Neverwinter ZORK

NWN2 Hall of Fame inductee : ZORK - RtGUE

2011-05-05T09:55:00.001+02:00

"The community has created some very cool content for NWN2 and now it's time to honor more inductees into the NWN2 Hall of Fame for the month of May 2011 as decided by the community. Congrats to all the authors on their awards!"

I'm sort of honored but, I have to admit that if they had not changed the base rule from 5000 downloads to 2500 , ZRtGUE would never had hit the wall at all.

I'm in good company because one of my favorites also moves to the HoF:
Trinity by E.C.Patterson and Gaming Parents Studios
Congratz!

It's a bit sad to see my work vanish from the Top NWN2 Modules list on the front page of NWN Vault,which was a damn good advertising spot for my small niche module.

Thanks for reading
/Amaraphael

Strange things might happen - a Zork entry

2010-07-06T12:28:00.000+02:00

I'm not a frequent visitor of my own NWVAULT entries, but yesterday I got a head-up from a guy that had some problems with the manual install of ZORK -RtGUE.

THERE IS ONLY THREE (3) VOTES LEFT UNTIL THE MODULE HITS THE HALL OF FAME! ! !

I suppose they have changed the voting criteria or something but I remember writing something about that it never would climb the top 10 list and never, never ever be a hall of fame module. In fact I should be a bit sad because it says something about the state of the NWN2 community. But not today. Today I'm quite happy to have got so much positive response.

So if you have played ZORK but not voted. Please do it. Help this classic a bit and make a fellow modder even happier.

Neverwinter News:
http://nwvault.ign.com/fullstory.php?id=57757

Thanks for reading, as always.

/A

ZORK for Neverwinter Nights 2 is now available!

2009-11-05T11:17:00.007+01:00

I've received some emails about when the module will be released. It has already been released quite a while ago so seems that I've been somewhat fuzzy about the status of the project. Here's the public announcement:

ZORK - Revisiting the Underground Empire
is released for everyone to play!

It can be downloaded from NWVault by clicking this link.
If you play it - vote for it (according to the NWVault voting standards)

Information:
This blog will not be updated anymore. I'll keep it open for reference purposes. All my NWN1+2 and other CRPG postings will occur at my new blog:

Amraphael's House of Curious Things

please update your blog-rolls and other links.

Thanks for visiting!
/Amraphel

If you were looking for Amraphael...

2009-07-30T18:16:00.003+02:00

Hi!

I'd say this wraps it up. ZORK is released and this blog has done the most of it's work. I started it almost 48 months ago with this naive post and now I end it with another one :) The main cause was to go public to force myself to push through when building the module wasn't all fun and joy. Public failure is too shameful - and it worked. And today I had my 100 first downloads. After just two days! I'd never though I would reach hundred ever.

So now I move on to another blog and if you were looking for me, it's at Amraphaels House of Curious Things where you'll find me and were I'll continue my thoughts on NWN2, CRPG's and of course module building. And the naive part... I may already have started fiddling with a new project...

If you're looking for ZORK – Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire then click the link to get the latest version.

If you're looking for help on playing the above module or have found a bug, head over to http://nwn2zork.freeforums.org.

I'll return to this blog when I have ZORK-related news and for reference, and it stays up as long as G0-0gle allows it to. But otherwise it'll be pretty dead around here.

Thank you every single one who has read, commented regular or spontaneous.

/Amraphael

ZORK - Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire is up!

2009-07-28T20:38:00.002+02:00

It's alive!
Download it now or may the Grue bite you!

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2ModulesEnglish.Detail&id=378

Now I'll rest. Tomorrow I put the news on the NWN2Forums

/A

Packed and ready to go!

2009-07-27T10:14:00.005+02:00

Hello sailors!

The 1.00 version of Zork is compiled into a self-installing executable. The Walkthrough is updated and I have asked the site managers of NWVault for a FTP access so I can upload the module. Now I only hope that everything is fitted together correctly and that I don't have to make too many patches.

I have also put up a NWN2ZORK-forum for players in need of help, hints and for reporting bugs and issues.

Finally, I want to thank everybody for the support and help you have given me over the last two years by showing this little, 80's classic style, end-game loadscreen.
After the release, my though further Neverwinter Nights activities will occur at Amraphael's House of Curious Things. Welcome to visit me there!

Thank you for reading, as always. I'll be back when the mod. is up!

/A

Probably the last post on this blog

2009-07-09T08:15:00.007+02:00

...before the release of:

ZORK - Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire
a re-make of the classic ZORK I, for Neverwinter Nights 2

I'm going into debug mode and won't surface until upload is complete.

Thanks for reading, supporting me and hopefully try this module. And dammit, vote for it! (according to the voting standards of course)

All custom content will be released soon after. In a bunch or as different kits depending on my mood. I won't even sort out the sad parts :)

/Amraphael

Rob McGinnis leaving Obsidian

2009-07-04T11:35:00.004+02:00

Well, it's not news anymore. I just thought that I should make a notice about Rob and his amazing work for the community. From the beginning his blog was a great source of knowledge and information and being a frequent visitor on the NWN2Forums, following and commenting he really did something for the community. An excellent community manager! I'd like to wish him the best wherever he ends up after this.

On the positive side he may have the time to play my module now :)

Rob McGinnis Assistant Producer Joined: 02 Nov 2006	Posted: Wednesday, 24 June 2009 06:08PM
	Here's another thread I missed. I can't wait for this module to be released! If I can free up some time, I'll give you some help testing it. _________________ Don't let your life be about the donuts!

All testers, last call!

2009-06-28T13:52:00.003+02:00

Hi all testers (and others)! Monday July 6 is the last day to send me your findings. Sorry to push you. If you're not finished, send me what you got.
[EDIT] You'll get an email about this too[/EDIT]
I have a goal of putting this module on the Vault by the 17th if I can. The 1.0 release will still have some flaws but nothing to sinister I think as the reports so far has been sparse.

If I can get it up before the 17th I'd be really glad as it would mean it's less than two years since I started this long and mostly existing and fun trip. And I promise you all, loud and clear.
- "I'll never do such a stupid thing again!"

My 50 cents:

If a project is more than 300 man hours - drop it!
Build many small modules, release often
Don't do things the original game wasn't designed to do
Don't do remakes, tell your own story even if it's tiny
Concentrate on content, not looks
Plan before, stick to the plan and adjust only if it's needed to keep the plan intact
Don't think your a superman/girl/dog/horse. You're not, no one is
Team up with a good friend. It's easier and funnier when you share the problems and joys
Test, test, test and then test some more. Build, test and deliver in small portions to avoid those huge races that takes forever
Don't care about what other people say (that includes me)

Have a nice day, now I'll enjoy the summer heat!
/Amraphael

How to make your own NWN2 paintings – The Easy and Free way

2009-06-26T21:22:00.000+02:00

This short tutorial was thrown together in 30 minutes and it probable contains lots of spelling errors, missed words and so on. But it should help the average module builder understand the principles of making a painting (or a rug, floor tile etc.) in a quick and easy way without expensive tools and knowledge about 3D-modelling and texturing.

[EDIT]
It's up at the NWVault. Go there for the latest version.

/A

Low interest in new modules?

2009-06-08T13:44:00.003+02:00

About a week ago I posted an invitation to test out the finished module before uploading it to the NWVault to get a pure players perspective and do some last QA. This invitation was posted in the NWN2Forums/Module-thread.
- Two persons did reply in the thread. But not as potential testers
- No one so far has showed interest or PM:ed me
First I thought that the interest for this particular module was low. It may be the fact, but when looking around it seems that the overall interest for new stuff is kind of lame. Not even the supposed community blockbuster modules draw that much attention.

Just an observation. It doesn't really matter in the long run.

/A

Yet another Dragon age post

2009-06-06T16:17:00.000+02:00

It seems that Bioware's upcoming RPG, Dragon Age is on everyones lips. Especially withing the NWN community. So I'd like to share my not so deep thought about it.

First of all, I have the deepest respect and trust in the guys at Bioware, they have been delivering quality releases for ages and seem to have a really good understanding in what we, the gamers, want. Sometimes before we knew we wanted it. Every since I first learned about DA I've been reluctant about it. I can't point out exactly why. It's something about the setting, not using a well know ruleset, and the lack of BG-style, co-op multiplayer. Now when the release comes closer and I read the forums, follow the rumors and DA-site almost every day I've started to feel a bit, friendlier to it. The first thing is the same that also seem to be somewhat controversial - the Violence and Lust part. (and I don't mean some kind of criminal kinky smackup-porno-stuff) I recognize that the game aims at a more grown up group of customers and I like that. There's a lot of blood and gore in the trailers. Pretty cool actually

I've seem a couple of posts that claims that the the poster knew it all the time. Roleplayers are bloodthirsty demon possessed satanists that love Marilyn Manson. And of course they are correct. An anagram for Dragon Age is Aged Groan which, as everybody know, the sound of the devil. And if you do some mathematical stuff with octal and pental numbers the result will end up 666. We have to burn those people that plays those evil games, every singe one. An the games with them. Witches!!!

I think I lost my point here somewhere... Yeah. I have changed my mind. I think I'll like this game. The few in-game clips looks nice enough, the rule set seems familiar enough, targeting an older customer group than lower teens. The story presented so far seems interesting and the few possible combinations races and classes don't bother me so much as I'm easy to satisfy.

The toolset with the presented concept with as a understand it, pre-made areas does not make me jump crazy. I love the NWN2-toolset too much :) But then I may force the players to work on the story instead of the never ending area editing that I enjoy.

Will I buy the game? Of course! I can't find any better excuse to buy myself a +B0+360 console.

What's new on Zork then?

Bug fixing
Implemented some additional hints hidden in the game. (Thanks for the idea, Lance)
Tried to find some more testers at NWN2Forums - No luck at all
Fixed a Help and Support forum for players that will get stuck
Finished the embedded Help system
Have to release asap. Will hate this module and banish it to Hades if we don't separate from each other soon.

Thanks for reading
/A

Bringing them down, one by one.

2009-05-26T19:10:00.002+02:00

Reported issues during the 0.98 tests

Just a short note about how much is left to fix at this very moment. Of course those numbers could change. Lance and Princess Eve is the top bug finders as of today, and even if they are fantastic testers they don't find so very much that I cannot handle the bug as the reports arrive.

This one beats me though. Maybe someone of you developers could help me out? When dropping an item to the ground via a script the lootbag sometimes show up as a tiny, thin item. It's like the model has the size 0.1,0.1,1 instead of 1,1,1. It's almost invisible to see. Any idea?

202 days over due.

2009-05-22T09:19:00.003+02:00

I noticed that my counter flipped 200 days over due some days ago. But testing is going well, lots of smaller issues are reported and I fix them as they are mailed to me. Last night I did a huge job implementing the Frobozz Magic Help and Support system. I've been told that the puzzles in this mod can be hard to solve so now the player can chose to have a hint system enabled when configuring the game at the start. It's based on the original Infocom InvisiClues with small adjustments to my work. Using it comes with a price though so the player will have to work a bit for both finding and using it.

Other game configurations that can be made is:
- Game difficulty: Normal or Easy (Easy means that the player has som advantage in combat)
- Area Maps: Off(Default you need to find a map ut use it in certain unknown areas) or On (the map works as in NWN2)
- Map Notes and Floating Room Descriptions: On or Off

In this screenshot you can see the Frobozz Magic Help and Support officer and a small portion of the gigiant library of hints.

Last beta under test

2009-05-20T20:51:00.002+02:00

Today I made version 0.98 available for the test group. It's the end of test phase 3 and hopefully the last release before making the 1.0 available for the masses at the Vault. During the test period to come I'll work a bit on the remaining low-priority issues and a bit on the documentation. Both are pretty boring but I'll try to pick myself together and just do it. Making a advertising trailer movie will be more fun so I use that as a reward for myself being a good boy eating the oat porridge first. *Yeuech!*

Don't remember if I told you that I've lured an old friend into playing NWN2 with my wife and another friend of us. Were playing the OC and I find myself having lots of fun. It may have something to do with my really bad memory because I can't remember the story at all. We are playing on the highest difficulty and with an AI-modification added and it's pretty hard to beat the baddies. And I'm really enjoy having Neeshka and Khelgar with us all the time. I think Neeshka is really enjoyable and we should probably get along well in real life. Strange, last time I played the OC I found her so annoying. Love at second sight, maybe :)
Our play style is just like when the four of us played Icewind Dale. We are confused, disagrees on if we should be good or bad ending up chaotic and lost without andy gold and get us killed by stupidity all the time. "Where's my sword? I had it in my hand, who stole it?", "Who's got a key for this door? Noone? Oh... hey I had it all the time", "BS,my Wizard is an expert on finding traps." *KabaBoOm!*

/A

I'm alive - again!

