Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga Modding the developers cut...

Hey, if anyone is still active here i would like to ask if anyone is interested in a project of ours, or at least to give some info if you know the franchise from the technical standpoint.

As you know there are a few of us who are still trying to mod this game more than textures, stats or some models. More specifically, we are looking to completely remaster and expand the game by changing some mechanics like scaling, leveling, and adding scripts for things like weather, day/night cycle, respawning enemies and maybe even finishing some of old content that was never released. The problem in hand is that divinity 2 has no working environment or is modular enough to be expanded on. Most we managed was to unpack some files and change basic values to get different time of the day, and my friend managed to add Zandalors beard in character customization however the hat turns out to be made out of hair which just doesnt work well.

So, after talking to modders from different games and even considering making a new engine from scratch (like openMW for example), we came to the conclusion that the best course of action is to "port" most of the game to the newer engine from divinity original sin, and then remake the whole game from there. The problem is, this is not a job for 2, 3 or even 4 people, or more specifically, if we were to attempt this in such small numbers we would probably not finish before Laurian makes another action RPG like divinity 2.

Ok, ill just cut to the point. First question is if anyone knows how much can be ported, or already is, to the OS engine. I know dragon commander uses the same engine as OS, yet reuses a lot of animations and mechanics from div2, so im 100% sure at least a portion of assets can be ported, i just wanna know how much is possible. We know it wont be easy and will probably take a tone of time, but if we are able to recreate at least the battletower and smoked sentinel island we would know how much is possible.

Second question is, even if you dont know LUA, C++ or C#, would you be willing to aid in such a project? It's for fun mostly, we dont know if its even possible, let alone sacrefice more than 10h weekly on it, at least for now. We would be happy to make a small team and attempt to crack away at this issue, and possibly make this hidden gem modable, potentially even reviving the game once again by getting it some modding support and fixing some issues we all had with it.

And of course third if any devs see this, we would like to know if there is any legal stuff we have to clear out, and more importantly, would anyone tell us if any of this is actually possible, maybe even tell us how the dragon combat and models were reused from divinity 2 to dragon commander, and if they were reused at all and not made from scratch to look simmular to those of the divinity 2.

Thank you for your understanding and we hope we can all work together to make this gem as good as possible.

Technically, it should be possible to create a convincing updated using Bethsoft's engine du jour; e.g. the one used in FO4 would achieve the same goals, broadly speaking. My own modding of Ego Draconis/DKS is limited to altering in-game models and textures and I've never progressed to attempting to change any elements of gameplay, but I ported stuff from Bethsoft's Gamebryo with comparatively little effort, just wrenching it about a bit to integrate with different model shapes (e.g. with armour and what-not). The only painful things were creating low-poly models in the same way as required by Dragon Age Oranges and integrating them into the ED/DKS archives but neither would be necessary using a newer engine.

The main issue I foresee is that I don't recall offhand what's the copyright status of the game's assets, which is likely to be the stumbling block given that it was done under the auspices of a different publisher (and is what ultimately caused Larian to become an indie developer). IIRC (and I'd need to check) the green-light was given to port models to other Divinity games but that was as far as it went. I could try to obtain clarification although given that everyone's busy with the impending BG3 release I suspect any sort of definitive answer wouldn't be realistic before the end of the year if it involves anyone having to research it. It also remains to be seen what will happen next with the DKS branch of the Divinity saga, which could have an impact either way; I'd like to be optimistic that means the project would be seen positively given that Larian have definitely embraced modding, but tbh I have no idea.

It's a pity the modding tools aren't available but I suspect the same applies as with Bethsoft's Construction Set/GECK/Creation Kit, which is there's a lot of (very expensive) proprietary software included with restrictive licensing terms which would need to be stripped out in order to distribute, something which would probably be an enormous amount of effort to accomplish.

Personally, I'd love to see DKS remade using a modern engine, especially something that is fully moddable; one can never have too much experience of Broken Valley! It'd be an extremely ambitious project and I've seen enough of them fall by the wayside, but they can succeed: one good example is the effort to remake Cyrodiil in Skyrim (the Beyond Skyrim project... I'll dig a link out later if anyone's interested) which, though a contemporary setting to the events in Skyrim, really feels like you're back playing Oblivion again. Which I feel is relevant as ED itself felt so similar overall to Oblivion what with using a very closely-related engine.

I'm probably not in a fit state to contribute much but I will certainly watch with interest. Oh, and my programming tends to just be in C: learnt it over 35 years ago, don't see the need to change now! :p

Heey, we were just playing arround with assets and whatnot and found out we could port it to unity engine which is sort of easy to work on and is mostly written in C# or javaScript (but you can guess that we chose C# which is really simmular to C).

We need someone who knows how to work with Animations and Textures, optionally having knowledge of .nif files.

Xandro managed to port Arbens tomb in unity, but will need a bunch of help, not only is there a lot of assets, but there are still some unresolved issues. When we have a bunch of working assets, we will have to rewrite the code in C from ground up because the existing codes are unusable, and most important stats are behind .item files which we werent able to open yet. But generally its fine, unity comes with a lot of premade code for 3D games, and we wanted to change a lot anyways, we dont plan to just port it to another engine but first of all make a modular installation fir ither people to mod, and of course fix some issues the game had due to cut time and an xbox port (like death animations and body despawns, because of having to port the game to xbox, its fairly primitive in the game, we can easily make lootable corpses, a lot longer despawn times and instead of death animations we can just release the skeleton like in skyrim or stalker).

Of course, this will take a long time, by then i hope i will get in touch with anyone from laurian to help with copyright, i wouldnt have a problem with making the installation dependant on divinity 2 developers cut, even if we cant make an installation that extracts files from dv2 there is always an option to make the main file dependant on divinity2dks.exe or whatever its named. However i dont see why they wouldnt want a remake that fixes problem sthat they had, returns some stuff that was cut pre release and makes the game modable for fans, it will only get them more players willing to expiriance the beautifull story and world of divinity.

If you want to help, send a message on discord to XANDRO#8742 and thank you in advance.

Also if you want to see some work Xandro did, he posted a picture of Arbens tomb in unity on reddit, here is the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Divinity2D...;utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Hello! I hope you're still here and can read me.
I recently decided to dust off Divinity 2 and see if I could modify it to add more enemies or even new areas.
I saw this topic and after installing it I started investigating the game files.
How do you open .dv2 files?
Sorry if my English is not the best, I am using a translator.

I really recommend you joining discord server, so we can discuss about that there : https://discord.gg/SMRwuSfjbx