Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General Newbie question about programming/scripting skills

Hello all, recently purchased DOS2 and subsequently made an account here. I have a very foundational understanding of programming (C++ class back in 1999, a *bit* rusty) but in my favor I have a subscription to pluralsight.

1) Can anyone give me a heads up as to what areas of programming courses would benefit me in learning how to work in the divinity engine? I have aspirations of doing some campaign work for game mastering, but with a good bit of scripted content as opposed to having to juggle everything on the fly.

Reading the scripts isn't difficult due to the nature of my current work, but I don't have any practical experience to know where to start learning.

2) Does a quick reference guide currently exist that gives a basic overview of the groupings of tools and their most practical uses? If not, I'll be happy to work on a QRG as I take studious notes during my learning process.


Thanks in advance for any assistance!

With regard to scripting, if you're familiar with events, loops, and if-then-else statements, you should be fine. The trickiest aspect of Osiris is the syntax, but I don't want to oversell the difficulty.

As for where to start, read the scripts. There's very little documentation currently, but they're working on it.

I would just start with the documentation available from Larian. It's important to know that there are really two different scripting languages used. There is Osiris for story scripting and then Behavioral Scripting for behaviors attached to items and creatures. While they look similar in many ways, there are some differences.

Story Scripting:
Osiris (wiki)
Youtube tutorials (from DOS1 but relevant, just realize dialogues are done very differently now)

Behavioral Scripts:
Scripting

They're both Osiris. These are just different systems.

Eh, I dunno if they are both considered Osiris.
All the Osiris specific tutorials refer to the Story editor. Both for 1 and 2.

They are both Osiris. They are "Osiris-used-for-story" and "Osiris-used-for-behaviors." You're using one language for different systems. You're making this more complex and confusing than it needs to be. Larian refers to their only scripting language as just Osiris.

Thank you for the responses!

Taking into account the availability of Pluralsight as a resource I am able to utilize for learning to program in modern media, would either of you have any recommendations for the types of courses that might benefit me? It seems like scripting would be the obvious one whether I am looking to modify story features or behaviors.

Any of those courses will delve into more detail than you need for Osiris.

But... if you want to learn for more reasons than modding, I prefer Frontend Masters over Pluralsight:

- Four Semesters of Computer Science in 5 Hours (The Basics)
- Functional-Lite JavaScript (Intro to Functional/Declarative Programming; Osiris is a declarative language)
- Deep JavaScript Foundations (Intermediate-Advanced JavaScript; recognized as the best online course in JavaScript)

You'll find a lot of use for JavaScript beyond web development (e.g., test automation.) In terms of web development languages, a number of them can be used to write CLI programs, including JavaScript with Node.js and PHP. These languages will also provide you with a solid foundation for learning Python, Java, and C#.

The Original Sin 2 toolset is written with a mix of C# and C++. If you want to learn the C languages, master object-oriented programming, garbage collection, optimizing for embedded systems. The game itself is written in C++, like most games, but the vast majority of Unity-based games are written in C#. These days, tools developers typically use C# and Python.

Learning Python is fairly easy. Mastering Python is fairly hard. In my experience, what separates junior and senior Python engineers is whether they can write "Pythonic" code, which typically means using list comprehensions and generator expressions.

Osiris is more like Prolog than any "modern" language that anyone would want to learn.
...and Prolog is essentially used mostly for AI, probably by about 12 people.