46 réponses à ce sujet

[Artemis Absinthe]

Well, the generic rule is to use the custom content only if you know how to do it. Custom placeable models need references (lines) in the placeable.2da file, you can't just put the models and textures in the override folder, while armors and weapons don't, you only need the models to follow the naming conventions.

The problem is that the game only load one 2da per type, so, this is already as simple as possible. If you need a lot of custom contents, from different authors, you need to know, at least, how to merge 2da files.

It's not rocket science, once you know how to do it, the process is quite simple.

Modifié par Artemis Absinthe, 07 mars 2013 - 12:52 .

[kamal_]

Get this:
http://nwvault.ign.c...ed.Detail&id=56

[kamal_]

Always back up your work when making changes, this is standard practice.
If you have a custom placeables.2da you are using, replace it with this one.

The reason these are needed is because many content creators needed to have a placeables 2da so they're stuff would show up ingame, so they tended to just tack on their entries at the end of the 2da without thought for how things would work with other content. This meant conflicts with other content that tried to use the same lines.

The master placeable.2da uses reserved lines (reserved via the nwn2 wiki page specifically for that), and while it doesn't support absolutely everything, it does support the most used custom content. In all likelihood it supports what you are trying to use.

[Artemis Absinthe]

Iveforgotmypassword wrote...

My problem is I don't know how to merge 2da and quite frankly am not interested and would rather happily continue with what I know and how many people like myself just don't bother with something that is too complex ? This then becomes the "problem" of the creator with less downloads and votes etc.

I don't mean to mock you, but this is like "I want to keep eating chocolate and not get fat. Chocolate manufacturers should makes a chocolate that doesn't make you fat".

If you don't know how to do it and you're not interested, don't use it... If you need to use it, learn how to do it or ask for help. That's what a community is for.

As for instructions, I'm not sure what you mean. In order to use custom placeables you need a hak version for the release version and an override version for the building process. There are a lot of tutorials in the vault and blogs.

The fact that modders include both versions is to help you, otherwise you'll have to pack it yourself before releasing.

In addition, you have to consider if the custom contents is still supported and updated to the last version. If not, you'll need to work on it, or ask someone to, otherwise it will surely cause malfunctions.



Of course, there are reserved range that should be take in consideration while creating custom contents, in order to keep them compatible, that is true, most modders don't check them.

Modifié par Artemis Absinthe, 07 mars 2013 - 02:44 .

[kamal_]

Something something great power something something great responsibility.

the 2da in 2da files stands for 2 dimensional array. These are basically spreadsheets, to the point where most spreadsheet programs (excel, Open Office Calc, etc) will open them just fine. At that point it's a matter of copy/paste to create your own.

One of Pain's many projects I believe is a utility to automate combining 2das to make your own.

[Artemis Absinthe]

Iveforgotmypassword wrote...

Wouldn't it be far better for the chocolate manufacturer to make a non fattening version that tasted the same and everybody could eat without having to have a high metabolism or lead an active life ?

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. In order to achieve a non fattering chocolate you have to take out butter, sugar and most of the milk, and that leaves you with dark chocolate, it's doable, but not a product that everyone will like. If you led an active life or take steps to accelate your metabolism, you can enjoy milk chocolate and not worry about getting fat. Nobody said you have to sign for a boot camp to eat a snickers.

As for a non fattering chocolate that taste the same, ever wondered why there's not such a thing ? It's too difficult to do. Chocolate taste so good because of sugar, butter and milk.

Same as custom content creation, yes, it could be good to have something easier to use, but if you know how to use it you can modify it, if you need, create your own, or just adapt the one available to the situation, while having something easier to use will limit your choices. It's doable, you can add custom placeables without touching the placeable.2da, but the only way to do it is to overwrite an existing one.

Not to mention the fact that is already hard to do, so, trying to make it even easier could be incredibly time consuming.

Of course, this is just my opinion, I like to learn new stuff, even if I don't have time to. I'm convinced that is better to know how something work, if you need to use it, but I could be wrong.



Now, when I say "merge the 2das", I mean a simple copy/paste operation. As I said, it's not rocket science. You have to open them, copy from one and paste in the other, save, and play... that's it. You can open them with a spreadsheet program or just with notepad. I usually open them in the toolset and hit save, so a copy is saved in the override folder, then edit them with a text editor. I use Notepad ++ or, sometimes, Crimson Editor, but the basic windows notepad will do, or gedit if you're a linux user.

