New to Grimrock modding

[furiousuk]

Hey,

I'm new to Grimrock modding, I've only played Grimrock 1 and a few mods for it, I'm mainly interested in creating old school style crawlers and I'd like to get into modding, where should I start?

I'm keen to get Grimrock 2 but which game should I start modding? 1 or 2?

Seems like maybe 1 would be enough for what I want and there are lots of mods to follow and much help, but, are the modding tools in 2 much superior?

I'd like to, eventually, get into doing some really interesting things with modding but info seems to be spread all over the place so I'm asking for some advice

Cheers

[minmay]

Modding Grimrock 2 is a lot easier and more flexible. There is so, so much more that you can do, and even if you aren't going to use any of the new Grimrock 2 features, there are fewer bugs and tons of new convenience functions like getDirection, toLocal, delayedCall, GameMode.showImage(), GameObject:destroyDelayed(), GameObject:getFullId(), Time.deltaTime(), and pretty much every Map method.
Plus, you can open Isle of Nex in the dungeon editor and see how everything in the main game was done (except for one of the bosses which is hardcoded). You can't do that in Grimrock 1.

Some examples:
- if you are making a Grimrock 1 mod at all, you have to write new versions of the allEntities() and entitiesAt() functions because of a bug (encountering a map note causes the iterator to return nil). In Grimrock 2, they work out of the box.
- if you want to move a lever slightly to the left in Grimrock 1, you have to make a new model. In Grimrock 2, you can just offset the ModelComponent and ClickableComponent by changing 2 lines in the object definition, or you can use GameObject:setWorldPosition() to move the entire object without defining a new one.
- if you want to change the material of a model in Grimrock 1, you have to make a new model. In Grimrock 2, you can just use the material and materialOverrides fields of ModelComponent.
- the only way to seamlessly play a looping animation in Grimrock 1 is to put it on a monster. Seamlessly playing a looping animation in Grimrock 2 is as easy as adding an AnimationComponent with loop = true.
- occlusion in Grimrock 1 is based on the wall/floor layout of the map and you have no control over it, which makes it extremely hard to make e.g. outdoor scenes that have acceptable performance. In Grimrock 2 you can use OccluderComponents to get exactly the occlusion geometry that you want.

Here is a good reference for the scripting interface: https://github.com/JKos/log2doc/wiki
And here is a dungeon editor file that will load Isle of Nex: http://cowmuffins.net/priv/grimrock2.zip

[furiousuk]

Hi minmay,

Thanks, a perfect response for me!

Decision made

Thanks again