Pillars Toolset

[peardox]

I'm wondering if there's any reason OBS can't do an Aurora Toolset for POE2?

 

Your founders wrote NWN after all and this was one of the first huge DND modding communities and added to NWN's shelf-life for years.

Yeah, we can't create full art - we'll be happy to use tile-sets and prefabs for now.

 

This has been requested by many people in our Slack group so within days of such a tool being made available there will be extra content.

 

We don't need anything fancy while you're writing the DLC bit anything is better than nothing


 

[TT1]

Stop drinking

[peardox]

@TT1 - you remember the toolset for NWN?

Nice comment...

 

I'm inventive, not drunk!

Edited July 23, 2018 by peardox

[Ethics Gradient]

On an related note, it's always a blast to hear Trent and Phil reminisce about the Aurora toolkit on their weekly Beamdog streams.  They are very aware that it helped make NWN a success, but whenever someone asks if it will ever receive any significant enhancements, the response is approximately thirty seconds of laughter followed by "nope, next question." Whatever popular-twenty-years-ago SDK held it together really has no modern equivalent, and it would take a ground-up rewrite to make happen.

 

Anyway, the idea of an "Aurora like" toolset for Deadfire probably sends chills down the spines of the poor programmers.  Aside from developing such a magical tool, the magnitude of changes to accommodate things on the runtime-end must be fantastically intense.

 

Considering all the subsystems a level touches, they'd either have to open-source significant pieces of Deadfire and let you compile the game in Unity like they do, or significantly up the mod support and develop some exciting new way to jam fan-made content into the game at runtime.

 

So, circling back to Trent and Phil, feel free to ask Obsidian about mod tools on their next dev stream.  I'm fairly certain the response will also be thirty seconds of laughter followed by some variation on "nope!"

 

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not against such tools being released, I'm just aware that they would take an awful lot of effort to make happen.  Obsidian already uses Unity and their OEI Tools dialogue editor to do their bulk of their work.  Asking for a mod toolset pretty much involves asking for a complex program to be written from scratch, and then altering much of the internal engine to accommodate such changes.  Aurora worked because it was already an integrated piece of the NWN ecosystem at launch.  Feels like a different story with Deadfire.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Ethics Gradient

[peardox]

Already done it

[peardox]

BTW

 

I'm asking for a minimal owing to the fact that the guys need to earn.

 

IF we can get an Aroura I'll be happy or my friends

 

I'll be bugging Devs about this (I've got s list)

[TT1]

PoE scenarios are art, NWN scenarios were created with assets. Its completely different.

 

I dont think its possible

[peardox]

It's defo doable

 

IF we had design/assets/*.png as tiles we could have an island that when you land on it asks where you wanna go thru a portal which would hit us with user levels.

 

As pointed out above they don't wanna do it - this is purely financial.

 

We're creating paid DLC why let 'amateurs' spoil our work. The answer in the case of NWN was that they created a better game.

 

We're fighting for a diffo argument this time as POE2 is superb - this is merely added content.

 

OK - you want to limit content so we can only have official or want to discover new talent?

I can guarantee that some POE2 guys are NWN modders

 

I'm not asking for myself - it's our artists who wanna play

[Ethics Gradient]

As pointed out above they don't wanna do it - this is purely financial.

 

Any decision can be seen as "purely financial" when it might require a thousand man-hours to implement.

 

The Aurora Toolkit wasn't just a side project that was gifted to the community, it was the actual software BioWare used in-house to develop content.

 

To design levels in Pillars, Obsidian uses Unity.  The reasons why they haven't released a modding toolchain thus far likely include:

1. Letting modders natively recompile the game to create new areas would involve disclosing signifiant pieces of internal code and raw assets.

2. Building a tool to develop content offline would negate many of the benefits of using Unity in the first place.  Unity is nice because you drag the assets into a project, write code, do stuff, and the SDK figures out how to best store and load things.  Aside from the time spent developing such a tool, the game engine itself would need significant overhauls to pack and unpack external data like NWN's .mod, .hak, etc... files.  Such an internal framework presently isn't there and would need to be added.

3. The OEI Tools node-based editor is probably a significant asset to the company.  Unlike proposed mod toolkits, it is an actual piece of software they could release if they wanted to.  Though, its use wouldn't necessarily be limited to Deadfire, and the software could be used to develop anything so long as it can read xml.  I'd love to be able to mess around with it too, but I totally understand why they'd want to license it out.

 

For the time being, let's wait for Beast of Winter and Deadfire 2.0.  With the infusion of new content, it's possible that there may be some new vectors for modding that weren't present in the initial release.

[peardox]

Bigger picture. my friend

 

Small acorns ...

 

We've got a shed-load of reqs in

 

This is just one of them

 

Our group has a lot of fixes in motion

 

This is how you get a call from some dev asking you to fly to USA for a "chat"

 

The "chat" means a job offer - they've already decided they want you - formalities

Been thru SO many "chats" in my life (why did I buy that suit?)

IF A SINGLE PERSON from my group gets a "chat" I will have done something worthwhile