Captain's Log: Mod Tool Development Part 1

There's a lot to talk about, so jumping straight to the point, this log is mostly going to be talking about a handful of features that'll be in our expanded modding tools, which we mentioned in our last log.

This is going to be a bit more technical than usual, and we'll be focusing on explaining new functionality that the tools provide over reviewing everything that these new features allow us to fix. In other words, this log is going to be directed towards experienced mod developers as opposed to players.
We also won't be going over everything; there's a bunch of smaller tweaks and fixes that the new modding tools will implement that simply don't warrant being included in this.

Keep in mind that the mod tools are still in active development, so everything we mention here may change down the line.

[h2]Darkest Dungeon 64-bit build[/h2]
As you may have recently seen, Red Hook has recently released a new Darkest Dungeon build for public testing, and several Black Reliquary developers helped out with testing/validating it. This new build fixes a handful of long-standing issues and even upgrades the Windows version of DD to 64-bit! We're really happy to see these improvements after such a long time, and we're grateful to Red Hook for giving us a seat at the table and working with us to ensure that our development plans weren't hindered. Moving forward, we'll be incorporating all major changes made to DD, including all bug fixes, crash fixes, exploit fixes, and of course the 64-bit upgrade.

[h2]Custom Buff Sources[/h2]
Probably the biggest thing we've accomplished with our modding tools is that we can now create new buff sources and manipulate existing buff sources with extremely basic lua. These sources were previously hardcoded and were probably the most obnoxious modding limitation we had to deal with.

We've also added new functionality to buff sources where modders can define new tray icons for specific buff sources. This is a gamechanger for modding, as it gives modders a lot more control over UI for custom/unique mechanics. This change essentially allows basic custom "statuses" using Actor Dots or buff fx to exist in a more proper manner. For BR, this means a lot of previously obscured information is now more visible and/or digestible.

Look at all these lovely new icons! Janissary's gimmick should be even more obvious now

[h2]Improved Logging[/h2]
One of the more useful adjustments we've made is that debug/game logging is now written to .txt files. This allows us to see debug logs without having to rely on Darkest Dungeon's base debug output, and most importantly, it gives us information on crashes where previously we had nothing. While crash logging won't really be readable to most mod developers, it will enable the BR Team to diagnose and fix crashes that weren't feasible to fix before.

Debug info written down for later reference

This crash is related to hero activities

This is pretty similar to the new logging in the most recent DD 64-bit build, but our implementation will differ a little in how certain errors are logged and also (hopefully) provide more information on crashes.

[h2]Improved Tooltips[/h2]
Another improvement that we've made is related to tooltip length. Darkest Dungeon has a lot of character limits that are pretty restrictive. We've used a lot of workarounds to get tooltips looking as nice as they do, but the way we've been forced to handle it is both extremely time-consuming and practically illegible.
Seriously, take a look at the tooltips for Crusader or Veiled in the files and try to tell us what's going on. Zero-width character tooltip manipulation is a scourge upon our world.

Anyways, we've drastically increased the size of a bunch of tooltips. Basically anything related to character skills and buffs got their tooltips anywhere from doubled to quadrupled.

Here's a side-by-side using the same stress test tooltips

Perhaps more importantly, we also included some new mode parameters that can be used to hide or partially hide mode information. This is useful if you want a unit to have multiple modes for mechanical reasons, but those other modes don't have relevant tooltip info.

Here's what Musk's Standard Shot looks like without any tooltip workarounds You can hide the info/effects for all the extraneous modes And here's what Musk's Standard Shot looks like with those changes
These params only affect the character sheet and training hall upgrade tooltips. When in combat, the tooltips will still be shown dynamically based on the hero's current mode.
This noticeably still has quite a few edge-case issues, so we'll be working on addressing those in the near future, but overall this will give modders way more flexibility in designing complex heroes by saving them a ton of time and effort by using zero-width characters.

[h2]More Status Checks[/h2]
The last thing we'll be going over is that there are several new status checks for the "is_actor_status" and "actorStatus" buff rule types.
Mainly, you can check if a hero/target has:

• Horror
  
• Restoration
  
• Aegis
  
• Stumble
  
• A Symptom/Disease (just Disease for vanilla)
  
• Riposte

Despite the implications of this list, we're only planning to apply these to a handful of trinket and quirks at the moment.
Here are some examples of some minor trinket changes that use these new status checks

What's perhaps more exciting is that we're planning to look at expanding the status checks to automatically include all buff sources, meaning you can check to see if a hero/target has a custom buff source applied to them. This could be a big deal for modders, as it'd grant finer control on buff conditions and could even be used to create conditional buffs vs custom "statuses".

[h2]The Future / Transparency[/h2]
You may have noticed that this log is labeled as a "Part 1". That's right, we're planning on doing 2-3 (depending on how fast things move) more Captain's Logs that focus on our modding tools.
This set of changes was mostly focused on fixing a longstanding set of issues, making UI improvements, and making some QoL changes for advanced DD modding. Moving forward, we'll be focusing more on changes that translate to actual content and aim to have the "Part 2" log completed towards the end of March.

For clarity, 1.0 content development has come to a halt while we continue to chip away at completing our modding tools. A lot of what we're planning depends on these tools in one form or another. We're confident that taking this extra time will improve the final product greatly, but working on the mod tools is expensive, tedious, and ever-fluctuating. We're constantly re-evaluating our priorities based on our testing and the research gibbed does into the engine. All this to say, we still can't give a proper timeline/deadline for the 1.0 release/mod tools in good faith.
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Thanks again for your support and patience,
-Team Reliquary