Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods Adding spells

Hey all

I'm about to finish the main campaign, and I am very excited to get started with the editor!

I watched the introduction video about what the editor can do, but I have a few questions about spells - seeing as the video says we can add and modify spells.

My dream is to make a new spellschool.

Questions:
1. Can this currently be done in the editor?
2. I can easily make the assets and make a balanced set of spells (I have an art/design background) but I haven't dabbled all that much with programming. The video says the scripting language is easy to understand - what's your experience with this?

And lastly, any pointers on where to start would be great. I have watched the introduction videos now, and have made a functioning level (which was awesome fun), but I don't know where to go now.

Thanks for your time <3

Hello,
should be possible as i see it. The Main.pak [1] holds a lot of scripts dealing with spell behavior, and script language is pretty basic. You can find the icons in the resource manager if i'm not mistaken. But you would have to do some pioneer work since this has not been explored yet ;D

[1] http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=505777#Post505777

The problem is that spells/abilities aren't scripted
They are described by Public\Main\Stats\Generated\Data\SkillData.txt and the SkillData.xlsm files.
You need to pick a "template" or type for each ability, which determines the way it works. You can specify a bunch of parameters that change the behavior of the ability, but they have fixed functionality by design and AFAIK you cannot extend them beyond those.

eg. skills with a SkillType of Summon can only summon entities, they cannot fire projectiles or do AoE-s or any other stuff; if what you want is not available in any of the SkillType templates, you can't do it.

Okay, so my real plan was to add a Shapeshifter school, since it's always been a favorite of mine.

I want these features:

1. A new spellschool, like Pyromancy and the like.
2. New books with supplementing spells.
3. New spells.

The spells would work like this:

1. Combat transformation
You take the form of a creature capable of combat (orc, spider, elemental, and so forth). Ideally you should get some new skills with it, but for now I simply want to mute the caster, so that it's melee focused. You also get boosted stats.

2. As a minor thing, I thought it could be fun to transform into a normal animal, like a cat or a dog, and gain the trait Pet Pal. This is nice to have rather than must have, though.

I'm thinking there should be 1-2 shapes per spell level, with an approximate amount of 12 shapes. These would range from undead to elementals to dragons. They should be a strenght or dex based alternative to mages, but should not get bonuses from weapons and the like. Instead they use their claws/natural weapons and innate abilities, and therefore the stats should be fixed (with a possible increase from high int).

I am really in love with this idea, and I played this role a lot in Neverwinter Nights, where I know that many others also loved it. I hope I can create something like this, and I hope you guys can help me get there somehow, so we can all have a shapeshiftin' good time

In the alpha you were able to use the polymorph skill that might be used by Arhu. There are some small openings in walls in Cyseal that were intended for this (e.g. the harbour storage).