2009-05-17T10:57:00.003+02:00

How long have I've been gone? Two hours?
It's like waking up from coma, the time has gone so fast since I pulled the plug. A quick update on what replaced the modding the last month.

- My company has been taking over some competitors business, that takes lots of effort and time.
- We have also started up business in 3 countries, lots of traveling for me.
- Along with the other projects I've been performing an extreme organization makeover and kick-started the development teams on our new generation of products.
- At home we try to get mine and my wifes home offices finished. As it's a complete and very slow destruct and rebuild project it has been a huge task beside them above.
- We have done some pretty large scale area adjustments to the surroundings of our little house (it's easier to do than in the toolset though) and I'm in the middle of building a new front porch together with a terrace at the back of the house.
- I've been fiddling with the book I've been talking about (No, not writing yet, as I promised, just researching).
- As I don't have enough to do I've started a new company on my own, besides my daily assignment, that work in a non-IT area. I'm thankful for not having my first customer yet :)

All this together with the pressure to build on Zork made me just sit and look at the toolset. Being 40+ I don't have time left to just sit and look so I pulled the plug, momentarily. And it took longer than I anticipated to get back on track (sort of).

So what's going to happen now? Today is the first time I launch the toolset since the break. Unlike many of the colleges that have burnt them out on module-building I been longing for it all time, every day. It'll take some time to orient myself in the module, find the way back where I stopped. I don't remember what bugs I were correcting, which area or script.

I still feel the pressure on myself. You now my usual ranting. The mod will be a niche module. Not everyone will understand it. The hardcore fans saying I'm blasphemous, and the ones that just stumbles upon it will think it's too difficult or strange that's it not a DnD-module. I'm afraid that I been too thorough at some parts and quite sloppy at other.

Anyway a new and probably last beta will be released and then we jump off the roof without safety line. Feels good!

Thanks for reading, as always!
/A

And for those few that wonder. Yes, I watched the whole Battlestar Galactica series too. And this morning I watched the first episode of Caprica. Call me simple, but I love it all.

...beep!

2009-05-15T15:40:00.004+02:00

Eye-movement under lids...

Crap! Micro-burnout!

2009-04-19T19:58:00.002+02:00

I believed I was made of iron-wood... Today the wall hit me with full uber-light speed. Need short break from correcting the bugs and from the toolset. I'm back soon. More coffee please!

The version 0.94 beta test period is now closed

2009-04-09T08:46:00.004+02:00

I want to thank everybody that have been so helpful with this first external test. I hope that you will recover without any permanent mental damage :)

My thanks goes to (in so specific order)
- Princess Eve
- Shaugn
- Lance
- Wyrin
- E.C. Patterson
- Tobbe76
- Valentine & Mikky from the Zorkian Fanbozz Club

// Posted from my iPhone //

What did they find then? Well, lots of typos, of course, and some bugs. Not a huge amount but enough to keep me busy for a while. Then they found a intricate mesh of problems with my NPC interaction and combat functions. Some of them I haven't been able to reproduce other I have solved partly and will keep working on. A surprisingly big number is about bugs and flaws in NWN2-itself. And how much I would like to solve them I cannot do much about it.

Another source of questions and confusion seem to be that Zork (the original one) is a really, really hard game. Many of the reported issues are about how things are unclear, too hard to solve and not so logical. Here I stands before a road sign saying "This way - that's how Zork I was, you have violated this fine game enough as it is!" and "That way - Here's your chance to make amends for sins made by Infocom decades ago" Some part of me would like to say. "Hey, it's an fantasy adventure! Why can't a door lead to one place and another place back?" or "Wait, now. Your think that a talking Cyclops and a Axe-fighting Troll is realistic but walking on a rainbow is not?" But I don't. I collect all those comments and ideas of how to make the game better/different/easier and if time allows it I'll try to implement some of therm.

Once again thank you and a Happy Easter or whatever everyone out there celebrates this time of the year. Me, myself, eats candy and hunt down bugs :)

/A

// Posted from my iPhone //

Short message

2009-04-02T13:29:00.003+02:00

I'm doing some cross-border commuting nowdays. Norway - Hooray!
It takes lots of my time
The beta tester squad are doing a great job
They found many things to fix
At Monday 6th version 0.94 is closed and I start to join my internal 0.95 with the bug fixes for 0.94
Version 0.96 should be released for test phase 3 within two weeks (perhaps)
The sun is shining - I have hope for spring this year too

// Posted from my iPhone //

Beta 0.94 handed over to the testers

2009-03-22T16:32:00.003+01:00

Hi!
A new version, 0.94, has been made available for the helpful beta testers. This means that we're now entering the beta phase 2 where the primary objectives are:

Important
1 - Find remaining show stoppers and gameplay strangeness.
2 - Find bugs that has to be fixed in the first release

If there's time
3 - Spelling
4 - Looks and Feel

If testing goes so fast there's lots of time left
5 - Nice to have thingies
6 - You should do this instead ideas

What's new in 0.94?
- A failsafe script to fix potential problems with handheld light source VFX's
- More placeables in the Maze Area but lots left to do...
- Fixed missing load screens
- More consequent damage of items in the game
- Fixed Bad stref in clothing materials
- Fixed several missing Placeable descriptions
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Area DayNight cycles fix
- The Area Maps can be enabled both in the intro conversation and with the Z-Helpers Debug conversation
- Missing wall in the Maze Are has been corrected
- The combat conversations is now more stable

I cross my fingers and hope for luck!

/Amraphael

BTW
During test phase 3 and 4 I may need some fresh eyes so if you're not already a tester and want to do some just-before release test, drop me a line.

About torches, light and visual effects.

2009-03-21T15:06:00.003+01:00

Okay, obvious we can't use the function
ApplyEffectToObject(int nDurationType, effect eEffect, object oTarget, float fDuration=0.0f) when it comes to Items. Please prove me wrong but it just does not work. To be fair, no one has claimed it would... It means that the torches and other handheld light sources I use in ZRtGUE will eventually fail, making the game really hard and boring to play. It's not a show stopper but it's like a show noone reasonably sane wants to sit through.

So I picked up my old idea about deleting the item evertime the player un-equips it and re-create the same item fresh. So if the torch vfx and light dies the player just have to re-equip it to make it work again. Maybe it'll even prevent it from failing. One drawback is that if you have the item in a quickslot it'll be removed. That one I can accept.

The problem with this and the reason I dropped the idea was that sometimes the item was lost during creation. I believe it could be beacuse of that the creation took longer that the delayed destruction of the item. So I made a modification to my little script by assigning the creation to the Players action queue:

void CloneItem(object oPC, object oItem)
{
string sItem  = GetResRef(oItem);
CreateItemOnObject(sItem, oPC, 1, "", FALSE);
}

void main()
{
// * See to that the Player has a fine new working torch after unequip
object oPC      = GetPCItemLastUnequippedBy();
object oItem    = GetPCItemLastUnequipped();
AssignCommand(oPC, ClearAllActions());
AssignCommand(oPC, CloneItem(oPC, oItem));
DestroyObject(oItem, 0.05, FALSE);
}

First external beta-test. Done!

2009-03-18T07:52:00.004+01:00

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...

Still sick...

2009-03-09T20:47:00.003+01:00

I'm still sick. Today is the 12th day with the headache from hell and intermittent fever. The trip to Germany last week wasn't the best thing to do either. So I'd call this a confirmed A/H3N2 infection. I'll stay in bed for now...
I've started to prepare the beta test kit and been trying to make my FTP-server work with large files without luck. Then I've been looking into several upload/storage services to find a reliable place to put the files. With kind help of Wyrin I'll soon have that problem solved.

Over and out, transmission over!

Got a cold in my head

2009-02-28T21:23:00.002+01:00

Head pain, sneeze and cough... You know how it is this time of the year. I'm too much jelly to sit by the computer.

/A

What would you do? (about HAK packs)

2009-02-20T17:16:00.005+01:00

Hi fellow mod-builders (and others),
I sitting here (at a Friday evening!!!) thinking about HAK-packs and what would be the best to do.

1 BIG single hak-file
Pros: Easy to pack and distribute
Cons: Big size

or

Multiple hak-files (one for 2da files, one for models and textures, one for vfx files and so on)
Pros: Easy to distribute patches and fixes. If there's need for changing a 2da I just upload that small hak to overwrite the old one.
Cons: Complex to make

Ideas?

Yesterday when trying my install kit I installed on my laptop. While the installation when well I encountered some strange behavior in the module when playing it. Maybe some of you have an idea about what's happening.

When entering an new area i write some variables on the PC. One of those is if the PC is in a area where the Thief will show up. Then in a HeartBeat script i do some checking of that variable and if it is TRUE I'll jump the thief to the PC. The thing is that it does not always work. Even on the same area. I now have one game saved where the thief shows up all the time and another saved game where everything works as it should. It seems that if it fails one time it will faill forever and vice versa. Strange - and scary because I was about to release the module for testing this weekend. Now, instead I have a bit of detective work to do...

Take care!

Packing the beta build

2009-02-18T18:42:00.003+01:00

Today I've been putting the last of the tester's documentation together. All necessary area maps are there, the what-if?, the how-do-I?, the game mechanics and of course a walk through. Then I've been scripting the install package and making the hak-pack. I use an excellent tool called Inno Setup. It's easy to use, reliable and safe. I know that a bunch of you out there don't like setup.exe's but. I think it's a great way to distribute things for the masses. And it's very helpful for uninstalling stuff too. I know the arguments. But everyone should have a good anti-virus/anti-spyware tool or deserve some evil bug storm brought upon them. For the control freaks I'll provide a zipped version too :)

It's getting closer day by day...

And a little screen shot. It's maybe hard to see but it's the hieroglyph-floor of the Eyptian Room I wrote about last post.

Tinkering

2009-02-09T15:59:00.002+01:00

Just one word (actually three) Custom Load Hints. A whole Sunday of them. It's cool that you can associate them with an specific area. Didn't know that that was doable.

I say that doing this last minute tinkering is like plastic surgery.
- Hm, those bags under my eyes has to be fixed.
- Oh now that the bags are gone my wrinkles looks so deep. Have to fix them too.
- What. Were did those love handles come from. Didn't notice them before.
- Oh, I didn't know they were called man-boobies... Can I replace them with fake muscles?
- ...Wonder, if they do whole body transplantation too...

The more I look the more I find. Like Saturday night. I was strolling around the forest areas and thought - Well, wouldn't it be nice if a map pin with a direction note showed up whenever I find a new path leaving the area to give the player a feel of discovering the area? And then I started to implement it. When I was finished with the 7 forest areas I concluded that it worked very nice and that EVERY outdoor areas must have this :) Then it was late night for an old man like me and my elbow ached from clicking, copy and pasting as a madman. But before I dropped into the bed I made a Egyptian-looking floor tile for the Egypt Room. Not perfect, but it'll do.

Thanks for reading, as always!
/A

Ho, Everybody!

2009-02-01T12:58:00.003+01:00

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

It's getting closer...

2009-01-20T17:41:00.003+01:00

I've been pretty silent for some time (much traveling and such at work) but wanted to tell you that I'm into the polishing phase. Well, I have one complicated scene left to do, but it's not crucial for playing the game. Then my friends, it's beta-testing time. I'll try to find 4 testers that are willing to spend about 8 hours each. I'll provide a beta-testers walk through and a issue report sheet with nifty codes to fill in.

So watch out for my call for help to test this module. When? I don't dare to say :) Just wanted to let you know...

