Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General General Modding Questions

Hey Everyone, new around here!

I had some general questions about modding, mostly about mapping (for now). Experienced modder from other games, but for brevity, the questions will sound simple, and blunt (sorry).

I don't see any "world" maps (campaign sized), only single levels. Is it just tedious and unpopular so people opt for GM style add-ons, or is there a limit with the editor stopping us from doing huge worldplaces? Or did vanilla -> DE kill most of the WIP worlds?

If one did plan to make a multi-continent map, what is the "file structure?" for such a project? Is it simple like creating a 100k x 100k level, morph the terrain like your worldmap suggests, and include "open areas(houses, towns, etc)", then create separate levels for the "closed areas (dungeons, portals, underground, etc)"? Or is there some sort of "merged" worldspace where you create a multitude of levels, and merge them to create the big worldspace?

I've also heard some things about compatibility between patches, seeing as they're frequent enough to happen between now and finishing such a long project, am I doomed because the next patch will render something I create now useless in the next patch?

Thanks for taking the time to read/answer! Happy Modding.

For the map, I'd recommend loading up some inherited levels from larian first, see how Fort Joy or Reaper's Coast is laid out. Reaper's Coast is considered about as large as the engine can handle at least at a comfortable pace.

If you want to create one "open world", you'd place interiors, caves, etc anything "instanced" outside the main map, as you'll see in any inherited main levels. The external "areas" are sort of lumped around outside the main area.

I'm not 100% sure of what your vision of a world map is, maybe a point of reference to another game would help.

In general, you have two primary components to work with: levels and terrains. Each level can have many pieces of terrain in it, and that is how you can do something like enter a hatch in the ground and end up in an isolated dungeon area. They can be two patches of terrain completely detached from each other in the same level with scripting to teleport between them.

The extent to which you divide your campaign into multiple levels, and terrains within those levels, really depends on what you're trying to accomplish and the performance impact, both while playing the game and trying to work on things in the editor. As your level grows in size and complexity, stability and response time tend to go down with it, although in general the editor is pretty efficient. Creating one really huge land mass can just become unwieldy while developing, and it can impact performance while playing since there are scripting behaviors that are run on a per level basis.

My own guess about the primary limit in the modding community from doing huge world spaces is the amount of time it would take to create one that looks good and is filled with meaningful content.

Thanks for the replies guys, sounds good!

Incase anyone found this thread with the same questions, I got some discord responses as well.... here's the gist

Most people do tend to make GM mode levels, and "one-shot" type stories. Big worlds are ambitious.

When the editor starts lagging for you is when the file is getting too large. Use tricks like caves, between act boat rides, portals, etc to split up a large open worldspaces

No patches have broken DE mods yet. No reason to believe they will in the future.

Hello everyone, listen. I recently voiced the video intro at the very beginning of the game Divinity 2, extracted and processed the sound and replaced it with the Russian version. Can I publish such a mod on the web and distribute it for free? After all, there is a video from the developer! But now they speak Russian in it, will I break any agreements? Can I do this?

I just checked with our producer and ,yes, you can! (as long as you distribute it only for free)

It's similar to other mods that are based on assets from the game, like when modders export a model or armour, modify it, and then redistribute the modified version as a mod.

Thank you very much, I will definitely leave references to the company and its rights! Unfortunately, I didn’t answer those questions about other questions, take this opportunity, since I was answered here more quickly, I want to ask one more thing: Can I get structured data about the voicing of all the game characters? That is, now I manually extract all the texts and assign them to the characters that I listen in the game directly, can the developers provide me with such information and facilitate my task? I would be happy to receive information about exactly where the cues of all game characters are located - by their names, that is, for example, the replicas of the character "Fein have an identifier: v02a77f1f872b49ca91ab32098c443beb_ but the developers could provide information about all the characters of the game. If this is possible you would be very good helped. Perhaps such information already exists somewhere in the open form and I do not know about it.