128 réponses à ce sujet

[Proleric]

I'd be happy to help with making better terrain or lightmap tools, if there is grunt work that doesn't require much knowledge...

... or is it all rocket science?

Modifié par Proleric1, 11 juillet 2011 - 02:15 .

[DarthParametric]

You might want to talk to ChewyGumball - http://social.biowar...m/project/2793/

[-Semper-]

CID-78 wrote...

if we want to make the community bigger we need to make those tools, so we can also appeal to the lesser talented people.

isn't there still the problem that we don't know how to integrate the dll aka plugin to the toolset? the devs promised a feature upgrade with plugin support but i guess that's absent now.

Modifié par -Semper-, 11 juillet 2011 - 03:53 .

[JasonNH]

NWN2 got strong because it did get the tools after a while such as YATT and Terracoppa. it also got lilacs script generator.

I think if you were to review the single-player modules for NWN2, you would find little reliance on YATT or Terracoppa. While I think those utilities are fanatastic and I have made use of them personally, they have more relevance to the persistent world community where you have to churn out areas in mass quantity. YATT does not save all that much time really. Sculpting the height of terrain is the easiest part of creating an exterior area. The more time consuming process is in the texturing and placement of vegetation, and there is no simple solution for that.

I think NWN2 got strong because it was able to ride the success of NWN1, it got decent support from Obsidian, and it was created from the beginning with modding in mind. You also have the well-known D&D franchise behind it, so many modders could bring previously formulated ideas and experiences to the table right away. With DA:O, we all had to invest a certain amount of time getting immersed in the world before we could begin to spin new ideas out of it.

Adding new tools to help modders may be a necessary, but probably an insufficient condition to revitalize things. I think the larger issues of perception over its orphaned status, and the lack of new content for modders is a bigger challenge to overcome. It would be nice to see it get some love again - hopefully the support for the wiki is a start.

[CID-78]

your right that the heightmap isn't the hard part. but a terrain tool should beable to add the base texture paint aswell. or plock down trees, fences and that kind of common props aswell. the heightmap might be the simple step while getting a good prop placement algorithm raise the bar a bit towards rocket science. atleast if you want it to be generic, ie treat any prop as a fence prop and still make them match up. climb hills and so on.

No we don't need a dll plugin to make tools. you can allways run something externally that is connected to the same database. something that for example uses ADO.NET and MS SQL server, sure it's not as good as a plugin,

[CID-78]

Yes i hope Chewygumball get his Lightmapper of the assembly line. I am currently working on my own DA related Scripting tool. It's far from complete any help would be appriciated, I would gladely help with any specification or design plans for a Terrain utility but I can't take up a new project before i get this one done. Because if I put something on ice it has a tendens to remain frozen for eternitity. And i still got months of work left and have spend several on it already, and i don't ewant to have wasted that time.

[sidefx79]

Well, it's encouraging to see some activity on these boards.   I've been playing with the toolset and can see why people get a bit frustrated with it, and why novices might be scared off by it.

JasonNH wrote...
Sculpting the height of terrain is the easiest part of creating an exterior area. The more time consuming process is in the texturing and placement of vegetation, and there is no simple solution for that.

YATT allows for colourmaps and texturemaps as well as heightmaps, and simple formula to assist in applying\\generating them. I did toy with the idea of some sort of vegetation map as well, which would randomly apply placeables according to intensity\\brightness in an input image; never did get around to it though.

Modifié par sidefx79, 11 juillet 2011 - 09:16 .

[CID-78]

personally i would prefer an even easier approach then heightmap. a simple terrainmap. and then have thesoftware autogenerate accordingly. ie if i have a mountain terrain (color) it will automatically create a steep, cliffy terrain within the area depening on a seed. so all you need to do is paint blue for water bodies, green for forest and so forth. then within the tool you could setup properties for those terrains.

making a heightmap that you like can be tricky aswell. in this case you can draw a very rough map and just change the seed if it didn't come out right and give it another spin.

[Elvhen Veluthil]

I doubt that the toolset will ever get any kind official support at this point. It seems though that many devs are individually positive to help. What possibly can be done is what is happening with the wiki. The community should approach them and ask them to release whatever they were working on to improve the toolset (plugin support and other things they talked about back then), without offering official support for them. Also in the same manner they could release some resources from DA2 or help the community to do so. Another thing that could help is that they appoint a toolset forum moderator and give him/her the power to update the "Featured Project" section in the main page.