OnEnter-problems

2009-01-10T09:30:00.004+01:00

I assume that almost every builder has noticed the OnEnter-problem introduced in 1.21. If not here's Rob McGinnis quick update. When looking over all scripts in the module that are affected by this I found that assigning variables to a PC through a OnEnter-script (Area, Module, Trigger) as the first thing that happens when the player enters a new area is unreliable, not only after 1.21 but has been so since the first version. This was news to me. Important news. You see, I have some variables set on the PC when he/she enters a new area. Such as if the PC is in a Dark Area or a Theif-Free Area. Sometimes checks against those variables have failed and I have suspected myself to have missed setting the variables correctly. It seems that I've been setting them before the Area is completely loaded (or if it's that the PC isn't controllable) . So now when I've introduced a loop that checks that the PC has the variable everything works fine. The same thing works for conversations started from a trigger. You have probably worked this out already but heres how I did:

#include "ginc_item_script"
void StartConversation(object oPC);

void main(string sCommand = "")

{
  object oPC = GetEnteringObject();
  if (!GetIsObjectValid(GetControlledCharacter(oPC))) return; //*  
  if (!GetIsPC(oPC)) return;          
  string sTrigger = GetTag(OBJECT_SELF);

  if (sTrigger == "TR_RIVER2A") // Entering the River Area from north
  {      
      StartConversation(oPC);      
  }  
  else if (sTrigger == "TR_ARAGAIN") // Entering the aragaiN Falls
  {
      CreateBoat(GetLocation(GetObjectByTag("WP_ARAGAIN")));
      StartConversation(oPC);
  }
}

void StartConversation(object oPC)
{ //Fix the OnEnter problem in version 1.21
  if (!GetLocalInt (OBJECT_SELF, "Trigged") && !IsInConversation(oPC))
  {  
      DelayCommand(0.5, AssignCommand(oPC, ActionStartConversation(oPC, "river_travel", TRUE, FALSE)));
      DelayCommand (1.0, StartConversation(oPC));
  }
}

Finishing Mystery at Willowbow

2009-01-07T19:05:00.005+01:00

Yesterday we finished Saorsa's Mystery at Willowbow which was a enjoyable if somewhat short module. I liked the swamp area setting and the huge amounts of undead creatures that haunted the village of Cobbelich. The figths were sometimes a bit too easy and the story thin as horse hair but still a jolly good side quest for our little XP-hungry team. After this one we started to play BM productions' Tomb of Horrors Revisited FINAL. So far it plays out well but look butt-ugly. Yes I mean it. The area design really sucks which really affects me. I can take a thin plot and a smaller amounts of quirks but ugly things is sooo disturbing :) The module has got some good comments on the Vault though so I try to keep my mouth shut while playing and see if I get into it.
This isn't pretty area design:

Here's two shots from Mystery at Willowbow. See how brave my friends are helping my figther when he gets attacked by two wraiths... Below is a action shot of our team teaching those top-modell looking monsters a lesson.

On the module building front there is not so much new to tell. By an coincidence I found two mean bugs that took me about six hours to straighten out. I should write myself a reminder: "Next time I should make an spread sheet of all variables I use and why I use them!" I'm now into the phase were testing of all things that can go wrong in the game is tested. You know, all the ways the player can get him/herself killed, trapped or destroy important items (and repair them again). I've also started to implement all speaktriggers which will pop up the original room descriptions when the player first enters an important room or area and enables the map note. That's lots and lots of work :) And yes, the player can chose if he want to have those or not.

A little toolset screenshot of one of the first areas the player will visit.

Thanks for reading
/A

Forest map pre-view

2009-01-01T19:32:00.005+01:00

Thought I would show you this early stage map over the forest areas. This will help adventurers lacking sense of orientation to find their way through the several forest areas. I think I'll make it accessible from a map item. The quality is quite poor due to rescaling it. I promise the in-game quality will be better.

Happy New Year 2009 to one and all!

2008-12-31T17:34:00.003+01:00

Wishing one and all good health,
peace on earth and elsewhere (with the toolset too)
renewed prosperity and lots of new modules
for the coming year.

Chrismas Holiday on a 11th century convent (and some NWN2 related too)

2008-12-30T11:09:00.008+01:00

My wife and I went away over the holidays. The three day trip took us to Vadstena and the old abbey where we spent the Christmas. It was a great experience with Hogwart-like moments. You know the huge dining hall and the long long corridors leading everywhere. Lots of good food and drinks. Christmas midnight mass (even though we're hardcore atheists). The medieval decorated room was very cool and was also very cold :) Overall one of the best holidays trip I ever been on.

A short history lesson:

The convent was originally a huge sinful palace and was build around 1250 when Valdemar was elected king by his father Birger Jarl. The young king and his Danish wife spent their time entertaining the European jet-set of their time. The royalties came from all around to visit this medieval Las-Vegas for a grandiose experience. About hundred years later the fun ended when Birgita Birgersdotter of noble linage (who later became a saint) talked the ruling class into letting her inherit this palaces. She went to the pope (with the funny hat) and hassled him for 20! years to get a permission to found a new cloister order - the Birgettine order and sent people to Vadstena to transform the palace into a convent. She never visited the convent, but 1384 it was inaugurated. 60 nuns and 25 monks (rigorously separated) lived there. During the time until 1595 the order became the Norther Europe's most powerful company with a turnover bigger than the whole Swedish Great Power. Then king Karl IX with the coolest haircut ever, closed it down for good.

OK, over to the NWN2 related stuff.
My wife did a play-through of the Zork module. She played the whole thing in 4 hours with help from my walk through and found a couple of bugs, which I corrected yesterday and things she think a should change. Her opinion was that the modules puzzles is really hard to solve (a bit harder than Myst and Riven) but that the environments were good looking and that it was fun to play. The only irritating moments were one puzzle where the player has to run back and forth an area three times to collect all stuff needed. But that's how the original game is and I won't change it. Now I'm down to 11 known issues and 14 todo's except from all sound, light and area decorations. But that's fun stuff to do.

I'm a little concerned about upgrading to 1.21 and SoZ. I'm not adding any SoZ stuff to this module right now as I want to keep it OC+MotB compatible. But I've been reading some scary posts about upgrading. I fear that my 2da's will need a workover...

Yesterday it was NWN2 gaming Monday. We finished Kevin Carr's Goblin Bandits of the Delimbiyr Route. The ending was sort of a disapointment but it was a overall good module. Then we leveled up to level 4 and started with Mystery at Willowbow. It's a straight on hack and slash module with a nice swamp setting and. I love snow settings and I love swamp settings. Don't know why. We bashed the life out of a huge amount of Lizard men, Bandits, Spiders, Fire beetles and Trolls before calling it night. I suppose we can play it next Monday too before finishing it.

Here's a screen shot of my fighter Handbane, parrying a blow from the Green Guy and my wife's rouge, Briela (in a purple cloak) stabbing a bandit in a two-handed attack while our friends cleric Perien holds the position far to the right, waiting for our shouts for healing.

Season Greatings

2008-12-23T15:07:00.001+01:00

My best holiday greatings to you all!
I'm on my way on a great two day vacation.

-- Post From My iPhone

It's cold outside Let's set another power supply on fire...

2008-12-22T16:51:00.002+01:00

I went up early this morning. Imagined myself spending some quality time with my best friend, mr Toolset. But, when I started my computer it shut off by itself. I tried three times and then I smelled something like almond and a not so small smoke puff appeared before me, like a Chrismas ghost. I'm not so smart that I stopped here. I held the powerbutton for a couple of secconds (don't ask me why) and then I got interesting, sparkling sounds and a tiny, tiny fire :) So much for early morning module building. 09:00 I pulled the door open to the nearest computer shop and cried out "Gimme your biggest PSU!!!" They gave me one and took all my gold pieces and to my relief the computer started just fine with the replacement part.

I didn't get much module building done but I tried my newly written Walkthrough. It's a WT that describes the fastest way through the module (it's not much fun playing that way though) and it took 1 hour 21 minutes. I don't believe one can play this module much faster which gives me a hint about the average play time. About 6 hours. The famous Battery powered Brass Lantern last only 2 real hours but if the player plays the module smart it lasts longer by turning it off when not needed and using other light sources.

What more? Well, I found out how the addtional +5 Game Points mysteriously showed up. It was pretty stupid, I probably pressed the "Give me 5 points" line in the debug conversation :)
I also have built in some safety functions to prevent items from disappering when beeing copied from the inventory to the Thiefs bag.

I've also found that VFX's applied on the PC can make the game crash when transforming the PC into a invisible creature. And then I discovered that removing this effects sometimes fail. None of those things are cool. Not at all.

On the bright side is that tonight is our Goblin Bandits of the Delimbiyr Route evening and I'm sure that we finish the module tonight. We will be continuing with Mystery at Willowbow as it's a multiplayer module starting at 4th level.

Thanks for reading
/A

Load screens!

2008-12-18T07:56:00.003+01:00

After dinner last night I focused on solving the GameScore problem I mentioned earlier. I've gone through every collectible treasure checking that it gives the correct score and every other score-giving event. Still I could not find what's causing the extra 5 points. It probably mean that one of the treasures rewards the PC two times or that one of the on_death-scripts run twice. All other combinations would be so hard to track that I don't care to bother yet. After failing to find the bug I fixed some of the smaller bugs on my list. The backpack (that has a limit of 8 items) now tells the PC that it's full (8 items) or allmost full (7 items) . I made small script that unlocks the destination door when unlocking the source door. I also found out why certain foes does continue to fight even if they are dead and solved that bug and a few more small ones.

Then I started to shoot screen shots. It sounds like an easy task but it took two hours to get 26 of them. It's the fiddling with Photoshop that takes time. Resizing, blurring, blooming and get the fogginess right takes tome time. Now all areas but 3 has their screenies attached and if I'm satisfied with them during play I'll look into which of them will have flavor text attached. You know like:

"You are in a large square room with tall ceilings. On the south wall is an enormous mirror which fills the entire wall."

You have probably seem them before in a way or another but heres a few samples:

A milestone! First complete play through.

2008-12-16T17:17:00.003+01:00

Today I was able to play Zork - Rediscovering the Great Underground Empire, from the start to the end. The play to about two hours and was not completely free from troubles. It's a milestone though and I'm quite satisfied with it. My list over issues found during this test was only 27 entries long. The most irritating and troublesome is:

I ended up with 355 points when 350 should be maximum! This bug will take some tiresome work to hunt down
My functions to fix the CopyItem bug (the one that turns of torches and such) seem to be bugged sometimes leaving VFX's on the PC. It looks silly to hold both a lantern and a torch at the same time :) Worse is that this seem to make the game crash cutscene are transitions
Lot of uglies in my Thief-routines. He stays put when he should leave, he waits for conversation to begin when he should not, he shows up in areas where he should not and the appear and disappear animations looks strange
The digging animations looks great on male PC's but female PC's hold their shovel the wrong way. The digging animations loops long after exiting the conversation with the shovel
A few doors which are locked from "both" sides (in transitions) do not unlock correctly which keeps the PC stuck on the other side not being able to walk back through them.
Some NPC's don't lay down when struck uncoincious and the keeps fighting even after the PC has killed them. I have to find a better way to exit conversations on death
On one occasion a torch disappered from the inventory when I unequippped it. This scares me as I have no clue about what happened

Other than that it's only polishing left to do. Lots of speak trigger should be placed and I have to plunge into the start and end scenes. If I only had two weeks off from everything.

Thanks for reading!
/A

Oh yes, I forgot. Yesterday was our Goblin Bandits of the Delimbiyr Route evening. Me, a friend and my wife is playing this module togheter. Next monday we'll finish it and I must say we had some really fun moments. Here's two screenshots from the session, where we are giving a poor goblin warrior a hard time (well they were about 20 when we started our bash feast):

Baby steps...

2008-12-14T11:03:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I broke out of my suite and tie-prison and forgot about work for a few hours. I repaired the broken Atlantis-area. I don't know if I wrote about it when upgrading to 1.13 but after the update every time I baked the area it crashed the toolset. I tried it several times until the area was totally corrupt :) Removing the GIT and GIC files and replacing the missing stuff was no big deal and sort of entertaining. Then I plunged into the problem of UserDef cameras not working after copying conversation nodes. With no luck that will say. I'll take a look at the XML-files to see if I can edit them and import them again as the

<Info variableName="Mode" variableValue="None" />

seems to be missing.

