Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General They haven't learned :(

I was so hopeful this time around. They said they would make the editor more accessible. Better tutorials, better everything to make it at least closer akin to the NWN toolkit.

However the editor is just as complex as it has always been. Nothing is intuitive, thousand editors, sub menus, panels etc... It is very powerful I give you that and given enough time you could probably recreate the entire game of D:OS in it. However this is starting to come in the area of "drupal" software. There is a saying in Belgium , 'The only people that know how to write drupal are those that made drupal'. Larian being a Gent company should have heard of this saying !

I really hope that either this time around the community steps up and writes tons of tutorials "WRITTEN not youtube !" or this editor will go the ways as the old editor. The few basic features I had expected aren't in and the filetypes are not documented again. I believe a lot of it has unchanged though since the PAK extractor norbyte made still works. Still I dread having to go write another greyscale map importer, something that should be basic for a 3D editor, at least I would think that to be basic

Here is hoping for some great custom adventures. I was hoping to recreate a simple D&D adventure, but after just a few hours in the toolkit, I just can't ... I have a real job too and it takes to much time to do even a simple thing as create a house and put some furniture in, and we haven't crossed sculpting and texturing a terrain yet

end rant ... needed to get that out for a moment

http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=611835#Post611835

They are working on a wiki page with written tutorials, the community can post tutorials aswell.

And to be honest I think that there is no such thing as an easy engine editor to create games.

NWN 1 toolset has set the benchmark, nobody has ever come close to an easy way to create your own adventures. NWN 2 even dropped the ball on that one, although it was still ten times easier then this one.

The biggest problem they have with this engine is UIX. It lacks badly

To be fair, the editor/game itself just came out and a lot of information is not quite there yet. I also prefer reading tutorials and not watching videos.

Some very bad news :-(

In my opinion NWN1 editor was super easy to use because it was all prefab tilesets, so constructing maps was super fast but you were also limited to either the tilesets in box, or the ones others developed. I always felt hindered by what was possible in that toolset because of that.

With NWN2 (and D:OS) the editors were so buggy that I had a real challenge even being able to edit anything in addition to being super complex.

My sense is that what is different this time is that a) there is a stable toolset out now, with the launch of the game, b) has steam integration for publishing (which will hopefully lead to a good community and lots of mod sharing, which we had with NWN1 at NWVault), c) there is an effort to get at least some basic documentation up on a wiki.

It is my sincere hope that we, as a community, embrace D:OS2 and it's editor and work together by collaborating, sharing our experiences, and as the users build that community which will lead to a robust gaming environment for years to come (a la NWN1).

It's not as hard as you think it is and they did make it MUCH easier. I can't list everything you had to do manually to set up a simple module that you no longer have to do. They vastly improved the editor and I am grateful it isn't dumbed down as that would limit the possibilities. Just watch the video tutorials for the old editor and this one is pretty similar when it comes to the basics.

If it was like nwn every map would look the same and bore me to tears to explore. Wouldn't be fun creating maps either, cause you wouldn't be able to paint whatever you can conceive in your mind as you c ad n with this editor.

It's definitely not that bad once you get the ball rolling! Within 12 hours of starting, I had already created a small village to use.
If you would like a tutorial on all of the basics, I recorded my 'Let's learn' stream for everyone.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/175333523

I will be doing more streams almost daily to work on my project in the toolset and help people learn!
You're welcome to ask as many questions as you want to so we can get more content creators out there. =D

Sharing all the knowledge and information we can is the key if we want make something great with all this. I'm an artist myself and without all the people out there showing and sharing all they know, I would never have learned everything I know today.

I really think they have some good tools there, and for obvisous reasons they are not gonna give us the full-engine capabilities. We don't need anything like open source code (we are not gonna create new games here), all we need is support from devs, documentation and tools.

I'm excited to see what we can do as a community, I'm a really big supporter of team work.

Yeah, I am currently trying to create some Custom NPCs, but it is difficult to be sure, but I cant say the same for the first games Toolkit, one look at that and I just ran away

I disagree and think that they have learned a lot. I don't expect a game of this quality and complexity to come with a toolset like NWN1. If someone released a game like that today, I doubt it would make the money back that would be required to create something like it. For better or worse, expectations are higher for graphics and other gameplay features. Given what DOS:2 can do, this editor is quite remarkable in its balance for accessibility and flexibility.

That said, Larian have made huge improvements in being able to do most things from within the editor. Stats editing, dialogs, journal maintenance, and several other areas have received huge quality of life improvements. They take a little time to learn, but once a development flow is established, it begins to move along nicely.

