Modders of Witcher 3, What Makes Modkit so Inferior?

[Drone456]

We've explained it 1000 times since the Modkit released, there were often posts on the subreddit with a tonne of upvotes which stayed on the frontpage for quite some time.

That only really applies if he watches the subreddit, and if he was checking at the times these were actively on the front page. Which is entirely possible he did/was not.

 

 

 

At this point you don't have an excuse to claim that there hasn't been any dialogue.

People just talking about it (especially other modders to fellow modders) isn't a proper dialogue. What he was asking for (quite nicely might I add) is a dialogue between the mod-user and the mod-maker, a back and forth conversation. Such as "(mod-maker) The *insert whatever* really sucks.", "(mod-user) well why does it suck?" Or at least that's how I'm understanding it.

 

 

 

And you could just download the Modkit and look at it yourself, you don't need any experience nor much technical knowledge in order to see how limited and shitty it is.

That would just be a layman looking at it in a layman way, and understanding it laymanly. What he wants is for an experienced modder to try and simplify it in a way that a layman could understand. That way he could understand more about the tool and it's possible shortcomings than what he could have been capable assessing on his own.

 

 

 

More like: CDPR.."here is a pair of chopsticks , they can function much like a shovel..have fun building a house" Worst game editor I have ever tried to wrestle with, totally non intuitive, the GUI is MIA and only a portion of the long hyped functions available. I thought that once the ModKit update hit the road we would have something better to work with..sigh. Hear that laughter foolish modders?.... it's the gaming gods.

 

Lol this really reminded me of Shanghai Noon if you've ever seen it.

In the movie, Jackie Chan gives Owen Wilson a pair of chopsticks to dig himself out of the sand, instead of just digging him out himself.

 

 

Really good movies by the way. If you like Jackie Chan, you might want to give them a shot if you already haven't seen em.

Edited October 27, 2015 by Drone456

[ERASERhead1]

 

I was wondering if some of the loyal, dedicated, and often times underappreciated modders would explain to a layman such as myself some of the challenges faced (as well as limitations) with this Modkit.

 

Witcher 3 is the 13th most modded game on the Nexus, yet the majority of mods seem very lackluster in comparison to the likes of what Bethesda enables modders to create with the Creation Kit. This is in no means meant as a dig on the modding community, as I have posted comments enough on mod pages and have had responses from modders who have expressed the diificulty and often times strange limitations of the ModKit.

 

I feel a proper dialogue between modders and the end consumer would offer some transparency that would be beneficial to those like myself who would like to be more in the know.

 

Thank you modders for all of your hard work and for sharing.

We've explained it 1000 times since the Modkit released, there were often posts on the subreddit with a tonne of upvotes which stayed on the frontpage for quite some time.

At this point you don't have an excuse to claim that there hasn't been any dialogue.

And you could just download the Modkit and look at it yourself, you don't need any experience nor much technical knowledge in order to see how limited and shitty it is.

 

I don't know where you got that I was making excuses.

 

Also, as someone who frequents Reddit I haven't seen this topic on the front page ever. I just searched r/witcher, r/thewitcher, r/witcher3, r/thewitcher3, and r/witchermodding and don't see anything, so I guess you are referring to something else? If so, please send me the link and I will happily check it out.

 

I apologize for being so late to the party on the topic and my being ill informed has bothered you to such an extent. Regardless, your other posts were interesting and I thank you for sharing.

 

@Paul McGann

 

I actually read that comment before posting this thread. It was very insightful and was a contributing factor in me wanting to inquire further. It certainly cemented the fact that the desire is (or was at this point) there to mod Witcher 3 but the tools provided/promised are subpar at best.

 

Can you elaborate on the 3 current functions you mentioned earlier, and why only one of them works properly?

 

Also, this texture limit issue, it's the first time I've seen/heard this. Is this an engine issue, limitation of the ModKit itself, or just an unneccessary restriction in general? Could a mod be made to lift the limit?

 

Some of my favorite Skyrim mods were animation and audio related, neither of which I see here. Is it impossible with the ModKit or just too much of a hassle to bother attempting?

 

Anyway, is the point ultimately moot with Fallout 4 releasing in a couple weeks... the damage already done?

[PaulMcGann]

 

 

I was wondering if some of the loyal, dedicated, and often times underappreciated modders would explain to a layman such as myself some of the challenges faced (as well as limitations) with this Modkit.

 

Witcher 3 is the 13th most modded game on the Nexus, yet the majority of mods seem very lackluster in comparison to the likes of what Bethesda enables modders to create with the Creation Kit. This is in no means meant as a dig on the modding community, as I have posted comments enough on mod pages and have had responses from modders who have expressed the diificulty and often times strange limitations of the ModKit.

 

I feel a proper dialogue between modders and the end consumer would offer some transparency that would be beneficial to those like myself who would like to be more in the know.

 

Thank you modders for all of your hard work and for sharing.

We've explained it 1000 times since the Modkit released, there were often posts on the subreddit with a tonne of upvotes which stayed on the frontpage for quite some time.

At this point you don't have an excuse to claim that there hasn't been any dialogue.

And you could just download the Modkit and look at it yourself, you don't need any experience nor much technical knowledge in order to see how limited and shitty it is.

 

I don't know where you got that I was making excuses.

 

Also, as someone who frequents Reddit I haven't seen this topic on the front page ever. I just searched r/witcher, r/thewitcher, r/witcher3, r/thewitcher3, and r/witchermodding and don't see anything, so I guess you are referring to something else? If so, please send me the link and I will happily check it out.