Goblin Bandits of the Delimbiyr Route

2008-12-08T21:41:00.003+01:00

Tonight me, my wife and a friend played the first part of Kevin Carr's Goblin Bandits of the Delimbiyr Route. It's a multi player enabled module (one of the few that has been rated at the NWVault). We played for about three hours and we all loved to play a low-level module again. It's some thing special about having to watch out for and run away from bears and goblin. The module is standard NWN2 without custom content. It looks okay, but is far from a design wonder, but I like it anyway. We chose to go for the classic setup with me, playing Handbane, the fighter (the cool bearded guy with the crossbow), wife as a rouge and our friend as the cleric. In the screen shot we're exploring a strange complex in the woods. The nice thing is that we decided to schedule three more Monday-adventures so now I must do something else than work :) It gives me inspiration to put some more time into Zork.

Got a few modding hours this Sunday

2008-12-07T19:33:00.002+01:00

It was great to get away from work related stuff this weekend and I got a few hours of good modding. I solved some of the remaining combat scripts but eventually got stuck on two things. I will sleep on those and probably solve them later next week.

1) It seems that the when disabling a NPC's automatic dialog facing with SetOrientOnDialog(oNPC, FALSE) the NPC actually turns around as a compass needle towards the last speaking PC *after* the conversation ends. It looks pretty fun but it's not what I want to have. I can't remember having a problem with it pre 1.13.

2) When copying lines in a conversation the user defined camera fails to function anymore. No matter of what camera mode I chose the random one is used.

Now my wife and I will continue our MotB session. I'd almost forgot how fun it is to play :)

Thanks for reading
/A

Not much to tell...

2008-12-02T17:14:00.002+01:00

It's insane times at work. I wake up, work hard an drop dead a night. Trying to get some building time here and there but I don't get much done.

Mask of the Betrayer marathon

2008-11-23T18:01:00.002+01:00

I was so long since my wife and I played NWN2 together so today i decided that I should take a break from the toolset and play the game instead. As the characters we used when first playing MotB didn't was too exciting (straight bard and wizard). So we started all over again creating one Human Fighter/Weapon Master/Frenzied Berserker for me and a Half Orc Fighter/Rouge/Blackguard for my wife. Oh yeah, lots of brute violence lies ahead :) Then, after the level-up mania at the start we played for seven hours with just a coffebreak. Perfect snowy-Sunday time killer, and we can't wait to continue later on this week.

Playing the pipe

2008-11-19T16:27:00.004+01:00

No, not the painting with the same name but some rusty sewer-pipes. Tired of fiddling with the combat scripting I spent some hours making a few more pipe models for the module. It's a couple of bends, valves and a new texture. I don't know if those ever will be interesting for someone else as I'm pretty sure that iron pipes and valves are rare in Forgotten Realms. In the Great Underground Empire they are common though.

The guy in the background has nothing to do with the pipes. They are a part of my old self-balancing encounter generator. For the moment they are spanking an overpowering troll...

One of those short updates

2008-11-15T23:57:00.006+01:00

Been working on the turn-based combat script almost the whole day long. I found some strange things in the routines for scaling HP and Damage due to decimal rounding problems. I think I've fixed it so I started to make the animation routines. I have different ones for Attack/Hit, Attack/Miss, Stunning the opponent and Disarm and Knockout. They are not perfect and I'm not entirely satisfied with the sounds but I have to draw the line somewhere. Now everything works and the Hostiles gets easier to kill when the PC gains GamePoints and the PC also receives more HP as in the original game. The script is over 900 lines already and the Troll's token-based conversation is about 700 words. It's really cool to generate conversations via CustomTokens and I wish I had more time to explore it. Tomorrow I'll get on to the other NPC's combat text-lines and animations.

Some cellphone shots of my temporary workplace.

This is how my home office to be looks like for the moment. A bit like a late night bugbear party....

The future of the NWN2 builders community

2008-11-09T12:15:00.004+01:00

The famous and overwhelmingly nice Liso (gaining influense 2+ ?) from BouncyRock Entertainment wrote an interesting post at their forum:

"I was reading a blog by Wyrin,
Someone posted their concerns that we're starting to see a trend of modders taking long time outs, or retiring all together.
Why do you think the passion is dieing out so fast?
Post your reasons here "if you would like"
Mine are.

1) Building a module in NWN2 alone is daunting and too time consuming.
2) Players do not comment and vote i.e. 5000 downloads, 25 comments & votes
3) The toolset is problematic

That is all I have thus far. I realize I know nothing about the TS. I do however talk to a lot of modders on a regular basis. These are just my best guesses.
So I wonder....
what are your thoughts?

The Halloween module got so many people excited to get their creative juices flowing and knock something cool out in 3 months!

ponders"

Here's my thought about this:

Building a module in NWN2 alone is daunting and too time consuming
I'd say that because of that we can make so much more complex modules than with other earlier tools (not only the Aurora toolset for NWN1) we tend to shot for the stars. It's like when a amateur one-man-band on the street tries to play like a professional 85 man symphony orchestra led by a world famous conductor. Just because we have the tools for it we, alone, try to beat them who has this as a full time job.

Maybe lower ambitions would shorten the development time and produce more (but still very enjoyable) modules. Instead of ten 9.75 rated modules we would have hundred 5.0 rated (which still would be a good fun).

For me who has really taken on a project that's too ambitious for my competence that's a problem. 18 months now and lots of work to do. And I know that it's a niche-module that only will attract a smaller audience. I really want to close this project and start on a smaller one. But give up - no!

Players do not comment and vote i.e. 5000 downloads, 25 comments & votes
Yes, the sparse feedback on the hard work sucks. But do we build just for fame and appreciation or because it's fun and a way to kill some time? Do you all give feedback on everything you download from the Vault? I try to, but still I feel that I don't do it in a way that I myself would like other's to do. I really don't know if this has an impact on me wanting to go on or not.

The toolset is problematic
I would say no. The toolset has it's quirks but it's better than all tools I've seen (and that's a lot). The problem is that you can do so much with that it's easy to get lost in small and insignificant stuff. This is what differ many of us amateur builders from the professionals. We can fiddle with the color of a hill, the angle of a mountain for hours or why not a script for sitting on furnitures in the most perfect way. The professionals focus on their task and leave all the other stuff aside. The player's will not care of the flagstones are overlapping with the grass or not. The care about the game-play. The exception is people like me that can't play a module without thinking about how I could steal ideas or what I could have done better. Crashes, bugs and such are irritating but if one plan, backup, and have patience and lots of good fellow-builders it's not a biggie.

Just my 2 pennies worth, but it doesn't mean that I'm not concerned with lots of veterans and first-timers leaving or taking long to everlasting breaks. I am.

It' may take forever but I'm not quitting...
/A

Turned based combat. Sneak peak.

2008-11-07T17:02:00.003+01:00

I got a little help downloading my workfolder to my laptop yesterday (see earlier post) so I could work a bit on the module while waiting at the airport. My basic script seem to work fine and I can start to implement all the combat text strings needed for each fight and the animations and sound. I also tested my idea on how to get scripted peusdo-control over the Camera Shot Type and it works okay. In this screen shot you can see the PC's attack string in cyan and the trolls response in red. The yellow text is debug info that will be hidden for the player.

If somebody wonders about the debug info in the screenshot:

Chance is the chance to hit the opponent.
CResult is the Combat result (0 is for a complete miss)
Damage is the Damage dealed to the opponent
PCHp is the PC's hit points
HostHP is the hostiles hitpoints

Now it's food time. I need it!

Report from Denmark

2008-11-05T17:44:00.003+01:00

Hi,
as I mentioned earlier I'm in on a conference Copenhagen, Denmark. It's pretty interesting stuff going on in our niche of the IT-business right now. Copenhagen is a nice city even this time of the year. The weather is taken directly from a Sherlock Holmes novel. Above you see the Castle Rosenborg.

I was smart enough to take my heavy but movable laptop with me so I can get my daily Toolset-rush. To forget syncing up it with the latest version of my module wasn't so smart though :) So I've been fiddling with some lesser important stuff that I know won't interfere with the later version. I have to remember to be careful when merging them. Last week I worked some more on my converastion based combat scripts. It works pretty well even if I don't have been able to chose camera mode from the scripts. I start to suspect that it can't be done. I have one possible workaround evolving in the back of my head but it has to wait until I return home.

Take care out there!

Day Zero. Overdue release.

2008-11-01T11:35:00.005+01:00

The frequently visitor already got the message but here's a official announcement - sort of :)

Today is Day Zero - the day the Zork was predicted to be released and... it isn't. The Halloween project stole some time. But it was worth it. My contribution was small and simple but relaxing to build. Work stole a whole lot more time. Big things are happening on that front, both good and bad. It will continue to eat my time for a while. Next week I'm going to Denmark. I'll take my toolset with me now that my laptop can run it. But I suspect that the evenings and nights will be filled with work-related things.

So, the big question. When will this module be released? The answer is: As soon as possible. The release-o-meter to the left of this page will keep on ticking, reminding me of that you never should promise a release date :)

Here's two in-toolset screen shots of the animated trapdoor I've made for the Living Room in the White House and I also used it in *small spoiler* my secret laboratory in the Halloween module. It has a second placeable that is a hatch that can be placed in the roof of the room below the trapdoor. Not much to fuzz about but I'll put them in a pack and upload them to the NWVault if anyone should be interested.

So that's all for today. Now I'll fix me some lunch and then plunge into the scripting of turn-based Combat Conversations.

By the way. It started to snow yesterday night. Dark times are coming...

/Amraphael

It's alive! The NWN2 Halloween 2008 module is up

2008-10-31T11:25:00.005+01:00

It's here. And everyone should know what I mean. Please hurry and download your own personal copy of the NWN2 Community Halloween 2008 module. I can tell you it's awesome. Not because of my little contribution but because it's... *speechless pause* ...just awesome, funny, different, creepy and cool!

In a few weeks 25 developers has build more than 20 unique modules in the spirit of Halloween. That's huge. That's fun. That's the coolest NWN2 event ever! All thanks to BouncyRock Entertainment and their great initiative.

So play and have fun. Don't forget to vote. But most of it all, have a jolly good Halloween!

/Amraphael

Cast of Module-builders

ActorOfVeil
Adam Miller
Anduraga
Amraphael
AmstradHero
Berra
BlackRain Software
Chaos Wielder
DirtyWick
Eat2surf
Eguintir Eligard
Elysius
Enoa4
Gaming Parents Studios
JasonNH
Jclef
Jonny Ree & Liso
MokahTGS & Jaesun
Mooncalf
Raith Veldrin
Shaughn78
Skunkeen
Tiberius209
Vendalus
Wyrin D'njargo

Combat in Zork

2008-10-27T12:54:00.004+01:00

I've made up my mind (again) about the few but important combat situations in this mod. Earlier I've implemented some creature ability scaling to make the encounters suitable for different PC's and different stages of the game. But I have not been fully satisfied with how it worked out. Most of the times it works fine but in a few situations with very weak characters or parties bigger than two PC's everything gets unbalanced and really boring.

Then I remembered: Zork isn't DnD. It's a conversion of an old text based adventure and it's really, really turn-based (for real). So I've discussed with some of the smart guys out there and decided to take on the idea of making the combat based on the original Zork rules and make it turn based, driven from a conversation. This will remove the strange behaviors of standard combat. It gives me the opportunity to play with cut-scenes too. The scripting will be hellish and make the custom tokens run hot but I'm looking forward to see what I can do with it.
And it'll give the nostagicophiles lots of classic lines as:

"You charge, but the thief jumps nimbly aside."
"The thief rams the haft of his blade into your stomach, leaving you out of breath."
"The quickness of your thrust knocks the thief's weapon to the floor, leaving him unarmed"
"Finishing you off, the thief inserts his blade into your heart."

The already slow pace will be a bit slower because of me beta testing the Halloween Module. It's really fantastic that all those developers (and little me in smaller portions) have come up with such huge module in just a few weeks. I had lots of fun last night. Fun to beta-test? My R&D department would never believe me ;)

Thanks for reading, as always!

