Mod Support

[gamerdude130]

Now as a guy who really modded the old baldur's gate and icewind dale games (not actually making mods just using mods) can somebody clarify just how open the system is for let's say, Total Conversions and such things. Sorry for my horrendous English  

 

 

[Silent Winter]

Right now we don't know.

There won't be modding tools on day 1, but if the game gets the warm reception we're expecting, the community should develop tools along the lines of BG mod-tools.

Obsidian have said they're willing to help by making file-formats open where possible (though that was a while back, don't know what the current state is).

[Namutree]

My impression has been that the game will not be too difficult to Mod in Npcs, quests, and dialog.

Areas however, are another story. Don't expect maps comin' from mods.

[Carlo]

Conceptually I don't believe the idea of modding for PE has changed much since this past topic, which is still relevant:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/59988-modding/

[gamerdude130]

Thnaks to everyone who responded, i'm fairly new to the forums.

[Macrae]

I am extremely in favor of modding support to this game, the potential is so huge.

 

It would be great if developers made a forum post, after release of game and bug-fixing has past, detailing what is required, in terms of softwares and manipulations, to modify different parts of the game such as:

 

- environments (including pathways, physics, lighting, all of the 5 layers..)

- combat mechanics, core systems and rules

- visuals of new items, characters, weapons etc..

- animations

- visual special effects

- scripts, dialogs and storytelling

- etc..

 

Just a video of less than an hour explaining all of that, including all the software required. There is so much potential in it if they just help the community a little bit a the beginning..

 

(Of course people will say "it's not as easy as you say", but there are plenty of talented people with passion and technical skills who can do such difficult things too..)

[Bryy]

I am extremely in favor of modding support to this game, the potential is so huge.

 

It would be great if developers made a forum post, after release of game and bug-fixing has past, detailing what is required, in terms of softwares and manipulations, to modify different parts of the game such as:

 

- environments (including pathways, physics, lighting, all of the 5 layers..)

- combat mechanics, core systems and rules

- visuals of new items, characters, weapons etc..

- animations

- visual special effects

- scripts, dialogs and storytelling

- etc..

 

Just a video of less than an hour explaining all of that, including all the software required. There is so much potential in it if they just help the community a little bit a the beginning..

 

(Of course people will say "it's not as easy as you say", but there are plenty of talented people with passion and technical skills who can do such difficult things too..)

They did, many, many times. The bottom line is that it's not as simple as just giving us an editor.

 

1) They don't own Unity.

2) The tools are just way too complicated.

 

"Passion" and "Technical Skills" mean jack squat in the face of reality. You're also assuming that the average modder has the ability to afford "all the software required". 

Edited July 19, 2014 by Bryy

[Macrae]

 

I am extremely in favor of modding support to this game, the potential is so huge.

 

It would be great if developers made a forum post, after release of game and bug-fixing has past, detailing what is required, in terms of softwares and manipulations, to modify different parts of the game such as:

 

- environments (including pathways, physics, lighting, all of the 5 layers..)

- combat mechanics, core systems and rules

- visuals of new items, characters, weapons etc..

- animations

- visual special effects

- scripts, dialogs and storytelling

- etc..

 

Just a video of less than an hour explaining all of that, including all the software required. There is so much potential in it if they just help the community a little bit a the beginning..

 

(Of course people will say "it's not as easy as you say", but there are plenty of talented people with passion and technical skills who can do such difficult things too..)

They did, many, many times. The bottom line is that it's not as simple as just giving us an editor.

 

1) They don't own Unity.

2) The tools are just way too complicated.

 

"Passion" and "Technical Skills" mean jack squat in the face of reality. You're also assuming that the average modder has the ability to afford "all the software required". 

 

 

Well, all games today, hard to mod or not, get eventually modded, because contrary to what you say there are people with the necessary technical ability and software.

 

So why not help them?

 

It would be a very low effort investment by Obsidian folks to make a post summing up things that they know by heart and it would have a huge helping factor for modding..

[Bryy]

 

 

I am extremely in favor of modding support to this game, the potential is so huge.

 

It would be great if developers made a forum post, after release of game and bug-fixing has past, detailing what is required, in terms of softwares and manipulations, to modify different parts of the game such as:

 

- environments (including pathways, physics, lighting, all of the 5 layers..)

- combat mechanics, core systems and rules

- visuals of new items, characters, weapons etc..

- animations

- visual special effects

- scripts, dialogs and storytelling

- etc..

 

Just a video of less than an hour explaining all of that, including all the software required. There is so much potential in it if they just help the community a little bit a the beginning..

 

(Of course people will say "it's not as easy as you say", but there are plenty of talented people with passion and technical skills who can do such difficult things too..)

They did, many, many times. The bottom line is that it's not as simple as just giving us an editor.

