Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Thoughts on Mod Support Stretch Goal

It's not that to understand.

Those are last year's videos. Stretch goal permitting, they are explicitly planning a redesign of the toolkit to make it better for amateur modders.

Therefore, since they are planning a toolkit redesign, making a video NOW, before the redesign, makes no sense.

oh yeah my bad, I thought you were saying that they did not make tutorials for the already released Divine engin toolkit, my bad

The idea is actually nice, even if I don't really watch streams [yet]. Obviously it would have to be parts of the game offering a bit of entertainment, I'm not sure watching a coder would be very spectacular. So, artists and designers ( world to combat ) essentially. Writers, sadly, are a big no since we don't want to get too much spoils - which are bound to happen anyway.

Even if the mod stretchgoal is reached ( and I'm quite positive it will for now ), keeping the streams for future reference could also be very helpful !

This is basically the same idea a few former CDPR devs (Wickerman Games) had - "transparent development". I was scratching my head then, too. I mean, what's the point? You aren't truly going to learn anything by watching 8 hours of someone coding if they don't guide you through the whole process. I don't think anyone would be willing to talk 8 hours straight every day for what they are doing and why when they could just concentrate on their task.

I guess what I'm imagining is a 10-30 minute video of someone designing the visual aspects of a small scene, and maybe another video of writers discussing a character, writing the dialog, and inputting the stuff into the editor. Not 8 hours of streaming. Tutorials are great, of course, but sometimes you can learn more about what working on a game or mod would actually be like by watching people working on an actual area.

Probably a heavily edited video would work best, since you can't really make a scene in 20 minutes. But you could start with pictures of concept art or however people get the scene into their head, then you could show maybe five minutes of someone working on manipulating the terrain, then skip ahead to where it's roughly completed, then do some texturing (this is the part I'm most interested in seeing, given how difficult it is) for a few minutes, skip ahead to when that's done and they start adding meshes and props and the like. I assume the process is something like that, but maybe it's not, and there's more jumping around with tasks.

Whoever is making the scene could explain as they go, though them doing a voiceover afterwards roughly describing their actions might be easier, since explaining what you're doing while trying to do something in real time can be tough. Or there could be no explanation, and it would still be helpful for people who already have a basic understanding of how the tools work. You can explain how the editor works in as much detail as you want, but just seeing at least part of the real process of going from nothing to making a good looking area would be really helpful.

I have to agree with Stabbey though that if there's going to be big changes to the editor, a video like this should probably wait until the changes are in effect, otherwise the video wouldn't be very useful (though it'd still be interesting to see how the systems used to work.) Though I don't imagine the terrain stuff will necessarily change enormously.

That's pretty much it yes (concerning the process). I can also assure you that, when you are rigged with the editor, you can do a scene that can looks pretty great in 20 minutes.

If how the devs are using the tool currently doesn't match with what the users who get the new-and-more-user-friendly-editor will be using the tool, then no, it won't be helpful, it will be confusing.

Cool. So maybe you wouldn't even have to make cuts or anything. I'll be a staunch supporter of this idea if others won't :P At least for level design. I could see it being a lot tougher for most other things.

It should be near enough - they aren't going to go out of their way to give us a tool that would be completely different from the one they will be using themselves.
I'd expect the "supported" editor to be maybe more functionnal and intuitive, but the overall rules should be the same. Maybe the menus will get a little different, maybe there will a bit more - or less - buttons, maybe the colors will change, but it probably won't be very much confusing than watching a tutorial video of YourProSoftware version 10 when today it's reached version 14. [hint from personnal experience, apart from a few technical differences, it's still completely viable].

What's more it's not only the technical aspects of the editor that would be interesting to witness, but also the philosophy put behind the general design - environment, combat, story planification, npc placing, etc - as well as revisions. The only real issue I can foresee is not understanding why, say, Jeff went back and change the players spawn point, without the internal parallel discussions about that particular topic. But as long as one's interested and have enough of an analyzing mind, one should be able to deduce the logic put into the level design.

One thing that I want with the editor, is that it's friendly to a point that you don't have a have a computer science degree in order to be able to design quests.

When your 'tutorial' goes into designing tuples and then into databases (for a simple quest), there are clearly some issues that need to be resolved around the editor to make it usable for those that don't actually delve into python programming/scripting or whatever. There are better and easier ways to do this that can actually save time for a lot of people working on making these.

Having a complex and quote "powerful" editor is okay, but people just using it to make something that should be really simple shouldn't be subject to a learning curve that suggests that you go visit your local college and take a couple intermediate programming courses.

It doesn't seem like there's much use in recording tutorials now for a thing which will change later, as opposed to recording tutorials later after it has changed.

That's a bit too strongly put for some reasons already mentioned. While I do agree it doesn't make sense at this point for Larian to start doing full blown tutorials, NorD's original suggestion for a lightweight stream could be helpful on a number of levels if it wasn't too much stress on the developers.

Well after some thought Stabbey is right on a lot of things. These kind of streams/video would be way better with the completed version of the tool. Way more useful for sure.
Yes I guess, as my 1st idea implied that some people would watch streams of devs just for entertainment and maybe they could learn something about the process but that would be way better to have this after the editor is completed.

It would be really interesting, if you can explain what you are doing while doing it or explain quickly beforehand, like "ok there I'm going to create a mountain with a few paths and 2 cave entrances".

Interested too, especially if it can be watched again after live streaming (I live in France, and if you work in Belgium we work at the same time, so I couldn't watch live).

You can always start modding 5 year after the game is released, like me... then spend 6 years on it figuring it will never be officially patched just for it to happen anyway.

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.

As for the Stream, my own modding experiences in mind yeah that can be boring to watch. And if chat is on, it can also be very annoying for the person being streamed. There's a lot of back-seat programmers around who would love to tell you all about how you do wrong and what would be a better way to do stuff.

Pretty much the only stuff I bring out to people cause it would be interesting to them and perhaps educational is a progression-of-cutscenes or things that went hilariously wrong trying to work on them. From the start, where nothing works as it should, all the way to till it actually works properly. Of course, this isn't exactly as easy for a full team that actual make content that's going on sale rather than a solo-person working though.

I would still probably be interested in watching one of the vids that is boring and all have already stated why it's boring. Education can't always be super-thrilling, and it can be rather interesting if it's your area of interest.