of that would be helpful. :P Cool things to include in it would be: tutorials and lots of explanatory text for the code, extra levels or areas that went unused, any systems that coders designed but ended up not using in the main game.

Also, can we get a peek at the new dialog editor please Heard it's new and shiny (I can't imagine making all those huge dialog trees with the old one).



Thanks for the response norD. Following through with Windemere's 4th point already Always thought the easier you make things for modders, the easier things will be for Larian too.

It's a pleasure.
Following Windemere's 4th point. I'll speak for myself, but I think a lot of people, after a full day of work, don't really want to go on their job's forum and still talk about work. But on the other hand, there are some people like me who likes to do it.
I know, has a gamer myself, that I really like to see devs passing here and there on forums and such on a game I spend time on.
Even more, I think, on a game with mod tools.

Well, my intent was that Larian would make a commitment so that developers could devote some fraction of time to the community as part of their work, not outside of it. It was never my expectation that developers would take time out from their personal time to do it.

Thanks for your feedback in the thread.

We'll see what Swen has planed if we reach the stretch goal. Which I hope we will!

this stretch goal is probably the most important to me (apart from the undead )

i certainly cannot make large campaigns like DOS or DOS2 (no time), but to be able to quick build some kind of dungeon/overland crawl mixed with a little story line i come up with and then play it, all done within a couple of hours would be uber aweseome!

first i did not like it, but sword coast legends concept of pre-made randomly assembled maps has the pontential to do exactly this. mix this with DOS open class system, open game play, some tile-by-tile editing of the map portions i dont like and "the answer to life the universe and everything" is not 42 but the DOS editor

oh, and btw: maybe then some dedicated guy(s) could finally do a remake of divine divinity/sword of lies using the DOS(2) engine

Let me increase the "Yay, for modding!"-crowd by one.

I really hope the stretchgoal is met, but TBH I'd exchange the 1,5m and 1,65m goals.

I can't highlight enough how important modding support is... even the best sports car is worth nothing with a flat tire. So give people the tools to fix it themselves and keep enjoing it!

And "Thumbs Up!" for finally having some dev contact.
It's not needed to babysit the fans all the time. But a comment now and then helps the other side to understand specific aspefcts and also get better into the projects vision.

PS:
Btw... hearing "engine" and DD... I'd still love to see it open-sourced and give the one or other aspect a nudge...

Hi peeps, I've a question for you.
I had an idea during the weekend that I'll propose to Swen at some point but 1st I wanted to know if that could be nice to some of you.
I was wondering if there could be an audience if some people at Larian would "stream themselves" working on the game.
Is it something interesting that some of you would watch?

If the idea sounds cool to you, reply ^__^.

*Remember, this is just an idea I had. I've no idea if it'll happen*

My first reaction is to jump at anything we can get, naturally. I'd certainly watch it. If it were an unedited stream though, it could have a lot of downtime if your development environment is anything like mine. If it's not unedited, then that adds extra work for you that may be more of a time investment than it pays back. Hard to say without seeing it.

There is also the issue of spoilers if we're watching you do things that unveil parts of the game we haven't seen yet. I also wonder if some of your colleagues might be more reluctant to have their work publicly scrutinized.

So like I said, I'd certainly be interested, but I suspect it might be more work and/or have some other ramifications that would make it tricky. Thanks for posing the idea though!

There is only one teensy problem - game development isn't very entertaining to watch. The same way the act of composing or writing a book isn't entertaining to watch. I predict the reaction to be "somewhat interested" and go fairly quickly to "neutrally disinterested". The question also arises - what's the point of us watching you? It seems Orwellian in some respects and I'd be creeped out if I was working there with you. I doubt an unedited stream will yield any kind of interesting information that you guys can't convey in a press release or something. If the idea is to show different aspects of game development by focusing on specific ones then it's going to be interesting for people who want to get into the video game industry. I suppose it depends on how you guys do it and for what purpose.

In my mind that would mostly be "What you see is what you get".
There are not a lot of downtime when I work normally. Few seconds hangup when I save because of Perforce but apart from that it's pretty straight forward (except when I crash... haha).
Edited videos, IMO, would be for official tutorial if the mod support stretch goal is achieved.

My idea would be basic like that. We announced it a few days before and then camera on, twitch on and go. During a few hours.

