DS Map Studio is a standalone map editor for all the souls games. It is intended to be the successor to DSTools, but be much more lightweight with a heavy emphasis on editor performance. It is currently in alpha testing with builds being uploaded to releases periodically. It is functional in many cases for games and supports saving maps for all the games but DeS and Sekiro, but the editor still lacks the stability and polish expected from a full release, so keep that in mind when attempting to use the editor.

• Dark Souls Prepare to die Edition: Game must be unpacked with UDSFM before usage with Map Studio (https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls/mods/1304).
• Dark Souls Remastered: Not officially supported yet, but it's possible to work with if you copy the map files to an unpacked PTDE installation, load from there, do the modifications, and then copy back to the remastered installation.
• Dark Souls 2 SOTFS: Use UXM (https://www.nexusmods.com/sekiro/mods/26) to unpack the game. Params must also be decrypted before use (you can open and save them with Yapped Honey Bear edition (https://github.com/vawser/Yapped-Honey-Bear) until I implement this natively). Vanilla Dark Souls 2 is not supported.
• Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro: Use UXM to extract the game files.
• Demon's Souls: I test against the US version, but any valid full game dump of Demon's Souls will probably work out of the box. Make sure to disable the RPCS3 file cache to test changes if using the emulator.
• Bloodborne: Any valid full game dump should work out of the box. Note that some dumps will have the base game (1.0) and the patch as separate, so the patch should be merged on top of the base game before use with map studio. You're on your own for installing mods to console at the moment.

Map studio operates on top of something I call mod projects. These are typically stored in a separate directory from the base game, and all modifies files will be saved there instead of overwriting the base game files (there's exceptions for DS1 and DeS because we don't have a mod engine solution for them). The intended workflow is to install mod engine for your respective game and set the modoverridedirectory in modengine.ini to your mod project directory. This way you don't have to modify base game files (and work on multiple mod projects at a time) and you can easily distribute a mod by zipping up the project directory and uploading it.

A: DSTools worked well for the creation of many mods, and is still actively used today. However, the bindings of Unity data structures to Souls ones grew very messy and buggy, and led to a very unintuitive user experience (i.e. most users can't intuitively know what Unity operations are actually supported by DSTools for export). Unity also doesn't provide sufficiently low level APIs for many of its useful subsystems like its lightmapper and navmesh generator, so making these subsystems work for Dark Souls range from painful to impossible.

By far the biggest issue though is how heavyweight Unity is and how bad performance is when importing assets. All the Dark Souls assets have to be imported into Unity which takes a large amount of space and imports themselves can take 10s of minutes for a map. All these lead me to decide to make an editor from scratch that is A) heavily focused on the Souls games and have the user interface designed for editing them and B) has super fast load times by loading the game assets directly with no intermediate conversions needing to be stored. Map Studio still lacks some of the more advanced features supported by DSTools + Unity, but currently the core experience is much nicer to use with loading times for maps being measured in seconds rather than minutes.

A: That's the goal, but asset pipeline work is still needed to get there. I'm currently working on bringing up a navigation mesh generation system for DS1 (and hopefully DS2) based on Recast, which will make full custom maps possible in theory. A simple collision mesh importing system will follow.

A: Likely not. Rendering the entirety of the maps for DS3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are quite challenging. In game they have techniques to limit draw calls, but in the editor context sometimes literally every mesh in the map may end up rendered. I thus use some modern Vulkan features to be able to batch and issue 10's of thousands of draw calls per frame, which unfortunately makes my renderer architecture incompatible with DX11.

• Windows 7/8/8.1/10 (64-bit only)
• Microsoft .Net Core 3.1 Desktop Runtime
• Visual C++ Redistributable x64 - INSTALL THIS IF THE PROGRAM CRASHES ON STARTUP
• A Vulkan Compatible Graphics Device with support for descriptor indexing, even if you're just modding DS1: PTDE
• Intel GPUs currently don't seem to be working properly. At the moment, you will probably need a somewhat recent (2014+) NVIDIA or AMD GPU
• A 4GB (8GB recommended) graphics card if modding DS3/BB/Sekiro maps due to huge map sizes

• TKGP - Made Soulsformats
• Pav
• Meowmaritus - Made DSAnimStudio, which DSMapStudio is loosely based on
• PredatorCZ - Reverse engineered Spline-Compressed Animation entirely.
• Horkrux - Reverse engineered the header and swizzling used on non-PC platform textures.
• Vawser - DS2/3 Documentation

• Soulsformats
• Newtonsoft Json.NET
• Veldrid for rendering
• ImGui.NET for UI
• A small portion of HavokLib, specifically the spline-compressed animation decompressor, adapted for C#
• Recast for navigation mesh generation
• Fork Awesome font for icons