How to mod Dragon age: Origins

[romandastairov]

I've been playing DA:O for a quite a long time and I really got bored of old hair styles, armors, weapons etc. so I wen't to nexus and searched for mods, downloaded few, but the thing is, I don't know how to put them into the game :( Please help me out because I don't feel like playing DA:O old fashion way :( Thank you :) Edited December 17, 2010 by romandastairov

[RustyBlade]

Guide for installing/uninstalling/updating Mods for Dragon Age should get you started.

[romandastairov]

Thank you very much, that really helps for me to start off :)

[Thandal]

Alex's Guide is very useful, and my six bullet point "Mini-Tutorial" (2nd post here: "Using DA Mods for Dummies") can get you started even faster if you're already generally familiar with installing mods for PC games.

 

In any case, Happy (Modded) Gaming! :thumbsup:

[Minecraftbabe]

Thandal, I Tried looking at your tutorial but it didn't help me even a tiny bit. I downloaded a fewmods ("More hair", Another look for Lelianna, and Another look for Morrigan.) None of them work and I don't know how to make them work.Again I looked at your Tutorial and It didn't help me at all. I have DAModmannager and the DA Character thingy (The one you said in your Tutorial.) and they aren't helping. I used 7-Zip because it is much faster and Much better (Plus WinRAR is NOT a Ziping thing, It put TONS of Viruses on my computer.)

[Thandal]

@Minecraftbabe

 

Ok, let's take it slow.

 

First, "More Hairstyles" is what's known as a CC ("Character Creator") mod. Those require one set of installation instructions. And DAM or DAMM don't help with those at all. So we'll come back to that.

 

NPC Face Morphs. This is a different kind of mod, so different way to install. There's no mod named "Another Look" (either one) on the Nexus, so not sure exactly which NPC facemorph mod(s) your talking about, but using "Another Pretty Leliana Morph" as a typical example, the author does a good job of providing the instructions:

 

 

HOW TO INSTALL IT

Go to your Dragon Age folder. Either the one where you installed it, or the one in My Documents will do just as fine. Now go into the packages\core\override sub-folder. Unpack the archive there.

If you're into that kind of details, you actually only need the .mor file. The readme is just for your info, and the .mrh file is the source text, in case you want to have a look at the parameters I've used.

 

Emphasis added.

 

NOTE: Again, depending on how they were packaged, DAM (or DAMM) may not know how to handle this type. You have to extract them first. For all NPC appearance changes you just need the .mor file to be placed in your "\<user's documents>\BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override" folder. (The .mor does need to be named exactly what the game uses for that character. In this example that's: "hf_genfl_leliana")

 

Now back to CC mods.

 

There are (almost) always two parts to any mod that adds more options to the Character Creator; the resources themselves, and the "chargenmorphcfg.xml" file that maps the resources to the sliders on the CC screen. The game can only use ONE such file at a time.

 

If you only have one CC mod installed, then that's the cgmc.xml file you need. But if you have more than one, (as most of us do) you have to merge the cgmc for each mod into a single file. While you can do that by hand, the CharGenMorph compiler does it for you automagically. But you have to remember to run it immediately after adding any new CC mods so that it can integrate those changes with the others it's already combined.

 

But in all cases, you have to copy the resources to the same folder as above for facemorphs. (I place each CC mod in its own subfolder so I can keep track of what I've got, but that's just me.)

 

So, with that additional information, what's still not working?

 

(BTW: WinRAR is a perfectly normal free-to-try utility that handles .rar, .zip, and most other file archiving formats. Any virii you encountered were due to the less than respectable source you used, not the program!)