Ho, Everybody!

Sparse updates seems to be the usual thing here. It doesn't mean that tools are down, just that nothing interesting is going on.

As I have much going on at work right now with the closing of the books, new owner structure cross-border traveling and such (not forgetting buildning on my home office) the beta tests will still be a few weeks into the future but to everyone that already showed interest and still is interested. Please send me an email on nwn2zork[a t]kliche[d o t]com.

I can tell you that painting walkmesh cutters around every placeable I've converted to environmental object is mega-super-boring. It gives me pain in the wrist and elbow. But every area shrinks with about 5-10% in disk size and are of course more kind to your computer's aging CPU.

More boring things that I doing right now:

• Hiding all map notes and painting in map note enable triggers.
• Entering all floating text strings that shows up when the PC enters a previously not entered room or area. That's about 110 locations even if not everyone has a floating text string. (I have to go through them all though)
• I've been lazy when and have not done all of the grassing and texturing in the forest areas. Now I have to do it by looking at the texture in the finished areas and try do make the overlooked ones look the same. It had been much easier if I'd done them together before.
• I'm fixing all item icons so that objects that can interact with other (cast spell unique power) gets a small star in the upper corner. Then I add a little background glow to them so they feels more NWN2
• I've done some more placeable models in 3ds max. At least the first time the player finds an treasure there is a placeable for it instead of that silly loot bag. I'm still hoping for item on ground models to be implemented in NWN2.
• All areas now have the correct music, ambient sounds and area on enter scripts. I'm still working on the NoMap functions but that may not make it into the beta-release.
• More things done in 3ds max. Instead of using VFX's for my handheld light sources. The battery powered lamp, the candle lantern, the pair of candles and so on, I've made item models (just by converting the placeable models) so they work as a real object. That seems to solve some problems I had with the game crashing on area transitions.
• The issue list is down to 21 entries. Many of them is just small irritating things. That will obviously change when the external beta test begins :)

This evening me and my wife will to a multiplayer test. MP testing has been down for quite a while now as there has been other important issues to solve. But I think we'll have a fun few hours.

The latest Zork - Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire (yes, name change again) stats:

• Areas: 30
  
• Scripts: 217
  
• Conversations: 41, 5643 words
• Placeable Blueprints: 398
• Item Blueprints: 75
• Visual Effect Blueprints: 71
  
• Module Size: 1254 files, 345 Mb
• HAK Size: 1257 files, 242 Mb
• Music: 11 unique tracks, 38 Mb
  

What else is new? Well my weekly NWN2 play group are still playing BM productions' Tomb of Horrors Revisited FINAL, and I still doesn't like it as much as the modules we played earlier on. I hate respawning monsters when they respawn without a cause and exacty in the same way. It's like playing Zelda (well I like playing Zelda at the Wii console but real crpg's should be different) And I still think the area design sucks. But it's always fun to play with friends and chopping up some mummies always makes me happy.

Next week we shift over to playing every two weeks and between that we expand or group with one more member and play a four player NWN2 OC. Our fourht member has never played NWN2 so we thought it would be a easy and nice way to introduce him to it as he's a BG and IWD fan. We save SoZ for later :)

Thanks for visiting and reading even now when long between the updates.


/A