Innodil's Pocket Plane - The Origin Story

Well, since I had to have something on here I decided to write a little bit about the what, why and how of the pocket plane mod. I will add some more specific information and tutorials about the mod soon.

Innodil's Pocket Plane is the first and (so far) most complete mod I made for Dragon Age: Origins. The idea came to me after the first playthrough.
Although I very much liked the game, some things annoyed me after playing a while:

• Storage! One lousy chest? And only if you bought Warden's Keep (which I did, and it didn't even work at first) If you like to keep stuff "because you could have use for it later" like I do, one chest isn't going to do it...
• Crafting ingredients. I like crafting, I use it a lot (traps, poisons, etc). If you do too, you know what a pain in the a** it is getting all the necessary ingredients all the time. Why can't at a certain point merchant don't have most ingredients available e.g.? No, 1 has that, another this, which makes  you travel the entire world map for half an hour trying to get a decent stash of ingredients together.
• Why can't I put up a camp while in some dungeon. Do adventurers never "pause"?
• The camp: another pretty useless place. So yes, there's an enchanter and a merchant....marvelous! You can't select party members, so using talents like crafting and trap making from other followers isn't possible.

Well, that's where the Pocket Plane comes in. Instead of whining about the (for me important) missing feature, I decided to create a mod that tries to solve the above issues without being an actual cheat.

My first thoughts were adjusting the actual camp. However, this wasn't easy to do without overwriting the entire area, due to issues and restrictions with the script engine. Secondly, this would render my mod incompatible with other mods and possibly future game updates.

So I decided to create my own custom area, to have all the freedom I wanted. I thought a teleportation device of some kind would be the coolest to get there and back again (instead of the slow world map transitions). This would also make the area accessible from anywhere at any time.

For balancing reasons, teleportation had to be restricted to only work when not in combat though since you could otherwise jump out of an almost wipe out, "restore" your party and jump back into the fray.

The area itself would feature mostly storage. Lots and lots of storage. I added all kinds of containers from weapon racks to armor stands, chests, cabinets and more.

Next to that, it had an NPC The Keeper that managed a little quest and featured a crafting merchant. He would sell all ingredients and some basic plans/reciped at reasonable prices and better yet: unlimited supplies!

This was basically the first version of my mod. After a few months of user feedback and learning a lot more about the toolset and modding for DA:O I decided to greatly extend the plane's functionality, or to at least make it very flexible in setup so less real modding and scripting was needed when I wanted to add something.

Secondly, since stuff is stored in containers in the area. The save game contains references to the area. This resulted in users not being able to update the mod while in a play-through. Updates to the area would only become visible when starting a new game. Ideally, the new mod would circumvent this issue too.

So it created a system completely based on custom 2DA and M2DA files. This allows me to:

• Create a very basic area, only the keeper, some merchant stores and a few other "special" things are preset (mostly because they are really needed or can't be spawned using a script).
• Create a custom 2DA file to define other placeables and NPCs in the area.
• Customize merchants' inventories using custom 2DA files
• Generate random contents for merchants using a configurable item list (preset to use almost every item available in the game by default)
• Easily allow users to completely customize the layout for their area
• Easily allow M2DA files to be plugged in the mod to for example "integrate" another mod into the plane.
• Give the Keeper some dialogue options for users to reload any changes they would make to the M2DA files.

Next to that, I would make much more extensive use of "generic plots" to handle all configuration and reusable actions in the mod. This allows modders wanting to extend the plane to easily create custom placeables or NPCs that can actually USE the mod's functionality.

And that's basically the new 2.0. version that will be released (BETA) very soon. Next to the improvements behind the screens, there is also:

• 3 new merchants NPCs or 3 additional magical chest
• Specify what merchants sell with a 2DA file
• The keeper can supply the merchants with brand new random supplies on demand
• Merchant upscale there items as you level
• An enchanter
• Some new container models
• A tutorial on how to customize the mod.
• Tome of secrets (can be used to unlock specializations, can also be disabled if not wanted)
• By default lots and lots and lots of storage
• Optional other predefined layout for the plane to pick from

Be sure to check back soon for the release announcement of the first 2.0 beta!