your top 3 mods to learn from

[Awachi]

I learn best by mimicking, so I'm looking for mods to dissect and study.  Preferably none too comprehensive in scope, but all three should cover 90% of modding scenarios (AI, item/spell adjustment, NPC/dialog, quest/map, etc).  Of course, verbose commenting is preferred.  TYIA

[Jarno Mikkola]

An NPC mod, the Tweakpack, and SCS. Easy piecy... but you know, 5% would be far faster to start from. It's not like you can make you own codebase to process other code to print out .baf files that will then be compiled into .bcs file. Yes, that's from SCS ... rather; start from the ground, make a stupid item file with Near Infinity and take it from there, make a weidu mod to install the said item to the game and place it in the games map, see that it works.  Example, here's one.

Learn to use the tools you are given, Near Infinity, IESDP, weidu, it's readme , and Notepad.

Ouh, and last and not least. EET. Go ahead, figure that out.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Jarno Mikkola

[jmerry]

For my work (a tweak mod), I went with Tweaks Anthology for at least 90% of what I was doing. Not much on the new content front, but that's not what I needed. SCS is far harder to copy from, as so much of what it does utilizes its own libraries that you'd have to include as well. I also had the WeiDU readme (a local copy) permanently open for reference purposes.

Any plain text editor works for building the files you need, but I strongly recommend one that includes line numbering. When you put the pieces together for the first time and get a syntax error at line 899 ... you don't want that pain. I speak from experience here.

[CamDawg]

SCS uses its own language--it's not something I like to wade through, and I can only imagine what someone who's new to modding would make of it. It's not something I'd recommend until you know your way around WeiDU better.

Tweaks used to be the example of How To Do Stuff, and I wrote the code with that in mind: lots of comments, long-form coding, descriptive variable names, etc. While it's no longer bleeding edge code (and probably not even cutting edge) I still heavily comment and would be happy to explain how and why it does x, y, and z. Tweaks is suboptimal in some ways because it's a maximally crossplatform mod, so code can be over-complicated because it's written for everything from oIWD to BG2EE.

The Branwen NPC Mod is a good one. It's written by Kulyok to not only be a functional NPC mod, but also a tutorial for creating an NPC mod.

And while it's a bit more of an edge case, BG2 Fixpack (and IWD Fixpack to a lesser degree) have all sorts of examples of dialogue and script patching using some WeiDU functions you probably won't see anywhere else.

[Awachi]

Thanks. Fortunately it's looking like what I want to do is pretty basic in execution.

[Jarno Mikkola]

3 minutes ago, Awachi said:

Thanks. Fortunately it's looking like what I want to do is pretty basic in execution.

Which is ? You get far more with questions than with cyptic silence.

[Awachi]

Currently just trying to add a new item to a container.  Succeeded, but need to find a club animation.

 

edit:  I must have hallucinated.  I would have sworn I remembered someone adding in a club animation.

 

Edited January 30, 2022 by Awachi