Common Problems and Mistakes Creating Your First Module

This article is a followup to “A Start: Creating a Module to Give Your Player an Item”

The previous tutorial worked great for most people, but in talking with some of you and helping with a few problems, I noticed that many of the same mistakes were being made.  Now there is nothing wrong with making mistakes, as long as we learn from them, so let’s take a look at some of the more common problems.

Properly Assigning Resources

When you create a new resource (or duplicate an existing one) the Create New Resource window is shown, and in this window we have two settings labeled Module and Owner Module.  Properly setting these two properties isimportant, and in the case of our first tutorial each is a bit different.

When we created the item, we set Module to not our module, but Core Game Resources instead.  This is because we want the item to be physically be placed in with the other game items, so that the Single Player module, and possibly other modules, can access it.  We set Owner Module to our module, because we do own it and control it.

In the case of the script though, we set Module to be our own module.  The reason for this is that the script is ours, and isn’t to be used by anyone else.  If you accidently set the script to be in the Core Game Resources like you did with the item, then the script would not execute.

UT_AddItemToInventory and Resource Filenames

The function we used to actually add the item to the player’s inventory, was UT_AddItemToInventory.  The first parameter in this function, should be the resource filename of our item.  Note that it is the filename, not the tag or resource name.  It shoudl end in “.uti”.  Essentially the resource filename, is the resource name with the “uti” extention.  You can see the actual filename in the tabs near the top of the editor.

Programming in C++ is an Exact Science

It is a bit of a shame that scripting in Dragon Age is done with C++, but we can’t change that.  For people who have never done any programming before, the leap into C++ coding is often very difficult.  Really that first hurdle into coding in any language is often difficult, and C++ isn’t exactly the most “newbie” friendly language out there.

Programming is writing instructions to the computer in a language that hasvery strict rules, and this often trips people up.  Things like the placement of brackets and semi-colons is vital, and the way a function is called is important.  One common thing I noticed is that many of you were trying to add mutliple items, but doing it allin the same one call to UT_AddItemToInventory, somethign like:

UT_AddItemToInventory(R"Item01.uti",1,R"Item02.uti",1");

Unfortunately you can’t do this.  The computer is dumb, and unlike a Human, it can’t process anythign except exactly what it expects.  If you want to give multiple items, you need to make multiple calls to the function, once for each item.  This makes our script a bit more complicated, because we were also counting how many of the item the player already has, so that we only give them one if they have none.  This is what it might look like for giving multiple items:

iItemCount = CountItemsByTag(oPlayer, "Item01");
if (iItemCount == 0)
     UT_AddItemToInventory(R"Item01.uti", 1);
iItemCount = CountItemsByTag(oPlayer, "Item02");
if (iItemCount == 0)
     UT_AddItemToInventory(R"Item02.uti", 1);

Obviously for multiple items that could get a bit long, but its the simplest way to show it, and I don’t want to get complicated at this point.