Dade’s Blog

Apparently there was some mixed up information so my section on how to assign Module and Module Owner is a little wrong. For this tutorial, they should both be the module name (ie. tutorial). Sorry for the mix-up. I will re-write this article when I have some more time to cut down on the wall of text into a more concise explanation.

dade-

Welcome to the first instalment of my Dragon Age tutorials. I will assume that you’ve looked at the toolset already and have a basic understanding of how the viewports work and how to navigate (mainly for this mod) the terrain window; such as camera panning, rotation, and so on. If not, I suggest you have a play around, though be careful not to create/save anything into the Single Player campaign as problems can occur this way.

Firstly, you want to create a tutorial module. To do this, go to File > Manage Modules. This will bring up a window much like the image below.

As you can see, this lists all the modules that are stored on the local machine, from the default to the custom created. Core, Demo, and Single Player are all default with the game. These you should leave well alone, and instead you want to create a new module.

When you create a new module, you’ll be greeted with the following window:

The fields you need to focus on for the purposes of this tutorial are Name and UID. Name is, obviously, the name of your module. This can be anything you like, and can contain spaces. UID is the module’s Unique Identifier. I’ve yet to find where this is referenced, but for the sake of module “best practices” I would give this a unique and descriptive name. For this tutorial, you can simply put tutorial into both fields.

OK that and then highlight and Open your newly created module. The first time the module is loaded after creation you may find that it takes a little time to respond. Be patient, and when it’s fully loaded you will have a completely blank module to play with. Go ahead and create a new Area. Do this by going to File > New > Area. This will open up a window like so…

Resource Name should be the name of your area. It is a good idea that for each module you create, you specify and stick to a naming convention for assets that you create, such as Areas, Monsters and so on. For this I will say use “tut_” as a prefix. Go ahead and call your map tut_flemhut_ext.

Folder is the location your area will be saved once created. If you look on the Palette Window on the right of the screen (enabled by default) you will see a folder tree view. Leaving Folder as / will create your area in the root of the Area tab. I’d suggest not putting your custom content in the root as this can get extremely confusing for larger mods later on. Go ahead and put /Tutorials in there.

Module is the module that you are creating the asset for. In this case, you should leave it as tutorial, or whatever you’ve called the module for this tutorial.

Owner Module confused me at first, but upon further reading I’ve discovered that this is specifying which module should be able to access the asset. I’ve set this to Core Game Resources. Anything that we set to be owned by “CGR” can be accessed by any other module. Obviously if you only want the asset accessible in a specific module, you will want to set this option accordingly.

Leave State as NONE and leave the tickbox as it is. This option literally acts like when you finish installing a program and tell the installer to “Run program when installer exits”. A quick explanation about checking in and out resources. When working on a mod with several people who are scooting about left and right modifying different files here and there, you will get to a point where your modifications to one object conflicts with another developer in your team. To counter this problem, the toolset has a Check In and Check Out feature. When a file is checked it creates a local copy of the file for that developer to chop and change and do what is needed on their part; for instance a programmer adds his/her script to a monster while another developer adds some armour and changes the appearance of that monster. When these two finish with their task, they Check In which merges their changes with the master copy saved on the module. Both of the changes are seen, and the monster now has scripts and some items and a new look with the least bit of hassle for either developer. :)

If you have multiple developers working on a single module, you can view the history of check ins/outs by going to View > Resource History. Notes are recommended when checking in resources so that others can see what it was you changed. Not essential, but it’s good to get into the habit of it.

NOTE: If you are familiar with using Git and/or GitHub you may be familiar with the way this kind of collaborative development works. It is essentially the same.

So now you have a blank area… what to do with it!? Well, you want to make sure the area is open so that you can see some of its meta data in the Object Inspector (enabled by default) in the bottom right of the window. You will see a whole list of variables and (possibly) confusing settings…

Area Layout lets you load a pre-made Level. Click in the input box on yours and then the “Triple Dot” button that appears. This will open up a list of the game’s areas that you have been walking around in the single player campaign. Load up ost101d which is Flemeth’s Hut Exterior.

Name can be anything you wish, though something relevant would be ideal.

The last important thing we need on this is Resource Name. You will notice in the above picture it is called dbare_flemhut_ext. Swap the dbare_ with tut_.

