Long post incoming!
Apologies for the upcoming wall of text, but I feel I should address every point accurately.
Here it comes!
Editor
1)You can't create Npc's from scratch, just based on a template (civilian/class) that on purpose locks out hairstyles and clothing options
You can. The civilian etc. root templates are the ones we created to make the game. You can make your own
character Root Template and assign it a custom
Visual Set. The current guides might not detail fully on how to work with custom visual sets, so if there are any problems with creating/changing resources, feel free to make a separate post on that. Me and others will happily clarify the steps.
2)Clothing textures have alpha channels, that's amazing, and they let pass certain RGB values to create color, but instead of letting you pick (like in any other game with textures with alpha channel) from the typical 16.6 million color picker you have 15-20 PREDEFINED COLOR , for no reason, it adds nothing, it serves no purpose but to limit the options, also Instead of giving you a regular wizard in the editor, (or where it should be, in the GM Mode) to create, place and control NPCs we have the choice of in the GM Mode to create a copy of one, the system is uncomfortable for no reason.
![[Linked Image]](https://i.gyazo.com/d2c971c91500dfcbb7af00c7a07847e8.png)
Limiting the option of colors is the exact reason why this is done. Designers/Users can create valid, good looking color schemes after which you can quickly switch between those instead of picking a color again every time. If you add a new color to your visual set, it will provide you a color picker with all 16.6 million colors.
GM mode is designed for quick interactions with a library of content, hence working with templates instead of creating things from scratch. Providing a creation tool in GM mode to make your own characters and visual sets as in the editor is a good improvement you can certainly post on the GM forum.
3)Live editing. Even if you create a scene based on a copy of a map, you can't see it in the game because it has to be part of a pre-published and installed mod, the game should just look at the "scenes" folder and let you pick whatever levels you had in there, but nope. The communication between editor and Game is...bad.
I don't fully understand what you mean here. You're addressing editor issues in this list, but this sounds like you're talking about GM scenes?
The editor creates data. The game works with that. You can create and edit GM scenes within the bounds of the GM game mode, but the data itself has to come from somewhere.
The game already looks at your editor folder and loads those projects into the game too. Publish/package/install is an essential extra step in sharing content with others.
4)You can't create new races, monsters or so, it's 2017 for god's sake, we can't use FBX it seems, so I can't do monsters nor animations...nothing more complex and movable than a trunk. Also races are hardcoded and you can't add new ones
FBX is not a holy grail. We have our reasons for using a different format. But that format perfectly supports custom models etc. as well. We are going to make the exporters we use for max/maya available so you can export straight from there to Granny. And similar to our
Guides On Custom Items, specifically the
Weapons Section our artists, once they are available and able, will also provide a guide and example files for characters.
Races are also possible. Here's a small example with file on how to add a
Custom Race. Do realize that fully supporting a new race is a very difficult process that will never be just "plug and play". But that's why we're here
To support your creation process and identify/fix the current shortcomings. So if you run into any blockers while making a new race, do contact us. We're very eager to see your content and help you in making it.
5)Editing Skills, creating new ones, or creating new classes to adapt (and i meean loosely adapt, not completely translate) the D&D system to divinity should be possible. But editing skills7classes is absurdly difficult for no plausible reason.
We have several new skill/class mods online already. I'm rather impressed by some of the cool ideas. And I'm not just talking about Baardvark's great bard & artificer mod but also the smaller ones of people I see far less often on the forum. E.g.
Tempest Class by Liyalai and
Chaos Huntsman by Kelvin
6)There's no Alive/Death condition for NPC's to place in the editor
There is. It's the "Default State" property, like Eldarth pointed out.
7)Stability issues, glasses.ese crashes frequently when opening a level or a project
I'm sorry to hear you seem to have stability problems.Feel free to send us your pc specs and any crash dumps and we'll take a look as to what is going on. If it turns out to be a code problem, we'll be more than happy to incorporate a fix into one of the next patches.
8)The engine has a SERIOUS lack of Wizards. We need automated tools for things that shouldn't be complicated, create an npc, a dialog, a skill, etc needs to be able to be done quickly
The Engine has always been focused on performance and features for the game. This often came at the cost of creating wizards on top of that as it was perfectly workable for internal usage, where everyone is up to date with the functionality. We are aware of that and actively try to incorporate more usability in every panel we update.
We also do our best to compensate the lack of in-editor help with (help buttons to) the
Wiki. Now that most of the technical pages are written, we focus more on guides, as evident from the growing
Guides Page which now also houses our video tutorials. If you'd like to see certain aspects prioritized, we can make those guides first
Just let us know what gives you the most trouble right now.
9)Races are Hardcoded in an object (unchangeable) instead of a variable (editable), which makes that we can't change or add races. And it's a terrible way to do things, hardcoding makes that you can't change things in further builds.
Already addressed in 4) I think? Unrelated to the races, do realize that some parts of the game are naturally "hard-coded", never as a design decision but because there's code support from the engine needed for the feature to work properly, and more importantly efficient.
Already addressed in 4). No indeed. We use different formats, which should still provide all you need.
11)We need to be able to paint fog of war, also, a button on editor and ingame to "see what players see", GM has no fog of war so we don't really know how a level would really look.