There could be potential spoilers for sure but I'm pretty sure we could work something out ^__^


@Lacrymas, good point of view. That's why I'm asking. Maybe that's a bad idea after all. I know that some artist stream themselves while painting for example. So that's why I had this idea. There was stream live, in the past, made by Larian about how you do stuff in the editor. People were asking for stuff and they would do it.
I guess that could be the same.

I believe the intended purpose is for education, not entertainment.

I think it'd be interesting, for one. It would give modders a good idea of what the whole experience is like. And yeah, it can be a little tedious sometimes, quite often even, but anyone serious about modding will realize that. Anyone you'll discourage with "boring videos" is almost certainly not going to mod anyway. And I imagine people experienced with the editor can actually do things reasonably fast.

Spoilers are a concern, sure, but there must be some little side quest you could work on that wouldn't be too big of a deal to show some stuff for. Unless, of course, it's in a brand new zone or something.

I reaaaallly want to see the new dialog editor. And proficient terraining would be interesting. Scripting a quest would probably be the hardest thing to demonstrate without 99% of people's eyes glazing over, but some people would like it.

well thing is I did not have time to use the editor that much so far (only few tutorials) but yeah that would be a really good motivation for me to get my hands on it ^^

I do not know how game developers work, but I created 2 games for the RPG maker and looking at me would have been very boring.

I would like when the developers make a tutorial video. People who work with this tool all the time show us what can be done, what cannot be done, what were the problems they faced most and what strategies did they use to solve those problems. They also make a small map with a small quest and explain what they are doing and why step by step.

I would not watch somebody work for a long time. And if I was a developer I would not like to have a camera watching me all the time.

That would be better, but they can't even do that, because they haven't even reached the "make it usable for non-Larian developers" stretch goal yet, never mind started the re-design. So any tutorial videos they make now will be useless by the time we get our hands on the new-and-improved toolkit.

well actually yhey did : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE13woN-fNgu6IuHZguk-VJE6xWCHh9bJ

(I know it because, as I said, I tried few things watching those vids)

Yes, this would need to be done when the editor is up for "release" to people outside Larian if we reach the next stretch goal.

Again, thanks for your feedback on the questions guys. ^__^

It's not that to understand.

Those are last year's videos. Stretch goal permitting, they are explicitly planning a redesign of the toolkit to make it better for amateur modders.

Therefore, since they are planning a toolkit redesign, making a video NOW, before the redesign, makes no sense.

oh yeah my bad, I thought you were saying that they did not make tutorials for the already released Divine engin toolkit, my bad

The idea is actually nice, even if I don't really watch streams [yet]. Obviously it would have to be parts of the game offering a bit of entertainment, I'm not sure watching a coder would be very spectacular. So, artists and designers ( world to combat ) essentially. Writers, sadly, are a big no since we don't want to get too much spoils - which are bound to happen anyway.

Even if the mod stretchgoal is reached ( and I'm quite positive it will for now ), keeping the streams for future reference could also be very helpful !

This is basically the same idea a few former CDPR devs (Wickerman Games) had - "transparent development". I was scratching my head then, too. I mean, what's the point? You aren't truly going to learn anything by watching 8 hours of someone coding if they don't guide you through the whole process. I don't think anyone would be willing to talk 8 hours straight every day for what they are doing and why when they could just concentrate on their task.

I guess what I'm imagining is a 10-30 minute video of someone designing the visual aspects of a small scene, and maybe another video of writers discussing a character, writing the dialog, and inputting the stuff into the editor. Not 8 hours of streaming. Tutorials are great, of course, but sometimes you can learn more about what working on a game or mod would actually be like by watching people working on an actual area.

Probably a heavily edited video would work best, since you can't really make a scene in 20 minutes. But you could start with pictures of concept art or however people get the scene into their head, then you could show maybe five minutes of someone working on manipulating the terrain, then skip ahead to where it's roughly completed, then do some texturing (this is the part I'm most interested in seeing, given how difficult it is) for a few minutes, skip ahead to when that's done and they start adding meshes and props and the like. I assume the process is something like that, but maybe it's not, and there's more jumping around with tasks.

