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A Necromancer’s Crusade – A Divinity: Original Sin Adventure Mod

Downloads:
Nexus: http://www.nexusmods.com/divinityoriginalsin/mods/91
Steam Workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=727266488

Summary:
Set before the events of Original Sin, two pilgrims are traveling to Rhalic’s Abbey, a holy site dedicated to worship of the Patron God of Humans. At the Abbey, hundreds of years earlier, it is said the Rhalic banished a horde of evil creatures that had pillaged the area.
No one knows why the undead came in droves, only that Rhalic banished them away. The survivors rebuilt and dedicated their entire existence to praising Rhalic.

However, another catastrophe will unfold sending the two pilgrims into the depths of the chambers beneath the abbey. Long buried secrets will be surfaced, lost history rediscovered, and a collision course with the Chosen Necromancer himself is ordained.

Screenshots:

More screenshots here

Features:
1 or 2 player campaign beginning at level 3
10+ hours of playtime
30 custom designed combat encounters
The First D:OS mod with dual dialog support
4 maps to explore
25 hand-placed, custom made unique items
Tactician mode support for increased challenge

Trailer:


Known Issues:


Tips & Information
1. The mod hasn’t been heavily play-tested, there are probably bugs and if you run into an issue please post the problem. I have some debug options built in that might be able to fix things.

2. Combat balance skews hard and on Tactician mode it requires much more use of crowd control, status effects, and consumables than the base game.

3. Enemies will have abilities you don’t necessarily expect.

Credits:
Baardvark - Map work on the caves area and initial combat layouts, designed the unique items, and wrote several NPCs.

Thanks:
Cadmus and Jean-Francois Gagne from Larian for answering questions.
mbpopolano24 and Abraxas* for playtesting ANC.
Roguelike for his D:OS EE utilities.

Coolio. You sure got this going fast while making a 4 player mod at the same time.

IMO the town would look a lot better if you'd rotate the buildings a little bit so it's not so uniform, though I can't remember if you can rotate walls. Probably a little too late for that now. I wouldn't mind adding some items or little stories or something of the sort once the mod is farther along (if you're willing.)

You can rotate walls but one of the problems with doing that (unless you rotate them on a 90 degree angle) is that the floor textures do not rotate. So you'd have crooked floor boards.

It's a bit too uniform though I'd agree, but I do think it looks worse from the above view than in game. It's not too late to monkey around with it though. I have that entire deadzone of space to the left of the town I'm not sure what to do with yet. The main reason I might not improve it is I'm trying to finish fast.

Also the lack of roof options in D:OS is a killer.




Archive of Original First post:
This is the shorter mod I'm working on now called A Necromancer's Crusade.

Story:
The mod is based on Divinity lore and is set between Dragon Commander and Original Sin in what's called "The Lost Centuries". Though it's closer in date to Original Sin.

The players are two pilgrims headed to Rhalic's Abbey; a church surrounded by a small supporting village dedicated to the worship of Rhalic one of the Seven Gods. The stories say that years ago Rhalic banished a horde of undead that descended upon the village and murdered the population.

No one knows why the undead came in droves, only that the patron god of the humans banished them away. Those few remaining in honor of their savior rebuilt the village and dedicated their entire existence to praising Rhalic.

Years later is where the players find themselves as pilgrims paying tribute to and praising this miracle. But soon something will happen leading the two protagonists to discover hidden history that is in the chambers below the church.


The Nuts and bolts of the mod are 3-4 levels, with 2 PCs that go between levels 3 and 8.

The first level is the village,church, and surrounding forest. There are 6 quests right now on this map.

The next few levels are buried beneath the surface and house all the secret history of the area. These levels are mostly combat and puzzle oriented.


Here as some images of the first map, obviously detailing isn't done at all nor have I populated it with random NPCs.

