The Witcher 3 Modding

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Dear Witcher 3 fans,

I have been hard at work for the past few months developing a website called thewitcher3mods.com I was inspired to develop a modding website for The Witcher 3 after my first modding website justcause2mods.com reached 276,000 members. This experience has given me a feel for how modding communities should be managed, and with the upcoming release of Just Cause 3 I began work on a better, more powerful website for it.

As a huge fan of open world games like skyrim, i was happy to hear that The witcher 3 was going open world. This led me to create a small network of modding sites. The Witcher 3 is one of the eight games I am currently supporting.

I hope you will allow my site to help you host your mods and provide a good environment for users and modders to get more out of The Witcher 3 and REDkit by helping you find mods more easily. Users will be able to rate and create support tickets for each mod. Uploaders can upload any file up to 20mb or use an external URL. Every mod will have screenshots that will help users find the mods they're looking for more easily. Each user has their own dashboard where they can manage all of their mods quickly.

I am always looking for feedback and suggestions, and therefore the sites are constantly improving. I have a ton of features that I'd like to add in the future that will make the sites far more functional, with more filters for sorting mods to find the perfect mod. I will over time customise the mod database to align with the The Witcher 3 world and its community needs by adding new relevant categories and features. This is only the beginning!

Please visit
thewitcher3mods.com

Thanks for reading,
Zenin

P.S. - A bit of personal background: I am 27 working as a full time front end Web Developer in London, with a specialty in user interface design. As a hobby I enjoy building gaming sites, usually based around modding, and like to play open world RPG's.

The more modding sites the better. I'll be signing up when the game comes out. Are you part of the team that developed MP for Just Cause 2? Because that was an amazing bit of work. Anyhow, nice looking site and good luck.
 
sorry for joining so late into this modding thread and i only read a few pages entirely without these answering my questions, so im just gonna ask:

what modding capabilities can we expect from the modding tools for TW3? is it on skyrim's level of creating practically anything from new meshes, locations, quests, monsters, armors, weapons, scripted mods that alter AIs, combat systems, new tools etc etc or is it on a more modest scale?
because mods i am looking forward to are mods that change how enemies spawn, how hard or easy or deep the combat is, maybe different weapons and armor, but mostly gameplay mechanics mods and more content and things to do. not as much as cosmetic stuff.
and i dont know what to expect.... =P
 
Could any volunteer make a mod with low heels boots for female characters? As soon as possible when the Redkit2 will come out? I think is the only I'd use

a friend and i are contemplating creating a mod in which all male characters (particularly witchers) wear high heels and the sorceresses wear thongs (flip flops) because that's a pun and puns are funny. but i guess your request makes a whole lot more sense!

(also i'm under the impression one of the DLC packs will include an alternative outfit for Ciri and it may or may not include reasonable boots.)

what modding capabilities can we expect from the modding tools for TW3?

if you look at the features of the redkit for tw2, you'll probably find more of an answer. a dude managed to completely revamp tw2's combat and the distribution of loot, as well as a bunch of other minor features. I suspect it will be the same for tw3's kit, perhaps even more accessible.
check it http://redkit.cdprojektred.com/
 
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Could any volunteer make a mod with low heels boots for female characters? As soon as possible when the Redkit2 will come out? I think is the only I'd use

Removing the heels is easy, and won't even need REDKit. But if you see her feet, she'll be on tiptoe. If the animations are based on wearing heels, her feet would be at the wrong angle. Fixing THAT would require REDKit and is a fairly big change (assuming it's possible at all)
 
Removing the heels is easy, and won't even need REDKit. But if you see her feet, she'll be on tiptoe. If the animations are based on wearing heels, her feet would be at the wrong angle. Fixing THAT would require REDKit and is a fairly big change (assuming it's possible at all)

And if they fix her standing on tiptoe wouldn't the different high be a problem in cutscenes? Let's asume Ciri hugs somebody.She would be a few centimeter shorter which could mess up the animation
 
Yes, if boots are linked to the feet bones it won't be esaey. Adding cutscenes...

It's like all these female agents in TV movie, with high heels, the WHOLE day, more than 24 hours of working, running, driving... so unreal eyecandy!
 
And if they fix her standing on tiptoe wouldn't the different high be a problem in cutscenes? Let's asume Ciri hugs somebody.She would be a few centimeter shorter which could mess up the animation

Disclaimer: I've never done this type of variation for video games, only video animations, so I'm not an expert.
We're only talking of a few centimetres here, as the shoes don't have to be absolutely flat to be realistic. If I were doing this, I'd extend her legs so that she was still the same height, and everything above the waist was still at the same height, so hugging, fighting, wouldn't be affected. There's enough flexibility in mocap data to allow for that much variation without it looking wrong, and unless her legs are already unnaturally long, it would take it without messing up her proportions.