 

I apologize for being so late to the party on the topic and my being ill informed has bothered you to such an extent. Regardless, your other posts were interesting and I thank you for sharing.

 

@Paul McGann

 

I actually read that comment before posting this thread. It was very insightful and was a contributing factor in me wanting to inquire further. It certainly cemented the fact that the desire is (or was at this point) there to mod Witcher 3 but the tools provided/promised are subpar at best.

 

Can you elaborate on the 3 current functions you mentioned earlier, and why only one of them works properly?

 

Also, this texture limit issue, it's the first time I've seen/heard this. Is this an engine issue, limitation of the ModKit itself, or just an unneccessary restriction in general? Could a mod be made to lift the limit?

 

Some of my favorite Skyrim mods were animation and audio related, neither of which I see here. Is it impossible with the ModKit or just too much of a hassle to bother attempting?

 

Anyway, is the point ultimately moot with Fallout 4 releasing in a couple weeks... the damage already done?

 

Well, let's see here. First of all, let me apologize. I forgot to bring my troll repellent to this thread. :P

 

Second. The three current functions of Modkit are: Textures, meshes, and scripts.

 

Scripts is big, and lets us do a lot. Without sound modding (and possibly lip syncing of some sort), however, it does NOT let us do quests/adventures. It's actually even better now, since they actually gave us notation on some of their code. There are some great modders doing great things with scripts. (Humble brag: including the guys on the School of the Roach team. We've completely changed how armor works to a much more immersive, balanced system with encumbrance and all kinds of other neat stuff. Made new skills. New all kinds of fun stuff with scripts.)

 

Textures: Now, to be fair to CDPR, they did sort of fix textures. With the first version of Modkit, we could only edit diffuse maps and put them back in the game properly. (The diffuse map is the main image you see over the armor in-game. Each texture also contains a normal map, which controls depth and shadow and, to use a terrible pun, texture, and what we /think/ is an ambient occlusion map, and sometimes a specular map, which handles light/reflectiveness/shininess. Sometimes that specular data is in the normal map, however. Also, the ambient map seems to be more like a tint map in this game, but working differently from other tint maps. Rather than a color, it provides more texture - pointing to leather, or steel, or another material stored who-knows-where.) One of the big problems was that to do any real texture modding, you need to modify ALL of the maps, and to get anything but the diffuse map back in (and even then, you had to make sure it didn't have an alpha channel - because that wasn't supported), you had to use a hex editor to modify the actual information of the file. Which is hard. I tried doing it myself and couldn't. Luckily, I have more talented guys on my team, so we got it done, but this is beyond a lot of people. Another big thing is that a LOT of stuff in this game shares textures with other stuff. This is not a mod friendly system AT ALL, as you could modify one thing then have 10 other things show up with that modification, but in another place because of the way they use that texture. Plus, all of the stuff we know about it is learned through trial and error and guesswork. I've done a LOT of research into this (I'm talking days and days and days), as has the awesome CDPR forums moderator, Dragonbird, and we still aren't close to knowing the system. Documentation in CDPR's pdf's that come with Modkit is laughable, though, and tells you nothing about how the system works.

 

Meshes: The system they use is also completely different from every other game. They use "nodes" instead of bones. And again, no documentation. I don't know as much about this one, but it tooks MONTHS to get our meshes into our mod. Months of trial and error. Then to make the textures ride on them correctly took even longer. But it mostly works. Mostly.

 

Hope this helps, buddy. Let me know if there's anything else you want to know. :)

 

-Richie

School of the Roach

[Aurielius]

@PaulMcGann

Slightly off topic but..this is third or fourth appearance of your self promotion of the 'School of the Roach' in threads that have nothing to do with your group (which one must assume is a modding collective). If this modding group is so spectacular then start a thread illuminating your group's projects, I am sure there will input and interest for that. I'm all for modding groups and I understand the internal group enthusiasm dynamic.

Make no mistake if they are as good as you say I will be first in line to download their offerings and be suitably impressed with their superior modding skills but until then....mind skipping the commercials?. :whistling:

[PaulMcGann]

@ Aurelius: I'm explaining something to someone who has no idea how modding this game works, and I used my first hand experience as examples. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Since I'm explaining things that people have done, I don't think it's outside of the topic to include the people who did them at all, either. You'll notice I also mentioned Dragonbird. If I had used another mod author, I would have named them. I do thank you for your polite tone, and just for you I will endeavor not to mention mod authors by name in threads not dedicated to their specific mods because you asked in a polite way, but I certainly haven't strayed off the topic as far as you have in asking not to stray off of the topic. Bit silly, right? Live and let live, that's my motto.

[ERASERhead1]

@ PaulMcGann

 

Dude, that response (right before the last one) was awesome. Thank you for taking the time to break a lot of that down. Your explanations were easy to understand and I sincerely appreciate it.

 

And that mod your team is working on sounds pretty sweet. Is there an ETA or a little taste of what to expect? ie pics, vids, etc.

[PaulMcGann]

No problem, Eraserhead1! Always happy to help. There's no real ETA at the moment (we're finishing up a few more things before it's ready for open beta), but there are threads on the CDPR modding forums and on the Witcher subreddit.

 

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/61000-Some-School-of-the-Roach-features

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3289249-during-the-events-of-the-witcher-2-geralt-of-rivia-wore-the-armor-of-the-legendary-witcher-raven/

 

Just do a search on reddit and you'll see a few poorly made videos we threw together. There will be one really nice video we'll make a little before the release of the open beta test that will be easy to find, but until then the best place to check for updates (unless you'd like to be part of the ongoing closed alpha test) is the CDPR forums. All of our members are active there.

 

Hope that helps.