Hey guys, I think I have a proposal for the modding community,
I’m very new to modding GD, recently learned the structure of the dbrs, mainly studying affixes to add or remove some prefixes, and while I was working on them I found that AssetManager and DBReditor while they do what they are supposed to do, they don’t have highly desirable functionalities like Importing the most updated dbr, finding the DBRs by tag or vice versa, opening a referenced dbr, Making a new dbr like prefixtables out of select prefixes…
So I started to write some tools, did 2 of them and saved some time on some tasks that I wanted to do
The first one was to make a new prefix table out of the prefixes that I’ve made, very simple task but very time consuming and error prone, so my tool just takes an empty prefixtable, populate it with the dbr references, weights, min/max numbers…
The second one which was to actually reference the new prefixtable that I’ve made into almost every dynamic table that has the basic prefixes, so my tool searched the entire database of game (AOM & FG included) imported them to my mod, and added the references to my prefix table, and the result was editing 255 files in less than a minute without having to worry about every single thing that I edited (of course the worry was when I was writing the code but I mean software development duh)
some ideas that I had, invictus probably already exists in the game but kept it just because the name was cool, and the other 2 just absolute memes
And wrote down some ideas, I’d be happy to take some suggestions and share what I’m doing with the community… once it’s beautiful the UI of the tool is nonexistent currently
Anything that would just let you edit mod archives without the rigamarole of having to constantly unpack and repack to check if your changes stick/work would be amazing.
I’ve been testing constantly to see how affixes and items work exactly, the pain point was setting it up, referencing the new dbrs, constantly checking if I didn’t mess up a word in there, that’s my huge pain point, which I will write a reference checker for it, the system is kinda weird, it’s a relative address, and replacing back slash with forward slash, or just going through the AM to find a file was very tedious, It will be coming #soon
I wanted to make sure you know about Grim Dawn Modding Suite - it has a search function that is great. I haven’t really used any of the other functions. The ModMerger would have been nice but to me it’s just an empty window so I can’t use it.
I’ve just learned today how to extract things with the Archive Tool, it’s quite the pain. Something to make it easier would be nice.
I don’t know if this is an issue at all anymore, but some guides said that in order to modify some records you have to change gdx1 or database.arz instead of gdx2. The given example was Necromancer skeletons. In the guide they said that it isn’t clear which database actually controls the record - an example they gave was some pet from Shaman being controlled by gdx2 even though it’s part of the base game.
I don’t know if the above is true anymore - an old aggresive skeleton mod actually had the changes made in database.arz and it seemed to work. But if it is an issue it would be nice to somehow be able to find out which .arz actually controls the record.