 

1) They don't own Unity.

2) The tools are just way too complicated.

 

"Passion" and "Technical Skills" mean jack squat in the face of reality. You're also assuming that the average modder has the ability to afford "all the software required". 

 

 

Well, all games today, hard to mod or not, get eventually modded, because contrary to what you say there are people with the necessary technical ability and software.

 

So why not help them?

 

It would be a very low effort investment by Obsidian folks to make a post summing up things that they know by heart and it would have a huge helping factor for modding..

 

You are simply way too worked up over this perceived injustice.

[Macrae]

 

 

 

I am extremely in favor of modding support to this game, the potential is so huge.

 

It would be great if developers made a forum post, after release of game and bug-fixing has past, detailing what is required, in terms of softwares and manipulations, to modify different parts of the game such as:

 

- environments (including pathways, physics, lighting, all of the 5 layers..)

- combat mechanics, core systems and rules

- visuals of new items, characters, weapons etc..

- animations

- visual special effects

- scripts, dialogs and storytelling

- etc..

 

Just a video of less than an hour explaining all of that, including all the software required. There is so much potential in it if they just help the community a little bit a the beginning..

 

(Of course people will say "it's not as easy as you say", but there are plenty of talented people with passion and technical skills who can do such difficult things too..)

They did, many, many times. The bottom line is that it's not as simple as just giving us an editor.

 

1) They don't own Unity.

2) The tools are just way too complicated.

 

"Passion" and "Technical Skills" mean jack squat in the face of reality. You're also assuming that the average modder has the ability to afford "all the software required". 

 

 

Well, all games today, hard to mod or not, get eventually modded, because contrary to what you say there are people with the necessary technical ability and software.

 

So why not help them?

 

It would be a very low effort investment by Obsidian folks to make a post summing up things that they know by heart and it would have a huge helping factor for modding..

 

You are simply way too worked up over this perceived injustice.

 

 

I'm not.. (why so serious?)

 

I just think this should be encouraged..

[Bryy]

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64794-interview-with-josh-sawyer-pcworld-update-69-modding/

[Luridis]

I'm with Bryy on this... It's kindof pointless for them to spend a bunch of time on modding tools and information just so people will turn around and say they're too difficult to use.

 

From what I understand: Obsidian is using some high end modeling software to make tile sets, which is probably 3dsmax or something along those lines. They use this to build the ground plane texture, which probably includes some static scene building and then export that as a 2D texture. At that point they import it and create a new level in Unity and add things like walk meshes and whatnot. That is a ton a work for a modder, more than I want to do.

 

Tile Sets: They're not likely to hand these out. Even if they did, the software to use them is likely in the thousands of dollars range.

 

Nav Meshes: You'd need a Unity Pro license to do these... $1500 last time I checked. Even then, they're not going to hand out the raw game project. This is asking for mods to introduce bugs, huge huge bugs.

 

What can they do?

 

Make an interface that reads custom levels. These would probably be comprised of files that list NPCs, quests and dialogues that are created on the fly. i.e. You'd specify an existing game model and equipment for your NPCs, then customize the quests and dialogue options. They could make a few generic town, wilderness and dungeon maps available for you to specify in the file and place your NPCs on. But custom models, maps and behavior of any kind are probably out.

 

I was much more optimistic about this before I got the beta. Now that I've seen the engine in action, I don't see mods with the capabilities of say NWN2 being viable.

[Lord Wafflebum]

Heh, modding is already being done. Bester and Sensuki are leading the charge there to make their own changes to combat to show OE what they feel combat should be like. I know Sensuki has mentioned a couple times they're very responsive to him when he asks questions.

 

They're ALREADY supporting folks who want to mod the game and only the beta is out. I'd say that's pretty great of them.

[Nakia]

The problem I believe is that you need to have the editor and getting it is not that simple unless you can afford to buy it.   This limits drastically who will be able to mod the game.  Oblivion benefited immensely from the thousands of mods made for in and are still being made for it.

[Lord Wafflebum]

Good point. I'd assume creating a mod program like the GECK for Fallout has got to be fairly resource heavy tho? PoE doesn't have the same lego-like aspect the Bethesda games have (albeit very complex legos). 

 

An easily accessible modding experience might just not be realistic for PoE, unless I've missed some interview that says otherwise?

[Sensuki]

The only thing that really needs to be done to better facilitate modding is Obsidian need to externalize more of the files.

 

I did some of the earlier modding, but Bester is a waaaay better and waaaay faster programmer than I am. He's been powering through several of my UI requests recently. It's been cool.

Edited December 27, 2014 by Sensuki

[Nakia]

I remember during the Kickstarter when asked about the possibility we were told that there might  be a chance.

