Official content creation tools
Djehuti
Member Posts: 3
Hello,
I'm aware of NWN's content creation system (I've only played BG1-2 and IWD) and the campaigns being released for it. I'm surprised that the Infinity Engine games don't have something similar. While end users have created tools, I don't find them simple enough to use without significant time investment.
Has Beamdog considered selling Infinity Engine creation tools as a new game? The ability to create a mega-campaign in a collaborative effort, or for a single user to build out a fairly decent 5-12 hour campaign on their own, sounds like a very decent next step for the series. (Especially if people create low-, medium-, and high-level campaigns you can transfer your character between). It's money for the license holders and more content for the fans. Has there been any thought to this idea?
I'm aware of NWN's content creation system (I've only played BG1-2 and IWD) and the campaigns being released for it. I'm surprised that the Infinity Engine games don't have something similar. While end users have created tools, I don't find them simple enough to use without significant time investment.
Has Beamdog considered selling Infinity Engine creation tools as a new game? The ability to create a mega-campaign in a collaborative effort, or for a single user to build out a fairly decent 5-12 hour campaign on their own, sounds like a very decent next step for the series. (Especially if people create low-, medium-, and high-level campaigns you can transfer your character between). It's money for the license holders and more content for the fans. Has there been any thought to this idea?
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Comments
Also keep in mind that replacing WeiDU would break all community content already existing (keep in mind that WeiDU even includes community content management functionality). And all kits/abilities/items in the savegames need to be existing in both games for the save to be transferred (which are even tracked via internal indexes even).
Note that WeiDU is so much integrated to the environment that GoG pushes it's own fixes to the classic versions as WeiDU mods installed on top of the base game as the last step of installation.
There's no point in reinventing the wheel, because it would require too much effort to cover everything already done and doable without breaking compatibility. Which just proves how adequate the current tools already are, despite the time investment required.
To be honest, what would make more noobs to learn WeiDU, is just a good old GUI. Using a console command is not intuitive for the younger audience, who don't remember the times when console command was a thing.
While I am pleased with the progress made by some mods like BG1 Dark Horizons or BG2 Sellswords, it is still very telling that the Baldur's Gate modding scene is so far behind many others. Ignoring the prominent examples like the Elder Scrolls, there are others like the Super Metroid modding community that have made hundreds of hacks filled with new content, largely due to an intuitive UI for creating new content. Yes, I am aware that the Infinity Engine is hundreds of times more complex than something as simple as Super Metroid, but a good tool reduces complexity to its most manageable form.
I would be very surprised to find out Beamdog used Weidu console commands to create Siege of Dragonspear. I would expect they used something larger and more comprehensive, even if it takes some learning or weirdness to overcome (I understand Near Infinity has significant difficulties creating new areas, and this alone would be a significant barrier that's overcome by having developer tools). Though there are a lot of things possible with the current modding tools, the real dearth of finished content suggests a significant bottleneck. After two decades, you'd assume there would be much more to show, especially with a community as passionate as this.
As far as I know, this is actually what happened. When you have half the SoD developer list composed of modders who know the toolset for years, I doubt these people would have dropped the toolchain they have the expertise with just to relearn everything on a something completely different toolset. To put this from Beamdog's perspective: why reinvent the wheel when you have hired the experts of it?
Also, did you just compared GBA rom hacking with the IE engine? GBA ROMs are limited to 32 MB by the format (I don't know Super Metroid but most GBA games I know were even smaller and only used 16 MB cartridges). You couldn't even increase the size and most ROMhacks literally just repacked the data to have some free space. Also, the Metroid games are lot less complex than this one and you don't have to deal with compatibility against each other.
I don't know what makes you think the output is small. It definitely isn't. What can give that impression is that the EEs rule out a lot of the older mods from the years because modding EEs needs active maintenance. Also, WeiDU offered the way to combine mods already back around 2005 or so, which actually renders it ahead of many of the scenes when allowing combinations only became available in mostly recent game's mods where 90% of them are just asset swaps which can be freely combined through Steam Workshop or the like. You still get plenty of mods which can be combined together in a lot of ways and modders even need to check and prepare against conflicts with other mods.
In fact, this is something which actually also renders the output being small - there are no mod resource releases. A lot of the modding scenes have dedicated artists only creating/porting assets without coding and releasing that, but IE scene lacks these kind of releases mostly because the monster slots are of limited amount and people just used Infinity Animations as the common standard to remain compatible with each other and resolved everything else for their own. Random artwork releases without actual usecases didn't seem enough meaningful to build up a subscene as it seems. Then again, the IE scene attracted (hobby) writers most.
There's also the issue that there might already be lost content due to server losses and the like. The Starfleet Command series had tens of gigabytes of content on Filefront back then (sure, many of them were model kitbashes with some customization, but there were total conversions even) which you will never see today because they went down the drain when that closed down and the scene never recovered from that. Who knows what got lost in the ages.
Wow, that is surprising, but very helpful to know. Thank you.
Well, my assumption that Beamdog had some higher-level tools waiting in the background has been shot down. I suppose the whole premise here is more or less moot. Thank you for the info.