Modifié par Artemis Absinthe, 07 mars 2013 - 05:26 .

[ColorsFade]

I feel your pain. I've been in your shoes many times. Quite often, people who have the technical expertise to create something worth sharing don't possess the same expertise or attention-to-detail to create accurate documentation for non-technical users. It's an issue, to be sure. I cannot count the number of times in my professional career that I have downloaded someone else's code sample only to find that they failed to include necessary libraries, files, or forgot to mention a special 3rd party installation that was necessary for their code to work. It's infuriating, to be sure.

Fortunately, in a good community such as this one, there often people willing and able to help decipher such tings and to help make things work if one but asks nicely :-)

[Muazen]

I think OP makes a good point here. I've skipped on good deal of mods because they came with more than couple of add ons besides the mod itself, it's not that I don't know how to install them - I just couldn't be bothered. Especially as I'd like to have good deal of modules on without them conflicting (or having to worry about them conflicting).

If you're making a mod, it's probably good idea to think for a moment if adding any custom content is worth the extra trouble you'll be adding on the install and the conflicts the users will run into if they wish to use custom content that isn't part of your module. I'd rather have a Flametongue with extra physical damage on crits, than a Flametongue with extra fire damage on crits and a Hakpak I have to install on the side that conveniently makes the damn sword only work on my mod anyway.

By all means, if you want half of your NPC's to use Kaedrin's classes, install Kaedrin's pack, but if you just want your elf city to have gigantic trees it might be better to scale up a regular tree model instead of insisting that the players install "lore friendly elf giant tree hakpack" to see them in the background for 30 seconds. (This also depends on the scale of your module of course, an epic level 1 to 30 adventure over 70 hours of gameplay can justify a lot more than 3 hour dungeon crawl.)

When I did my only module couple of years back, I made a point of trying to stretch the default toolset content instead of throwing in custom stuff. Unfortunately since my module looks like it was carved from industrial waste by a blind monkey it gives more the impression that I simply didn't know how to use the stuff.

[ColorsFade]

@Muazen

You make some good points and have spawned a question in my head.

When I started my module, I was thinking the same way as you - stretch the default toolset. Then I saw some of the community created content (RWS's placeables and tilesets being a prime example) and realized I would really enjoy having that stuff in my campaign. 

My question is: is it possible to make it easy to use 3rd party content such as the RWS stuff, and still make a module/campaign easy to install by consolidating all the necessary files yourself?

Can I make my own HAK (or series of HAKs bundled together), for instance, that contains everything necessary for my campaign to work, all wrapped up into one package, so my users don't have to go download and install a bunch of other HAKS and files to make it work? Is doing so simply a matter of getting permission from someone like RWS to bundle their stuff with my own campaign?

Because ideally, that's what I'd like to do. I'd like to just bundle everything myself and write an installer (if necessary). Being a developer, I just want my campaign to be as easy to install as possible for people, and to do so without creating conflicts for the user's other modules. I'd love it if people just needed to download a file, run an installer, and bingo - they're ready to play my campaign without trouble.  

[kamal_]

ColorsFade wrote...

@Muazen

You make some good points and have spawned a question in my head.

When I started my module, I was thinking the same way as you - stretch the default toolset. Then I saw some of the community created content (RWS's placeables and tilesets being a prime example) and realized I would really enjoy having that stuff in my campaign. 

My question is: is it possible to make it easy to use 3rd party content such as the RWS stuff, and still make a module/campaign easy to install by consolidating all the necessary files yourself?

Can I make my own HAK (or series of HAKs bundled together), for instance, that contains everything necessary for my campaign to work, all wrapped up into one package, so my users don't have to go download and install a bunch of other HAKS and files to make it work? Is doing so simply a matter of getting permission from someone like RWS to bundle their stuff with my own campaign?

Because ideally, that's what I'd like to do. I'd like to just bundle everything myself and write an installer (if necessary). Being a developer, I just want my campaign to be as easy to install as possible for people, and to do so without creating conflicts for the user's other modules. I'd love it if people just needed to download a file, run an installer, and bingo - they're ready to play my campaign without trouble.  

I'd highly suggest you contact Painofdungeoneternal, who is working on just such a thing and would likely love to have another programmer to assist as he has a ton of stuff on his plate.

[Artemis Absinthe]

ColorsFade wrote...

Can I make my own HAK (or series of HAKs bundled together), for instance, that contains everything necessary for my campaign to work, all wrapped up into one package, so my users don't have to go download and install a bunch of other HAKS and files to make it work? Is doing so simply a matter of getting permission from someone like RWS to bundle their stuff with my own campaign?

