Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General - D:OS2 ModdingTool - Discussions/Suggestions

Generally I think it is really important to have a import/export function of pretty much everything (parts of maps, templates, prefabs and blueprints of anything like items, created encounters, NPCs, weapons, treasures, all kind of scripts and scripted systems, light templates, visual effects, material and and and).

I am mainly addressing things you can make with the editor out of the box without any custom content. (combined with custom content would be also important)

To have a prospering modding community, there is a need to do small details, prefabs and blueprints for those that dont have the capacity to do a real big complete playable module but just tinkering around with one aspect of the game and providing it (templates, prefabs, blueprints) for the community (via nexus / workshop).

One guy just blueprints of all kind of orcs with nice names, colors and stats and maybe even encounters, the other girl is writing new usable scripts, the next one makes just beautiful plain maps and slow-joe-in-the-back-row just makes stunning waterfall vfx and materials so that finally MR. Not-so-much-time-and-capacity downloads all kinds of usable stuff imports these in his module and focusses on writing the story and dialogs.

Beside the importance for lone-wolves this is a must for any team creating playable content.

This must be easy uncomplicated and stable. Export - Import and voilà!!

@morez
you include assets?

In my last post i was actually more adressing import export function of anything that can be created with the editor out of the box. Still would be important to include custom made assets into prefabs etc.
I wanted to address the need for features and tools to share and work together on one bigger playable module.


Though, if an model / assets import export tool wasnt asked for before anyway this was the first thing i'd ask for. Thought better not to be too repetitive but well lets repeat the echo in the discourse:

"YES Larian we want to be able to import/export anything, from 3D models, to animations, to textures to just anything!"

[Provovation=on] Hey Larian, I bet you guys wont be able to not use too much proprietary stuff like 3rd party tools like GR2 things and so on that will always have right issues to make them available to players. You wont have the guts to make as much things as possible open source but at the end too much will be hardcoded again. [/Provocation=off]

To say it clearly out loud, it always was my dream to have a real open source thing with that kind of quality as DOS has (among some few others). Sure, I am not an insider of professional of games industry still i think a game that was more open than usual in the buisness could be a huge success once developers have the courage for that. At least Larian was proving a lot of courage already. So there might be a chance they will make things different.

[Provocation=on] But the guys from Larian never gonna do that [Provocation=off]

a wiki like this one would be awesome: http://www.nwn2toolset.dayjo.org/

or
http://www.nwnlexicon.com/index.php

or
http://neverwintervault.org/project...-reference-guide-tutorial-xls-collection

or something like this: http://neverwintervault.org/sites/n...oject/690/files/toolset_manual_v1.06.pdf

I know, all of that is community made. But I think that kind of documentation is needed for really cool mods

If Larian can't spare resources for this (which is fair), perhaps they could collaborate with a few community members to create the best Wiki experience. Channel our personal interest into professional outcome.

Just to bump this, would be ecstatic if what's on the list (as seen in the updated OP) gets to make it in. Really
If i could only add one request, that would be to make it as ---easy--- to "navigate" within the editor as humanly possible. This is very important

You need to take a step backwards and remind yourselves that from the millions of people out there doing mods, only a handful (relatively to the sum) have programming skills. The rest, like me, learned and did through trial and error. It never amounted to much, but that was never the point.

Starting from scratch can be daunting, but that is ok, as long as it's not being made impossible. Make the editor easy to grasp/navigate/work with, so that we may learn while trying it out.
The example i usually give is Morrowind's editor. It had functions enough for people like me to be out of their depth with, but sufficient ease of use so that changing gear, looks, NPCs/vendors, stats and spell speeds was possible. Even for me, lol

On the topic of documentation, the NWN2 community has spent a lot of time making excellent documentation such as this: NWN2 Toolset Notes

This happens because modders love working with the toolset...because it isn't ridiculously hard to use.

Yeah I am just adding this now

Fix Fortify...

There is no reason it should get worse as the game goes on yet alone become outright useless. Scale it... even if you have to scale it according to level.

This might belong in another thread.

Again tying the DM mode to the editor, the essential stuff needs to be really simple to use; enabling a DM mode for a human DM to 'fill in the gaps' to make it useful with absolute minimal skill would be great. Perhaps having the editor have a DM mode and a full mode would help encourage people to develop the skills necessary to become competent in full use mode ... at which point they could have friends play test a mod with the mod developer only rarely intervening to remove final bugs as opposed to being a 'true' DM where they're constantly 'intervening'. I suggest focussing on the DM 'minimal functional editor' and making it 'perfect' for early release. The 'true' full editor will probably 'always be in beta', but a highly stable DM mode with additional options that can be added/activated would make it customisable to everyone's skill level.

As with learning any skill, people need to feel they're making progress and can do something useful with it asap. Get them on a positive learning cycle and they'll continue to develop their skill. Get enough people developing full mods that can be sold through Larian (who get a fair cut of the profits), and you'll have yourself a source of golden eggs ... and the game's community as a whole will eventually have more new content than could be played in one lifetime

I don't agree. Ideally, the tools should be finished in time for the developers to make use of them. Good modding tools are not terribly different from a game engine. RPG Maker is a good example that really blurs this line.

