Dispatches From Neverwinter

Modules I've Played

2010-05-19T15:02:00.000-05:00

Some Distant Shore

And another I didn't finish:

Dragon Dominant

Modules I've Played

2010-05-08T09:05:00.003-05:00

After the End 1 - The Penumbra

And one I didn't finish:

3rd Edition Adventure Series - The Sunless Citadel

Modules I've Played

2010-05-05T09:47:00.003-05:00

Recently finished:

Agrenost: Beneath the Cobbles
Aribeth's Redemption, Chapter 1
Bloodright: The Blood Royal

I feel like there's one I've forgotten.

Modules I've Played

2010-04-01T17:55:00.003-05:00

Hey, it's only been, what, 2 years since I posted anything here? That's not so bad, is it?

I actually don't know if this list is complete, because I stopped keeping track of the modules I've played in the last two years. This is my best attempt to remember them all.

Modules I've Played:

A Forbidding Power
Against the Cult of the Reptile God
A Halo of Flies
A Hunt Through the Dark, Pts 1-6
A Tangled Web
A Tragedy in Tragidor
Avertine - A Nation Dreamed
Aylomeiger's Magical Curios
Beneath the Spine
Blackguard I
Blackwall Keep
Bone Kenning I - Art of the Thanaturge
Caereena - Krakona Rising
Captain's Choice
Chaos at Mageholm
Citadel
Cormyrean Nights
Crimson Tides of Tethyr
Dark Fortress
Darkness over Daggerford
Dark Water's Edge
Dastard's Morrow
Dream-land: By a Route Obscure and Lonely
Elegia Eternum
Elena's Tale - Roses For Rosa
Glorious Rejuvenation
Guild War
Ill-Fated in Innesbrook
In The Company of Thieves: Grand Theft Otto
In The Company of Thieves II: Metal of Honor
Into the Toadshade
Kale’s Rangers 1 & 2
Kingmaker
Kunoichi 1 & 2
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 1
Lords of Darkness, pts 1-4
Midnight
Midnight Calling
Midsummer Knight’s Dream
Midwinter Festival
Monastery of the Flaming Star
Mountain of Mirrors
Perchance to Dream
Portals: A Prelude
Prophet - Chapter 1 & 2
Ravenloft: Beyond The Gate
Red Moon Rising
Return to Ravenloft
Return to the Spine
Runes of Blood
Saleron's Gambit, Pts. 1-5
Sanctum of the Archmage 1 – The Sight
Sanctum of the Archmage 2: The Miracle Worker - Act I
Sands of Fate I – III
Scourge of the Slavelords 1 - 3
Shadow From a Soul on Fire
Shadowguard
Shadow of the Underdark
Shadows of Darkmoon
Siege of Shadowdale
Slimed!
Snickersnack!
Swordflight
Tale of a Mage, Chapters 1 & 2
Tales of the Sundering – Prelude
The Accursed Tower
The Aieland Saga, Act 1-3
The Aieland Saga, Act 4, Pts. 1-3
The Art of Death - Back in Black
The Black Ring Pox
The Breach
The Cave of Songs
The Citadel
The Conan Chronicles - Legions of the Dead
The Cup of Akbar
The Dark Ranger's Treasure
The Fate of Neverwinter
The Gods Themselves
The Island
The Lord of Terror – The Diablo Campaign
The Pillaging of Waycrest
The Rose of Eternity - Chapter 1: The Coming
The Sultan's Guard
The War for Cania
The Way of the Open Hand
The Winds of Eremor
Threat of Dreams I - The Hunger and the Sickness
Threat to the Spine
To Heir is Human
Twilight
Tyrants of the Moonsea
UK2 - The Sentinel
UK5 - Eye of the Serpent
Weapons of Zhentil Keep
Witches Wake

Total: 117

Apparently, I've played (to completion) 36 modules in the last two years. Looking back at this list, I can barely remember some of these modules at all.