.hak files are, basically, libraries. You can open them, extract them and pack them again. Tanita's NWN2Packer is a good tool.

The only thing you need to know is that you can have only one 2da per type. Doesn't matter if you have something in your override folder, files in the hakpack always have priority.

Muazen wrote...

I think OP makes a good point here. I've skipped on good deal of mods because they came with more than couple of add ons besides the mod itself, it's not that I don't know how to install them - I just couldn't be bothered. Especially as I'd like to have good deal of modules on without them conflicting (or having to worry about them conflicting).

hakpaks are libraries, if the module don't use them, there won't be any conflict. What you're saying is true only if you dl the override version which is only used in development. For the release version the modder should always pack the custom contents into one or more hakpacks.

Modifié par Artemis Absinthe, 07 mars 2013 - 07:08 .

[Tchos]

Tsongo: I definitely agree that a lot of content on the Vault is not well-documented, and assumes you know how to use their materials.  When I was a beginner, I had a hell of a time with it, and this was just after they took the information-filled old Bioboards offline.  For my work, I make sure to explain in detail how to use it, and what it does, and why.

However, I'm not sure better documentation would actually help in a case like this, if you are, as you say, not interested in learning how to use them.

ColorsFade wrote...
My question is: is it possible to make it easy to use 3rd party content such as the RWS stuff, and still make a module/campaign easy to install by consolidating all the necessary files yourself?

Can I make my own HAK (or series of HAKs bundled together), for instance, that contains everything necessary for my campaign to work, all wrapped up into one package, so my users don't have to go download and install a bunch of other HAKS and files to make it work?

You can put it all into a single hak, or you can put all of the custom content into your campaign folder, if you're making a campaign.

[Muazen]

Artemis Absinthe wrote...

hakpaks are libraries, if the module don't use them, there won't be any conflict. What you're saying is true only if you dl the override version which is only used in development. For the release version the modder should always pack the custom contents into one or more hakpacks.

Uh, yeah, you´re right.
What I mean was, if you put it in a hakpack then you can´t take the custom stuff with you if you want to take the same character to another module. (My mod was quite small, only took some 3 hours and you gained like 3 levels, many people would probably want to continue the character on some mod with suitable level requirement.) On the other hand, if you put it on override it could certainly conflict but you could take it along to most simple mods.

So what I was after was that looking to make short mods not require extra content would allow users to possibly use their favorite override stuff on it, and whatever you made in the mod would work if they decided to play the same character later. And of course there is the convenience factor of just copying the file to modules folder and forgetting about it.

[Tchos]

Looking it up on the internet barely worked at all for me, since most of those resources had been taken away by the time I came around.  I had to learn much of what I know of the workings of 2DAs from obscure references here and there, experimentation, and asking other people.  Now that I do know, I'm happy, nay eager, to spread that knowledge wherever I can, but I cannot put it on other authors' pages, so all I can do is describe what I've done in detail for the edification of any who look for that information, and answer you if you ask.

[Dann-J]

Iveforgotmypassword wrote...

Tchos... I admire your patience but I'm afraid I lack the nerve to experiment with something completely weird to me..

But I'm very glad that people like you dont

I find experimenting with the game files to be one of the most rewarding parts of  modding. You can read all the dry documentation you want, but ultimately you only ever *really* learn something by getting your hands dirty and taking the risk of breaking things. Having an internet resource tell you what to do, and what not to do, is no substitute for understanding *why* you should or shouldn't do things in certain ways.

I've learned far more from experimenting (and especially from breaking things) than I've ever learned from other peoples'  tutorials.

[Kaldor Silverwand]

The issue I have with hak packs is that haks take precedence over contents in the override folder. So basically the hak author is ensuring that you cannot choose to do anything differently unless you unpack the hak, dissect it, and repack it. Hak packs interfere with freedom. Much better to have contents in the campaign folder. For authors who only wrote modules and used hak packs, then shame on them because they really should have used a campaign. This is NWN2, not NWN.

Regards

[Shallina]

Whe you use a lot of custom content it's wize to link stuff in hak pack. This way the gamers won't need to "empty" their ovveride folders when they wants to play your mode.

Linking stuff in HAk pak allow for content inegrity, especially when you changed almost everything.

[Tchos]

In answer to your question, you can organise content in your campaign folder in subfolders, just like the override, yes. I do this. There is nothing in my hak except 2DA files.