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.