Active?

[whiteaden]

So... I've been reading both these forums and the Social.Bioware modding forums for a while now, and I've begun to wonder, the only sections where there's active posting are the "uploaded files" and "uploaded images" sections... most mod requests go unheard, most other topics remain rather silent too... for newbies like myself it's rather hard to get a grip on things if the ideas we spew out are ignored/ go uncommented... I need feedback to keep myself interested... and I'm not / hardly getting any... this is a real bummer for me, as I was hoping to be able to work with others while learning the tools and getting scripting under control... it seems like the community here is like the Silent Sisters... :( and I don't like them... lol

 

if this topic goes unheard, I know enough, and I will probably either move on to somewhere else, or to another game (Mass Effect & Mass Effect 2 are waiting to be played)

 

//Whiteaden

[DarkeWolf]

Yeah, I know what you mean. There's a few really big issues tho. 1) Many of these requests come with the expectation that this game is like Morrowind or Oblivion. Which it is NOT. It's a completely different engine, with a completely new way of doing things, and it's lacking a lot of the developer tools that have been made or used for the prior games.

 

Morrowind and oblivion have been around long enough that people have figured them out. we have tools to work with and a much larger community with knowledge.

they operate on standards which are better known, and use file formats that are more standardized.

There arent that many people that have figured out a reliable way of accomplishing some of the things that people are wanting.

 

2) Mods in this game can be a lot of work! I'll take a lot of the romance mods thats people are asking for. Seems simple enough to somebody that doesnt know what all is involved, but the toolset that BW provided, makes something like that a job that would take several tedious hours of work to accomplish.

Just adding a dialog line to the character to be able to kiss them, isnt really all that hard. But once I tried getting into actually making the SCENE for it to happen, I found myself not knowing how to operate the controls that I needed to use, not being able to access parts of the scene itself that I needed to manipulate, not even knowing what some of the "lingo" was for what the operations were. And THEN, by that time the toolset had sucked down over 3 gigs of ram, and CRASHED.

 

3) Half the tools we have, don't work. There is a large number of people that can't even get the toolset to operate on their computers. The import/export scripts for blender, crash a lot.

 

I dont want to sound like I know what I'm talking about, because I can say that I barely know the surface of what is involved with modding this game, and it's been so long since I've done any scripting that I've forgotten most of it...not that I knew a lot, to begin with.

But I've had a lot of ideas for mods. Ideas that I've tried to implement, and fell flat on my face on.

[whiteaden]

thanks for the details, and I know what you're talking about, I've been trying to modify 1 single (small) area in Orzammar, and I can't seem to test it... all I've done is add a statue with a description... o_O

[hdhd]

Scripting is the most difficult thing in the toolset. It took me two days to figure out how to add items to the game without doubling them at every game start. If it is so difficult to do one simple thing I don't even want to know how it will be if I want to script something more difficult :wallbash:

[killzone12]

the devs who made dao need to give the community the tools to make changes to add and remove i had an idea of bounceing boobs but someone replied in a bad way that i dont know that its really tough but i know its really tough so like i said the devs need to give out the proper tools to the community

[Tikkidew]

I'm waiting myself before digging in. I'm an artist and have done a lot of work in the "Sims" game, but they have tons of easy to follow guides and many tools that make working in that game a breeze. This game however, I've seen nothing but people struggling with the toolset. I really want to make mods for this game but will wait till there's better modding support or guides.

[tgvulcan]

Being a modder myself, so far i have to say the toolset isn't all that bad. Maybe some functions aren't quite what they appear at first but overall the entire thing is pretty well streamlined. Now scripting into the game is just a matter process and workflow. There isn't much documentation on how to do it and that will cause a lot of problems until people work through it or bioware posts up some workflows.