/A

Beta testing has begun! - Community Halloween Module Project 2008

2008-10-26T19:01:00.002+01:00

762 MB of sheer joy. This will be fun!

Why do the torch lose it's VFX?

2008-10-23T10:50:00.003+02:00

Cross-post from NWN2Forums:

While play-testing my module I've noticed that the standard hand-held torch lose it's flame and light effect. I've found four different situations.

1. It sometimes happen when performing an area transition.
2. It often (maybe always) happen when putting the torch in a container.
3. It always happen when using the CopyItem(object, object, int) function.
4. Sometimes it happens without a noticeable cause. I just run around in an area and when equipping the torch it has lost its vfx.

I've tried my own custom light sources and they behave in the same way so I suspect it has something to do with the handling of VFX's on items.

Now I've implemented a "fix lost vfx"-script in the game that the player can use but that's a really ugly solution.

So, is there any solution? Suggestions on a workaround? Any help greatly appreciated!

[EDIT]
There seems to be no solution to this common (as I have come to understand it) problem. So here's a workaround. Place this in your module's OnPlayerUnequipItemScript. It should take care of refreshing the torches and other hand-held light sources every time the PC un-equips them.

// * This code runs when the item is unequipped 
object oItem = GetPCItemLastUnequipped();
if (GetBaseItemType(oItem) == BASE_ITEM_TORCH) 
{
  CreateItemOnObject(GetResRef(oItem), GetPCItemLastUnequippedBy(), 1, "", FALSE);
  DestroyObject(oItem, 0.1, FALSE);
}

See you later friends!

/A

Upgraded to Patch 1.13

2008-10-21T12:09:00.003+02:00

It worked like a charm. This was the first patch that didn't end up in tears and twisting my ears. I prepared myself well by downloading the current version of all my toolset plugins.
Lots of thanks goes t0 LadyDesire for taking up Tanita's work on recompiling older plugins and to GrinningFool for some really great tools - Especially the Usability Tools Plugi n.
After a total backup of all NWN2 files I emptied my override folder and run the upgrade from 1.12.1295 to 1.13.1407 and finally to 13.1409. It went fine so I started to compare my modifed 2DA's with the possible changed ones in the patch. I recommend this fine tool for comparing files. It's free and called DiffMerge. It makes life much easier. I restored the override folder and did a test run of a random sets of areas in my module. No issues found.

So now I got my toolset preview back, the sound and light spheres are showing the real radius and haks are loaded in the correct order. Life's great!

Take care out there!

Do I dare to upgrade to 1.13?

2008-10-17T11:43:00.002+02:00

...or should I wait for 1.14? That's the question to you all. The 1.12 version gave me some toolset problems. Do 1.13 solve them or will I get lots of new troubles?

If you have any thoughts about it please drop a comment on this post.

Yesterday I played the module from the start. When I reached about 195 score points (of 350) the game got quite difficult. The thief was pestering me as a mad dog and I had not got strong enough (score points) to smack his pale butt. Finally he stole my lamp leaving me to die in the dark. And still I'm happy as a golden canary. It works and feels like the original game. If you gain score points too fast (or in a not so smart way) the game gets harder. If you collect your treasures in a slow way, planning your every move you are probably more lucky in your quest. And for keeping my happiness down on a more balanced level I found a couple of new bugs.

Back in business!

2008-10-15T15:26:00.002+02:00

My back pain has lifted a bit. I don't care what the doctors say. Resting my back for a few days make my pain go away - workout does the opposite!

Okay, end of whining. It took me almost five evenings to find out what made my module behave like it did. Several scripts had been messed up and even if I recompiled them the result was the same. It seems that (I have no way to verify it) moving around my Halloween module scripts to and from the campaign folder made some of my Zork scripts believe that they were campaign scripts. Maybe due to the same name, I don't know. But converting all my scripts to campaign, compile them one by one and convert them back made it all work again. It's strange and I don't want to think about it anymore. I think I would have nightmares then.

Tonight I can get back to doing some real building - I hope.

/A

Back (in two ways)!

2008-10-09T14:11:00.002+02:00

My development environment is now set for continuing the work on Zork. I tried to play it a bit yesterday to refresh my mind of what's left to do. To my big (and not so nice) surprise I found the HearBeat-system for several central things, as the Grue, the Thief and Light/Dark areas and light sources failing. The music doesn't play, several sound sources are gone and the walkmesh is screwed up in multiple areas. Why? I don't know and yesterday was too upset and tired to do a deeper research.
Still, I'm back! Now over to another back.
My broken discs are hurting as hell after a too long car trip last Saturday. It'll disable me from any longer toolset sessions for a week or two. Yes I know I can stand on my knees ;). That leads me to next obvious conclusion: Release within 25 days - fat chance! I'll keep the release date counter on so I can feel some pressure though.

Have a nice day!
/A

Done!

2008-10-02T08:11:00.005+02:00

It was with some hesitation I submitted my Halloween module to Bouncy Rock yesterday night. Is it really done? Can I fiddle some more with that crate on the shelf? Are the animations playing well? How will my cross-module items work? Do I have lots of spelling errors left?

Well, it was not as bad as I thought. Jclef of BR did a run-through without any big issues. It'll be great fun to get the complete campaign back for testing so that I can see what all those talents have been up to. This is a really big project done in just a few months.

But until then I'll take a short break going on a business trip to Denmark. I'll also spend a few nights building on my new home office, something that I've totally neglected in favor for the toolset. I think I started that home project in April :)

But today I'll restore my development environment for building Zork and try to remember where I should start.

Thanks for reading
/A

Oh, almost forgot. Here's a little screen shot from my Halloween module. Please don't tell anyone...

Too few posts lately

2008-09-26T08:52:00.003+02:00

Hello friends!

I just want to tell you that Zork is still in progress, even if very slow. The lack of posts I all about CMHP. My small contribution is... small, so I don't want to reveal too much to you spoiling the whole (small) thing.

As anyone can guess this lovely project has taken some time away from working with Zork and the release date will be pushed forward. I can't tell by how much yet. What I can tell is that it will include a few custom placeables of which one is an animated placeable trapdoor (I'm surprised that there isn't one included in the game). I know it's not so special, but it's a very usefull placeable,
I've incorperated some battle action into my area too, even if I didn't really had the time to do it. It's balanced for a level 5 character and can be skipped for any non-action interested player.

So by the end of this week (hopefully) I've promised to pack it together and hand it over. There's a few animations that doesn't work correct but I might let it go if I don't find a way to solve thed problem.

Some conclusions...
I'm not made for building a large standard DnD-like module. I'm too pecky about the details. While playing MotB I've been noticing (whole the time) how the developers have been cutting corners to get things working fast. Stereotypic interiors, NPCs that don't behave correct when interacted with. Illogical conversation alternatives and so on. I'm not about to tell you that's bad. In fact I like MotB very much and it's okay to simplify things to get them work good enough. But I'm not like that. I would love to be, but I'm not. My strenght lies in the details, the scripting and in having visons. When it comes to keeping a deadline or conversations and not to forget. Combat balancing I'm worthless :) I suppose I could learn some of it but I would be too detail focused to let an encounter not be as treathfull to a rouge as a barbarian (in different ways of course).

That is what the Halloween Project has learned me :) But it was sooo fun! What does this mean to Amraphael and module creating?

I'll release Zork as soon as possible.
I'll stick to Neverwinter Nights 2 as a player
I'll have a pause. Writing a childrens book that has to be written.
I'll release my bands best of 20-years album
I'll release my bands next album and singles (we'll screw our record company this time and release it for free at all legal and non-legal sources. Heck, we'll even pay for it)
I'll get back to the Toolset buildning a module that fits my skills.
Helping other builders is fun and I try to do it more often.

Thanks for reading, as always!
/Amraphael

[EDIT: Wow, look at my English! It really shows that I'm unfocused and sleepy]

Look at my house, look at my house!

2008-09-16T17:22:00.004+02:00

What can I say? Jclef of Bouncy Rock Entertainment made this for my area in the Community Module Halloween Project, and I love it!!! Check out the site for more cool screen shots of the neighborhood . Wyrins house is up too and it's as pretty looking as mine.

Thanks Jclef!

Nearly there.

2008-09-15T19:16:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I did some of the last scripting on the Halloween side project. Now I have to get the proofreading done. As the regular reader knows that's my big inferiority complex. I think I've got something for everyone. Riddles, hidden rooms, stories, danger and Jack O' Lanterns.

Halloween is pretty small in Sweden. Mostly a thing for the supermarkets to force on stressed up parents. Instead we have the Easter Hags or Easter witches that haunts the houses every easter. The kids dress themselves as the witch, often with a broomstick and an old coffee pan and begs for candy at the door. Often they bring presents in the form of badly draw paintings or rock hard cookies they have made. (That's why child labor is forbidden in Sweden. The quality is so bad *evil laugh*) At least the doesn't sing :) When I was a kid it was the funniest festival of the year after Christmas.

Easter Witches now and then. Not as evil-looking as the Halloweeners.
Well, the 1958 version is somewhat evil-looking :)

So while the older people (older than me - much older) say that Halloween will kill our traditional events I think it's great. Halloween at the autumn, Easter Hags at the spring, the Water Sprite at Midsummer and of course a bearded man at Christmas. I have no idea what they have in other parts of the world, but bring it on. The more things to celebrate and get together around, the better. Personally I'd like a day where the younglings ring on my door bringing booze for 40+ men with beard and Kojak-hairdo. Well, beer will be ok too. Can't afford to be finicky those days.

Soon I'm back to Zork!
/A

Sneak peek!

2008-09-09T16:27:00.003+02:00

I know, I know. I said there would be no screen shots, but I little one can't hurt :)
I had a major crash last night and I nearly gave up and started to write a mail to the guys at Bouncy Rock. Then I picked my self up and started almost from scratch.

Halloween Community Project report

2008-09-05T08:25:00.003+02:00

I don't really understand where the time goes. I go to work, I come home. Eat, watch the news, work on my part of the Halloween module. Then I sleep and goto work again. I don't want to tell you too much about it. No screen shoots and no details but so much can I tell:

My house is a small, two story one where Amraphael and his wife lives (yes my wife got to write a part as she's so kind helping me with the Zork-module testing and such). The conversations are pretty small too. About 2000 words. The player can chose between a few, hopefully entertaining, interactions with the NPCs. It's the classics that I'm found of; Stories, Riddles, and Dilemas. The player may receive some item(s) that will be usefull in more combat oriented environments. Putting it like that it sounds like it would take ten minutes to build :) Then it's the area design. I have put very much time into those few tiles and I now it feels like a place where I would like to live. There's a lot of things to do like verifying all the conversation threads with all conditionals checking if the player have done this or that. Much can go wrong when nesting links. Then all the animations are left to do. I feels pretty important to get them right as I use classic NWN dialogue mode (I don't really like the cinema ones as the reminds me of Knights of the Old Republic) where idle NPCs and PCs is okay when the camera looks another way.

What happens to Zork now? Not much before October 10, as my intention is to make the deadline. Then I'm off on a business trip to South Africa (probably) for about 10 days. This would mean that the release date will be pushed forward.

Have fun - I will!
/A

So little time...

2008-09-03T07:33:00.002+02:00

Some short notes:
- No, I'm still alive.
- Real life and the autumn rain consume my resources as the were happy alphabet crackers.
- The Neverwinter Nights 2 Halloween collaboration project takes up more time than I thought it would. It's very fun to work on but I think I have to shrink it down a bit more. From small to extra small :)
- No work done on Zork for 9 days.
- The real life project of reconstructing my home office stands still. The new wooden inner-ceiling is in place and all the wiring is done but that's about all.

Have a nice day!

Dark ages joke

2008-08-28T20:20:00.002+02:00

"I told you. There was no need for a urine sample. You're quite dead and that's a thing that's hard to cure."

NWN2 Bouncy Rock Halloween Modding 2008

2008-08-25T14:22:00.004+02:00

Okay, I know there's less than seventy days left until the predicted release of Zork, but I couldn't resist joining up with this great project. Lots of great module makers (and the not so great me, myself) will come together in a collaborative Halloween project. I promise you this will be a great and fun experience for players as well as the builders.

