Modding Cairn

Hi, I just bought GD on GOG due to the promise of mod tools, and I’m glad I did. This game just rocks. I have a question now: Will we be able to mod the existing world of Cairn, such that we can add new areas, or are we limited to making our own modded areas from which we will not be able to travel to Cairn?

You can make your own areas in Cairn, but the mod size will be large since it had to include the map.

Shouldn’t it just be able to link to the existing default campaign with your mods overlayed? Would be kinda ridiculous otherwise and yea it would increase the download size drastically.

Don’t see why it can’t be essentially plugnplay Elder Scrolls style.

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Because custom campaigns REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

In seriousness, this is one concern adoomgod and I have had with the rebalancing mod.

Yea I know about the custom campaign keeping the mods separate from the main game but why in the hell can’t you simply somehow link your mod to what is already there but thus keeping the saves separate. If it doesn’t already work this way then I am highly confused about how we are supposed to play mods without excess re-downloading what is already on your computer considering that most mods will be modding the main game.

What I gleaned from Asylums comment seemed to imply opposite of how I’m thinking it should be and it don’t make a lick of a sense. Ya get my drift?

All I can guess is that I’ve somehow misunderstood Asylums meaning.

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Go into your Grim Dawn installation. Go to resources.

How many levels.arc files do you see?

Now how many areas are in the game?

You cannot link them in separate files. It just doesn’t work that way. Unless something has changed, which I doubt, that seems like quite a lot of unnecessary work.

Though looking at it now, the map is considerably smaller than I expected.

I see 1 levels.arc at 228 megs.

So you can’t just simply make a new area, do whatever voodoo needs to be done to have it overwrite/add onto the default game when you select it without this file? (which is already on every GD players computer. Why not have some way when you start a game with the mod that tells it what files it needs access to to work properly rather than having to bundle files into the mod that everyone already has?)

While 200 megs ain’t the end of the world it just seems weird to me that there isn’t a better way.

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What I’ll probably wind up doing for the rebalancing mod is writing a patcher that extracts the arc files, makes the necessary changes, and repackages everything into new arc files to be used for the mod. That way the actual download itself is small, even if the end result is large. I would recommend this for mods changing the main campaign.

Mind sharing your technique or tools with others? I’ve got plenty of modding experience but little file manipulation know-how, and compatibility/merging with the main files is my biggest concern with even starting to make anything.

If I build it, they will come…

…or, rather, if I build it, you can have it. :slight_smile:

Ah cool Ceno. I guess I had been hoping some stuff like this could have been actually built into the game where once you load the mod and start it the game would know how to handle it appropriately (per what I was describing above).

But I suppose now that you guys all got the tools you’ll likely have to build the QoL infrastructure yourselves.

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Has anyone been able to decompile the “world001.map” file for editing existing Grim Dawn regions? So far I’ve been able to load the entire file into the editor as a (.wrl) into a new mod.
Without the associated decompiled files:
(.lvl .rlv .sd), the editor doesn’t allow terrain/painting modifications etc.

Perhaps I’m missing something related to the “ArchiveTool” functionality?

i’m still trying to figure how to open the game files.

Thanks for this, I forgot I could do this with Titan Quest. I am fooling around with it now. Will let you know if I find anything, but I bet we’ll need a tool like Tamschis Toolbox for Titan Quest

I also overlooked that it is an…unintended use of the editor.
However, sometimes working with something that is already there does wonders instead of starting from scratch.
For example: having access to all the various premade lighting environments, portions of joined assets, and so on.
I am more interested in creating new environmental assets; the replace feature does additional wonders further on down the road.

Just wanted to reference a thread where someone is working on a .map decompiler. Very useful tool if it gets released fully functional.

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38389

It would be nice if we could have a few “custom content links” where there is an NPC dialog that we can easily modify via a cnv file override, a quest gets started, and a side area spawns without having to modify the original map data.

That may already be possible, but I don’t know since I haven’t done map work yet.

On the flip side, yes we can create custom maps.