Modules I've played but didn't finish:

A Dance With Rogues, Pt. 1
Aiar 0: Youth
Almraiven
An Ancient Heart
B2: Keep on the Borderlands (Can't remember which version)
CC1: Gates of Myth Drannor
Conan - Beneath the Sands of Stygia
Desert Madness - Dark Summoning
Desert Rose
Dragon Dominant
Eye of the Beholder
High Adventures with the Baronness DeCallya
Island Adventures: The Horns of Craven
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 2
Lords of Darkness I
Orcs - The Awakening of Arak-Hur
Subterra: Manastone
The Battle of Kadir Pass, Ch. 1
The Last Inn
The Paladin War
The Rose of Eternity - Chapter 2: Cry the Beloved
Tomb Raiders
Tortured Hearts

Total: 23

Modules I've Played - Update

2008-04-07T09:54:00.001-05:00

Finished:

Lords of Darkness, pts 1-4
Chaos at Mageholm
Return to the Spine
Weapons of Zhentil Keep

Modules I've Played - Update

2008-03-09T14:55:00.000-05:00

Finished:

Avertine - A Nation Dreamed
Citadel
Dark Water's Edge
Elegia Eternum
Slimed!
Snickersnack!

Unfinished:

Lords of Darkness

Why I Quit: Modules I Never Finished Playing

2007-12-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

Every so often on the Bioware NWN forums, the topic of what players don't like in a module, or what makes them stop playing a module, comes up. There's one going on right now, and in the course of participating in it, it got me to thinking about what it was that's made me not finish certain modules. As such, I figured I'd go back and see if could pinpoint what it was in these modules that made me quit. I'm not going to comment on all of them, just the ones where I can specifically remember what it was that made me lose interest. In some cases, it's not that there was anything wrong with the module, but rather that it just wasn't my style. I prefer modules that feature a good amount of combat, and so modules like Almraiven and A Dance With Rogues just didn't hold my interest, even though they're excellent pieces of work.

If you're the author of one of these modules, and you happen to be reading this, my apologies. I don't mean to attack you, but I have to be honest about why your module didn't hold my interest, and I hope you take this as constructive criticism. At any rate, I think every module on this list was highly rated anyway, so it's not like my opinions are going to hurt any module's success.

Conan - Beneath the Sands of Stygia - There were two big problems with this module that stood out in my mind. The first was the visuals: the module is supposed to be set in universe of the Conan stories, and while I haven't read those stories myself, I know that they're set in a pre-medieval time. As such, the default NWN city tilesets don't fit the setting, and by using them, it ruined the immersion for me. The second, and bigger, problem was that the module was dull. After a short beginning section in a port city, the action moves to a lost, ruined city on an island. Exploring this city meant running around large, mostly empty city areas, occasionally going inside mostly empty buildings to check them out. Every so often I'd run into some wandering monsters, but those combats weren't interesting, just repetitive. Occasionally I'd have to bash down some locked doors. For some reason, these doors were made particularly tough, and bashing them down took a minute or so. I don't know why they were so tough, or even why they were locked, since there was nothing special behind them. All in all, after an hour or two of this, it became so tedious that I just gave up on the module.

One other minor, but annoying bit - in order to get to the only merchant, you had to do a lot of backtracking through empty areas, and that's never, ever fun.

B2: Keep on the Borderlands - I didn't link this one because I can't remember which version I played. I remember that this was a pretty faithful rendition of the original PnP module, and that's the problem: Keep on the Borderlands is a dungeon crawl, with no real roleplaying or story. I like action, but I need something more to stay interested.

CC1: Gates of Myth Drannor - I think this is one of those modules that rated well when there wasn't much to compare it to, but which has aged poorly since then. The beginning was ok, if unremarkable, but partway through the module, the difficulty level suddenly takes a huge jump upward. However, the merchants don't sell anything better than a cure moderate wounds potion. As such, the combat difficulty crossed the line from challenging to frustrating, and that's where I lost interest.

Desert Madness - Dark Summoning - My PC, a recently-freed slave, wanders into a nearby church, at which point the head priest decided to entrust me with a super-secret mission to rescue the princess from the castle (or something to that effect). So I go to the castle, find an ex-guard standing around, and tell him all about my super-secret mission. In turn, he tells me everything I need to know to sneak into the palace. Of course, none of this makes any sense: why would the priest give a random stranger this super secret mission? Why would I tell an ex-guard about this mission, and why would the guard help me? Bad story logic killed this one for me.

Eye of the Beholder - This one was just too hard, too frustrating, and required too much backtracking. Even with the walkthrough, just trying to figure out how to get through each level was a pain. Also, there were no merchants, and the henchmen didn't level up with me. By the time I got to the 7th level, it became obvious there was no way I was going to survive the module.

