Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General Current Limitations of the Toolset

Please find a list of current toolset and game engine limitations, compiled with the invaluable help of Noctro.

Larian, would you please consider addressing at least some of them?

To users: feel free to post your own limitations, we will add them to the list.

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
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.
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.
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
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.
6)There's no Alive/Death condition for NPC's to place in the editor
7)Stability issues, glasses.ese crashes frequently when opening a level or a project
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
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.
10)No native FBX support
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.
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.
13)You can't add stats or skills to players.
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?
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.
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.

GM MODE/MENUS/GAME
1)Menus are in SWF.....WTF (uneditable, unchangeable, etc...)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
8)Different players can't be in two different areas (scenes)
9)Item creator is vague, you can't see how is the object you make in game until you make an NPC equip it (no preview). Also you have to create it from a copy of a previous object instead of picking the model and create it from scratch
10)No ingame Wizards for creating NPCs, encounters, improvised dialogs, etc.
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
13)Unable to control encounter difficulty in an easy way.

Bump, and I'd like to add the fact that the armor seems to be hardcoded as well. The scaling can be easily tweaked, but the way damage applies to armor before health seems to be inaccessible, making it hard to work on a solution to those who didn't like the armor system.

Default State.

Long post incoming!
Apologies for the upcoming wall of text, but I feel I should address every point accurately.

Here it comes!

Editor



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.





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.



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.



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.



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



There is. It's the "Default State" property, like Eldarth pointed out.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



A GM issue, not editor-specific. I tend to agree with this and would certainly encourage posting this as feedback on the GM forum



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



A known limitation that will be improved



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



Fixed in one of the following game patches



Nothing we can do about that, sorry. The way the engine/system works.



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



Again great feedback Be sure to compile it in a thread in the GM section!





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

Kevin,

Thank you for your thorough responses throughout these modding forums and being a great bridge between here and the development team. I'm really impressed with the amount of patience and information you convey in your responses and you're doing a great job disseminating information while everyone is trying to figure things out and waiting on documentation.

I have nothing to add - I'm waiting until we can add armor/weapons types with animations properly to create a fun overhaul mod. I just wanted to say really appreciate what you're doing and the way you do it!

@Kevin:

I highly appreciate a dev comment with this length and completeness. Thank you so much. This really ties the community between DivDevs and players/modders together.

I too vote for more wizards in the editor. Create items / creatures / visual sets / import new assets. Although for everybody who digged into the engine deeper and established a workflow it is not that necessary but i think this really would increase the amount of players messing around with the editor and some quality of life for the more experienced.

Generally speaking, restrictions can be frustrating but "play is the free movement in a more or less rigid structure"

Second that, I'm not used to so much dev/player communication @_@, it's awesome.

Update: deleting point 6.

Thanks Kevin, It's been months since the Early Access started and You adressed most of my fears. I appreciate the time, the effort and the patience made point by point.
However, I feel the GM Issues should be addressed with the editor, since both tools work in conjunction for creating a story, that's why we tried to gather everything in one list.
About wizards: I think we (all) understand that the Divinity Engine is the tool you guys used on make the game. But most (and I think I speak for the silent majority of us) that are not familiar with scripting/programming(high-level modding feel that we lack of tools to make simple things. Both in the editor, and in the GM Mode. For putting it simple: Some of the pipelines to do some stuff are too complicated if you plan to do a long campaign and it would work much easier if they would be drivern by wizards for the medium guys that just wanna roleplay.
About Effects: Yes, fire is red, water is blue, maybe it wasn't explained very well, let me put an example:
-The players enter a dark crypt of the Big Bad Lich after forcing the entrance, inside the room the air has a cloud of a weird brown dust, too thick to be placed there naturally. In the campaign, the GM has written that this cloud of dust is poisonous, but instead of making hp damage, it makes the character sick and lowers their staming and strength on 1 for the next 24h /until an antidote is found.
In the GM mode, the GM could of course enter the player's stats and tweaking them, or apply a condition to them. But that cloud would always be the conspicous green poison cloud, or the regular smoke, when it would be super helpful to Create new>Surface/Cloud (pick cloud)>Select Color>Brown>and place it, and if you could also select it's effects would be super nice.
Another example: - After the party fights down a couple of levels they reach the Big Bad Lich Inner sanctum, and he appears in a burst of green vile flames...but...we don't have that, we have sacred blue fire that heals, but we can't make a (again, for example) a green fire that makes extra damage and heals the mischievous undead (or something). We're not talking about changing it's physical behavious (liquids can be electrified, gases are flammable) but it's appearances and properties.

