ZORK for Neverwinter Nights 2 is now available!

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

Probably the last post on this blog

...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

Lemon curd

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.

Screen shots

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.

Cutscenes

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!!

A thiefs life

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:

1. Check the Party's GameScore and subtract it from the maximum GameScore
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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

Pushing forward

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

Short update

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!

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

No screen shots today.

I know I promised to post a bunch of screen shots for you to look at. Yesterday I did some additional testing and at the same time I captured some images for the LoadScreens. I did about 20 LoadScreens but to my huge disappointment I now see that the Photoshop file I've collected them in doesn't have any layers any more. I seems that I accidentally saved the file as a single layer TGA and that this layer is empty. And I've deleted the originals - Oops! Well I'll do another run tomorrow and hope that I don't screw it up again. Recorded about 15 new issues too.

I have become sort of blind for it, but I think it start to feel as a real game. When I have gone through my 100+ game issues I'll do some multi player tests and then - Polishing, polishing, polishing. Every mod released now days looks so damn good so I have to work really hard to not look like garbage compared to them. Looks are not everything, just 80% :) :)

I also started to think about beta testing. I think I want one or two testers that have some time to play it hard looking for bugs and more serious problems and one that do the prettiness and spell checking. So now I have to come up with some in-game issue reporting tool or see if anyone else have done one.

/Amraphael

One single screen shot

This screen shot don't have anything to do with that I've finished the Thief's pseudo AI-scripts.
Now he:

• Based on the GameScore he shows up right behind you or...
• Moves randomly between 49 rooms in 19 areas
• Sometimes he robs you clean, other times he just pick up stuff he finds in the room
• Sometimes he's pretty evil and steal your light source and leaves you to the Grue
• Occasionally he let you speak to him - if you're kind
  

I just have to handle the things he steals in a fail safe way, but thats tomorrows dance.

Ooh, nice interior design. Wonder if it's IKEA?

Friday again!

This week just rushed by like an express train. the last 48 hours I spent overlooking the company moving to a new office. That means no modding at all, not even thinking of NWN2 or Zork. Moving is one big project alone. Moving when trying to keep one of Europe's larges IT-platforms (in our segment) running without a millisec interrupt is a crazy circus without any limits. Well, as usual we pulled it off without any customers or clients recognizing anything unusual. And I love my new VERY LARGE US-CEO-style office with a great, great view over the city core.

But tonight is Friday night and my wife have some friends over on dinner. Poor me that stay at my room alone and work on the module until I fall asleep on the keyboard :) If I do some progress I'll post something later tonight.

/A

Modding break!

As I wrote earlier I'll use the next three days to taking care of me and my wife. We'll take in on a nearby 1720's-mansion, relaxing, eating LOTS of good food and I'll try not to talk and think about the mod :) My wife says that it's not boring listening to my "... and I want to to that, but I can't because of the limits in this...bla. bla. scripting... bla..texture..." Often this is true, but I know that I'd think it's boring, listening to to same stuff for over six months.

I'll be back on Monday!

/A

Two days work lost!

Despite the size I decided to use the RWS Deep Chasm Tileset to make the maze more dynamic. It's a very nice collection of tiles in three different levels. The texturing leaves a bit to wish for but the overall feeling is just perfect for this part of the game. At Saturday morning I put it in and worked all day with the maze. Sunday I spent on securing all transitions and random doors then I started to script the parts that is associated with the maze. I even wrote a short conversation (I felt great - because there are so very few of them in the game).

At the evening after we'd watched Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro (I really loved it), I did my usual backup and tried to play a bit. Argh, the area doesn't load! I restored my backups all way back to Saturday morning without luck. It seems that the area got corrupted that first save and that I had made backups of a non functional module all the time. It don't even loads in the toolset anymore. Well. well, this was the first time I've encountered such bug so I don't hang my head. I'll have a go on it again at Thursday.

The upcomming weekend will be dedicated to my wife. We will take in on al uxious manor house at Friday - Saturday, just relaxing, eating and drinking. At Sunday we visit an afteroon teaparty were you can eat so much candy, cake and cookies you wish, everything are homemade and of the very best quality. Next week I'm back on diet :)

129 Megabytes of joy!

Pooh, today I finished (everything grass and triggers) the last above ground area. The big forest I had before has been splitted into seven separate areas. I've made the house area and at last the canyon area. It makes nine areas instead of two :)

I'll give you mod builders a tip: When working with terrain and texturing in a large module - start a new one. It's faster to load when testing it out, it saves faster and it doesn't crash as often. I have only encountered 12 crashes when working with the areas above. It's less than one crash per day!!! When you are satisfied enough with your work. Export it to an erf. And import it to your module. And that's what I'm about to do now. I'll post you some screen shots tomorrow.

/A

The forest - the first 60%

It took me a while to accept that breaking up the big forest area in seven smaller ones was a bad idea. So I had to start all over again. Performance isn't all about area size. It's the amount of different treas, grass, placeables, textures and terrain complexity that slows the system down.