Subterra: Manastone - This module is supposed to take place in an overcrowded underground city, yet I barely saw any NPCs walking around in the streets, and the city itself had a lot of open area. Not only did that not fit the idea of an overcrowded city, but it required a lot of backtracking, and so that killed my interest.

The Last Inn - Several things killed this module for me very early on. First, I'm given a quest by a woman who tells me she has no gold to pay me, yet after I poked around various containers in her house, I found that not only did she have treasure, but also that I was able to take it without any consequence. Second, her dialogue didn't change after I completed her quest. Third, the first thing some of the NPCs said when I spoke to them was "Are you here to do my quest?" The builder put in an actual list of all the quests in the module, and the order in which I should do them. It was this last thing that put the final nail in the coffin for me. If the module doesn't even make a stab at being believable, I'm not interested.

The Paladin War - As I wrote in my comment on the module's page: "There's no attempt at realism here: you travel through a dungeon that goes from grasslands to arctic to desert with no explanation other than that the caves in the area are "weird." There doesn't seem to be much thought to why the monsters are where they are. A chest with magic items sits in the middle of an empty cave for no apparent reason."

Tomb Raiders - First, the module is supposed to take place in an Arabian Nights setting, but the starting area and the first quest location used the basic rural tileset, and none of the characters have clothing or appearances suitable to that genre. Second, the game uses a custom script that makes your gold have weight, which meant my PC was weighed down as soon as I started the module. Realism is good, but not if it's implemented for no reason and not if it makes the game less fun. Third, the only merchant in town sold only the most basic of items, so there was nothing on which to spend my accumulated gold. Fourth, the module was full of spelling and grammar errors. Fifth, there were no journal entries. And finally, the first quest location had a bug that left my character stranded in the area.

Modules I've Played - Update

2007-12-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Finished:

The Conan Chronicles - Legions of the Dead

Unfinished:

Conan - Beneath the Sands of Stygia

Citadel

2007-12-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

On the recommendation of a builder whose work I enjoy, I started playing the beta version of a module named Citadel. I've never played a beta version of a module before, I already have dozens of modules in my queue, and in fact, I was already partway through another module. However, the module I was playing involves a lot of sneaking around, and I was in the mood for something with more action, and the authors described Citadel as a hack-n-slash module. Also, it starts at lvl 6-7, which meant I could use one of my pre-existing characters (I ended up using a 7th lvl Ftr/Wiz).

I've been playing it for the last three nights, and so far, my impression is that it's not only very good, but also one of the most unique modules I've ever played. The setting is original, and chock full of flavor; instead of the typical, quasi-medieval D&D setting, it starts off feeling a bit like a fairy tale, with an old gypsy, three mysterious sisters who reminded me a bit of the three sisters from Greg Bear's The Infinity Concerto, and a quest for a semi-mythical city on a mountaintop that provides a sanctuary for outcasts and misfits. The city itself reminded me a bit of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, with perhaps a hint of Terry Pratchett, and even Steve Jackson's Citadel of Chaos and the old Tunnels and Trolls rpg, with it's assortment of quirky NPCs, the unusual setting, and the inclusion of modern elements in a fantasy setting. The city of Citadel looks fantastic - the authors put a lot of thought into designing the areas and using placeables and custom tilesets - and as I wandered around, I really got the sense that this was a living city, full of secrets and adventures that were just begging to be discovered. I can only think of a few modules with cities that are done as well, and only one - Almraiven - that surpasses it.

The other thing that really jumped out at me was the quality of the dialogue. Bad dialogue is so prevalent in the modules I've played that I'm generally happy just to get adequate dialogue. Even some of the best modules have bad dialogue, and I can only think of a very few where the dialogue is actually good. The dialogue in Citadel is very good, and again, very different from what I've seen in other modules. Like everything else in the module, it's original and quirky and unusual and full of flavor, and it really gives the NPCs personality and brings them to life. The PC dialogue is just as good; instead of the typical noble/mercenary/jerk pattern that so many modules use, the PC dialogue sounds like something a real person might say, and what's more, there's generally no obvious good or evil choices, nor any obvious "right" choice of what to say.