 

Location areas would be painted backgrounds I think which if they are similar to the city builders I used are easy to work with.  Have no idea how the buildings would be created or how the interiors are made in PoE.  3D items, models I think would be part of the resources.  I do know that modders who make items use third party software which can be expensive but that is a talent in itself.  

 

At this time I doubt that OE has either the money or the time to make something that modders could use.  I am just hoping they will consider it for the future.  Bester and Sensuki are already doing things but that only reflects what they feel needs changing and what they like.  The value of the TES modding community was how broad it was so that almost anyone could find something that reflected what they liked and wanted.  It is impossible to please everyone because we are so individualistic.

 

Edit: I didn't see Sensuki's post.  Programming is the problem for many potential modders.  Because of the way TES games where made and because they did provide an editor even I was able to do some minor tweaking of MY GAME  some things like a quest added to a location might be easier depending on the amount of programming needed.

 

I can dream can't I?  

Edited December 27, 2014 by Nakia

[Luridis]

Like I said in another thread, they're building maps from high resolution tile sets in a high end 3D application, one too expensive for modding. I think that they then export that as a texture for a ground plane in Unity and fit nav meshes to it.

 

Probably the best thing they can do is make a few generic rural, town, wilderness, dungeon maps and nav mesh them and let you populate them from an external data file. That's not to say the uphill battle can't be fought, it's just going to be horribly time intensive.

[Sensuki]

I'm not concerned about modding area art, but modding the scenes themselves (scripts, monsters, npcs etc) would be cool.

 

Currently we can't do it.

Edited December 27, 2014 by Sensuki

[Luridis]

I'm not concerned about modding area art, but modding the scenes themselves (scripts, monsters, npcs etc) would be cool.

 

Currently we can't do it.

 

My best guess as to how they could allow it is to setup a custom level load that reads a file for descriptive information. They could even use the EMCAScript Eval("EMCAScript Code Statement") function to execute modder scripts. I've seen posts about people doing it before on the unity forums.

 

If they manage to incorporate it in 5, Unity will hopefully get Mono's compiler-as-a-service for .Net, which does more or less the same thing for VBasic and C#.

[Sensuki]

Nah all we need is for them to externalize some more files in .unity3d format. We may even be able to get at them if the disunity developer fixes a bug with his program.

 

There's a few other things that are hard to get at too - such as the TextAsset files.

Edited December 27, 2014 by Sensuki

[Bester]

they're building maps from high resolution tile sets in a high end 3D application, one too expensive for modding.

>tilesets

No tile sets, their terrains are 3d meshes with smaller 3d objects on them, they render it and save it as an image to use for background.

You can make a background image using the same process if you want.

 

If you do just that, you won't have dynamic shadows and some other stuff, but you'll still have a decent custom location.

>super high end 3d super duper applications

It doesn't matter what they use because:

a) you don't access to their 3d assets to modify them

b) even if you had, nothing would've stopped you from using blender if that's your desire, the .obj file format is used across all 3d software

 

 

My best guess as to how they could allow it is to setup a custom level load that reads a file for descriptive information. They could even use the EMCAScript Eval("EMCAScript Code Statement") function to execute modder scripts. I've seen posts about people doing it before on the unity forums.

You can execute whatever scripts you like and whenever you like with the modding framework that I've released. If you want to inject a script that would read a custom file corresponding to a map on load map and make certain adjustments to certain creatures, you can do that easily. You wanna do it? You can then write a basic "creature editor" that would generate such files. All in all, a day's worth of work at most.

Edited January 4, 2015 by Bester

[Hormalakh]

I think the important thing is to be able to import certain objects into the game even if they are third-party tool heavy. Just like we can import in any portrait we want, as long as we know photoshop, we should be able to import in a map - as long as we know 3dsmax/maya/unity.

 

As an example:

If I am able to import in a 2d image that would work as a map, that would be huge. I could import the four layers (normals, albedo, depth, and final) of the maps into Unity and compile that into an asset that can be then imported into the game. Just knowing that I can import in a file/asset that has been compiled by unity into the game and then giving me other options like importing or placing certain objects on that map, that would be great.

 

Information that we'd need would be things like, at what angle the 3d map would need to be rendered, etc would help to make the 3d object to 2d map rendering process easier. That way all the maps have the same isomorphic angles and look and don't look "weird" when imported into the game.

 

Basic information like that owuld be very helpful. Specifics on standards Obsidian has used when making maps, objects, etc.

 

These would all be helpful so that those who are interested and can get their hands on Unity (which is free) can compile an asset and just import the final thing into PoE.

Edited January 11, 2015 by Hormalakh

[Sensuki]

If you want stuff, you should probably post it in my other thread for visibility. I don't think the devs read this section very much.

[Sensuki]

Here is that thread for visibility anyway: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69992-mod-support-thread/