Editors and Mods

[Korica]

GUTS was finally released a few days ago. If you are not familiar, GUTS is the editor for Torchlight II. I was very excited to fire it up and start dinking around. And yet here I stand, hours later, and I still cannot even figure out how to put down terrain.

I definitely have noticed a trend in the fact that, outside of the World Editor for WarCraft III, it seems most modding and editing programs are really not designed with the everyman in mind. The best explanation I have heard for this is that if you want a program to be powerful enough to let people create truly awesome mods, it has to be complex.

StarCraft II was a particular disappointment, because where it should have taken the World Editor's strengths and improved on them, it got way too complex in the process. Something as simple as creating a custom unit takes infinitely more time. The very first tutorial I did for the SC2 Galaxy Editor was "How to make a custom unit", and it was ridiculous how much effort was required when you compare it to the old World Editor of WC3.

As a very average person who used to love making maps in WarCraft III, this saddens me.

Anybody else in the same boat?

 

[DoPo]

I still cannot even figure out how to put down terrain.

Didn't Runic release tutorials and manuals for how to use it? I remember they had finished the video tutorials several months ago.

 

[The Madman]

Not really. Most editors tend to be tricky, especially if it's an altered version of the original dev tools. Just read a tutorial or two and you'll be fine.

 

[Tom_green_day]

I found that years and years and years ago with the mod creator for Battle for Middle Earth and gave up after that.
Apparently the Geck and TES equivalent are easier. Haven't tried either, myself.

 

[Korica]

I still cannot even figure out how to put down terrain.

Didn't Runic release tutorials and manuals for how to use it? I remember they had finished the video tutorials several months ago.

No video tutorials for now. There are lots of old videos for the Torchlight I Editor, but the programs are not identical so many things do not transfer over.

There are some tutorials on the Wiki, and surely more will be added, but they seem to gloss over simple things like "This is how you build a room from scratch" They all seem to involve copying or editing existing content, or in some cases downloading pre-created examples and then doing something like "Add a few rocks"

Judging by what I've seen from the posts by Runic employees on their site, this is literally THE program they use to make the game and is not really meant to be user friendly.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Mod tools are usually devs own tools or a close approximation so yes things were not built for your understanding they were made for their specific use.
And it will be a steep learning curve for you as it was for them, but the upside is you will have a much greater scope of things to make.

Has to be said however that tool makers could take a few courses on user interfaces because most just build shit in their own quirky way and fuck whoever ends up deciphering it later on.

 

[Rob Robson]

Hmm. I loved the Morrowind construction set. Oblivion then introduced voiced dialogue, which prompted the need to create silent .mp3 files for every line of dialogue in a mod, if you didn't want every line to zip by in a fraction of a second making it impossible to read. Then Skyrim's CS just made a whole bunch of things worse. And they STILL don't have a functioning heightmap editor that doesn't crash. And for no apparent reason, they changed their scripting language in Skyrim, one that is a million times less intuitive and less powerful to boot.

So yeah, when The Elder Scrolls aren't even trying anymore...

 

[josemlopes]

The more control you want over an editor (game, music, video, image, etc) the more complex it gets because the editor will have all the functions to do things that you dont need right now (but may want to later).