Wednesday 18 March 2009

First external beta-test. Done!

Last weekend Wyrin did a great job (supathanks) playing through Zork - Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire (which is the new and final name) so that I could be sure if it's ready enough to release for a wider test group. Surprisingly and positively his issue report contained only 19 entries of which 5 was different aspects of the same problem. My head still feels clogged and snotty and my fitness shape (the little I had) is gone. Have to rest in the middle of the stairs :) But I got my toolset started and I corrected most of them yesterday. So far everything is well.

BUT... The final five is severe, and they are all about Torches and VFX's. Sometimes when equipping a torch the VFX and the Light are gone. In a few cases it helps to drop the item on the ground and then picking it up. This is something I've encountered in a couple of modules I've played and in the OC too. In this module though, it's a show stopper as there must be a limited numbers of Light Sources and the areas must be dark.

I have asked about it on the NWN2Forums last year without getting no real solution. So I've played with the idea on recreating the item every time the PC unequips it and it works fine except for the intermittent disappearance of this new item. It seem to be a glitch when doing many things at one time.

[Edit]
I've got a few pm's telling me that this is not a module bug but a system bug in the engine itself. Nothing much to do then :( I have loaded up the OC and been provoking it and by quickly equipping and unequipping a standard torch from the quickslot the VFX and the Light sometimes (pretty often) vanish. I think I'll have another go at trying to recreate the item every time the player unequips it.
[/Edit]

So before solving this problem I hold on to this module and you testers out there have to wait some more.

Thanks for reading
/A

please send me some Mummy's Tea...

9 comments:

EC said...

Great news! Good job Wyrin! Don't hesitate to get in touch if you need me, Amraphael.

Hope you're fully recovered soon. BTW, that elephant is... disgusting ;)

Amraphael said...

Yeah, that ellie looks exactly like I feel. Happy and snotty...

I gladly ask you for some testing help as soon as I sorted out this mean torch thing

Wyrin said...

was a pleasure to test and a great amount of work and attention to detail gone into this. I was quite taken by how moving through the maps did evoke the sense of typing West, North, South in the old text-based games

Torch vfx issue was doubly annoying as I could play for 2 hours solid and it'd never happen, then try another time and first time i do an area transition, it'd hit. good luck finding a solution

dirtywick said...

Should be able to use tag based scripting to apply the vfx and light. Just create your own torch with no vfx and have an equipped and unequipped script to apply the effects and take them off.

Good luck with the rest.

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi,

Hopefully you will be well again soon. :)

I was going to suggest the same thing as Dirtywick about the torch issue.

Not long now then. :)

Lance.

Shaughn said...

Other then the snot this is some great news. Looking forward to the beta release.

Amraphael said...

@Dirtywick & Lance
Is it possible to apply SEF's to an item from scripting? Please tell me how as I never been able to do this successfully.

If so it would be great news to me!

dirtywick said...

I've never tried to do it so I can't say. However, there looks like there's two possible ways to do it:

ApplyEffectToObject

or

ItemPropertyVisualEffect

Shaughn said...

If the apply visual effect doesn't work you could add an on activation script that would destroy the current light source and give the player a new one. Not a perfect fix but may work.