So far the following builders is on the boat: [EDIT Sept -09]
- BouncyRock Entertainment
- Wyrin D'njargo
- Eguintir Eligard
- JasonNH
- Gaming Parents Studios
- Pipboy3000 (Adam Miller)
- ArrakisDune
- Skunkeen
- Shaughn78
- Eat2surf (Dave from NWNP)
- Raith Veldrin
- DirtyWick
- MokahTGS
- Frank Perez
- Zachary Holbrook aka (Maerduin)
- Phoenixus
- Ernie Noa (Enoa4)
- Wylonus
- BlackRain Software
- mooncalf
- Chaos Wielder
- slowdive_fan
- Jolly Jenkins
- Kinthalis ThornBlade
- Ayrin
- AmstradHero
- Russ Davis (Tiberius209)
- ActorOfVeil
- vendalus
- And me, Amraphael

My contribution will be one of the smaller as I'm keen to try hitting the Zork release date as close as possible and work will take many of my evenings and weekends the next few months. I haven quite come up with the microplot yet but I've started to build an indoor area to get some creepy, Halloween inspiration from.

If you want to know more about the project you can follow the discussion here: http://forum.bouncyrock.com/viewforum.php?f=27

Even more load screens

2008-08-20T21:11:00.001+02:00

While re-designing my forest areas (changing the tress, grass types and converting loads of placeables to environmental objects), I take some new screen shots for the custom load screens that will be used. Going over those areas for the third time is pretty fun but time consuming and it's time I don't really have for the moment. But I'll try to make one area per evening and guess that I'm finished with it at Monday or Tuesday.

Please upload your Day and Night cycle settings!

2008-08-19T09:53:00.004+02:00

Almost every builder seem to think that finding the best settings for the DayNight cycle is a pain and that everybody elses are better. So I suggested adding a new category - Day Night Cycle in the Prefab Areas to the helpful guys at Neverwinter Nights 2 Vault. And they bought it :) So start sharing all your settings. The more we have to chose from, the prettier modules to play.

Upload them here: http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/submit_processor.php?clusters=nwn2prefabareas and select category "Day Night Settings".

Have a nice day - I will.
/A

Fraser Fir Clusters; curse them all!

2008-08-18T08:03:00.003+02:00

I have written about my forest areas performance problems by nighttime a couple of times. I've cut the forest into 7 smaller areas. I have removed all possible placeables and cut them out with the walkmesh cutter triggers. Then I've cursed, tried change the length of the night and cursed again. I've reduced the amount of threes to 40 per area. No luck! The games stutters at nighttime. I have even increased the memory in my computer to 3GB.

In a hysterical, wild and uncontrolled notion I did a batch replacement of all "FraserFirC" (they are nice an volumious) with a mix of "WestRedCedar (X1)" and "Scotch Pine - Cluster". To my surprice everything runs as smooth as anyone would ask for. The forest get a whole different mood to it but I'm not the one to complain. My wife says it look better. The sad thing is that it's 6 forest areas left to do it in. Lots of recoloring and adjusting textures for. But I'm a happy guy today! :)

Note: I should have suspected those fraser firs as I found out that the can be insanely performance craving when trying to help Wyrin with a strange crash in his DA2-module.

Thanks for reading, as always!
/A

Dusk, Dawn, Arrgh!

2008-08-16T09:37:00.005+02:00

One whole day in the trash bin! Now I've learned the hard way that the Module Properties setting "Dawn Hour" and "Dusk Hour" don't affect the DayNight cycle. A short background to get interested people into the function

Every AModule has a Time property where you can set:

Dusk Hour - the time when the transition from night to day begins
Dawn Hour - the time when the transition from day to night begins
Minutes per Game Hour - how many real time minutes one game hour takes
Start Day - the start day
Start Hour - the start time
Start Month - the start month
Start Year - the start year

Every Area has seven DayNight cycle settings where plenty of lighting a nenvironmental parameters can be adjusted.

Sunrise
Daytime
Sunset
Moonrise
Nighttime
Moonset
Transition
(Default - This one is not a part of the DayNight cycle and is used when an area has Day/Night cycle disabled.)

The problem I've been fighting is that I wanted the night to be shorter, as in the summer. So the natural way would be to set Dawn to 4 AM and dusk to 11PM. But no, after trying everything including suspecting my module to be corrupt I found:

The Dusk and Dawn settings only affect functions called from scripts, as GetIsDawn() and GetIsDusk(), some conversation tags, and the Area sound setting Ambient Sound Daytime and Ambient Sound Nighttime.

That's it, now I've to try changing the different DayNight cycles to fake a longer day by replacing the moonrise with sunset and night with moonrise and so on. I'm pretty tired of this and really need a better editor for the settings. Matbe I would write one. "NO, concentrate on the module!" *hitting myself with a mouse with low battery*

Here's a few of the new load screens. They are pretty dark, but when used in the game against a black background they look OK. The black top left corner will be used for some descriptive text in white.

The Cellar Area

The Coal Mine Area

Inside the White House Area

The Treasure Room Area

The joy of converting Placeables to Environmental Objects

2008-08-13T19:30:00.004+02:00

I doesn't take much to make me happy :) Everyone knows that when an area is full of placeables the walkmesh can get messed up and that too many of them can make the area more performance intensive. Today I played around with my 14x15 Coal Mine area, converting every placeable that could be converted to a enviromental object. The area size on disk was reduced by 12%! It may not seem that much when a indoor area is about 4 MB, but it does really affect the overall size of a whole module.

[FILE] [BEFORE] [AFTER]
ARE     253kb    253kb
GIC      55kb     55kb    
GIT   1,292kb  1,181kb <<  
TRN     926kb    926kb
TRX   1,374kb  1,254kb <<

Lemon curd

2008-08-11T16:55:00.006+02:00

Yes, it's like swimming in lemon curd - it takes me forward, but very slowly (and not as tasty). After my little side quest with the prefab area and the tutorial, I spent most of last night hunting down issues on my still growing list. Of the total 319 issues I've found since starting the tests long ago, there's only 51 left . It seems like a lot of them, but many is just like "ISSUE 316: MUS: Fix some scary music in the start area, when you enter the garden" or "ISSUE 090: VFX: Bird VFX at Forest Path is so ugly. Fix it!" and I have only a few ones that worries me.

The next mission will be to replace all animations in my conversations to be triggered by action-scripts. It was stupid of me not to do it in the first place as it's much more easy to replace for example the manipulate low animations timing by changing one script than going through all the conversation lines it may have been used in. After that I'm back to optimizing the forest areas which still are too performance heavy by night. I also might split my Maze, Coal Mine and Round Room areas. They are also pretty heavy. I just can't decicde. Is it better with fewer larger areas that are slow to load or a couple more but faster loading.

I also made a couple of needed placeable models. Nothing to complicated. A machine for the Machine Room, a placeable wooden crawlway to place on the floow/ceiling where a ladder goes up/down and some iron pipes for the Maintenance Room. I throw in a couple of in game screen shots for you to look at.

The summer in Sweden is going toward it's end. It's both nice and sad. I love the autumn escpecially when it's a dry and cold one. And I had my longest vacation since I was a little snotling. Next week it's back to work, and I'm not too excited about the idea :)

Thanks for reading
/A

In one corner there is a machine which is reminiscent of a clothes dryer.

Examine a coal gas pipe with while holding a candle. Intelligence -3

Strange view, but there is a hole in the ceiling.

Tutorial and Prefab Area at NWN2 Vault

2008-08-08T09:03:00.003+02:00

The prefab area Acorncroft: A ring-walled fort and the related tutorial Amraphael's "Let's build us a little fort"-tutorial are uploaded and published on Neverwinter Nights 2 Vault.

"Let's build us a little fort"-tutorial

2008-08-06T13:52:00.008+02:00

Hello, think I've been away for awhile? Yes, I needed a little break and made a PreFab area for a friends DM-ed campaign and while doing so I made a small tutorial. It may not be the best one out there because I only documented the process so he (and maybe others) can get a hint about area design. As everyone already knows - I'm a CEO, not an expert.

It's a small fort, inspired by an iron age - medieval circular village on the cold and dry flatland that I visited last summer. It's complete with animals and sounds and a pretty foggy DayNight cycle. Just place down the NPC's, heroes and start telling the story.

The PreFab will be available at the NWVault in a few days and the tutorial too. Meanwhile you can take a sneak preview of it here:

http://www.kliche.se/download/AMRAPHAEL'S “LET'S BUILD US A LITTLE FORT”-TUTORIAL.pdf

Oh, yes. Here's a fat bunch of screen shots for all the screenie junkies. Enjoy! Next week I'm back to Zork.

Thanks for reading

/Amraphael

Thou Shalt Backup Thy Module!

2008-07-29T19:43:00.005+02:00

Thought I would share this simple bat-script with you fellow module builders. It's great to have it on the desktop so that I can backup my module directory fast and easy. The date format is Swedish but you can easily shuffle around the %yy%, %mm% and %dd% to fit your own needs. Just configure the SourceFolder and DestinationFolder and save. Even though you could use it on the entire modules folder I would recommend to use it with directory mode and you working folder.

@echo off
rem ** Backup script for NWN2 Directory Mode Modules **
rem ** The usual disclaimer applies - If you use it, it's your own fault **

rem ** Configuration **
set SourceFolder=C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Neverwinter Nights 2\modules\My Module
set DestinationFolder=C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Neverwinter Nights 2\modules\Backup MyModule
My Module
rem **               **

for /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/ " %%g in ('date /t') do (
set mm=%%g
set dd=%%h
set yy=%%i
)

for /f "tokens=1-2 delims=: " %%j in ('time /t') do (
set hh=%%j
set mn=%%k

)
if exist "%DestinationFolder%\%yy%-%mm%-%dd%-%hh%%mn%" (
rd /S /Q "%DestinationFolder%\%yy%-%mm%-%dd%-%hh%%mn%"
)

xcopy "%SourceFolder%" "%DestinationFolder%\%yy%-%mm%-%dd%-%hh%%mn%" /s /i

Gone fishing...

2008-07-25T13:58:00.002+02:00

Combat balancing

2008-07-21T10:43:00.003+02:00

Due to the fact this module is a puzzle module there is very little monster slashing in it. There are a few encounters though and I wanted to make them as challenging as in the original game. Therefore I started to balance them for 1-4 players of any level. And here I am, one week later. Tired and angry and that's why there has been few updates this week. The original games combat was based on a combination of luck and game score and I thought it would be easy to implement. I was so wrong. The d20 system in NWN give so many combinations of AC, HP and AttackBonuses that making a module that will behave equal independent of how many players and their statistics that it's silly. I will have to rethink my scaling system or maybe force level 1 players of the fighter class. It doesnt really matter what class you have as in this puzzle game the character is only a pretty avatar.

Now I'll do something completly different - start to put the ceiling back in my to be home office. I want my room back now!!! *fetching the hammer and nails of nailing+2*

Here's one screen shot from our latest multiplayer test. I think it's pretty cool, even if the screen shot is low resolution.

Thanks for reading
/A

Day off

2008-07-17T13:02:00.005+02:00

Yesterday I took a day off with my wife for a day trip with boat to the island of Björkö (Birch Island) and Birka. It's believed that during the middle of the 8th century it was earliest urban settlements in Scandinavia, Birka was the Baltic link in the river and portage route to the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Califate. Birka was also important as the site of the first known Christian congregation in Sweden, founded in 831 by Saint Ansgar. Based on the coin finds, the city seems to have silenced around 960. And no, no, no! The Vikings did *not* have helmets with horns. Blame Richard Wagner or some other 19th century guy for that!

We had luck with the weather and besides eating sandwiches and drinking coffe I was most interested in the re-creation of a small village. Of course it made me think of the toolset, texturing and placing of objects :)

Scary moments. Updating from 1.10 to 1.12

2008-07-13T17:40:00.007+02:00

For quite some time I've stayed at 1.10.1116 English, but today I have decided to take the leap up to 1.12.1295 English, mainly because I need to run Grinning Fools Creature Plug . It's scary...

[Edit]
Upgrade done, without errors.

[Edit 1]
The toolset seems to load fine except for all my plugins that are for the older version. I will download newer versions from the vault then start to fix the .2da's so there's no collisions. It's still scary.