So I first made an analyze of nice areas in the OC and in some community modules. For every texture I did a Swap Terrain and replaced it with black color and took a screen shot. I then had a handfull images where I could clearly see how much and where the artist had used each texture. Then I carefully planned which five textures I would like to use in my area, which 3 tree types I would use. I use only one seed per tree type and make the variation by changing size and proportions together and placing the trees a bit smarter. So far 168 trees are placed and the looks and performance are pretty good. I haven't started with the grass but I hold it down and try to put it in the right places. I'll also use a more narrow far plane and clever walkmesh cutting to keep the players from seeing that the wood stops just a few meters from the occlusion grid.

So far I'm about 60% done and the forest is still just 35MB instead of 153MB when I had it in seven parts. It's not as beatiful as some of the other modders but I think this is how far I can take it with my limited artistic skills. (Able Painter -4).

Oh my... What have I done?

I wasn't satisfied with my gigant forest area. Too ugly and aso large that it would make the average PC go down on the knees. So i took the big butcher knife and started the disjoint feast. :) A really ugly job and the result? Worthless.

Late that night I created 7(!) smaller areas and I suddenly realise how much work that it will take to make them feel like different parts of the same forest. The morning after I got the next shock. If you take a 32 x 32 area and makes it into seven 8 x 8 it doesn't mean that you goes down from 1024 squares to 448 and the mod gets smaller. No, no...
It gets B I G G E R! Before it was 223 MB now it's 377 MB and I haven't even started to put out the placeables yet :)

Todays weight check:
Module: 377 263 kB
HAK Pack: 107 334 kB
Music: 37 121 kB

Bug fixing day

Yesterday was the great bug fixing day. I repaired the GameScore-system and based it on include-scripts so if I missed something again, I don't need to go through 20-25 scripts. It took 3 hours!

Then I wrote a completly new TakePlaceable-script. You know the one that lets you click a placeable object, destroy it, and place a corresponding(?) item in the PC's inventory. Now the take high, mid and low animation works for both male and female players.

Before getting to bed I made some last minute adjustments to two of the placeable interaction scripts that were working a bit odd when it comes to animations, VFX and sounds. Then the toolset crashed while saving. I could salvage the scripts so next time I get on to it I just have to restore the last backup and copy/paste the code. An irritating end to an otherwise productive day.

And I almost forgot. I've posted my last weekly update for a longer (or shorter time) on the NWN2Forums. I think I don't write anything so interesting that people would like it and be inspired to build their own stuff. It's a very good idea, this weekly module update and I may be back to it when I feel I can contribute with something valuable. So from now I only write here.

Feel free to comment. It's open for everyone. But it's more fun if you register :)

/A

Multiplayer play-through

I feel a bit guilty for not updating this blog so often as I would like. But today I felt so much better that I at least give you a screen shot from my first multiplayer test session.

My wife and I spent 4 hours playing through the mod. I let her follow my walkthrough and did the job of being the side-kick and writing down bugs, errors and flaws on yellow notes. (The desk is full of them now.) It seem that not everything that worked fine in single player works in multiplayer. Several of the key creatures AI and such don't work as supposed. The torch, lamp and other importand items suffer from the same problems as the non-working torches in the OC. Suddenly the don't provide light anymore. I have to catch up on that old topic again and see if I can make a repair function that keep those items work in all situations.

Besides the almost 150 errors we found (mostly in the Game Score System, the Take Placeable functions and in the Animation scripts) we also found a few things that could make the game less fun to play. It's not my fault :) the original game had this in it too. I'll try to correct it with changing how certain things work and add a few new ways to solve puzzles to get around it. We also learned that Zork can be a pretty difficult game to play and that I really need to prevent the players to get stuck or lose interest because of that. I'll include a in-game hint book. I need to come up with a penalty system for "cheating" first.

They play test gave a hint of the lenght of the module. I took us almost four hours to complete it. Except for the two puzzles that are left to implement due to a missing area. I'd guess it the length for a clever player that don't have the walk through would end up in between 5 and 8 hours and maybe even up to 12 hours for if you're making everything difficult for yourself. I said to my wife, that if the mod was filled with the usual encounters and fights from the DnD-world one could play it for about 25 hours! "Don't think about it!", she answered, and she's right.

Anyway, it was great to get this first multiplayer session done and it gave me a whole new view of the state of the module. Lots of things left to do. Some things works very well, others don't. The next few weeks will be bugfixing all over before I do another test. I'll try to do updates more often even if they will be shorter.

Delania and Amraphael
starting the multiplayer play-through

Thanks for reading!

/A

It's nothing new - and very short...

The weekly update has been posted to the NWN2Forums. It's number 10 in the row so I'll celebrate with a big cup of coffee!

If you're the creepy kind of control freak you may want to catch up with the earlier posts here:
Update #1
Update #2
Update #3
Update #4
Update #5
Update #6
Update #7
Update #8
Update #9

Have fun :)


/A