In addition, Larian had an early access period where they paid to have modders come visit their studio and provide feedback. They have created a nice infrastructure for building up a knowledge base, and we have already seen them here posting a lot to help the community get going. The tools were practically available on day one and we see way better traction at this point than DOS1 ever did. Larian have learned and accomplished a lot. While there is always room for improvement, let's give them the proper credit that is their due.

a) Stabilty is great
b) This is awful, when GOG owners can't even use those mods

Far from leading to a good community, Steam Workshop divides communitieas, even when it's a Steam exclusive game, like Skyrim, the first Workhop game.

It has no mod management features, and is nothing but a glorified downloader of files to a specific folder.

All that's incidental, when compared to the fact DOS2 isn't a Steam Exclusive.
When a section of the owners can't even use Steam Workshop, integrating that walled garden is a huge roadblock to building a cohesive community. We are starting with two.

One open to all types of mods, and users, hosted independantly mostly on Nexus Mods, but anywhere is possible.

The other limited by the restrictions of the Workshop requirement for prepackaged mods, and only available to ownwers on Steam.

This was, in my opinion, another decisive factor in the small size of DOS1/EE modding scene.
One being repeated again.

NWN and NWN2 were tile based. That simplifies things a whole lot. Skyrim's editor was more complex than NWN's as well for this reason.

So far the table based editing of Stats is ok, I would have preferred a pop-up window to click to add Skills, Talents, and a "function helper" similar to what you have in Excel to assist with adding conditions etc.

And I disagree. Steam Workshop is amazing for growing a mod community and distributing mods. It is undoubtedly a net positive.

Mod Developers can easily take their steam workshop files and upload them on Nexus Mods just as they would if Steam Workshop does not exist, so mod makers lose nothing.

Nexus is a total pain in the ass regarding the uploading of mods. There are 14 steps to follow to upload a mod. I stopped because of that. While on steam, it is usually a "upload" button, with a few fields to fill. No picture here.

As far as the toolset goes, it was never going to be an "easy" toolset. While there are, to put it mildly, some garbage mods on the shop right now; You can't deny that things are going much better than the first time around.

It took months to get the types of mods up there for 1 we have for 2 right now.




I normally upload my stuff to Nexus as well as Steam. But yes Nexus is pretty terrible for that stuff.

But I do think a good idea might be to just post it on your own google drive/dropbox/whatever account and then put the link on your workshop page as a manual DL.

It requires time if a DM wants to make own scenes / campaign. Using default ones should provide for good "session zero" ones.

But... requires "work" to do something. It is quite streamlined once you get the workflow, so the more you do the easier it becomes.

I'm finding the main issue to be the lack of any sizable scenes for GM mode without figuring out who to create your own in the editor. I think a few larger ones would have solved a lot of the issues some people are having trying to learn the editor. I don't think an actual town or two and being about to go into the houses is some of the scenes would have been to much to ask. Eventually I'll learn the editor and make some cities but for now I'll be wasting away using 10 scenes to get through one simple quest because we're ready to start playing.

I think a lot of the issue was expectation. I was expecting to be able to open the editor, generate some terrain, start plopping down buildings and be done.

Reckon the "game board" type of thing should start to make sense once more and more creators start ( if possible ) to share their Packs of premade props.

That way the non-editorial DM will be able to prepare the scenes really fast with some prior work to the sessions.

Given a team of 5 is needed, DM and 4 players why not share the load and have all five do some Prefabs ready for the DM to use ? In the end everyone will enjoy the scenes.

For sure. It seems the idea is for the community to provide several pre-built packaged areas : A Town, A castle, A room, Mountainous region etc. etc.

Imagine if we had 50 towns, 20 castles, 15 dungeons etc. and the GM with no mapping experience can pick one, and fill it with his NPCs, loot, monsters etc. I think that is where they want to head. But it's going to be community driven, not necessarily Larian staff sitting and making all these prefab areas.

For me it's simple what makes a good editor.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSo56yAlA8SXRk9sIp6OarNnsoVjR5_dkr9rgoxUG_571bVUfOQfw

If I can't make this simple layout in less then a day. I mean layout not making it look pretty with props and atmosphere lightning, sounds etc ... Then the editor has failed. I realize NWN1 was tile based and so was NWN2 dungeon editor, but that shouldn't be an excuse.

The wall building in D:OS is arguably also tile based, since one section of a wall is a tile. Yet making a nice enclosed square wall is an effort in frustration. Having to figure out you have to hold down CTRL and then scroll up and down to change the texture of a wall piece is not very UIX either.