[Edit 2]
After editing thirteen .2da's with sweaty fingers I'm up and running. The toolset load the module and the game loads it too. No strange stuff yet, except that everything seem to run smother. But it might me just me going into post traumatic stress. Enough fun now, back to work!

Screen shots

2008-07-10T11:12:00.005+02:00

Not much news today. I've been reading through the original InvisiClue-book (hint book) and the original ZIL-code to see if I missed something, except the things I've decided to exclude. It seems that I've got the most things right but one great miss.

Well, misunderstanding I would call it as I never reflected on in when playing the original text implementation. There was this reservoir area in the game and as it's underground you need a lamp to see anything. From the reservoir you could go to the top of the great dam and you didn't need the lamp anymore as the area was bright. I thought it was because the reservoir was inside the mountain and the dam itself on the outside. The the river leading away from the dam had to be outdoors. But no, the river is inside the mountain and why the sun shines in the dam are in the original game is beyond my understanding. Maybe it's lighten by some magical means or maybe the area is more like a control room for the dam than the dam itself.
Anyway, I don't going to ditch my nice dam and river area just because of this. I didn't recognize the problem 25 years ago and now this will be my artistic interpretation :) I solve the inconsistence in another way.

Now to the screens shots. I don't know if I posted any of them before.

Release date

2008-07-07T13:53:00.005+02:00

No one has commented on that yet, maybe it's because the visitor rate on this blog has dropped like a iron golem on a unicycle. It's expected because it's been more that a year now since I announced this module, and I've been pretty silent on the NWN2Forums. I never planned that it would take so long time. My first secret release date was November 1 2007, then I made a half public announcement about this spring. Now my realistic idea of a date is November 1, 2008 and there's a pretty green/white count down box in the top of the right panel.

The module is about 90% finished now. It's still very many small things left to do and then it's the never ending play tests. The last one was very successful and was the 68th in the long row. Now I'm trying to fix-up some uglies, tuning the areas. It's going fine at the moment and I have finished my cursed rubber boat cutscene.

But still, it's summer. I want to enjoy those short moments of sun. In Sweden we use to say "The Swedish summer is the most beautiful day of the year." Work has been hellish and it's hard to flush it out of the head and turn into that creative mod building mood. Then I want to wait for NWN2 XP2 - Storm of Zehir to see what it brings (it may be out by then). I don't think I'll make it mandatory for playing but it may affect my custom content (as the 1.13 patch).

As always, thanks for reading
/A

Brave Noob World

2008-07-04T21:33:00.006+02:00

Don't know what you think, but I found this both funny and interesting. Which was just what I needed after a pretty rough and evil-packed week at work, which can be described with the following quote: "I dream of the day when I will learn to stop asking questions for which I will regret learning the answers." followed by "Your approval fills me with shame."

Cutscenes

2008-07-01T08:32:00.003+02:00

Just a small note...

Making a invisible creature with a boat VFX attached to it travel some distance along the Frigid River isn't difficult.

Making a cutscene that allows the PC to travel across areas, interacting with the boat via conversations where you can land the boat and disembark at different landing sites along the shore and being able to deflate/inflate and launch the boat at the same shores - That's difficult (for me that is).

Yesterday night I could travel the first portion of the river and chose between continue down the river or land at the eastern shore, deflate and pick up the rubber boat, go back inflate it and embark. The cameras are placed and now it's just 80% left to do on this RiverTravel-thing :) Tomorrow I'll look into some helpful stuff Wyrin and E.C.Patterson mentioned. Ahoy!!

Maybe I'm stupid...

2008-06-28T10:21:00.006+02:00

... but yesterday I realized the I can do conditional loops in conversations. I don't know why I missed it but it doesn't matter now. Okay, I did know how to make conditionals and conversation links, I'm not completely stupid :) What I needed it for is that damn boat travel that disturbs me by looking old school NWN1. I want the CutScene camera to track the boat down the river until the boat reaches a specific way point where the player can interact via the conversation that started the travel. The problem was that it's pretty difficult to calculate how long time it takes to travel between the way points so the conversation starts unpredictably and often very wrong.

This example convo shows an example loop (for everyone as stupid as me) that loops until the counter variable = 4. In my boat travel conversation this would be a variable set when reaching a specific waypoint or tripping a trigger. You can probable do it smarter (if so tell me, please).

Back to the toolset to start to implement it into the module. It won't be easy and I'm a bit nervous that messing with the existing scripts and conversations may give me real problems for a few days.

/A

[EDIT]
Yes, I'm stupid. This thing works but isn't the best way to do it. I'll ditch this baby immediately.

Celebration day. 90 days without crashes!

2008-06-26T07:53:00.002+02:00

When purging my backups i realized that yesterday it was 90 days since the last toolset crash. I know I may upset the Eight Gods of System Crashes by saying so and that I probably will regret it soon. During this period of peace I have done 1 542 saves without a toolset crash! That's about 462 Terrabytes written down to disk.

I believe this is why it has worked so fine for me:

I'm using Directory Mode so the toolset don't have to pack/un-pack a huge .mod-file during every save.
I'm not using HAK-packs during development. Every file resides in the override folder until the game is finished.
When working with the toolset. I kill my Antivirus and deactivate my Internet connection. If I need Internet access I use Terminal Server Client to a computer with the connection.
Only two programs are allowed to be started simultaneously. The NWN2Toolset and the NWN2Main, no mail, no paint, no notepad, nothing. I even stop some of the memory intensives WinXP services that usually run via a script.
I have an egg cooking timer that beeps every two hours. Then I save and exit both the toolset and the client to get rid of memory leaks. If I see that WinXP don't get it back I sometimes restart the whole OS.

You may thing this routine is complicated. Well, I'm pretty used to it now and it's a LOT LESS WORK THAN REPAIRING and REBUILDING a crashed module.

Now I'm off to work and I'll buy myself some nice cake to celebrate this joyful event :)

Have a nice day everybody, and thanks for reading, as always.
/Amraphael

Long time no post

2008-06-22T16:28:00.005+02:00

It would seem that I only sits home complaining about our shrinking privacy sphere here in Sweden. Nothing could be more wrong. Sure I've joined the underground freedom movement :) but most of the time I've been working on the module. My wife and I are play-testing as maniacs. And faster than she finds bugs I fix them. My issue report system crashed last week and it took a while to re-construct the database by playing and finding the problems a second time.
I think I've mentioned the problem with torches and other hand-held light sources that when they have been in a container don't have any light or visual effect anymore. This is a problem with the original game too. This is my conclusion on the topic.

PC's can only have one light source at the time. The different levels of dark vision is the base of this priority system.
Because of the only one light per PC, torches for example have their own light effect attached to them as an item appearance effect.
When using the CopyItem fuction this effect is not copied and the item don't have the light, flame or whatever effect is attached to it.

That sucks because there's a lot of copying in the game. So I have struggled with making my own copy item function that checks if the item is a light source before copying it. If it find a light source it does a CreateItemOnObject instead. Not to hard to make when I found out why those damn things went black. The hard thing was to find out all scripts where I needed to replace the function.

My Thursday night issue list was 244 entries long (strange how it keeps growing) but this morning it's down to 75. The great thing now is that the fun-to-have and it-would-be-nice entries are the most common ones.

You know I like bullet lists so heres some of the categorized issues:

10 Area Issues, mainly black squares due to bad light placing and some walkmesh problems
3 Creature related bugs
8 Dialouge problems. Missing links and such
2 Door bugs (I'm sure there must be more of them)
3 Icons are missing
10 Models has to be fixed in 3dsMax
4 Bugged usable placeables
3 Script bugs. Long live the module verify.
6 Sound Issues. Most of them are wrong sound level and strange stereo image
3 Visual Effects are messed up.

I have also started to flesh out some of the conversations. I'm playing Zork I in a DOS-box close to the toolset and are cursing the DOS cut and paste. I'll shout out for a proofreader soon so if you are interested, drop me a line and I might send you a couple of text files to read trough. The text are quite stiff and I sometimes want to make it more literary but I'm afraid it will be a too large step from the original.

As I have been bug chasing there's not any new screen shots so i throw in these in-toolset shot from one of the more hot underground areas.

No more time for writing. I'm a toolset slave, and my wife is reaching for the whip. Khatash!!!

/Amraphael

=======================================

It was great to see that several of my favorite module makers won the Golden Dragon Awards.
Here's the complete list:

Best PnP Conversion Module:
Tomoachan by Enoa4
Enoa4 has added a great deal of polish to the original PnP classic; with a strengthened backstory, excellent area design and smart use of custom content. Whether you have played the original or not, Tomoachan offers an excellent gameplay experience.

Best Roleplaying Module:
Dark Avenger by Wyrin
Dark Avenger takes the 2007 Golden Dragon award for Best Roleplay module, because roleplaying is really central to the concept behind this superb module. You play the story character, but you define your role, your character and your background, and this impacts the world around you.

Debut Author Award:
Zach Holbrook
Zach Holbrook (aka Maerduin) produced one of the defining modules of 2007 with Harp & Chrysanthemum. His attention to detail; from landscapes to music, character writing to story, makes him this year’s Debut Award winner.

Community Contribution Award:
Grinning Fool
From beta testing until today, Grinning Fool has continued to support the community and NWN2 tirelessly. He has worked as a Community Rep on the toolset, answering questions and gathering up bugs on behalf of the community and making sure they reach the ears and eyes of Obsidian Entertainment. He’s also enhanced and added to the toolset’s features through a number of very useful plugins.

Veteran Author Award:
Adam Miller
Adam Miller wins the Veteran Author Golden Dragon Award for his consistenly top quality modules, produced across both NWN and NWN2. With the Dark Waters campaign, he continues to innovate and stretch the engine to the very limits.

Best Multiplayer Module:
Tomb of Horrors revisited by BM Productions
Tomb of Horrors is a devilishly difficult module based on the old PnP classic that really comes into its own in multiplayer mode, where strong thinking and team play will see you succeed… or fall.

Best Action Module:
Moonshadows Chapter 1 by Alex Hugon
Hugie’s Moonshadows is a blend of high action and gorgeous landscapes, set in the Forgotten Realms. With excellent polish, and varying difficulty, it offers an exciting journey for all players.

Best Adventure Module:
Dark Waters Chapter 1 by Adam Miller
Dark Waters sets a compelling mood, tells an interesting story set in a world with a well-developed history, includes extremely well-developed companions with richly drawn personalities, and exhibits extraordinary attention to detail.

Most Re-playable Module:
Pool of Radiance Remastered by Markus ‘Wayne’ Schlegel
This remake of the SSI classic captures the Most Replayable Golden Dragon Award. A strong story is enhanced with a plethora of choice on gear, companions and class options, and topped off with a variety of combat situations.

Best Sound/Music:
New Music Tracks for Harp & Chrysanthemum by Zach Holbrook
This year’s Best Sound/Music Golden Dragon Award goes to the new music tracks produced for Harp & Chrysanthemum, by Zach Holbrook. They combine interesting use of voice and backing with an excellent fit to the module itself.

Best Tileset:
RWS Deep Halls by RWS
The Best Tileset Golden Dragon Award goes to Robinson Workshop’s Deep Halls tileset, a new and deeply atmospheric interior for Neverwinter Nights 2.

Best Custom Content:
Sorceress Ashura VFX Pack
This VFX pack includes an astonishing array of weird, practical and beautiful visual effects: from ship wakes to the sparkles on a pile of treasure. The sheer depth and wonder of this pack makes it this year’s Custom Content Golden Dragon award winner.

End of freedom?

2008-06-17T19:32:00.006+02:00

[EDIT]

What can I say. I didn't believe that criticizing anything public in Sweden could make any difference, but as you see, my post is gone. It took me completely by surprise. Of course I believed someone could be p***ed off by it but when it spills over on the ones you love even I get soft. So I removed it and are replacing it with a link to a external site with information. No, no! No one put a gun to my head saying "remove it or I kill you", but if this law becomes reality someone evil in a far future has a great tool for doing so.

http://www.radsoft.net/news/20080608,00.shtml

Good news though (for the moment). In the parliament 157 voted yes and 155 no so the law is delayed and sent back to the defense comity for some polishing.