At this point I think that beside NWN2, the DA toolset is the only tool that builders that like to make "turn-based gameplay" mods have in their disposal, so whatever can be done to improve it will make our life easier.

[Obadiah]

I think the complexity of the DA toolset and the lack of multiplayer are the biggest bar to a thriving community.

I could rant for a bit on the DA toolset's complexity, but I don't think anyone disputes that.

The NWN toolset was clearly built to encourage novices to create modules. It even came with basic documentation. It had a few other advantages though. The engine supported multi-player so, in addition to encouraging people to play, it got them playing together. It had the added advantage of being built on a fully documented ruleset that a huge community had been familiar with for years. Thus there were decent modules with full adventures within the first week. The engine even came with Linux support (I was playing it on my openSuse build a few months ago).

Modifié par Obadiah, 13 juillet 2011 - 07:13 .

[sidefx79]

Obadiah wrote...

I think the complexity of the DA toolset and the lack of multiplayer are the biggest bar to a thriving community.

That's something that worries me about spending much time on the DA toolset... how big an issue is the lack of multiplayer for mod builders?  I know I liked working on NWN\\NWN2 mods (and a persistant world) knowing that I could play the results with friends. So is the bigger issue the DA toolset, or lack of multiplayer?

[CID-78]

if MP was that important people wouldn't have bought and played DA:O in the first place. neither would they have bought DLC's and expansion packs. So there i splenty of room for SP module building. which is actually easier todo then building for MP. The toolset complexity is both it's strength and its downfall. Personally would never recommend DAToolset for a person that never have mooded in his or her life. it's more a professional tool, for team of builders that know what they do.

[Shallina]

MP is really important fo community games.

Community wants to play together, it's not the same thing as single player. You want "to share" your game with friends. Online poeple likes to be able to play together. And that's something DA will nevers be able to deliver.

If you watch NWN and NWN2 a really big part of innovation and custom content comes from the PW makers. All this work can be used in a single player mod. And in return the innovation for single player mods can be used in PW.

For DAO more than half of the community is missing, all this PW crownd, or LAN players will nevers be there.

[Proleric]

I don't necessarily disagree with the last few comments, but if we want to identify practical actions for the community in this discussion, I suggest we set aside things we can't easily change.

As I see it, MP is out of the question. The DAO toolset is professional. Bioware's DA team aren't in a position to be as helpful as they would like. All of that is a done deal IMO.

I'd prefer to see the discussion focus on how we move forward. For example, site pooling / outreach, promotional activity, wiki, lightmapper and terrain tool have all been mentioned as practical possibilities.

From what's been said so far, I see a clear action point on the lightmapper, but I'm not sure what we're proposing about the rest?

[CID-78]

Shallina wrote...

MP is really important fo community games.

Community wants to play together, it's not the same thing as single player. You want "to share" your game with friends. Online poeple likes to be able to play together. And that's something DA will nevers be able to deliver.

For DAO more than half of the community is missing, all this PW crownd, or LAN players will nevers be there.

Share games yes, MP No. I have been a active forum member since NWN was released and i have barely played anything online. we sure want to share ideas and content when it fit us. Browsing the forum is more a background task for us. when we are building. in fact it's the PW crew that is lesser eager to share in many apartment because they  want their server to be unique. and if they give out their source other server will adapt it and their server will be one among all other. and PW wasn't half the Community atleast not in the beginning. it might be a higher factor in older games like NWN where most SP player has moved on. But in the beginning of a game life cycle the SP group is far far bigger then the MP/PW crew is.

it's about giving and getting feedback. ie everyone like give away stuff aslong as it's appreciated by the community. it doesn't matter what it is if it's a PW or 3D model. They also do it because they think it's fun.

[Obadiah]

CID-78 wrote...
...
Share games yes, MP No. I have been a active forum member since NWN was released and i have barely played anything online.
...

I used to do that all the time. As much as I liked the NWN2 single player video game, MP had some of the most memorable experiences I've had with NWN2.

Lack of multiplayer is not going to stop people from buying a great single player game like DA, but the community isn't just builders, it includes people that play the content. I think the multiplayer aspect of NWN, in addition to attracting single player players, brought in the multiplayer community. Multiplayer just gives the game a broader appeal. Broader appreal = bigger community. It probably doesn't hurt the community the muliplayers are used to working with other people.

