Building a Village

I got in several hours of work over the weekend on the module, plus a little bit extra here and there. However, this mostly involved the fairly tedious process of building the interiors for all the buildings in the villages and then setting up the door transitions. I normally enjoy area building, but since the CEP 2.0 still isn't out yet, I don't have access to all the placeables I want, so trying to fully build each area is mostly pointless right now. This is irritating, because my normal m.o. is to work on one thing until it's done, then move on to the next thing. Instead, I ended up just laying down a bunch of mostly empty homes and buildings. I also painted a bunch of encounter triggers, which is moderately more interesting, but I may end up changing them, or at least having some of them only activate when the player has a certain variable set, so that I can create the illusion of enemies appearing repeatedly while the PC is wandering around the village.

The city interior tileset continues to be a pain in the ass. I imported the City Interior w Blank Rooms Hak, and that helped, but I still don't have the full control I want. Getting a truly blank 2x2 living room in the shape I want is difficult; getting one with a kitchen is impossible. Apparently, the tileset is designed so that if I want a 1x1 kitchen or bedroom from the "features" in the tileset, it either has to be on it's own, or attached to a room with a minimum size of 2x2. I can't have a 1x2 living room with an attached 1x1 kitchen and 1x1 bedroom. The only 1x2 rooms are found in the "groups" part of the tileset, and they can only be expanded upon from their fixed doorways. As such, trying to build interiors to the specs I want has been difficult (also, buildings in NWN are kind of like the TARDIS, in that the interiors are always invevitably larger than the exteriors). I can construct 2x2, 1-story houses with kitchens using the individual house tiles in the hak, but all those tiles have built in furniture and such, so I can't get a truly blank 2x2 house with a kitchen that way. Also, there's some kind of weirdness with the hak in which I can't seem to select any of the CMP tracks; they're all visible, but they won't play. The prefab building interiors I downloaded earlier turned out to be little use: they rarely ever meet my needs (e.g. a door will be on the left side of the south wall when I need it on the right), and for some reason, I can't change the music in them at all.

The only other major thing I did was begin writing the first of two fairly complex conversations for a side-quest I decided to add. The player can meet a young boy who's hiding in the village, then find his sister, bring her to him, and then escort them both to safety. However, the PC might also meet the girl first, in which case, he could then look for her brother, bring him to her, and escort them to safety. I have to write things to accomodate both of those options, plus provide an option if the PC meets one of them, refuses to help, and then meets the other and changes his or her mind. Or if the PC meets one of them, refuses to help, meets the second, and then changes his or her mind and goes back to the first one they met to help. It's going to be a challenge making sure all the variables get set to the right numbers in the right conversations, and that the correct conversation options appear based on those variables. Then again, I might just make it easier by only allowing the PC to accept the quest from the brother; if he meets the sister first, he'll find out about their plight, but won't actually be able to take the quest until he meets the brother, and then he'll have to lead her to him, rather than the other way around.

Frustration

I've been frustrated for some time now at my inability to find time to work on the module. Not only is the pace slow, but the longer I don't work on it, the more I forget how to do things. I've been wanting to get in a full day's work on it at some point, so I made today that day. I got up early (for a weekend, that is), went straight to work, and put in, I'd say, about nine hours of work.

And got very little accomplished.

It wasn't because I let myself get distracted or because I slacked. Rather, it was more a series of frustrating events, along with a bad decision or two. First, I tried to figure out how to write a skill check using my own DC numbers, rather than going with the standard method. Once again, it didn't work, and after looking around for a while, I finally gave up and posted to the forum for help. Except the site wasn't working, so after two tries I gave up.

Then I decided to add the CMP and the rural extended tileset to my module. No problems there, but then I decided that I was going to start setting the music for each area, figuring that it would be better to do it now and then as I go along, rather than all at once at the end. The problem is that the CMP has a huge number of tracks to go through. I decided to start making notes for each track describing what it was like, so that I wouldn't have to listen to every track every time I wanted to pick music. As I said, the CMP has a huge number of tracks to go through, and after a while it gets very numbing. What's more, I didn't really find music that really fit what I wanted. Finally, after going through a huge chunk of it, I decided maybe I would put all the music in at once at the end.

Then I started messing around with the city interior tileset again, trying to learn how to construct buildings the way I want to. However, I got nowhere with this: the tileset seems to be designed to produce maximum frustration. Since the next part of the module up was the village of Cheswick, I decided to import the three prefab villages. Two were fine, but one slowed my computer to a crawl, so after wasting some time trying to use it, I finally deleted it. Then I selected the prefab I wanted to use and began to make changes, figuring that it'd be a relatively quick process. It wasn't. In fact, in retrospect it probably would have been quicker to build one from scratch. I made a ton of changes, spent a long time putting down placeables, and gave myself an ulcer trying to get rid of a hill that was in the prefab. I now have the village exterior more or less how I want it, but just about nothing else is done: I didn't put down any transitions or encounter triggers, and now I've got about a dozen house/farm/barn interiors to do. Even with the prefabs, it's going to take a lot of work.

The only bright spot is that I finally was able to post my question about the skill check script, and I got an answer: the person who wrote the example I copied left out a semicolon, which is why it didn't work. It figures.

Fun With Custom Content

Haven't had a chance to work on the module since this past weekend. However, I did download some new custom content from the Vault, and it looks like I'm going to include it in the module.

