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Modding The Witcher 3 : a collection of tools you need

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Nolenthar

Rookie
#1
Modding The Witcher 3 : a collection of tools you need

I often found myself in a position where I was in difficulty to find which tool I need to do something. To find the link or whatever. So, I thought this morning, why not make a thread ?

This list aims to be exhaustive, but surely won't be right away. By all means, please, help me make that list as exhaustive as possible. I expect the textures & meshes genius have tools they use.

- Official Mod Kit : irrelevant of how much more we would like the official mod tools to be, the mod Kit is a must when it comes to mod The Witcher 3.
- Mod Kitchen : an useful GUI to use the Mod Kit above.
- W3 Edit by Sarcen : An advanced decoder capable of altering some files otherwise not accessible. I'm not an expert, but I use this one to edit .env files, and I'm sure a lot more can be done with this.
- Quick BMS : Once the unofficial way to extract .bundle and alter their contents, Quick BMS is still useful nowadays, as explained in this thread
- W3 Strings Encoder by rmemr. This tool deprecated a similar tool by Sarcen. This opened the door to localized string content, and nowadays, no one should really nuke the localization files anymore thanks to that.
- A Gui Tool by PMark, to use rmemr tool This is a very new thing, but I'm sure it will be improved and become a must.
- Gimp Well known free & Professionnal Image Manipulation Tool.
- Blender I'm really not an expert at meshes, but I heard this free professional tool can help you with TW3 meshes. @marvelmaster or @HalkHoganPL : if you guys could confirm, that would be sweet.
- Witcher 3D Models Converter
- W3 utils Tool, a complete set of Tools that may make your life modding easier
- Skacik Quick String Encoding Script - Requires W3 string encoder
- Power Shell Script to decode all game strings

About the W3 Strings Encoder : This tool uses an unique mod ID to avoid mod-defined strings to overwrite each other. This however requires the community to keep track of each other's mod id. When the mod is on the Nexus, it's generally easy enough (as this would be the nexus mod id), but for the others ....

So please, check this page before assigning a mod ID. PM me to add your mod id to this spreadsheet.

More details & tutorial can also be found here

How to Make a DLC, just like this thanks @KNGRSM

Support

If you're after modding support, veterans modder are happy to help on this discord server. Just pop in, have a coffee, and see how they can help.

All the tools will always be available here would they disappear one day from the web.

Feel free to answer this post to add more tools and bring your expertise to the table.
 
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web-head91

Senior user
#3
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KNGRSM

Rookie
#5
Also, @Nolenthar

we already discussed this in our discord group that when using the W3 String encoder, we should make our id-space used in our mods public, so it will not conflict with other mods that start using custom .w3strings files.

So far we have used:

KNG Depth of Field Mod: id-space 2003
Random Encounters Mod: id-space 1994
@thibaudv is currently using: id-space 9998 and id-space 7100

Maybe you want to add that to your list, since this thread was stickied. Thanks.

More will follow.

also the list is missing this awesome tool:

http://jlouisb.users.sourceforge.net/

I use it all the time to look at meshes and stuff to "identify" the entity i want to work with, the names aren't always that clear to identfy what you work with.
 
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sv3672

Forum veteran
#6
Nolenthar said:
- Quick BMS : Once the unofficial way to extract .bundle and alter their contents, Quick BMS is still useful nowadays, as explained in this thread
Click to expand...

Not sure if it is worth mentioning here, since it only reads W3 files and does not create or modify them, but I posted a related utility in another thread. It can do the following:
- extract anything from .bundle and .dzip files, regardless of the file type or compression method
- extract from sounds.cache and w3speech files
- convert .w3strings files to text format (same as the output of inspect_w3strings.lua, but UTF-8 instead of UTF-16)
- convert data from CR2W files to a Lua script containing an array of the elements (same format as inspect_cr2w.lua, but this is only partly implemented)
- extract dialogue trees from scenes in (localized) text format
- supports both TW2 and TW3 format files, and most languages
- can run recursively on directory trees, or entire game installations, processing all .bundle, .dzip, .w2strings, and .w3strings files it finds (the order of precedence is currently alphabetical - when there are duplicates, the last file in the last bundle wins)
- for packed files in bundles/DZIPs, the user can specify a path name filter (any number of sub-strings and suffixes to include or exclude)
- for those using non-Windows operating systems, the source code is included - it is a single file in C++ that can easily be compiled, and does not have any dependencies (tested on x64 Linux)

Update: the old download link no longer works, the current version is here.
 
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Nolenthar

Rookie
#8
sv3672 said:
Not sure if it is worth mentioning here, since it only reads W3 files and does not create or modify them, but I posted a related utility in another thread. It can do the following:
- extract anything from .bundle and .dzip files, regardless of the file type or compression method
- convert .w3strings files to text format (same as the output of inspect_w3strings.lua, but UTF-8 instead of UTF-16)
- convert data from CR2W files to a Lua script containing an array of the elements (same format as inspect_cr2w.lua, but this is only partly implemented)
- extract dialogue trees from scenes in (localized) text format
- supports both TW2 and TW3 format files, and most languages
- can run recursively on directory trees, or entire game installations, processing all .bundle, .dzip, .w2strings, and .w3strings files it finds (the order of precedence is currently alphabetical - when there are duplicates, the last file in the last bundle wins)
- for packed files in bundles/DZIPs, the user can specify a path name filter (any number of sub-strings and suffixes to include or exclude)
- for those using non-Windows operating systems, the source code is included - it is a single file in C++ that can easily be compiled, and does not have any dependencies (tested on x64 Linux)
Click to expand...

In my book, any tool that can help modding shall be listed here. Irrelevant of whether it can create or just help creating. I added this to the list above.

KNGRSM said:
So far we have used:

KNG Depth of Field Mod: id-space 2003
Random Encounters Mod: id-space 1994
@thibaudv is currently using: id-space 9998 and id-space 7100
Click to expand...

Thanks @KNGRSM. I added a google spreadsheet list to the post above. I'll keep it up to date and can also give rw access to some serious people.
 
M

MrBroche

Rookie
#10
Just curious, is there any way to craft new missions with these tools? Or is that only possible with the REDKit?
 
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Nolenthar

Rookie
#11
MrBroche said:
Just curious, is there any way to craft new missions with these tools? Or is that only possible with the REDKit?
Click to expand...

Well, it's /possible/ apparently, as Thibaudv is doing one. Is that accessible to all mere mortals ? I don't think so. You have a few Modding genius, which you will probably find all on the discord server mentionned above, who can do things that would normally be tagged as impossible. @erxv flying horse is an example of what is possible, yet very hard.

The Witcher 3 has a very complex scripting engine, which, technically, can achieve wonders, but you need to know it very well to achieve what you want.
 
M

Martindnewton

Rookie
#15
Looking at the tools posted on the front page. In the most laymen terms possible, what would the difference be today that can be done with them tools, and redkit3? It looks like modders aren't limited that much anymore. Or is it the difficulty of actually doing it?
 

Guest 2364765

Guest
#16
Martindnewton said:
Looking at the tools posted on the front page. In the most laymen terms possible, what would the difference be today that can be done with them tools, and redkit3? It looks like modders aren't limited that much anymore. Or is it the difficulty of actually doing it?
Click to expand...
Point A is that we still are fairly limited.
Point B is that yes, our hacky tools allow us to do quite a lot, well, most certainly more than CDPR ever allowed us to do by themselves.
Point C is that every single step along the road of modding this game is bothersome, lacks documentation and is based on literally hacking the game and a lot of guessing.
 

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