[edit]
Well, well... They did it. With a few meaningless adjustments the law went through. Now everyone are shouting about how it could happen and how it violates several UN agreements and people are going to the police making complaints over how the government are breaking the law and constitution. They should have been listening more carefully last year when this first came up.

A thiefs life

2008-06-09T10:37:00.006+02:00

No multiplayer test run yesterday, so nothing new on that topic. But to have something to write about I thought I could reveal a little about more about the Thief and the scripting behind him.

The Thief is a NPC with a little more complicated action pattern than your usual wandering commoner. Here's his daily routine:

Check the Party's GameScore and subtract it from the maximum GameScore
If the result is less than 10, it's a 10% chance that the Thief surprisingly appears just behind the back of a random PC
If the result is bigger the 10 he shows up in one of 45 selected rooms. If there's a door nearby he comes out of it, if not he makes a dramatic appearance from some dark corner.
When finally in place he decides to take some action. If he sees a PC he
a) Rob him/her of one inventory item and rushes away to leave through the nearest door
b) He picks up whatever item that lays around on the floor and leave the room
c) He steals the PC's light source (he's a sneaky guy) and leaves the PC in the dark :)
d) He just hangs around for a while waiting for the PC to interact with him or just leave him to himself
If the Thief shows up at an empty location with no PC around he picks up whatever item that lays around on the floor and leave the room
Then it just to start over hoping the PC has gained some more GamePoints so he can sneak up behind him/her more often.

Don't seem to hard does it? Well, at least for me it took a lot of complicated scripting to make sure that it will work in all the situations. Some of the recently solved problems:

The thief never jumps. He is spawned and destroyed for every move. To ensure he never gets stuck. This of course have some implications on handling the thief's death. How to handle the things he steal (so I don't destroy them) and not spawning more that one thief at a time.
I have a queue system to handle the synchronizations between the module HeartBeat and the thief's actions and a lot of functions like ThiefLeave(), ThiefRobPC(object oObject), ThiefSpawn(location lLocation) and ThiefRobRoom() the the queue system calls.
One of the most difficult things to fix was selecting a true random PC to sneak up on. I had to keep track on if the PC is in an area where the thief can go. Then see if the PC had a chance to sneak out from this area before the spawning of the Thief and activation of his actions could happen.
One function I thought was fun to implement was the different appearances the Thief can take. I have total 5 different looks and names of him that are used. I may come up with some more.
The Thief isn't hostile by default (hey, why should he? If you're not alive there's no-one to rob to get food for the day.) so the famous sword doesn't glow with it's faint bluish glow. So I had to make some adjustments to make the sword glow anyway.

Well, that's a small primer on the Thief. I hope it not destroys the game play for anyone.

[edit]
Here's a really nice and very rare poster for the Zork User Group by David Ardito . You can see the Thief in the right-down corner. Enjoy!

Have a nice day!

/Amraphael

Map making

2008-06-05T20:13:00.005+02:00

More bugfixing today and a completed (cross my fingers) Death & Re-spawn script. Yes you can die in this game :) But you have three chances or lives as they called them back in the great days. Quoting the original manual:

What happens when you die in ZORK I?

You may appear in the forest with your belongings scattered (valuables below ground, non-valuables above).

ZORK I is as fair as baseball. Three strikes and you're out.

Then I returned to fix one of the maps that will help the players to find their way through the underground. Here's one map of the southern parts of the caves that is almost finished and inspired by the early-orginal maps.

What comes after Zork I?

2008-06-04T15:30:00.003+02:00

Ernie Noa said:
Now you need to admit the idea for your next project is lurking in the back of your mind somewhere. Enchanter anyone?"
The natural answer could be Zork II. But no - or more accurate Hell NO! If this module have been hard to interpret from the original Zork II and III would be nightmares. And Enchanter even worse. I have already hinted about my next project even if it won't be a NWN2 project.

I''ll write an adventure book for younglings (6-7 years). It'll be a book the kids love but their parents won't :) I have a pretty clear memory of what I liked in that age and it'll be about adventurous quests, good and bad, strange places and a brave, cute royal worm.

Okay, what will I do then? My band will release an anniversary album since it's over twenty years since our first release. We're arguing with our record company about releasing the unrelased material free for download. I'm pretty sure the guys in suites will have solve it. So prepare to download all of you out there. Stereophonic Electro Pop for the crowd!

But, what will I do after that? Hmm, there's that game, NWN2, that you can build your own modules with, maybe I should build something...

Of course I'll make a new mod! I've been thinking of a classic "steal the treasure"-module. Sort of a Forgotten Realms Oceans Eleven if you know what I mean. Play it cool, like the rouge or ugly, like the fighter.

Or if I find someone with a promising idea to team up with I may go with that instead. But it's a long way to go and I don't want to lose myself in making notes, drawing maps and doing research instead of finishing Zork.

So now you know :)

42 down, 82 to go...

2008-06-03T21:06:00.005+02:00

I have been hunting down some bugs this afternoon. I solved all of those found at our multiplayer session and a bunch the others. Many of them was area related such as faulty walkmeshes and missing doors. Then I focused on the script bugs because they were easiest at the moment. I've decided to leave all models, conversation TGAs and icons as is to the end of the project to stay focused on making everything work smooth. It couldn't keep me from making a new cave wall and ceiling texture of course :) I got bored on the earthy, clay-like texture and wanted mossy rock instead. I'm pretty satisfied with the look of it. See by yourself here in this before and after images:

Another screen shot from our multiplayer test. We are looking at a painting of the dire Christmas Monster...

Thanks for reading!

/Amraphael

Multiplayer test

2008-06-01T21:27:00.007+02:00

Todays MP test run, went much better the one last Sunday. We could play for 1 ½ hour before our light sources burned out and we were Grue-food. Obvious I need to put bigger batteries in the lantern. A few bugs that makes me concerned is one where dropping an item to the ground makes it disappear. I can't see what I could make wrong and it only happened once. Another is that effects that are removed from the PC shows up again after an area transition. Very strange. Lots of issues we found are related to broadcasting messages to party or not and some other smaller MP screw-ups. I've also messed too much with a couple of areas and lost some tiles and the door transitions. Easy fixed but irritating.

Only one screen shot this time. It shows a bit of in-game object interaction to compare with the text game (if you have played it). The original game would have looked something like:

This is an art gallery. Most of the paintings have been
stolen by vandals with exceptional taste. The vandals left
through either the north or west exits.

A painting by a neglected genius is here.

>Take the painting
Taken.

/A

I forgot...

2008-05-29T17:28:00.002+02:00

I don't know how it could happen. I completely forgot one area, actually two but that's another story. So when talking to one of my colleagues about Zork and old times he said: "When I played Zork I'd never understood what a barrow was. I was later when I read a book about the stone age I got it." - Barrow? I said. - What barrow? Now the barrow area is a very small one but important in it's own way, but it's no excuse to leave it out. :) So I took my bike and rode home for lunch and a quick modding. Here's the result. It's a bit dark, but that's how it is at night. If you click the image you'll see the details better.

"You are standing in front of a massive barrow of stone and dirt.
In the east face is a huge opening. You cannot see into the dark of the tomb."

Pushing forward

2008-05-28T11:50:00.004+02:00

As usual I abandoned my development plan. That's why I don't work as a software programmer (even if I'm a pathological wannabe) . The plan was to fix the music and load screens for all areas. Instead I fixed the take placeable scripts which was a large and boring work. I made a hand held lantern for use in the multiplayer version as you see in the picture. The idea is that there's only one battery powered lamp as in the original game, but when playing in MP mode there will be a few additional light sources with limited burn time scattered around so every PC gets his/her own light source. I did a run on the drowning script and now the water rises nicely and a killer-placeable damages the PC's in the area so that they will drown within 120 real time seconds (if they don't find a way to prevent it of course). In the screen shot you can also see the new control panel. Looks a bit strange in NWN2 but Zork isn't DnD, it's more like Dungeon and Techno.

The Grue script is also fixed. At least i presume so until Sundays playtest will prove otherwise.

This is the spawn rules for this creature of the dark:

PC is in an area specified as "dark"
PC doesn't carry any light source
PC isn't within 15 meters from another PC that carrying a light source
PC isn't withing 15 meters from a placed light that have a light sphere of +15 meters and +1 intensity

The HeartBeat script will push it hard but there's only one Grue at the time and the HB-script is quite smart. I'll make some performance tests later on to measure the difference between script on and off.

The weather outside my window is so nice It feels like the first summer day and I think I'll eat my lunch in an exterior area today.

/A

Grue!

2008-05-27T22:43:00.001+02:00

Multiplayer fiasco

2008-05-26T08:21:00.005+02:00

Yesterday night my wife and I rigged a second PC in our very temporary home office to do a MP-test session. It ended after 25 minutes and those minutes were filled with failure :)
So we shut down the whole thing and watched Mythbusters (the airplane on a conveyor belt episode) and then a episode of Smash Lab.

This is some of the things that went wrong:

Somewhere along the bugfixing-road I've introduced a new, nice one making it impossible to pick up placeables in MP ( I use them to represent importent items in the game until OEI fixes this loot bag flaw). If I didn't see this bug happen by myself I would say it was impossible.

The game score message broadcast don't work in MP. Only the PC that solves the quest sees the game score pop-up. This seems like a little problem to solve and it is, but due to bad coding there's a lot of testing to do to see that it works for 19 separate quests. (I keep call them quests but it's really more points you get for laying parts of the puzzle).

When interacting with objects in the game I use three methods. A. conversations, B. Floating text over PC, C. Cast spell, Unique Power. In MP it shows that the other PC's in the party will feel a bit off because they don't know what's going on in the interaction with the object. I have to look at broadcasting all written responses to the party's info box. Like the score message broadcast it is a huge job to find all scripts that "talks" to a PC.

Originally there was only one light source because there was only one player. In MP there's too silly to use only on lantern per party. OK, it makes it harder to play and more realistic when everybody has to stay close to each other to avoid being eaten by the meanies in the dark, but it's also tricky to play. PC's stumble to each other etc. I need to rethink this and maybe give each PC a lamp. The limited burn time must be preserved, which means 4 lamps with 25% fuel instead of one with 100% (it will fail if all PC's uses them at the same time) or 4 lamps with a common time based fuel depot (it means that when one lamp has burned 100% of it's fuel all lamps will go out). None of those solutions are perfect so re-thinking there is.

I'll fix some the issues this week, and we do another run next Sunday. Hopefully a bit more successful.

Thank for reading
Amraphael

Poll result

2008-05-24T09:00:00.004+02:00

Well, what do this non-scientific poll tell us? Maybe that custom content are boring or hard to work with and that socializing with other NWN2 users are less fun than designing areas. ;) I don't got a clue, but polls are always fun and I can't resist answering every single one I stumble over. What I know is that Area Design and Scripting are my favorite NWN2 activities, then comes playing the game. Right now I'm trying out Wyrins Dark Avenger chapter 2, so far it's a blast and the final release will almost certain hit the top list.

/The Pollaholic

p.s
I really love this thing called G_o-o_gle Charts. Wonder why I didn't found out about it earlier.

Short update

2008-05-23T20:22:00.002+02:00

Debugging isn't one of the most inspiring things you can do on a Friday. But knowing that I've been putting 28 of them to rest eases the pain. Some of them were really hard to fix like the rising water and drowning script I've told you about a long time ago. Besides that I managed to test out some tricks the increase the performance in my forest areas and experiment with the Day/Night settings for them too. It's easy to fall in love with the bloom effect but I'll try to stay sane.

Tomorrow I'll get into putting in the music at the right places and shooting new high-resolution screen shots for the load screens.

Major break-trough!

2008-05-21T11:07:00.004+02:00

The last area is done. The biggest design obstacle is behind me. I feel good today!

The small print:
There's a lot left to do. But from now on it's about look and feel. Well, the Grue AI is still screwed up in multiplayer and there are still performance problems with the forest areas when night falls and the shadows grow. There are hundreds of small ugly things to polish, many icons, maps and some custom models to fix. I also have to take another look at the river travel sequence, maybe try a cutscene solution again. But I'm over the hill!!!

/Amraphael