You will notice whilst editing that Object Inspector that a map has loaded. As a default the camera will be faced down at the exact centre of the area. Navigate North a little and rotate the camera so that you can see Flemeth’s hut front. Right click the ground and place a waypoint, then another. These will be our spawn locations, but before we start editing the finer points of transitions we’ll create/place everything that’s needed.

You will see on the front of Flemeth’s hut that there’s a little niche where a door should be. Now here comes the magic from BioWare, and one of the hundreds of reasons why I love this engine. Open up Placeables (Palette Window, Table icon) and select the Area Transitions > genip_at_normal and place it just in front of Flemeth’s hut. You will notice that there is a blue ball on the side of the door, which is the reference point for doorways. It’s magic, I tells ya!! Drag the ball on the door to near the one on the door frame and let go.

BOOM! No need to faff about aligning and re-aligning. The engine knows which way the door should sit, and whether or not it’s rotated the right way. Anyway, now that the excitement’s over and we have our first area kitted out with waypoints and a door, we want to create another area. Follow the steps as before, but call it “_int” for interior, and load the Area Layout called ost102d. This is Flemeth’s hut interior, as seen in the campaign.

Go ahead and add a door to the interior, and place a single waypoint here. Rotate and move your waypoints so that you have something along the lines of…

And the interior should look like…

Select the left-hand waypoint in our exterior and go to its Object Inspector. The waypoint’s inspector looks like this:

As the caption says, Tag is the important field here. This one we will call mod_start. This will be the point where we initially spawn upon loading our mod. You may specify a name if you wish. I would personally advise you do so, even if to fully explain the tag; for instance with our mod_start waypoint we could give the name a value of Module Starting Location or something similar.

Our second exterior waypoint will act as our transition anchor. This will become clear soon. This one I named wpt_flemhut_ext. Now open the Object Inspector for our door, which will look like this:

Everything for this door can be left as default, even the Tag of the door; however, for larger scale mods I would advise change these tags too… less confusion when you try to debug and need to find a single door in a city area. ;) For simplicity’s sake, set the tag to atdr_flemhut_ext.

Note: In the next tutorial I will be going over custom area transitions. :)

One last thing with our door transition is to set its variables. In the Object Inspector window, click on the “Open” button (triple dot) to get this:

Sort the Name column so that you have PLC_AT_DEST_AREA_TAG which is the area tag of our destination. Seeing as this is our exterior door, we want to point this to the interior, which should be tut_flemhut_int and set the PLC_AT_DEST_TAG as wpt_flemhut_int.

That should be it for the interior. OK that window and switch to our interior. Again, we want to name our waypoint and set the transition of the door. The interior waypoint has to be the same as the exterior door’s variable PLC_AT_DEST_TAG, which in our case is wpt_flemhut_int. Now change the interior door’s variables to point to the waypoint outside.

PLC_AT_DEST_AREA_TAG = tut_flemhut_ext
PLC_AT_DEST_TAG = wpt_flemhut_ext

I hope that made sense. Basically you need to point the object to its opposite side, which is where naming becomes essential to save time and headaches.

Right! Almost done. The last thing we need to do is save and then “Check In” both the areas we’ve created. The easiest way to do this is to right-click the tab in the main view port and then click Check In. You will see that the resource you’re trying to check in is highlighted, and there is a comment box below. I normally put something like this:

Repeat this with both areas, and once done you want to go to File > Manage Modules again and under Starting Area select our exterior map, then set the Starting Waypoint to our mod_start. OK that, select Open on our Module again, and finally we’re ready for the export and test. :D

Go to Tools > Export > Export with dependent resources. Give this some time, as it can take a moment or two to export all the necessary files. Once done, we want to do two more exports, but this time we want Tools > Export > Export Module XML and Tools > Export > Export Manifest XML.

Once all these steps are done, open up the game and (hopefully) the newly created mod will be filed under Other Campaigns on the main menu. :)

NOTE: If whilst testing you find that you spawn outside the map, or do not spawn at all, check that the transition door are named and pointing to their corresponding waypoints. Also, if you placed a waypoint on uneven ground, you want to lift it just a fraction so that it doesn’t go through the floor. If you are still having problems, leave a comment and I’ll try to answer your queries.

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