Images:

Heh, you racing against D:OS2 or something? :P Floor tiles are a pain, you're right. There are floor tile objects you can use, but annoying to line up also. Anyway, looking forward to it

Half the tiles don't actually have AI which is shockingly bizarre. I placed a whole bunch of stonefloor tiles only to find out they don't paint even with walk on checked....

Far as speed goes, nah I'm just looking to spit something out for people to play then figure out Dunamis. I already did about half the design the of the mod before the editor came out. I'm also not planning on doing custom stats files and such like I did for Dunamis which will vastly decrease the time it takes.

This is what I worked on tonight, it's a bit spoilerly though:


Certainly needs more detail like everything else, but the framework is there. Also I forgot to include a cast animation on the lightning attack.

Also the screen was supposed to shake when the explosion happened but it isn't for some reason.

I really like making those types of scenes. There are several of them in Dunamis as well.

Your decoration skills has improved since Dunamis man.
Good job.

Lookin' good!

Thanks. Got any Pro Tips for what you guys do with the sort of dead space on the side of terrain that is raised up? They always have that samey generic rock texture.

Looking at Luculla, most of the time it seems Larian places those cliff pieces on the sides.

One thing that is good is using a mix of textures and props. So not only painting texture because it's "impossible" to create real cliff with the terrain tool but also not only putting props to cap every single part because it's not optimal.

Taking Luculla for example. On your left you see that there are a few cliff props, a lot of bushes some birch tree and the rest is textures.


You know, if you look at a completely normal cliff (like this image for example https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Gad_cliff_dorset.jpg) you'll see that it's not 100% rocks. You also have grass and other kind of vegetation.

Obviously, you're not recreating the real world so adding a few trees here and there is also cool.
The goal is to break the texture tiling as much as you can.

So yeah, tl;dr, mix of texture painting and props placement to "hide" the base.^_^

One of the thing's I was looking at on this end was to place trees on the sides of cliffs, that seems to increase the amount of terrain you need by a lot. Seems like at a minimum most trees in D:OS EE take up 4-6 little terrain squares.

Yeah, the "big trees" are really big.
Also like you said, decoration will force you to tweak the terrain and more than less, you'll end up with bigger chunk of terrain.
That's why you always need to think about that when you create your terrain shape. Always keep in mind that the end result will be "smaller" because of decorations.
Trees and rocks take a lot of space.

Nice

Latest WIP:
Detailed and built up the town inn/tavern.

Started work on the next level.


I wanted it to be kind of a visual shock but I think it's a little too white. Maybe I'll change the floor to those mosaic tiles instead.

Hey JFG, if you're still lurking around I have a question.

So I'm trying to make platforms of sorts and the terrain really doesn't cooperate. See the spoilers, thanks.




Also this is my first attempt at a "normal" side:

I had a similar problem when I tried to make a harbor.



In my case I "hide" it under the sea level.


I also tried to give the sloop smooth terrain option a negative strength, which give these very high but sort of vertical sloops.
Maybe you can use the 2 bridges in this picture for platforms, they are called hum_bridge_b and hum_bridge_c

Didn't even know you could use a negative strength, I'll play around with that. Thanks.



Yeah I use a few of those but they are too small for having combats on.

Somewhat burdensome trick (depending on how many platforms you have):
1) raise the terrain as you did
2) generate the Ai grid
3) before releasing, flatten the terrain again but don't regenerate the Ai grid
4) profit!

It's probably best to keep a copy of the level with the raised terrain before releasing so you don't have to reraise it again afterwards.

Another idea might be to 'SetMaterial' (via Item Script) for a floor tile with AI (or any available flat item), choose the texture/material you want and fill the empty space of your floor with these objects. Might be a bit difficult to achieve that the texture does not look strange on the item. But it works.

I've done a trick similar to that before but the problem is if I flatten the terrain to a level where they don't stick through the side of the wall, there are good sized gaps on top.

My strategy lately has been to straight up cheat and just angle the walls a bit.

Hmm, apparently Photobucket has had a conniption and all my pictures aren't working

EDIT: Ah good, they're back.