Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Dev tools for dummies. Please.

I am an air head when it comes to coding, scripting and such. The last game I hated, like pure hated the tools.. it had me in tears multiple times.. all because I couldn't figure it out...So pretty pretty please.. try and make the tools a bit more easy to use this time?

I'm also hoping it'll be more accessible: the previous tool gave me a fairly major headache and I never did figure it out. I think Blender is about the limit of my patience when it comes to learning something, if it's more awkward than that it's not going to happen!

As long as they aren't any less powerful than they were last time, I have no qualms with them being more clear and easy to use. What I DON'T want is losing power to make it more streamlined, like what happened with Sword Coast Legends. I remember Dan Tudge saying his goal was to make the editor easy enough his 10 year old kids could figure it out. Big mistake! As a result, it lacked power and their entire mod community died before it began.

I think they should make a few changes to make it easier for new comers, such as automatically having all the necessary core scripts set up for new modules (I remember having to add a script just to enable combat to take place), making it easier to add roofs to houses, automatically planting and generating AI seeders for pathing upon saving and stuff, but I don't want anything to change that limits what the more advanced modders like myself can do.

I think their main focus to make the dev tools more accessible "for dummies" should simply be better documentation and more detailed video tutorials. Other than that, I only see the power being limited through any real changes.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, or shouldn't be: over the years I've seen plenty of examples of software that manage to be both powerful and fairly straightforward to use. And of course some less impressive examples which manage to be neither.

The lack of accessibility to the editor has been a bit of a problem, though, which is probably a major cause of the modding scene not really taking off with D:OS; in which case it ultimately didn't matter how powerful it was, because hardly anybody used it.

^ this. Also Sword Coast Legends is a horrible example. they promised so much and almost none of it was delivered and then the company shut down. Their editor was never made to be powerful.. they wanted to keep alot of power out of players hands. Larian studios actually delivers on their promises which makes them a diamond in the rough. They already have a powerful tool kit, they just need to make it a bit more user friendly for those of us.. who sadly don't understand scripting languages and such.

TBH, I'd say it wasn't the complex usage of the tools alone, but also the way subpar documentation. A lot of features were not even mentioned, and even the ones described had A LOT of quirks about them one had to find out by trial an error unless someone else went through it already and cared to share it.

I think they showed during the kickstarter campaign the tools would be more user friendly. I remember them showing the dialogue trees for example and it looked neat. I did lots of modding on Neverwinter Nights and as the GM mode will be shipped with DOS:2 I will probably come back to create content for a game, at least to make my own campaigns and to have my pals play.

I really like the fact they added some ways to write comments for other GMs in the campaigns. It's really nice and allows to keep the original vision of a scenario.

Well there are a few things they should do:

First of all a simple grayscale heightmap importer for terrains. Last time around I had to write it myself and it never took of. I'm not even sure at the moment it still compiles.

https://github.com/Celludriel/DOS_Terrain_Importer
https://github.com/Celludriel/DOS_Terrain_Lib
https://github.com/Celludriel/LsLib
https://github.com/Celludriel/DosPak

I do not want to go through this again. While I like programming, figuring out the files was living hell of try and error. Finding out which Endianness that had been used etc... it was just a nightmare. I don't think anybody ever used my tools either which was a big letdown as well. So in short:

- Open file descriptors so modders can write editors for them
- Greyscale heightmap importer so a lot of the sculpting of the terrain can be done upfront
- Easy dialog editor so storytelling can be done quickly and you aren't fighting the tools and are focusing on the story
- Easy templating of items so it doesn't take hours to make a new item
- Scripting language for creating events would be nice (like in NWN) but I can understand this won't be in it

I used your heightmap importer to re-create parts of Britannia. The mod didn't get far for other reasons, but I much appreciated it!

Nice glad to hear it helped someone out