Proleric1 wrote...

I don't necessarily disagree with the last few comments, but if we want to identify practical actions for the
community in this discussion, I suggest we set aside things we can't easily change.
...

As complicated as the toolset is, there are already some great videos and wiki articles explainig how to use it. It just takes way longer to get anything interesting done in the DA toolset than NWN. Not sure what's to be done about that.

The thing about NWN was that content was always being released by the community, or with the official expansion packs. Dragon Age not so much. We're over a year out of the single player, and people have moved on to other games. The expansion packs look like they have to be hacked to get the new abilities and assets into a community made module. Not sure what to do about that.

We could create re-usable areas. The most generic adventure involves a village, ruins, and a cave dungeon. The
assets available in Dragon Age don't include a village or a generic cave (they're all Deep Roads specific). We could create some of those and make them easy to find on the Nexus or Google Code.

We could try documenting the setting. NWN was built on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting which was REALLY fleshed out well. The Codex entries, wikia, and the table top rules for Dragon Age are good, but not much of a substitute. I had to get the map in the tabletop game just to know the distances between locations. If there was a PDF or a word document that spelled out the history of the region, the known ecology of the some of the beasts, and the state of Ferelden after the Blight that would help. That's the kind of thing that gets my imagination going to create something.

Modifié par Obadiah, 13 juillet 2011 - 03:37 .

[CID-78]

we already got the Community contest, which has added some usefull extra resources such as several villages. the idea for that was to gather builders that just wanted to contribute with a small piece. all the resources that was made is availble for anyone to use.

but to be honest expanding the prebuilt area liberary will not attract that many builders, we need a way to make it simpler to make your own levels. a terrain tool that save time sculpting and texturing terrain cut several hours of the creation time for each level. but lets move that discussion over to another thread.

[Obadiah]

CID-78 wrote...

we already got the Community contest, which has added some usefull extra resources such as several villages.

Yes, but one has to know about the Community Contest to find those resources. It is not listed off the Main Wiki page or anything. Ideally though, there ought to be some sort of wizard from the toolset that says "Please select village/town level layout that you want to use for Area" and you get a bunch of boxes with previews to select from. Right now you're just sort of stuck loading up each area layout to see what you find.

So that's probably something else that could be added to the wiki: A page with previews of all of the Single Player and Community area levels with their names, along with links to them where appropriate.

Modifié par Obadiah, 13 juillet 2011 - 07:55 .

[Elvhen Veluthil]

Obadiah wrote...

I used to do that all the time. As much as I liked the NWN2 single player video game, MP had some of the most memorable experiences I've had with NWN2.

I am not a big fun of MP myself, so I don't see the lack of MP a big problem, there are plenty of free MMO this days for those that like such things to get their hands on.

As complicated as the toolset is, there are already some great videos and wiki articles explainig how to use it. It just takes way longer to get anything interesting done in the DA toolset than NWN. Not sure what's to be done about that.

The toolset is significantly harder to work with, click-and-drop isn't exactly the way it works. Some tools have already made things easier, some new tools make come out from this discussion, and many builders have dedicate quite some time updating and adding to the wiki to help the rest of us.

The thing about NWN was that content was always being released by the community, or with the official expansion packs. Dragon Age not so much. We're over a year out of the single player, and people have moved on to other games. The expansion packs look like they have to be hacked to get the new abilities and assets into a community made module. Not sure what to do about that.

From the beginning the situation was different with DA. Some modders came by inquiring if and how they could commercially promote their mods, Bioware did at some point also state that they were thinking something similar to a market for mods. A lot of builders are sharing things of course, it's just that the sharing attitude never completely dominated the scene. Also Bioware has lost interest in the building community and wont release new content.

About people moving to other games, I don't think that there are really that many choices, if you want to make a story-driven, party-based mod. The only other decent toolset for such tale-telling is the NWN2 toolset. And lets not forget that there will be many years to come that we'll continue to see DA titles coming out, so potentially there will be always an audience to play your mods.

We could create re-usable areas. The most generic adventure involves a village, ruins, and a cave dungeon. The
assets available in Dragon Age don't include a village or a generic cave (they're all Deep Roads specific). We could create some of those and make them easy to find on the Nexus or Google Code.

The toolset contest was a great initiative to that direction. Hopefully more and more builders will share the content of their mods to a builder-to-builder base.