Painting is not on the schedule right now. Shroud is there for all parts you haven't visited, or it's disabled fully. GM indeed has no fog of war.
In-Editor: Level > Edit level data... and then set the "Hide Shroud" property to True. You can check this out in The Sandbox, our example editor level. This is also explained in our
Level Creation Video Tutorial.
12)No item/Object editor? Again, we need a wizard for that, not create a copy and tweak it. That's slow, uneffcient, and clunky.
Not exactly sure what you mean with this one? Are you referring to creating
Root Templates? Copy and tweak is my personal favorite because I start of from a template that is similar to what I want, but as the tutorial shows, you can perfectly create something from scratch.
13)You can't add stats or skills to players.
Players characters are based on initial dummies/origins used in character creation. You can add skills/stats to these dummies and they'll carry over to the final character. Take a look at the S_Player_GenericOrigin characters in the level SYS_CharacterCreation_A for example.
14)You can't edit an ongoing campaign for...no reason. Does that mean we have to make all the maps beforehand? Does that mean also that a new player can't create his character and play with the others if the players are weeks deep on a campaign and are long past de starting/creation point?
A GM issue, not editor-specific. I tend to agree with this and would certainly encourage posting this as feedback on the GM forum
15)Fog/Map limit: For avoiding seeing the border of the map you have to create a HUGE map and make the playable area too tiny. Background at the edge of the map should be black to avoid breaking the illusion.
Actually, one tile around the actual map is enough. The Sandbox is a nice example of that. Also, if you look at our
Level Creation Tutorial Video you an see that the area around the level indeed turns black. You can also work with Region Triggers to simulate several separate regions, with everything outside the region being blacked out. We'll address region triggers in a more advanced tutorial video later on.
16)No wizards for creating stuff, that's a main issue, you should be able to create things easily if the wizard could do the scripting for you (like it should), ej: create an ability, check it's effects, attach an FX to it. Or create a new class.
Already addresssed in 8)
Game Master I would suggest discussing this on the GM forum, but I'll address them as best as I can for the sake of completeness.
1)Menus are in SWF.....WTF (uneditable, unchangeable, etc...)
That's our engine. We use flash. My apologies if you wanted to publish UI changes. You are still full and well able to extract and change the flash files locally. But there will always be code support to interact with the UI layer, so you can change visuals, but adding new buttons with custom functions will indeed not be possible.
2)A new player can't play when he join an ongoing custom campaign if it already started and the rest of the players moved from the starting point/map/level, there's no PC creation, that means you can't create a new character if yours get killed. Also the GM can't help you do reroll since he can't change your race.
Indeed a limitation of the current feature set. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the GM forum. We are aware of this and would certainly value feedback on how to improve it.
4)You can't change the color of the surface painted effects, they change the color when they change the properties, but again, no color picker, no properties chooser.
Fire is red, water is blue? Changing those colors? If that's the case, then no indeed. I would also advise against that as surfaces are an intricate part of the combat system and visual feedback of what a surface does is tied closely to the fact that the color corresponds to real-life.
5)You can add vignette images easily, but you can't import music nor sound effects, also, theres NO LOOP BUTTON. In addition, STOP/PLAY buttons work a weird. When you play a song you can't stop it right away, losing control ot the atmosphere if you missclick.
A known limitation that will be improved
6)I Understand that the main campaign is made for 4 heroes, but pushing that limitation through players' throat in custom campaigns makes no sense
Not really enforcing the limitation because we just want to, but because that's part of the game, the ui, the performance etc. That said, N-player support for GM is an awesome feature I would certainly be vocal about on the GM forum
7)When you play between Steam and GoG you choose direct connect, it gives you a connection ID, that you give to your friend, a normal human would press ctrl+c and ctrl+v to paste it on place but someone actively disabled cntrl+v and programmed a button to paste from clipboard Yes, it sounds stupid and minor, but it says a lot of the weird design philosophy they have at Larian.
Fixed in one of the following game patches
8)Different players can't be in two different areas (scenes)
Nothing we can do about that, sorry. The way the engine/system works.
10)No ingame Wizards for creating NPCs, encounters, improvised dialogs, etc.
The drag/drop principle would be heavily slowed down by step-by-step wizards, in my opinion. But again, GM thread is the way to go. That aside, The Hungry Journey (our example campaign) has a lot of stickers with help and explanation on how to create and run a GM Campaign and our
GM Tutorial Video also contains a wealth of knowledge
11)If you create an NPC in the game master mode, you can't set emotes, patrol waypoints, or make him sitting on a chair
12)Unable to control several npcs at once
Again great feedback
Be sure to compile it in a thread in the GM section!
13)Unable to control encounter difficulty in an easy way.
![[Linked Image]](https://i.gyazo.com/151ee32749b54e6c688d833cd5f83e9f.png)
The encounter panel allows level managing for entire groups and singular enemies in that group. If anything is missing there, feel free to compile some possible improvements into a GM thread
Again, we'll be happy to hear you're feedback on the subject.
Phew, *cough* ... *drinks 2 liters of water*... that was a looooong post
Sincerely,
Kevin
