Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods Request for more helpful tools

Hey,

I've already posted this on the steam forums but it might be useful here as well.

For the past week I've been playing with the editor. I've got a pretty good feel for building houses, manipulate the ai grid, sculpting a little bit of terrain. It all works technically but the worst part is the textures, so much tiling going on and just texturing a decent looking road that isn't blank takes aaaages. I like to see much more stories appear , but considering the time sink for making simple things I fear for it. So the following tools in my oppinion would really help.

- Filler tool : Basicly a tool like in paint that would fill a selected or boundried area. You would get a few options with it as well. You can select which texture layers to use. What kind of noise dispersment you want on it. Maybe some kind of gradient. a valid use case for example would be:

I want to create a forrest with some dark dirt terrain, leaves, mosses and pebbles. So I make a 900*900 blank terrain. Choose my four textures, move them in the right order. Then I take the fill tool. I choose some kind of noise distribution, then 70% dirt, 15% leaves, 10% mosses, 5% pebbles. The result would be a nice forestry terrain with mixed textures. Now I've saved about 100 hours of manually texturing the terrain (with no undo on terrain texturing I'm not that much of on this estimation)

- Road building tool: A point to point road building help. Again you choose which textures make up the road, you then click on several places on the map until you are satisfied with the layout. Next you have the option to set the max width and min width of the road in AI tile size. You then get the option how even distributed the width is of the road. 100% would be all width is the same, Press generate and presto you have a nice looking road with curves and stuff, and you saved yourself 500 hours of manually trying to create a road with nice textures and evenly spaced out width.

- River building tool: A point to point river building help. Same as the road actually, but you get to choose, width and depth as well. How shallow the shore of the river is. Is it grand canyon style cutout, or are we sailing down the pontar river (wrong world/game but those that know it know what I'm talking about)

Just these three tools would make our lives a lot easier and help pouring out good looking content way faster. I know this takes quite some time to develop. The fill tool alone with a nice noise distributement, will probably take a decent programmer a full sprint. It took me two weeks in my spare time to write it for Neverwinter Nights 2. Maybe at one point you could let us write our own extentions for the editor. But please provide an API documentation site for the DLL's then not like bioware did and let us figure it out ourselfes with undecompilable dll libs !

All textures will look "tiley" on terrains in the engine, you need to get creative: use the instance painter to cover the floor with grass, shrubs, rocks, etc.

I know but thing is you can actually automate a lot of the base work. Leaving only fine tuning and sprucing up.

http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/prefab/area/terrain-importer-3-v123

Take a look at this little thing I brought back from the grave and improved upon. With just a heightmap I could generate a simple decent looking terrain in NWN2. Having something like this for divinity would be great. However since the editor doesn't seem at first glance as flexible as NWN2, I have my doubts it will be possible. But doesn't hurt to ask now does it Their offices are only an hour and a half from me so I could ask personally but that would just be ... "weird" :p

There is a heightmap generator already. http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=518432#Post518432 (I've added a link to this on the wiki now).

You can "randomly" place items using the "Instance Painter".

Roads are annoying to draw with a mouse, I'll grant you.

Rivers are kinda weird, but they aren't a huge amount of time to spend compared to everything else (like the pile of shit roof editor).

I'm not saying that more (and better) tools wouldn't be appreciated, but at the moment we are still struggling with basic bootstrapping (scripts, resources, etc).

The thing I find interesting is that the editor is apparently the same one as the devs used themselves to make the game.

Well yeah , but they are trained artistic professionals that get paid to deliver quality. With a fulltime job it's hard to have the same amount of patience. Certainly when a lot of stuff can be procedural generated. Just a little bit of time spent in programming the procedural toolset could save countless hours