Dragon Age: Origins Toolset Released

After a short delay, BioWare has given us the Dragon Age: Origins toolset. Here’s the description that goes with the 472MB executable, just in case you’re unfamiliar with it:

The Dragon Age Toolset is everything you might need to create your own adventures in the Dragon Age game. It contains the same utilities that were used by BioWare to create all of the official game content, including the main campaign, and includes several enhancements specifically for the benefit of end users.

The level editor supports both indoor and outdoor terrain, with complete control over the placement of structures and props. You can create a dungeon by piecing together large prefabricated tunnel pieces, or stack wooden mugs one by one on a tavern counter. Visual effects and lighting conditions can be combined to produce any mood.

Conversations, plots and scripting are tightly integrated; you can use simple plots and pre-defined triggers to handle most common aspects of adventuring or delve deeply into the game’s inner workings to produce more specialized effects. Much of the functionality that in previous games would be hard-coded into the engine is instead handled by scripts that an experienced modder can easily override.

Also included is a dedicated cutscene editor with a wide variety of powerful cinematic capabilities. The cutscene editor is a movie-making toolset in its own right; it is quite capable of producing stand-alone works of machinima if one so desired. All of the in-game footage in Dragon Age was produced using it. Lip-syncing and facial animation is fully automated, making lifelike performances easy to accomplish.Let us know what you think when you give this a whirl.