In terminology of scrum if your least amount of effort task to produce something deploy able to production takes longer then two days, you are in trouble, that's how I feel currently in the editor. I'll play around with it after work during the week, but for now I feel disappointed, I had expected more from it. They should have given kickstarters access to the editor way earlier so we could give constructive feedback, and not just the elite few they had for testing.

[quote=Celludriel]For me it's simple what makes a good editor.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSo56yAlA8SXRk9sIp6OarNnsoVjR5_dkr9rgoxUG_571bVUfOQfw

If I can't make this simple layout in less then a day. I mean layout not making it look pretty with props and atmosphere lightning, sounds etc ... Then the editor has failed. I realize NWN1 was tile based and so was NWN2 dungeon editor, but that shouldn't be an excuse.

The wall building in D:OS is arguably also tile based, since one section of a wall is a tile. Yet making a nice enclosed square wall is an effort in frustration. Having to figure out you have to hold down CTRL and then scroll up and down to change the texture of a wall piece is not very UIX either.

In terminology of scrum if your least amount of effort task to produce something deploy able to production takes longer then two days, you are in trouble, that's how I feel currently in the editor. I'll play around with it after work during the week, but for now I feel disappointed, I had expected more from it. They should have given kickstarters access to the editor way earlier so we could give constructive feedback, and not just the elite few they had for testing. [/quote]

They made the game in this editor. So I think you just need to get used to it.

Aka. Git gud.

You're basically asking the editor to do something it's not designed for with that layout. The hallways are too narrow, the round sections are extremely difficult to pull off with the existing root templates, and there's no clean way to fork off a wall in a 3way hall like the left side of the image. You have to adjust what you're trying to do to fit what the D:OS editor does, not try to make the D:OS editor do what it's not good at.

Hi there, first of all I own a gog version so I don't have the editor yet but I can share my experience with the NWN2 toolset which I've been using 6 years now.

When I first opened it it was chaotic. I had no clue how to create an area, what a script looked like and how to create a module that is playable. The good thing was, that the community was very active. This is what we need, aside from a wiki page that is on its way. Whenever we have a problem or encounter something we don't know how to tackle... ask around here. Someone might have already solved it.

In the NWN2 community, rjshae created the toolset notes, which is some documents of personal notes about how to achieve various things. He did it as he built and kept notes to reference in case he needed to do the same thing and forgot how it works. Then he published them. I aim to do the same for divinity once I start modding.

Furthermore, one of the best things in the NWN2 forums was that we have a different section for different aspects. I would love if this was the case here too. Section scripting for scripting questions, section toolset for building questions and so on. Just modding section is too abstract.

Well as a d&d enthusiast, my aspirations where that it would be easy to make a dungeon like this in about a days time, as preparation for a GM session. It doesn't have to be perfect and have tons of detail, but the layout should be easy to make. If the editor can't pull this of fairly easy, and you need a months prep for one GM session (and I'm not talking in reusing the same prefabs there are now) then I don't feel like it's up to par. A tool should not hold back your creativity.

Anyhow that being said, if I take that picture I posted here earlier, transform it with a paint editor to black and white, and get my terrain import running in D:OS2, I could relatively fast generate this layout. Sad part is I have to write my own tools again, instead of using the default editor.

So I can get around with it, I'm just still disappointed that once more there isn't a game that can put out a NWN1 experience toolset.

Yeah, I agree, that would be nice to have. Especially because it would enable to limit the search function of the forum to a specific category (e.g. scripting).

Currently that's not really important as there are not that many questions yet, but if the toolkit hopefully takes off and is maintained further into the future by the dedicated mod support team, and there are many questions already asked, then it would certainly be useful.

The Editor is shit. It takes 34095867340598674359086743905687340958674395086743509 hours to make a simple level. KEEP.IT.SIMPLE.STUPID.

Whatever happened with the KISS principle, people !?!?!

-Drakkanis

Again, I would rather have the massive variety and allowance of creativity the current editor offers than the cookie cutter repetition that you were limited to with NWN, as much as I love that game.

I've been making some pretty sweet level layouts that wouldn't have been even remotely possible in NWN.

It shoudln't take you more than a few hours to do the layout for a HUGE level. If it takes you longer, you just need more practice.

