Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods [help requested] How to create your own talents?

I've been maintaining a thread for suggested talents (here) and I suddenly wonder to myself... how hard would it be to create a mod where such talents were added to the game?

If someone could walk me through how to do it, or point me to some pre-existing tutorial, that would be swell.

Hard

The list of talents and related calculations are hardcoded in the .exe, so they can't be changed via a .txt or script.

That's a bummer. Is it impossibly hard, or just "you need to be a genius who writes his own independent utility" hard? (In other words: is there some kind of .exe validation which prevents/overwrites modifications to the .exe, or is it against the ToU in some way?)

It's a bit harder than "you need to be a genius who writes his own independent utility" hard
There are 2 problems here:
- Unlike the .txt-s and scripts that contains readable source data, .exe-s contain compiled code, so you have to reverse engineer parts of the .exe; depending on what you're looking for this can take pretty long. DOS has somewhere around ~46000 functions in the .exe and the disassembly for them looks like this
- Each time the game is updated, the offsets in the .exe change, so you'll have to redo a lot of the decompilation again to find the new offsets

Alpha/beta versions of the game had a .pdb file which contained the symbol table, so it was pretty easy to change things in those versions as things were properly named in the exe. The .pdb was removed in the release version, so exe-modding became 100x harder

Well, I guess I'll just put it on my wish list for future version of the game to include moddable talent support.

I saw this post while I was looking into if it was possible to create a custom class. Does this mean that it is not currently possible to create a custom class? If so I really hope the expose this functionality in a later version.

Custom class != custom talent.
A class is just a set of predefined attributes/skills/abilities/talents. You can create one by adding a new preset to Mods\%yourMod%\CharacterCreation\ClassPresets\.
Talents are currently unchangeable.

I would say look at Rhidian's Thread on a roundabout way of editing Lone Wolf, Glass Cannon, and Leech. Basically you can say "if the player has x talent, then give him x bonuses/drawbacks as well." You'll probably have to be creative to get what you want exactly (and some things might be really hard), but I think a lot would be possible. Hopefully they'll make the code for talents more accessible soon enough.

I would love to make a new class but I don't know where to look for the presets.