"Module Update of the Day" Sunday #01

There's a great initiative called Module Update of the Day going on at the nwn2forums.bioware.com. It was started by JasonNH, and when he asked me to join i wasn't late to accept. I really enjoy reading the short and long updates made by fellow mod-makers. I gives a great perspective on what's going on out there.

I'll write some thing short every Sunday from now. I'll of course write here as usual but as I'm a lazy guy I will use material crosswise. Here's my first update:

Module Update Sunday #01

And here's a summary of my work of the week:

I once again followed my walk through that I’ve written to do the testing on a basic level. Whenever I find something wrong I write a note and play ahead until I hit a stopper. Then I go back to the toolset and start to correct the errors and flaws. When I’ve fixed all things on my list I replay, finding new ones that I missed and checking out the ones that I’ve fixed and do it all over again. Really boring, actually. This week I’ve fixed about 60 bugs and done some polishing on the visuals. But most of the time - over 16 hours - was spent on the inflatable, magical rubber boat and how to make it travel on the river. It was meant to be a cutscene where you could decide where to travel and the watch it happen. But I’m either to stupid or the camera and conversation system is too simple. So here’s what I do instead: I change the PC’s appearance into an Air Elemental, removing the Air-effect and applying a MagicRubberRaft-VFX. Then I jump the PC into the river and takes command over him/her. With a rather complicated trigger and waypoint-system I can simulate the river taking the boat along and by giving back control at certain points the player is given the opportunity to land the boat. It’s almost done but I’ll spend some more hours on making it more robust. It would be sad to be stuck without control in the middle of a river. Besides that I’ve made a custom drawing chalk system which is not in the original game. I’ll come in very handy when walking around in the Underground Empire without a map. I’ve also done some work on custom load screens. Some of them can be seen on my web site. There are some issues with load a specific load screen on an Area Transition (trigger or door) that I‘ve not been able to find a solution to.