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​‘Dark Souls’ Modders Have Worked Out How To Add Custom Maps

Julian Benson

Published 
| Last updated 

​‘Dark Souls’ Modders Have Worked Out How To Add Custom Maps

Featured Image Credit: Bandai Namco

While modders have been altering and polishing Dark Souls for years, one challenge has always been too much: adding custom maps. Until now, the way in which FromSoftware made the game was impossible to decipher completely. However, with much work and a little luck, modders have now been able to add in completely news maps for players to explore.

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Take down giant monsters in Dark Souls
Take down giant monsters in Dark Souls

The problem was that FromSoftware didn't create all the software it used to develop Dark Souls itself. This is pretty common in the games industry, rather than write an entire physics engine from scratch, for instance, developers will license it from another company. In this case, FromSoftware licensed a program called Havok to calculate the physics of its game, and that software was a black box to the modders. As Eurogamer reports, while the modders could manipulate a lot of Dark Souls, anything to do with Havok was harder to penetrate. This meant while they could add new maps to the game, the player would simply fall through the environment because the collision physics weren't being calculated.

This was a problem that the modders weren't able to overcome until Havok released an old version of its tools. Now, instead of reverse-engineering Havok's software, the modders could simply use the old version to create the collision data that needed.

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Since then a team of modders have managed to import Crossfire, a map from Half-Life, into FromSoftware's game and get a player character running around the very non-Dark Souls industrial complex. They've even got the ladders working.

Check it out in the video below:


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While this is a huge step forwards for Dark Souls modding, one of the modders, Zullie, told Eurogamer that this took a huge amount of work. So this process isn't yet at a stage where custom maps can be easily imported.

And it may be a step too far to be able to get AI enemies into these custom maps, as that would take generating navigation meshes for the maps, but PvP arenas aren't out of the question.

Check out Eurogamer's full report for more details on the challenges of modding Dark Souls, as it makes for fascinating reading.

Topics: bandai namco, Dark Souls, FromSoftware

Julian Benson
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