Thanks Kevin, indeed, for your long answers.

However, I am still absolutely incensed about the hardcoded things. And the deception I was a victim of months ago, when I begged the team not to do so.

GM suggestions ported here: http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=626259&#Post626259

Thanks for putting it there as well Ansem, I talked with Seter about what I answered here to give him more information about what was already discussed. I hope his answers clarified some GM decisions in more detail.

Addition about custom skills. I pointed out some great mods, but forgot to mention we have a Skill Guide that should give you most information needed on the topic of creating custom skills.

@Noctro Thanks for the clarification! I did not think that far ahead and see now what you meant with changing surface colors. I really like that idea but I'm pretty confident providing such an on-the-fly color change option is out of reach for the current engine. I know it's not the same thing, but you do have the possibility to mod the visuals of surfaces as a whole by modding their Root Template.

And thanks to everyone else for chiming in on the topic. Makes me glad to hear you're able to enjoy the toolset and our interaction with you guys.

No need to apologize for long posts. It's the modding forum, people here passed their attention will savingthrow. ^^
Great to have a bit of contact finally!

When can we expect the next massive toolset/engine update?

Or at the very least still had a single point of armor left...

I found out something interesting regarding Editor and GM Mode interaction.

When you open up GM Mode and Editor at the same time there appears a warning that this cause data corruption.

But if you do so, you can edit a non used scene in the editor, save it, load it in the GM Mode, and you see the changes. Then you paint surfaces and change something and load again another scene. Switching back to editor make some terrain / item changes. Generate new AI Grid, save it. Now again as GM you reload the scene. Voila there you have the changes but still you beforehand painted surfaces.

I ask myself what serious data corruption could happen?

I see here really nice potential. Having one GM and one world builder together in the team (a shared folder of the mod is possible?)

Sure, mapping a nice scene takes ages when suddenly the freestyle GM led RP session wants to go to Kings Landing, but honestly this could be a nice tool to make some on the fly changes.

Also without live editing in the GM Mode this has potential: As the GM Mode always loads the recent scene but remembers stuff by its own like surfaces and their coordinates you can alter the saved Gm game to your needs between the sessions.

@DEVs: I really would like to know more about GM - Editor interaction. An saved game exporter / importer to Editor would be nice...

just had to share the insight.

I hope I shortened the poat I'm quoting properly because it was long and I'm only commenting on one part of it.

So I have myself been trying to bring attention to some of the features I think gm mode needs to be viable long term but I don't feel like I've been bashing Larian or the game. I think its a good game and one of a few games ive ever bought two copies of so the wife and I could play together. I did buy the game more for GM mode than anything else. I mean the GM mode was the reason I even heard the buzz about the game. I just wanted to clarify my feeling on the game before this next part.

This comment really stuck with me for some reason after reading it. No perhaps you guys feel like people have been bashing you non stop about missing features causing you to get a bit defensive which I can understand. This comment just has a sucks to suck, sorry for your luck. To damn bad vibe to it Or that's at least how i took it.

Ive played Zork, Warcraft, builders gate, the realm, runescape, everquest, WoW, bla bla games forever you get it. For the past decade any game ive seen that involved modding had UI changed as some of the most popular stuff. To push for GM mode and modding support as the target stretch goals and then have the UI and things like talents hard locked just seems (reworded to be respectful) like not a good decision that supports those targets.

Flash is an industry standard technology for game UIs. Scaleform GFx, which is Flash-based UI middleware, is used in all Unreal Engine games, all CryEngine games, all Gamebryo games, and so on. If you want to modify the UI for any game, you'll need to put in a lot more work than changing a few files. Look at the SkyUI project for Skyrim and Skyrim SE; those modders had to decompile and reverse engineer Skyrim's UI layer and SWF files. That's the way it goes. Welcome to modding!

Guess we're just spoiled with modders willing to work with difficult systems

Basically it starts to feel like you need to become a full fledged developer. At one point I wanted to become one, then I realized how much I would not enjoy it. So anything I want to mod, if it feels like it's not modding anymore but instead developing, I stop right away. Leave it to the guys who already have long careers doing that stuff.

Issue 17)Not possible to add personalised elemental types: stuck with following limited damage system of 4 elements, poison, and limited physical damage types.