The problem is how accurate you want it to be. At modding level, you'd probably be satisfied just moving the foot (two joints typically, the ankle and a single joint for the toes). At professional level, if CDPR did it, there's the issue that women just don't move the same with heels, other joints, in particular the hips, are also different.

Oh, and I'm just talking technicalities here. There's no way I would actually MAKE a mod like this. So you'll need to find another volunteer, wichat. :)
 
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As long as the mods in Witcher 3 is more compatible with eachother, then i'm looking forward to see what people can come up with. I noticed with Witcher 2 that mods more often than not excluded another.
 
Removing the heels is easy, and won't even need REDKit. But if you see her feet, she'll be on tiptoe. If the animations are based on wearing heels, her feet would be at the wrong angle. Fixing THAT would require REDKit and is a fairly big change (assuming it's possible at all)

The animations are based on the skeleton, not the mesh. The mesh is rigged to the skeleton's bones. Any change to the mesh would not be possible to do with REDkit. You'd need a 3D rendering application to do that. There really are no feet inside the boots/shoes. As far as the skeleton is concerned, the boot/shoes are the feet.

If the same skeleton is used for both male and female (usually is), one way to relatively easily accomplish the removal of heels from female shoes, is to find similar shoes from male models and copy and paste them over the female model. If the heels are low enough, it'd probably be easier to just delete the heel mesh and reshape the heal.

Of course, that doesn't take into account unpacking/repacking the files, or whether CRPR is using some proprietary filter for their 3d app.

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As long as the mods in Witcher 3 is more compatible with eachother, then i'm looking forward to see what people can come up with. I noticed with Witcher 2 that mods more often than not excluded another.

The issue there, a lot of the W2 mods were just edits of default game files, and not additions to the game, which should be possible with REDkit. So if, for example, your mod gave stats to a silver sword, say Moonblade, you'd edit def_stats_item_swordsilver.xml. If someone made another mod that gave stats to say Aerondight, he/she would need to edit def_stats_item_swordsilver.xml as well, so when you install the second mod, the first one would obviously get overwritten, asn the xml file is just a text file.
 
The issue there, a lot of the W2 mods were just edits of default game files, and not additions to the game, which should be possible with REDkit. So if, for example, your mod gave stats to a silver sword, say Moonblade, you'd edit def_stats_item_swordsilver.xml. If someone made another mod that gave stats to say Aerondight, he/she would need to edit def_stats_item_swordsilver.xml as well, so when you install the second mod, the first one would obviously get overwritten, asn the xml file is just a text file.

For Dragon Age Origins there was a xml merge application, which you could merge two different xml files. Sadly I dindn't find anything of this kind for TW2.
 
The animations are based on the skeleton, not the mesh. The mesh is rigged to the skeleton's bones. Any change to the mesh would not be possible to do with REDkit. You'd need a 3D rendering application to do that. There really are no feet inside the boots/shoes. As far as the skeleton is concerned, the boot/shoes are the feet.

The expert arrives :)
OK, so what I was thinking... Simplest version: You can remove the heels as a simple texture mod. There'd be a problem with the underside of the flat heel, but it's probably not seen very often.
Better version:
1. Use tools to morph the model (push up the heels, stretch the legs so that any adjustment you make to the foot don't change her upper-body position). I'm assuming here that stretching the legs would automatically stretch the rigging accordingly. I'm also assuming you'd definitely need 3rd party tools to make these changes, but it may need REDkit to handled exporting and importing the model after the change.
2. Fix the animations so that her feet are at the correct angle relative to the ground and her legs. This is where I don't know how it works in this environment. From what I've read, they mocapped the women separately, presumably wearing high heels, so you would just be able to swap it for the male animation? Otherwise, how would it work? Layering a foot animation on top to get the correct angles? This is still just an academic exercise for me, but I'd be interested to know how you'd do it.

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For Dragon Age Origins there was a xml merge application, which you could merge two different xml files. Sadly I dindn't find anything of this kind for TW2.

That's because REDKit was (and still is) in beta mode. It's still basically a version of the tools that the developers themselves use, and hasn't been productized. The developers wouldn't have needed a function like that, as the main game is tightly version-controlled, and you shouldn't have two people editing the same xml file.

I would very much hope that when the non-beta version of REDKit is released, it would handle things like this, but don't underestimate the effort needed to productize internally-developed software.
 
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