Here are some ideas.
-Scaling NPCs, both enemies and non-party allies alike. And not just the generic "scale to PC level" but other options such as "scale to PC level + x" or "scale to PC level but max out at level 5".

-An option to make some skills exclusive to certain classes, such as the 2-handed skill not being available to the Mage class. So essentially creating specialised classes, instead of the current system where everyone can level up in any skill, which totally fine, but the option to create normally RPG specialised classes would be nice.

-An online option so several people can populate a map with items, sort of like a Google-drive document that several people can edit at the same time.

Something I would hope for, is the ability to leave areas of the map blank, for being only dynamically filled with procedural content (or blueprints with randomized decor) if required at runtime.

E.g. house interiors, open plains, etc. That's not making much sense for single player campaigns, but for GM sessions, the ability to patch the world as the session goes should proof rather valuable, as it removes the need to model tons of features forehand, if the players are never going to see them anyway.

This could be expressed in a more generic fashion: Support for deterministic, procedural script plugins, which can be given a free-form area of the map, optionally with a number of fixed features (doors, passages to other areas, bounding box and alike, can be assisted by querying for adjacent features instead). Effectively, "Scripted Blueprints" / "Scripted Brush".

In terms of workflow: Select a region (whereby the engine per default snaps to the edges of a "blank" area, e.g. indoors to the wall, outdoors to the edge of "unpainted" terrain, on painted terrain to the edge of the texture, alternate mode: Snap to "region", whereby the engine tracks regions.), adjust the parameters (including the random seed) and get a live preview of the modifications the script would do to the map. Once you are happy with the results, persist the changes (for alternate selection mode: also persist region information). When in a multiplayer (game) session, distribute changes on persisting.

(Regions can be hierarchically nested.)

A script could perform arbitrary modification to the height map, place all types of assets, paint terrain, auto generate script triggers.

Also the ability to call another script from within a script, to generate sub-features. (e.g.: High level script divides house into floors and rooms, aligning with doors and windows, low level scripts for various room types add the actual interior, lights, rugs etc.)

Effectively, this should allow rather easily to "paint" e.g. unique houses, outdoor features and alike with minimal effort. It also allows modders to share "concepts" instead of just ready baked assets, allowing for mass production of unique features.

I don't expect the folks from Larian to use such a system themselves - they got the resources to hand-place every single pebble in the stock campaign, but for less-than-fulltime map makers, this should reduce the work significantly while avoiding the "cloned" look you would usually get with ready made assets.

If this has already been suggested, my apologies (feel free to delete my post) :s

Currently, Larian cannot release the EE editor for fear of the upcoming patch causing issues. Something which has happened before, with the original version.

Using once again the same paradigm (Morrowind), i would ask for a DOS2 editor that gets installed 'once' and is made in such a way so as to be able to function independently/with any version of the game, regardless of future changes.

I also want to suggest that ALL assets from the previous game should be available for modders, especially monsters\sounds. Worldbuilding too, but I am curious about how we will be able to import new meshes\textures.

1. Say you are populating a patch of forest with trees, you then plop in 10 x tree A, 8 X tree B and 6 x tree C. The problem is that they're all set at the exact same angle so in order for your forest to look natural you'll have to manually turn each on of them.
So i propose an option you can turn on and off, where each time you put in a tree (or any item actually) its angle will be randomized any where from 0 to 360* where 0 and 360 is due north and 180 is due south.
Does everyone understand my proposal here?

---------------------SPOILER ALERT----------------------------

Divinity: Original Sin QUEST SPOILER AHEAD.

2. It would be cool to be able to have quests with random endings! It can be really simply or real complex. Let me elaborate. I remember playing Fallout 2 many years ago, and one of the early quest you got in the Den was one where you were supposed to find a book someone had misplaced, it was actually rather simple to find, it could be at 1 out of 3 places, the thing was that each time you started a new game it might appear at another place than in your previous game. Such kind of a feature shouldn't be hard to implement, right?

Now imagine this feature taken to the next level, so when each time you start a new game in D:OS Jake's murderer and source user would be a random one, out of say, Esmeralda, Evelyn, Robert the mortician plus some more that way you would actually have to do some investigation each game run.

PS. When do the editor "closes" for new features? There is a sum up of what people suggested, in the first post but it doesn't seem to have been updated in many months, do the devs. still look at this page??

You can actually already do this in the D:OS editor it's just kind of a pain in the butt.

Totally ! haha.
Personally, I find it only useful to place object like trees.

Even for that I stopped using it because the instance painter actually makes it harder to tweak them later. Unless there's some magic trick to it I'm not aware of.

And if it's one of those trees that has leaves as separate objects I found it harder to use.

I guess it comes in handy as well when you places stones, rocks, plants (not the 2D ones) and other vegetation.
Also I wasn't aware that such a feature already existed in the D:OS Editor