We could try documenting the setting. NWN was built on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting which was REALLY fleshed out well. The Codex entries, wikia, and the table top rules for Dragon Age are good, but not much of a substitute. I had to get the map in the tabletop game just to know the distances between locations. If there was a PDF or a word document that spelled out the history of the region, the known ecology of the some of the beasts, and the state of Ferelden after the Blight that would help. That's the kind of thing that gets my imagination going to create something.

There is already a wealth of information in the wiki:

http://dragonage.wik...Dragon_Age_Wiki
http://social.biowar.../wiki/dragonage

The forums also have tons of information about lore. The problem imo isn't the lack of tales to tell, the problem is the efforts that one has to make to see it come alive through the toolset.

[Obadiah]

Elvhen Veluthil wrote...
...
There is already a wealth of information in the wiki:

http://dragonage.wik...Dragon_Age_Wiki
http://social.biowar.../wiki/dragonage

The forums also have tons of information about lore.
...

Agreed, but you're missing my point. Let's say I want to set a module in Denerim or Highever.
- How big an area does it cover?
- What is the approximate population size?
- What sections is it organized into?
- After the darkspawn attack, how was it rebuilt?
- What is average daily life of the noble/peasant like?
- There is an Arl of Denerim, and a potential Bann of the Elven Alienage (with the City Elf boon), how many other Banns are there in Denerim?

This is the kind of information I need as a builder to create content set in those areas. If I start answering any of those questions with something I made up for expediency, there is a good chance it will end up conflicting with some new piece of lore dropped officially or by another builder at a later date, and make my content inconsistent/invalid. That lack of specificity and cohesion is not conducive to encouraging community content.

(Edited)

Modifié par Obadiah, 13 juillet 2011 - 10:31 .

[Shallina]

Even if you don't respect the lore, if you make something cool, poeple will like it.

The problems are more technical with the dragon age toolset I think.

[Elvhen Veluthil]

My opinion is that you can ignore most of the questions you asked when giving life to a city, the players don't care much about them. Take for example Denerim from DA:O. It was as big as it needed to serve the story, the population size doesn't matter, sections are again defined by the story, after the attack you can rebuild it as you see fit since is unlikely that Bioware will revisit it, daily life is defined by scripted behavior for NPCs, and the number of the Banns doesn't matter unless your story depends on it.

Personally I am not depending anymore in Bioware's writers to shape my tale, I see the world through the eyes of the important persons that shape it. Would be wise though to avoid cities that will likely be in the next DA games, like Val Royeaux or Minrathous.

[Daeltaja]

I guess that after spending 10 months to complete a mod using the tools, I wanted to branch off and move onto different tools. I've been spending a lot of time with Unity and UDK but have yet to start work on a new project for a number of reasons.

I've not been too active here since releasing Craggy Island, so how are we all doing? Any projects in development at the moment? I agree with some of the above sentiments that the barrier of entry is far too high here, which is usually what puts people off. However if you stick with it, I think you'll find that you can overcome most of the issues through these very forums and also through the Wiki and various other tutorial sites.

As proof, this set of tools were the first I had ever used and I managed to release a campaign after 10 months of work. Granted, 2 of those months were taken up with voice acting, plenty of procrastinating and generally being too much of a perfectionist. So if I can offer and tips or advice to potential modders, it's that you simply have to stick with it and since there are a tonne of people who have by now encountered all of the major issues that the tools cough up, with some proper planning and pre-production, you can avoid many of the pitfalls and bottlenecks that others have came up against.

It's great to see a bunch of familiar names still posting here!

Modifié par Daeltaja, 19 juillet 2011 - 09:48 .

[errant_knight]

All I really want is the unavailable content from the Origins DLC, including voice files, and ideally, some of the dialogue that was cut, to have more options for voicing the NPCs in mods.

[-Semper-]

errant_knight wrote...

All I really want is the unavailable content from the Origins DLC, including voice files, and ideally, some of the dialogue that was cut, to have more options for voicing the NPCs in mods.

the models, 2da, uti and so can be extracted if you decrypt the addins. voicefiles are accessable through the appropriate folder (my documents\\bioware\\dragon age\\addins\\addin_folder\\module\\audio\\vo). the areas, dialogues and cutscenes are still locked and you will need bio's database which won't happen.

Modifié par -Semper-, 16 juillet 2011 - 09:39 .