If you see the nexus mod page for Divinity 1 you only see reskins. This is because Larian uses a third party software for animation called Granny3d that uses .GR2 files.
The choice of file format has little to do with this; the issue is that Larian didn't release any exporter with the editor, so it was quite impossible to import/export meshes.
Granny 3d is old as f#~k, Blizzard uses it on WoW, which is 13 year old.
The same could be said about FBX, couldn't it? It was created in 1996 after all ... But despite that, both the FBX and GR2 formats got significant updates, and even though its still called GR2 it's very different from the old GR2's.
Even if they miraculously managed to use a 13 years old SDK for this game (which they didn't), I could still argue that meshes almost contain the exact same info they did 13 years ago, i.e. vertices, normals/tangents/bitangents, UV sets, skeleton, animation frames and some additional metadata. If you look at how a modern engine stores meshes (eg.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/API/Runtime/Engine/Engine/UStaticMesh/index.html), you'll see that its almost the same as it was in the last decade. Vertex data is one of the very few things in graphics that didn't really change with the advance in technology.
Blender can import .dae files, but why leave out the 2 big ones, Maya and Max?
Mostly because it was the easiest file format to handle in the little spare time I had (and there are plugins for Maya and Max both to import/export .DAE files.)
Max hasn't got a GR2 importer since Max 7.
The SDK I have contains exporters for up to Max 2013 though its quite old; newer SDKs probably support up to Max 2017.
I mean I could be wrong but i honestly don't understand how Larian can develop an almost perfect system and make the mistake on relying on expensive middleware to work
I'd say granny as a middleware isn't so bad, the mistake they made -- which, from a modding point of view, is a very significant one -- was not checking whether they can provide the GR2 SDK to players. I'd say it was because modding was more of an afterthought in D:OS and EE and not something they've spent a large amount of effort on in the early stages of development, so by the time it came to licensing it was already too late to change formats or it was simply not viewed as a significant enough issue to spend effort on. (I may be wrong here though.)
D:OS2 -- as stated before -- will have importers/exporters, so this issue will be nonexistent.
We need more info in the so-called modding tools that is coming
Yeah, at least a list of what changes were made would be nice.
The 6 man party mod for D:OS EE wasn't good. Changing hex values on a .exe, and giving the players just henchmen to play with and it didn't managed the game properly when it came to conversations, scripts, and stuff.
I'd say it was because the whole main campaign was built around there being 2 main chars and 2 henchmen, and the way the scripts were built didn't really handle 4+ players well as they didn't expect them to exist at all.
From what I've seen so far, the char creation script support for D:OS2 is way better than the ones in OS1, this doesn't guarantee that it'll handle 4+ chars properly though. We shall see.
and i fear that with a mod things will get nasty, handling more than 4 inventories, asking for dice rolls, etc would cause problems.
From a scripting/API point of view handling any number of characters is feasible; the main issue in D:OS 1 was that certain elements were hardcoded both in the exe and in the main campaign scripts, creating various issues for 4+ players.
I am kinda jealous of people who just have an innate skill for modelling though, and manage to create some seriously awesome stuff while I'm dragging around one vertex at a time. My 2D skills aren't any better either.
Yeah, I kinda gave up on modelling a while ago, I'm just no good at it.
P.S: Maya and Max have a waaay easier curve for modelling than blender IMO.
I have to agree that there are some things that are _very_ hard to use/get used to in Blender. Some of their UI design decisions are truly puzzling to me, there is probably some logic to it though that I can't see yet
