Modding Related Change Coming in 1.0.0.5

Grim Dawn Modding - Projects
21

Hello,

I know it’s not the main topic, but can we hope to see the addition of a mod manager for both DL and activation ?
I remember the mod manager of Torchlight 2, it was really excellent and comfortable.

I wanted to try Frost Knight mod, got a headache while reading how to use it and another one trying to DL it, then realized it was merged in a bigger one.

Not really user friendly, isn’t it ?

PS: please forgive spelling, grammar, typo because i’m not native english and because my english is really limited.

22

Unfortunatelly I can’t test anything at all right now as I’m currently on vacation and therefore also can not answer this.

I’ll be able to test / answer this at wednesday when I’m back home but thanks for your effort so far :slight_smile:

23

Guys please don’t be shady about this whole stuff, we all supported you so far so just tell the truth about why you don’t want to open more options about modding. The limitations are fine so far but you’re closing stuff little by little, might as well delete everything and call it a day, it’ll be faster.

24

Exaggerating a bit? What else have we locked away “little by little”? The sky isn’t falling, no need to herald everyone’s doom quite yet.

This issue was an exploit, and one that created actual problems for us to release new content for everyone. Despite that, we spent time looking into the matter and determined that it is possible to continue using the same method as before, but only for Custom characters…seems like a reasonable compromise that maintains the fact that Mods are intended for Custom Game characters.

25

So I wonder what’s the point in this thread then if this decision is practically already made.

Looks like I don’t need to spend time to write an answer now anymore.

:cry:

26

I’m not talking about that issue (sorry for not being clear about that), and I understand you fixed it; it seems normal to do so, although I don’t fully understand the implications of a decision like this.

It’s just that what you gave us to mod is simply not enough for big projects. It’s not too much but it’s just enough for us to exclaim that you are making it hard on us to mod. For me it’s mostly the limitations in skills and class creation; for others, and it might be more annoying, is the lack of resources for modeling and animating.

Well, that’s a recent issue so I won’t ring the bell and cry that the vikings are going to raid the coast. I just wish that we had more things to do.
Buy us new toys uncle Zantai please! It’s Summer Christmas!

27

The point was to inform modders of the change…

28

I was rather talking about this part as it sort of sounded as if we had a chance to get something back that enables main game mods:

Should have made that more clear. Sorry.

29

There was no way the Main Campaign exploit was going to stay, what we worked out was a Custom Game version of the same approach to mod hosting to facilitate your needs. Thus my earlier question…does the Custom Game method allow you to do what you needed?

You have access to all of the skill and class creation tools that we do. Short of giving away the codebase, you have everything at your disposal, including the same Lua hooks. :undecided:

What resources for modeling and animating are you lacking?

30

Unfortunatelly not at all.

Idk what you did, but whenever I try to either join a custom game that runs a mod that I don’t have I get an error that says “you need <modname> ~ world001.map to join this game” and the other way round if I host a mod nobody else has but which uses the main campaign it throws the same error.

Also there are usually not more than 5 players online there and the main goal of my idea was to bring together lots of players into one server (more than 4 which actually works pretty good) to have fun together in a modded fun world.

This sort of stuff is a lot of work and if there will be like 3 persons that join, it’s not worth the work at all.

BTW: little side note: can you please put “custom game” in the custom game browser as default game type? I thought for months that there were no games at all in custom quest because by default it was grim dawn and I had no idea that I had to change the type to search for…I mean I wouldn’t really expect that in the custom game menu the default game search type is main game.

Also I still don’t really get what you’re promising yourself with “closing this exploit” as it still rather harms modding than fixes any malicious stuff.

For example regarding items that kill your character when you equip them: You could still modify the game’s database and give your main game char such an item in single player, change back database and join multiplayer and give the item away, not to speak of simply copying over custom quest chars to main game etc.

Regarding the killing of players, especially hardcore players, I’ve spent a bit of time (like 30 mins) to see what is possible without mods and found multiple ways to kill players without having to use a mod, even inside peace zones in both pvp and non pvp enabled games (both host and client, even more ways as host) and I think everybody who knows how this works with mods will find these ways if they spend a bit of time and work into that.

As I already said, modded main game servers were fun as hell back in tq and this type of server survived until the end of the game’s online time and they still were always full nearly instantly after opening them.

What’s so wrong about just adding a warning when you’re about to join a modded game, including a “cancel” button so people can stop joining if they feel like they don’t want to and a warning if somebody tries to join your server with a modded version of the game?

31

so if Zantai’s intention is to stop the exploit from ruining peoples gaming experience. And everything elfe is saying is true. neither of you have presented an actual solution to the problem and you are only making it more complicated

real solution:

Don’t make the proposed change. but instead add automated (versioned+dated) char backups that exist only when playing multiplayer and joining other games (no backup if you host). and just let the player choose to restore to a previous version so they can undo the griefing. (for joining MP games only)

because:

  1. griefers killing you (HC) char
  2. ridiculous lag killing your char
  3. griefers giving you items to kill your char

can all still happen if elfe is correct.

yeah so waht teh HC chars aren’t as HC anymore. but dying to lag or griefers isn’t fairplay for HC (or SC) play. and the cheatesr will cheat anywayts and bring their HC chars back to life so does it really matter? the chars are stored offline.

32

But we can’t create our own templates, we can only rely on you for creating new templates to make our dream skill come true (I may be exaggerating)!

Currently we only have (unless it changed since then) a simple base model and a 2H weapon for scale. Not sure we can even make animations for the base model, I didn’t try it. I’m bad at modelling and unwilling to work through my inexperience. So don’t take my word for much. Still, having more models would be very nice for people who model stuff… For their stuff.