Whoever is making the scene could explain as they go, though them doing a voiceover afterwards roughly describing their actions might be easier, since explaining what you're doing while trying to do something in real time can be tough. Or there could be no explanation, and it would still be helpful for people who already have a basic understanding of how the tools work. You can explain how the editor works in as much detail as you want, but just seeing at least part of the real process of going from nothing to making a good looking area would be really helpful.

I have to agree with Stabbey though that if there's going to be big changes to the editor, a video like this should probably wait until the changes are in effect, otherwise the video wouldn't be very useful (though it'd still be interesting to see how the systems used to work.) Though I don't imagine the terrain stuff will necessarily change enormously.

That's pretty much it yes (concerning the process). I can also assure you that, when you are rigged with the editor, you can do a scene that can looks pretty great in 20 minutes.

If how the devs are using the tool currently doesn't match with what the users who get the new-and-more-user-friendly-editor will be using the tool, then no, it won't be helpful, it will be confusing.

Cool. So maybe you wouldn't even have to make cuts or anything. I'll be a staunch supporter of this idea if others won't :P At least for level design. I could see it being a lot tougher for most other things.

It should be near enough - they aren't going to go out of their way to give us a tool that would be completely different from the one they will be using themselves.
I'd expect the "supported" editor to be maybe more functionnal and intuitive, but the overall rules should be the same. Maybe the menus will get a little different, maybe there will a bit more - or less - buttons, maybe the colors will change, but it probably won't be very much confusing than watching a tutorial video of YourProSoftware version 10 when today it's reached version 14. [hint from personnal experience, apart from a few technical differences, it's still completely viable].

What's more it's not only the technical aspects of the editor that would be interesting to witness, but also the philosophy put behind the general design - environment, combat, story planification, npc placing, etc - as well as revisions. The only real issue I can foresee is not understanding why, say, Jeff went back and change the players spawn point, without the internal parallel discussions about that particular topic. But as long as one's interested and have enough of an analyzing mind, one should be able to deduce the logic put into the level design.

One thing that I want with the editor, is that it's friendly to a point that you don't have a have a computer science degree in order to be able to design quests.

When your 'tutorial' goes into designing tuples and then into databases (for a simple quest), there are clearly some issues that need to be resolved around the editor to make it usable for those that don't actually delve into python programming/scripting or whatever. There are better and easier ways to do this that can actually save time for a lot of people working on making these.

Having a complex and quote "powerful" editor is okay, but people just using it to make something that should be really simple shouldn't be subject to a learning curve that suggests that you go visit your local college and take a couple intermediate programming courses.

It doesn't seem like there's much use in recording tutorials now for a thing which will change later, as opposed to recording tutorials later after it has changed.

That's a bit too strongly put for some reasons already mentioned. While I do agree it doesn't make sense at this point for Larian to start doing full blown tutorials, NorD's original suggestion for a lightweight stream could be helpful on a number of levels if it wasn't too much stress on the developers.

Well after some thought Stabbey is right on a lot of things. These kind of streams/video would be way better with the completed version of the tool. Way more useful for sure.
Yes I guess, as my 1st idea implied that some people would watch streams of devs just for entertainment and maybe they could learn something about the process but that would be way better to have this after the editor is completed.

It would be really interesting, if you can explain what you are doing while doing it or explain quickly beforehand, like "ok there I'm going to create a mountain with a few paths and 2 cave entrances".

Interested too, especially if it can be watched again after live streaming (I live in France, and if you work in Belgium we work at the same time, so I couldn't watch live).

You can always start modding 5 year after the game is released, like me... then spend 6 years on it figuring it will never be officially patched just for it to happen anyway.

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.

As for the Stream, my own modding experiences in mind yeah that can be boring to watch. And if chat is on, it can also be very annoying for the person being streamed. There's a lot of back-seat programmers around who would love to tell you all about how you do wrong and what would be a better way to do stuff.

Pretty much the only stuff I bring out to people cause it would be interesting to them and perhaps educational is a progression-of-cutscenes or things that went hilariously wrong trying to work on them. From the start, where nothing works as it should, all the way to till it actually works properly. Of course, this isn't exactly as easy for a full team that actual make content that's going on sale rather than a solo-person working though.

I would still probably be interested in watching one of the vids that is boring and all have already stated why it's boring. Education can't always be super-thrilling, and it can be rather interesting if it's your area of interest.