However, as much fun as it was, what I want to talk about is not the game, but the mods. Baldur’s Gate is an old game which was never designed to be modded, but it has been, extensively. Now, because of the nature of NWN(2), we tend to create modules not modifications and doing either is easier. However, it suddenly struck me that NWN(2) suffers from many of the modding limitations that BG suffered from – in particular, 2DA and TLK merging.
To illustrate what I mean: If go and download Kaedrin’s PrC Pack, suddenly, I can’t use anyone else’s class pack, unless I merge their classes.2da files. But wait! That’s not all. I also can’t use any other completely unrelated packs with custom strings, like an Animal Companion pack, because they both use a modified dialog.tlk file. Now, it’s not too hard to merge them for those that know how, but what if I want to combine three, four, or more packs?
Furthermore, this situation gives rise to a distinct dearth of such content – notice that we generally only have a few large such overrides, and very few small ones (and any mathematician should suspect that this is wrong because it contravenes the power law we might expect such releases to follow). Why? Well, I’m hardly going to spend my time building and releasing my PrCs of the Discworld pack if it has to compete with such giants as Kaedrin’s, or Drammel’s Tome of Battle, and I don’t want to provide a plethora of merged files for each possible install combination.
Anyway, the point of my story is that, as anyone who’s modded BG will know, most mods are now installed with an awesome utility called WeiDU. What it does is dynamically patch the TLK, 2DA, script and other files, and is capable of checking for compatibility with existing mods etc. Then, when you’re done, it will uninstall the mod for you – and can even uninstall them in a different order to the one you installed in, by un- and re-installing mods as appropriate. Because it keeps a complete backup, you never need to worry.
It took a while, though, for the ramifications of this to percolate through my brain. Suddenly, it hit me! Why couldn’t we use WeiDU to install NWN(2) mods? It quickly became clear to me that we couldn’t – the games are just too dissimilar. But surely a similar program could be created?
Well, I’ve never created a piece of software in my life, but I did do one course on C (half of which covered syntax common to NWScript) so I figured it might be worth a go creating something, even if I had to learn as I went along (which I did). So, I do now have a “proof-of-concept” program which can automatically patch TLK and 2DA files so that multiple mods can be installed with relative ease, which I intend to release (albeit probably as a beta) sometime soon (I’ve been kinda busy recently so I’ve only been working on it on and off).
However, I think I’ve written more than enough for the meantime, so whay does everyone think about whether such an automatic mod installer might work?
Modifié par The Fred, 03 août 2010 - 12:16 .
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That's the main reason I haven't come back to modding in NWN2; its a royal pain compared to DA.
