Dragon Age: Origins Toolset Editorial

Ten Ton Hammer has published a three-page editorial designed to walk us through the creation of a simple area in the Dragon Age: Origins toolset. Experienced modders need not apply, but if you’ve never tinkered with similar toolsets in the past, then this might be worth your time:

Once you’ve placed your waypoint, you’ve got to give it tag. Or our module, we’re going to give it a tag of mod_start_area. Get used to doing this with almost everything in the toolset. There are times when the toolset will ask you to name something, and then just make that a tag. This is why I mentioned earlier that it’s always a good idea to get used to using an underscore every time you need a space. The only time you don’t need to is when you’re filling in the Name field in the Object Inspector.

Adding a waypoint so our character has a place to start is a great first step, but how does the game know that’s the waypoint we want to start at? I’m glad you asked. When the game starts up a module, it also loads a starting script. Go to File > Manage Modules, select Ten_Ton_Hammer and click on Properties. Here, we’re going to change the Starting Area to peaceful_home and enter the Starting Waypoint of mod_start_area. This tells the game that when we load this module, we’re going to start in our little home, standing by the bed, and facing whatever direction we previously rotated our waypoint flag to.

You’ve now created a nice little place to call home. That’s great and all, but personally, I didn’t go through the work of learning how to create a module to just sit at home. Since I don’t want anyone (or anything) busting up the joint, let’s create another area to do some fighting in.

We’re going to take the same steps we did before, so I’m going to give the quick version here. If you get confused, just scroll to the beginning of the article and go through the same steps, just replacing the names and area with the ones listed here. So in a nutshell, go File > New > Area. Give it a resource name of ready_to_rumble and hit ok.