13 replies to this topic

[Shed]

With reference to this thread, what are you looking for when you come to mod Dragon Age? There will be a toolkit packaged with the game, although just how user friendly it will be, or customisable the game will be, is not clear.

What are you looking for in a toolkit?

What kind of interface should it have? GUI, or text-based?

Is it important to make the toolkit more accessible to the less serious modder, or should the toolkit be a more powerful program?

What should you be able to do in the toolkit? Should there be a limit?



Thoughts, demands, wants here .

[Tom]

Yeah I'd say they should make it nice and powerful, but it doesnt necessarily have to be restricted to make it more user-friendly. If it is so simple that any idiot can use it then you get unmitigated levels of crap churned out at an alarming rate, if people have to take a little time to learn how to use it then it generally filters out all the non-serious people.

[Feanor]

If it is so simple that any idiot can use it then you get unmitigated levels of crap churned out at an alarming rate, if people have to take a little time to learn how to use it then it generally filters out all the non-serious people.

 

First and foremost, Tom, mind your tone, please.
Second, a toolkit il also for personal use. What's your problem if someone makes crazy things with it ? :glare:

A nice idea would be to have a toolkit which allows the user to make changes within the game itself.

[Tom]

My problem is that you get thousands of shitty mods made, and it is that much harder to find a decent one. If someone wants to make a mod for themselves, fine, but its also their right to publish that mod, and if you have every Tom, Dick and Harry churning out mods then things tend to get out of hand.
Take a look at the 2896 mods on Morrowind Summit for a perfect example of this - there are some good mods there, sure, but I check that everyday to look at the new mods added and in the past 2 months of doing this Ive found 11 mods worth downloading, and only 4 of these I still use.

Edited by Tom, 22 December 2004 - 03:41 AM.

[Archmage Silver]

True. If I can't learn to use the tool I'm more stupid than I ever realized. So, no need to make it less powerful for the sake of those who can't comphrehend modding tools at all.

[Shed]

I think it would be an interesting if a customised DA text editor was an integral part of the Toolkit .

[Archmage Silver]

Yea, that would surely prove interesting, but whether it is to be or not, only time will tell.

[Schatten]

yeah, tom is right there. look, bg2 is not easy to mod and you got good quality (for the most part).

[Archmage Silver]

Quite right about that, if we compare BG mods to those of Morrowind, we can see that most of the Morrowind mods are just crap and BG doesn't have many mods that are similar. Morrowind has it's good mods too, but it is still proven that the mod tool was too easy to use; thousands of crappy mods. A quest: Find the good ones. Takes time.

[Feanor]

Georg Zoeller :

Hey,

Conversations build from scripting is not likely, mainly because the writers at BioWare are using the next generation of our dialog editor which allows them to do everything they need to do to create the story for Dragon Age. Creating a second dialog system that nobody at BioWare would use is not likely to happen, since there are better ways to spent development resources 

I also would not expect a random NPC generator. While something like this could maybe done from scripting by a clever person (and even that's not guaranteed), DA's focus is story based gaming with memorable NPCs, and random NPCs are as far from this goal as it could get, so I doubt that there will be a lot resources dedicated to something like a random NPC generator.

[Tom]

I also would not expect a random NPC generator. While something like this could maybe done from scripting by a clever person (and even that's not guaranteed), DA's focus is story based gaming with memorable NPCs, and random NPCs are as far from this goal as it could get, so I doubt that there will be a lot resources dedicated to something like a random NPC generator.

Good, random NPCs are almost as bad as random items

Also, are they going to release their dialog editor? Im assuming not, but ever hopeful

[Feanor]

Some news :

Fact: there won't be tilesets, but no details are known about the terrain editor.

Fact: the world will be area based, not a continuos landscape.

Fact: interiors areas are said to be (*gasp*) pre-rendered to accomodate better visuals in the campaigns, no clues about how a builder is supposed to customize the interiors.

Fact: the toolset is not the main focus of the game.

Fact: DA won't be a PW builder and not everything that is possible with NWN is granted to be possible with DA at this point.

[Tom]

Still sounds good to me.

[Archmage Silver]

We'll see...