It might be surprising, but until this point it’s been pretty much impossible to import a custom map into the original Dark Souls. According to Souls modders, the closest you could get was importing maps from Demon’s Souls – and while modders have worked on custom maps for some time, problems with the specific file format used for collision detection in Dark Souls 1 meant that progress was stalled.
Until now, that is, as several modders have figured out a way to import working custom maps into the game.
As explained by modder Zullie, progress began in earnest when modder Meowmaritus created a tool to import models, but without collision detection (in layman’s terms, the physics required to make things actually solid). The next step was carried out by modder Horkrux, who recently developed a way to create collision maps.
Why was it so hard to get to this point? As modder Katalash explained on Reddit, all Dark Souls games use the proprietary (essentially secret) file format Havok to store collision data, with FromSoftware adding their own customisations on top. “To further complicate matters, the file format and stored data change drastically between game to game,” Katalash added. But Horkrux figured out that using an old version of Havok Content Tools (that were released publicly for only a short window of time before Havok stopped distributing them) would allow them to create collision maps in Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition and Dark Souls 2.
“Simply put, we were apparently way overthinking it,” Zullie told me over Discord.
“We had initially thought we’d have to reverse engineer the collision format that Dark Souls uses in order to be able to generate custom collision, but Horkrux figured out how to do it just by using official Havok tools. It turns out FromSoftware didn’t make anything especially fancy, Horkrux just needed to make a template for Havok.”