DISCLAIMER - I know what I’m about to say will rustle someones jimmies, but there are some things in this post that I think need to be said, and I’m extremely frustrated right now!***
Ive been on this site a few days, reading posts, trying to figure things out. This is my first post here and will be my only post. So far I haven’t been able to mod ANYTHING on this game, mainly because it seems that crate entertainment unnecessarily over-complicated this process by requiring you to use 3rd party software to un-compress or create proprietary archives and then re-compress or build them.
I just spent like 8 hours last night trying to just do one simple thing - change the sound of the levelup.wav file. I took a file that I recorded myself, ran it through audacity and changed it to a 22khz 16bit wav file and then put it in the place ([username]/documents/my games/grim dawn/settings/sound/human/level_up.wav, in this case) and now when I level the sound plays really really fast, like instead of a 2 or 3 second file its like .5 seconds and very high pitched. Something similar happens in Valheim with certain sound files so I did what of course I always do in situations like this - I used audacity to slow or bring the file down in pitch and/or speed (respectively), but this game and software for some reason still speeds it up.
So I naturally tried adding the file to an already existing mod I had installed (Dom) in this case. I looked at the file structure of Dom and there is a “resources” folder with a “sound.arc” (archive) file in it so I figured id just update a file in there or at least update the sound.arc file in the main game directory.
Boy was I wrong! You see, you have to use a pretty worthless program from the 90’s called ArchiveTool.exe with a dos prompt or power-shell (something that mostly window users don’t even do any more cause you know, command line stuff went away around 25 years ago?), so I fiddled around with this program for about 7 hours or so last night and the only thing I was trying to do was update a fucking file (either the sound.arc file in Dom or in the Grim Dawn root resources directory) with error after error after error and finally said fuck it.
Look, ive been a system administrator for like 30 years now. I am not new to this, nor new to using command-line programs. But this is ridiculous. Ive been modding Minecraft since 2016. Ive been modding Valheim since about 2 months ago. Neither of these games require anything outside of a standard winzip program and/or notepad++ to edit .json files or what have you.
Why did you make updating these archives so fucking complicated??? Why didn’t you just allow us all to use a standard zip program to un-compress these files, update them accordingly, and then recompress them? Having to use a dos-based program to open an archive just to update or add files to “mod” something is just…
Oh and by the way, I did read all of the tutorials and posts that I could find on this site. Most of them were in broken bad English so it was hard to understand them. I read some of the tutorials on nexus in some of the posts as well. Hell, most of my time yesterday was just reading stuff. I thought I had trouble modding and cobbling together 355 mods for Minecraft back in 2016, but this takes the cake.
Judge me harshly or whatever, unperson or cancel me for having an unpopular opinion - but I know I’m not the only one. If you just read over the comments and replies on this forum let alone some of the posts over on Nexus, you can see whats going on. And whats going on is the only people who can properly mod this game are the ones who were born with an MIT degree shoved up their asses. Simply because of the fact of over-complicating this process for the sake of complication. I jest and am being sarcastic here but this should be an obvious sign of my (overly frustrated and maybe even passive-aggressive) approach to this post, and I apologize for that.
However - you can tell my allegations are true and factual by the sheer fact how long this game has been moddable and how many mods are out on nexus and this site. About 90% of the people on nexus are asking the modders “if they can make such and such”, instead of just doing it themselves. Look at Valheim, it has over 700 mods since its been out. Minecraft, way way more but has been out arguably a lot longer.
Crate… I appreciate you making this game moddable, and I think its great that you did that. But I certainly would have went another route and still scratching my head why you made it so difficult to do so. As for the people who have went out of their way to make how-to’s and dummy’s guides, I appreciate you. I really do. None of you had to take the time out to write those guides, but you did any way, and I personally thank you for that.
But as someone else stated sometimes those guides are hard to follow. I know that for some of you, your native language isn’t English - it’s just that sometimes when you write a guide and your grammar is off - its very hard to understand what you are saying and meaning. But all the same, I - WE appreciate you. If this game wasn’t so difficult to mod, you wouldn’t need to make those guides. This is on Crate, not you.
Again, I apologize in advance for anyone I triggered, but I needed to vent and say some things I feel like are on some peoples’ minds about modding this game. It needs to be put out there. I made this account to make this post. I wont be checking back, because why bother at this point? I know what will happen - either the prominent modders (those maybe around still?) will tell me to just STFU and deal with it and play the game if i cant figure out how to mod, or a couple people might chime in and agree with me. I wrote this because I want Crate to know how other modders probably feel about this game as well. I wrote this, because I think Crate needs, as well as deserves to know - how some “would-be” modders feel about modding (this particular game).
Lock this thread or whatever, I wont be back to check replies.
Good day.
Regards,
A very frustrated modder.
