Question about skill cost and Mastery UI visual bugs

TL;DR
Questions will be marked with Q:

Summary

Hey, super newb here. Played GD alot, PoE even more and some others like Titan Quest. Recently started to get an itch for creating/re-creating stuff for GD. In particular, rework the way some skills act (reworking Aura of Censure into something like “Righteous Fire” from PoE, like an example) and their damage types variety (or lack of, at least IMO, looking at you AAR).
I plan on revisiting almost all skills, mostly focusing on correct Elemental Damage Visuals (through PSEditor) and adding some Risk/Reward kinda changes.

What I’ve done:

I’ve read through all of this
[Grim Dawn's Modding Tools + User-Generated Tutorials to Get Started]
(didn’t actually help me much past one specific point, even though most of it is pretty well explained, what I’m looking for isn’t exactly any of this)

I started with Aura of Censure, from Inquisitor, as test. I went into auracensure1_buff.dbr (since this is the actual skill, where you can change level, damage, etc, not auraofcensure1.dbr)

1 - Up the damage :white_check_mark:

2 - Make it cost life per second. In CastConfig, created values for skillActiveLifeCost up to level 12 (even thought the skill has skillUltimateLevel set to 22, I decided to not go too far and just test it right away) :white_check_mark:

3 - S̶a̶v̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶,̶ ̶B̶u̶i̶l̶t̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶,̶ ̶w̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶G̶D̶,̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶C̶u̶s̶t̶o̶m̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶>̶ ̶g̶d̶x̶1̶ ̶ ̶(̶a̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶s̶i̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶̶̶A̶u̶r̶a̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶C̶e̶n̶s̶u̶r̶e̶̶̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶i̶e̶r̶ ̶9̶ ̶s̶k̶i̶l̶l̶,̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶5̶0̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶G̶D̶ ̶I̶t̶e̶m̶ ̶A̶s̶s̶i̶s̶t̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶s̶.̶)̶ <— Later found out you can just lower it to tier 1 in SkillConfig , thus resulting in only needing 1 point into the mastery bar. :white_check_mark:

4 - I got what I wanted… kinda. :thinking:

It costs life. But I could only make it cost specific values of life per second, like 100 or 200. I tried putting a number followed by %, such as 5%, but when used in-game, no life was used.

Q: Can I make skillActiveLifeCost be % instead of flat values? If so, how?

The most recent problem I’m facing:

Summary

Edited the Arcanist Mastery, added 1 new transmuter to AAR, got it to appear on the skill tree, opposite to the already existing transmuter “Tainted Power”. Both the name and description are the same, but the new one does a different conversion.
“Only” problem here is, while doing this, I somehow completely wrecked both the Mastery Selection UI and Skilltree UI. The Mastery UI shows Shaman and Arcanist almost perfectly overlapping each other (either box selects Arcanist), while also showing the Mastery picture upside down (only happens for Arcanist).

The Skilltree has it’s background and Mastery image also upside down. Only shows the active skills icons. Transmuters and passives are all black. Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange and Callidor’s Tempest both have wrong connectors (instead going down into their transmuters, they go up into oblivion) and the Mastery Bar box (not the glow that appears after putting points, just the UI element that visually constrains this) is at the top ( instead of bottom)

Q: How? Where? Who?

no

I’m not sure what you did to do this, my suggestion is to start over because so far it looks like you broke just about everything there is to break. Some people have an issue with the texviewer flipping images, but I’m not sure what you are doing with the portrait or mastery background in the first place to have even run into that issue…

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1- That’s too bad, was planning on a health cost - focused class.
2- Wait, that might be it. Is there a fix to the flipping images thing?

Thanks for reply :smiley:

Yeah, don’t use texviewer.

Use TQTexture

The folder is filled with old Titan Quest mod tools developed by Tamschi, but what you need/want is TQTextureExtract. It has an .exe, just open your .tex files with that .exe (set it as your default method to open .tex files) and it will instantly convert them to .dds

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Oh, ok, that makes me facepalm. Thanks :slight_smile:
I assume .dds works the same as .psd and .tga, for auto-creating assets?

You’ll need to convert to psd or tga with whatever art program you use.

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Thank you very much for your replies :smiley: I guess I DIDN’T f* up and it was “just” the texviewer. That’s actually very positive, was starting to lose my patience after nearly 4 days looking at the same correct things…

It’s been that way for a long time, at least it seems to be the case from what I’ve seen people saying. I’ve never actually used it, been using TQTexture for years, it works flawlessly for my needs as a modder :smiley:

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