Castle, City, Rural, & Below v3 is a mega-hak that combines some of the best custom tilesets into one package. Well, actually, it's four seperate haks, and at the moment I'm only planning to use the rural hak. I played around with it last night, and it's got a lot of great stuff in it. I was planning to use both the DLA Canopied Forests and Pasilli's Castle AddOn for Rural and Forest in my module, and they're both in this Hak. There are also some Elven buildings, and while I prefer the Elven City Tileset, I'm trying to keep the haks to a minimum, so this gives me what I need to create an Elven village without adding another tileset (as it stands, I may have to include the Wooden Elven Interiors hak as well). Plus, there's just all kinds of extra good stuff in here. For instance, in the battlefield cutscene I put in three placeables to create a ruined cart on fire. This hak has that included as one feature.

Hmm, I just noticed there's an empty city rooms tileset. That'd be useful, as the standard city interior tileset really doesn't look right for the peasant homes I'm building. However, not only would that mean adding another tileset, but I'd also have to build all the interiors myself, instead of using the prefabs I downloaded, so I'll probably skip it.

The Community Music Pack is a huge compilation of custom music from the Vault and other sources that offers over 200 new tracks. Like the CEP, the idea is that once you download it, you can play any module that uses the CMP and not have to download any more music. It's a good idea, and I'll probably use it because I like having custom music, I think players like hearing custom music, and it's something I want to support. My worry is that the huge download size may turn off some players. However, the creator makes it clear that if you don't want to download the music, you only need to have the hak, and the module will run, so that mitigates things somewhat. The sheer number of files is daunting though. I was listening to some of the tracks, and I realized that I'll never remember them this way. I'll just have to add them to the game and then choose them as I build the areas.

In Limbo

Put in a couple of hours on the module this afternoon. It was pretty much all building: I built a fourth area with two houses in it, and then built areas for the two houses. I made this somewhat easier by downloading this collection of prefabs. This is ideal for my module, since It's going to require a bunch of mostly generic home interiors, and creating them all would end up sucking up a lot of time. Still, it wasn't perfect, though this is mainly due to the limitations of the toolset: I quickly discovered that I could only manipulate the tiles so much. Once more, one of the prefabs combines areas in a way that I'd really like to duplicate, but can't figure out how to accomplish, despite messing around with the toolset for about an hour. Other than that, I set up some transitions and did a bunch of other minor things. I tested everything, and found that most everything worked. The hobgoblins now both display the arguing animation like I wanted. OTOH, I still can't figure out how to make the corpse lootable. Also, it took some fiddling around to get the merchant's conversation to work right. First, I forgot to set a variable check at an important point, and then after I set it, it still didn't work quite right until I realized that I had "<=" in the code instead of "<" when checking the value. Finally, I also removed a custom tileset I was using; I only had it in the cutscene, and didn't forsee using it elsewhere, and that wasn't enough to justify keeping it.

Unfortunately, there are further setbacks in the release of CEP 2.0. Specifically, the team got fed up at all the abuse they were taking on the forums, so they basically said "fine, we just won't do it then." Having taken my share of abuse when I was working on Shadowfist, I sympathize, especially since most of the vitriol directed at them was petty and stupid and whiny and just plain mean. Unfortunately, this leaves my own project in limbo, because I don't know if the project is dead for good, or if the people working on it are just blowing off some steam. Until I know for sure, I'm very limited in my building. I don't want to use any of the current CEP stuff in case 2.0 still comes out. OTOH, if it doesn't, then I'm going to have to start learning how to merge the custom content I want with the current version of the CEP. The whole situation is really disheartening.

The Fine Art of Conversation

Just got done a four-day weekend, which gave me some time to work on the module, though I didn't spend as much time on it as I would have liked. I finished tweaking the third area, but I'm still left with some unresolved problems: the player still can't loot the body of the soldier, and in the hobgoblin conversation, the animations are only firing on one of the hobgoblins. I also nearly finished the third area, though I haven't tested it yet. This involved creating a merchant for the first time, which wasn't too difficult. It also involved my first complex conversation. It actually turned out to be more complicated than I originally planned, because I ended up putting in more dialogue branches for roleplaying purposes. This involved putting in both alignment checks (which I've already done), and skill checks (which were new). I spent some time looking up how to write a skill check, only to discover that there's an automated way to do it in the game. However, the game method only lets you make it easy, medium, or hard, so I think I'm going to have to write my own script after all so that I can set specific difficulty numbers. Otherwise, I don't think the player will have any chance of making a medium check, much less a hard one, which will make big chunks of the dialogue superfluous.

I also got in more practice with setting and retrieving variables in a conversation. Although you can set this automatically, it can still be tricky. I originally created three different variables, each representing an amount of payment the player is supposed to recieve for completing a task. Then I realized that I needed to set another variable which would indicate that the job was done. While I could have created a new variable, I realized it was smarter to have one variable with four different values (three for the payment, and one indicating the job was done), rather than having a bunch of different variables.

Finally, I made the process a little harder by making the task a little more complicated. Originally the player was just supposed to bring back a wagon wheel to fix a wagon. Instead, I decided that the player would have to bring back a mule for the wagon, and that they'd have to find some food in order to get the mule to follow them. Since I was basically stealing a similar idea from Cormryean Nights, I opened up the module to see how it was done. This was harder than I thought, because the animal you have to recover in that game (a dog), wasn't painted down. Rather, it's spawned through a conversation. So I had to find the conversation that spawned it and the conversation used to lure the dog and copy the scripts, which I'll eventually modify and use. Also, the actual script that gets the dog to follow you does so using a method I don't understand, but so long as it works in my module, that's fine. However, I can't do much of this until CEP 2.0 comes out, because there's no mule in the standard toolset. I think there'll be one in the CEP, but I may have to change it to a horse instead.

Next up will be to create the areas involved in the mule quest. Although it's a relatively simple quest, it involves the creation of a small village, which means I'll actually have to create several areas. It'll take a long time, but at least it'll mostly be painting instead of scripting.