It was nice to see a stretch goal dedicated to the editor. As someone who has had a high interest in it since the first Kickstarter, I just wanted to share my own personal feedback on what I would like to see if we reach the target and indeed get a couple of developers devoted to it. I highly encourage others like Baardvark and SniperHF to chime in here as those who seem to have progressed the furthest with fully completing a mod. Burgee too if he is still around.
1) Compatibility
Creating a standalone adventure with a modest amount of playtime at decent quality will perhaps take an average
minimum time investment of somewhere between 8-12 months (just judging by past experience with NWN/DA and having dabbled in the DOS toolset). If I'm going to invest that kind of time, I'd really like to know that my labors are not going to end up in vain because of changing interfaces or deprecated versions of the game. This was the primary reason for halting my efforts with D:OS. When Larian went AFK after the initial batch of information, I had a sneaky suspicion that the modding community was going to get orphaned, and it has. It's not just because the editor is 'complicated', it's also because there is little confidence that any work invested will see the light of day if Larian keeps moving forward without any communication about, or consideration for how its decisions will impact people working with the editor.
2) More building blocks, less reliance on your campaign scripts
This kind of follows up on the compatibility issue, but it would be helpful to have better building blocks that are not inherently tied into your main campaign systems, which are more susceptible to change and consequently break our own mods when they do. Take a look at the work done for the
standalone project template to get an idea of the kind of fundamental building blocks that could help people begin with a template to build their own mods.
3) Modularity
Help modders help each other by making it easier to integrate multiple mods and import/export individual components. Share with us your best practice suggestions on how you integrate perforce into your workflow so we can model our own source control sharing into our projects.
4) Hang out with us from time to time
It would be nice if we could have a post in the modding forums now and then to verify when we have understood things correctly, acknowledge those items most needed by the community, and get some kind of handle on what changes, if any, are coming to the editor.
5) Features
I put this last because it's so obvious, but I actually don't think it's the highest priority anyway. I know a lot of people have expressed their desire for the toolset to be more friendly, but that is probably going to require the greatest amount of effort on your part and if the aforementioned items are not done in conjunction with that effort, I don't think it will have much of a return on investment anyway.
I'm looking forward to what the others have in mind who have invested time with the original editor. Thanks for your consideration, and I hope we meet that goal!