I have mixed thoughts here. I don't have the game, considering buying it for the editor. However, I made that mistake in D:OS, and feel very shy about doing it again.
Pros:
- There is probably a learning curve here, Celludriel, that might be worth it.
- Editor seems very powerfull
- there is a wiki, with some stuff already, that didn't exist with the D:OS engine

Cons
- As for the Aurora engine not being good, what is the point of having a great editor, if only the devs can use it properly ? I mean, just give NWN2 toolset with up to date graphics, plug ins, and enjoy the show the community is going to give...
- from what I can read here and there, it is complicated to do basic things, as it was in the D:OS editor.

Conclusion:
Hopefully the learning curve make it worth it. However, it seems that we, NWN2 modders, are still orphans...
(btw, I am EAGERLY waiting for the Mount and Blade 2 "engine"...)
Cheers and love, modders

Yes, this toolset is less simple than a starcraft 2 editor.
But I got there 2 days ago, and today I managed to make a small islands in 5h and I start using triggers and scripts. And as you can read it I'm very bad in English ...
I think in one day we understand how it works. Once logic is in front, it's very simple.
In addition here, there are many who help and it begins to be of tutorial written and video.

I think if you really want to get there. you can learn it much faster than you think.

Being an artist myself and worked with several games editors, I could not agree more with you on this.

We have great tools here and this is just the beginning.



If you need those hours to make something decent, you need get through a needed process, the learning curve. If you are not ready for that, I would recommend you to not touch any game development software.

You are wrong in some points.

First of all, the differences with dos2, and improvements from DOS1 are massively huge.

And second, I would not expect to see the tools we have here for M&M2. DOS2 is more complex in his behaviur itself, and the things you can change and mod in a rpg like dos2 or nwn1 can't be compare with a game like M&M (we not talking about which one is better, just the complexity and the possibilities of creation).

You could buy the game and discover the potential of these tools, and the game is awesome!

/wave

[q]First of all, the differences with dos2, and improvements from DOS1 are massively huge.[/q]
So it seems, great news.
As for M&B:W, the modding potential is huge. I mean, star wars mods...

I am really considering buying D:OS2 more and more, indeed.

Cheers.

Don't let how user friendly the editor is dictate your decision to buy the game or not. D:OS2 is pretty decent game.

I'll chime in since I've built large and small zones.

I acknowledge that I have prior experience with a lot of editing tools, so this sort of thing can be a bit easier for me.

Is the tool bad or unusable? Not at all.
If you have been watching my videos, you can see how quickly you can get into the flow of creating levels.

If you want to design places to use in the GM mode, things like terrain editing, npc creation, building creation, decorating and all that are very simple. It shouldn't take you more than a day or two to make a medium-sized zone with proper decorations.

Does the UI need work? Definitely. Right now I think the best word for it without being too harsh is 'clunky'. It can be tricky to get acquainted without tutorials, and even then finding things can be a bit of an issue.
Jumping between the resource manager, and the actual side-bar is a bit of a pain.

It is definitely more complicated than tools like the Neverwinter Nights toolset and Warcraft 3. Someone just looking to churn out mediocre content without putting the effort in will get frustrated at the learning curve.

Now for constructive feedback!
- Work on streamlining your windows for what the user currently needs.
A good example: When I click on a Wall object, I can click the root template to change it to a roof, or another type of wall. No other object types show because they aren't compatible. This is good. You aren't overloading the user with useless information.

A bad example: When I choose the material for my floor or roof, it gives no prompt on what to look for. Only when you press the arrow to assign a material it says 'Choose a material resource'.
So I go to the resource manager and choose TR_Woodpanels.. but it doesn't work but TR isn't a valid type. TR is exclusive to Terrain painting. Why let me choose it?

- Terrain tools are almost perfect. Only things I want are new brush shapes, like square, and a more visual brush size changing. I only figured out to use [ and ] by looking at the hotkeys. Visual feedback is good.

- AI pathing painting is a little odd. Tooltips can clear this up. Tell people what it means when they hover their mouse of Full Generate or similar.

- Object movement, placement, and resizing are wonderful. I actually like your system of doing this more than Neverwinter Nights and Starcraft 2. Well done.

I have to get ready for a meeting, so I'll add more later. Overall, I love the editor! But I can definitely see why people find it a bit daunting or frustrating.

Thank you for sharing your experience @Caiden.

I have to disagree. For the wooden worker house there is a one tilesized door with a little roof over it. But it is ALWAYS pointing in the wrong direction. The little roof is inside of the house. There is NO FUCKING WAY to flip that door around. Because A) somehow you canÄt flip doors and B) even if you flip the wall before you create the door it is STILL POINTING INWARDS!!

So I think building creation is horrible and shit!!!

Saving houses as prefabs turns them into a single wall tile. So you can't actually reuse a house you finished. This is crap.