33

They have to as the survival mode otherwise wouldn’t work.

But they could remove the database version check to enable playing modded main game by adding stuff into the main database and running mods already by starting the game.

34

ok then do it but also have the char backups. don’t let the grieferterrorists win

35

I think maybe a programmer had to make a tweak in the code for 1.0.0.5 that allowed it, but it works for us with mods that do not have their own world file (and thus load the main campaign’s world). Mods that have a custom world file do require every user to have the same mod installed.

This seems to be difficult to absorb, so I’m going to be plain…this loophole has created a legitimate issue for us when implementing Crucible Mode that caused its data to be loaded in the Main Campaign (much like your mods are). On top of that, it is also an exploit (one of several) that can hurt legitimate players.

If we had a larger team and more resources, sure, we could work on an alternative way to load our game content differently and for you to continue to use the loophole for mods with an additional warning to joining players.

But we do not have such resources. We have 10 people, 3 of whom are programmers and constantly busy as it is. I see modders asking (and sometimes straight up demanding) this feature or that feature, or wondering why something isn’t as easy as they hope/want…and generally the reality is that those are precisely the limits we work with everyday. Sometimes, the fix is simple (ex. missing animation slots for Spears/Staves), and we squeeze that into the timeline; other times it’s a request that’s been on our list for months, maybe we’ll finally get to it for the expansion; and the rest of the time we simply have to let it go, because the alternative is to go insane with work tasks.

So when the choice came to either close a loophole that was impacting our work and ability to release new content to All players or to leave the loophole so that a Subset of players can use it, we had to make the resource-conscious decision.

If you have an exploit you wish to share that we can work on closing (though in many cases probably not possible given the locally hosted nature of the game), we will look into it.

36

None that could be fixed without having to rewrite nearly the entire multiplayer part of the engine.

Thank you for that clear and open answer though still there is no real reason not to simply remove the version check (maybe I’m blind or stupid but commenting code out is, from my experience, done pretty fast, correct me if I’m wrong) as it won’t change much regarding the “problems” that would be “closed” otherwise as they will still exist even if you let the check in, in different ways though but still with the same possibilities and also not much harder than before.

The difference is that this will patch out all the good stuff but let in the malicious.

BTW: Since the start of MP, there only were like 5 persons I ever knew or heard of that found out how to do that and nearly all of them left the game already. Actually this is about like 2 people that can’t keep their stuff for themselves and need to ruin other people’s fun, both for victim and other modders. It’s not like there is an army of malicious modders, waiting to kill all hardcore characters.

Alright, I think I’ve said everything that’s to say there from my point, so I guess my only hope is to wait until you guys have more time or resources to deal with that.

37

In that case, since i’m sure enough people know how build their databases, it’s will be like tq style modding renaissance :stuck_out_tongue:
old good times

38

Umm… Excuse me sirs? Is there any word on increasing the mastery limit at any point? T’ank ya kindly sirs.

(AKA: I’m a customisation whore and I am dying for more masteries! DAIL helps, but please sir - I want some more!)

39

edit I will keep adding more to this post.

I’ve compiled a list of highly desired features from modders I know, as well as features I’d like. I understand you guys are short on time and unlikely to make any of these changes but I’m putting them out there just to have them there. I know y’all are extremely busy (Man, just editing items is extremely time consuming, I can’t imagine how hard the art side must be. I’ll figure out how to make the PSeditor work one day.)

I’m sure you’ve already gotten some of them, I apologize for any redundancy.

Ahem Please:

  • let conversions be recognized as an array so a transmutor can offer different conversions based on rank.
  • Make bleed a conversion type (allow things to convert to it and allow it to convert to others? Make it an extension of pierce if you have to.
  • Make it so devotion nodes can give item procs, like 5% chance on hit to cast fireball.
  • Making skilltrees in the player dbr an array
  • Add possibility to grant skill per lua / quest (preferable lua)
  • Add possibility to check whether player has skill x or to loop through the player’s skill list and do things like tempremove (for arcade-like maps/game modes and for disabling skills temporary), remove, add, change skilllevel
  • Allow lua Tempremove all items from player / certain items only
  • Make transformation skills possible
  • Make invisibility skills possible
  • Possibility to enable knockdown on player via lua command and skills (-> possibility to make traps that will make the player fall and accidentially discover hidden cellars etc)
  • Tempremove, remove and add attribute points / attribute values directly (also for arcade-like mods)
  • Add possibility to play video via lua script like the intro
  • Add possibility to add more ui stuff like a list that can be updated (for example for pvp arenas so people can keep track on their progress etc)
  • Add “chance of conversion”.
  • Allow items to grant bonuses to more than just 2 skills.
  • Allow us to use mod tools to set the interval between waves on volcano skill (Magi constellation) and Devastation like skills. Intervals in general are nice.
  • For that matter, allow us to set an interval range. So the delay between waves can be more sporadic. i.e. a 0.2-0.4 second interval. This will allow stuff like volcano projectiles and meteors to be tuned to feel more natural.
  • Let anything with “projectiles” have “minprojectiles” and “maxprojectiles”… so like, a skill could cast 1-3 fireballs instead of always the same amount. This may seem clunky but it has a lot of uses, it’ll be good for item procs, and while no player wants a skill that’s 1-3 generally, if you balance it around having many projectiles, the higher the range, the less a small projectile difference will change the dps. i.e. the difference between 1 and 3 projectiles is huge but the difference between 23 and 25 projectiles is not.
40

I just have to empasize this and other player immune status effects like fear.
Why does stun get so much love after all this time? :stuck_out_tongue:
When used in special circumstances, the more animation triggers the better.