There are a few other things worth mentioning. First, the module is absolutely loaded with custom-made items, much of which is very powerful and very expensive. In particular, there's a lot of class-specific gear for almost every basic class that had me drooling and wishing I was playing a different class, just so I could get that stuff for myself. Unfortunately, it's all very expensive, but a lot of very good stuff can be found for free. What's more, the fact that the merchants are carrying all this custom stuff, rather than the typical magic items you see over and over again adds to the originality and flavor of the module. Second, this is the only module I can remember playing that not only caters specifically to gay and lesbian players, but which makes it a strong sub-theme of the module. This may or may not specifically appeal to some players, but it's an interesting inclusion, and what's more, it's just not in there for the sake of being in there, but instead, it's actually integral to the concept of the module.

Of course, this is a beta module, so it still has a number of rough edges. These are mostly typos, places where the journal doesn't update, and other minor flaws. Right now, the biggest problem with the module is the combat difficulty. The authors have really striven to make the combat challenging. At the moment, however, I've found that it's as often frustrating as it is challenging. In some cases it's a matter of carefully using tactics, along with all the buffs at your disposal, to win fights. However, in others it's just that the fights are simply so hard that they're not fun, and sometimes they're even unwinnable. However, part of beta testing is figuring these things out, and the authors have been very responsive to feedback and quick to make changes.

At any rate, if you're willing to play a module where the bumps are still being smoothed out, and you're looking for something different and unusual, I highly recommend you give this one a try.

Ooops

2007-11-15T12:12:00.000-05:00

Under the list of modules I started but haven't finished, I listed "Dragon Dominant" when I meant to list "The Fate of Daggerdale."

Modules I've Played

2007-11-13T17:24:00.000-05:00

A Forbidding Power
Against the Cult of the Reptile God
A Halo of Flies
A Hunt Through the Dark, Pts 1-6
A Tangled Web
A Tragedy in Tragidor
Aylomeiger's Magical Curios
Beneath the Spine
Blackguard I
Blackwall Keep
Bone Kenning I - Art of the Thanaturge
Caereena - Krakona Rising
Captain's Choice
Cormyrean Nights
Crimson Tides of Tethyr
Dark Fortress
Darkness over Daggerford
Dastard's Morrow
Dream-land: By a Route Obscure and Lonely
Elena's Tale - Roses For Rosa
Glorious Rejuvenation
Guild War
Ill-Fated in Innesbrook
In The Company of Thieves: Grand Theft Otto
In The Company of Thieves II: Metal of Honor
Into the Toadshade
Kingmaker
Kunoichi
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 1
Midnight
Midwinter Festival
Mountain of Mirrors
Perchance to Dream
Portals: A Prelude
Red Moon Rising
Rose of Eternity - Chapter 1: The Coming
Runes of Blood
Saleron's Gambit, Pts. 1-5
Sands of Fate I - III
Shadow From a Soul on Fire
Shadowguard
Siege of Shadowdale
Tale of a Mage, Chapters 1 & 2
The Aieland Saga, Act 1-3
The Aieland Saga, Act 4, Pts. 1-3
The Art of Death - Back in Black
The Black Ring Pox
The Breach
The Cave of Songs
The Citadel
The Cup of Akbar
The Dark Ranger's Treasure
The Fate of Neverwinter
The Island
The Pillaging of Waycrest
The Sultan's Guard
The Way of the Open Hand
The Winds of Eremor
Threat of Dreams I - The Hunger and the Sickness
To Heir is Human
Twilight
Tyrants of the Moonsea
UK2 - The Sentinel
UK5 - Eye of the Serpent
Witches Wake

Modules I've played but didn't finish (or which I haven't yet finished):
A Dance With Rogues, Pt. 1
Aiar 0: Youth
Almraiven
An Ancient Heart
B2: Keep on the Borderlands (Can't remember which version)
CC1: Gates of Myth Drannor
Desert Madness - Dark Summoning
Desert Rose
Dragon Dominant
Eye of the Beholder
High Adventures with the Baronness DeCallya
Island Adventures: The Horns of Craven
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 2
Lords of Darkness I
Orcs - The Awakening of Arak-Hur
Rose of Eternity - Chapter 2: Cry the Beloved
Subterra: Manastone
The Battle of Kadir Pass, Ch. 1
The Last Inn
The Paladin War
Tomb Raiders

Played: 102
Finished: 81

NWN 2

2007-07-23T11:18:00.000-05:00

Finally got around to installing and playing it this weekend. Unfortunately, my initial impressions of the game have been marred by technical issues. First, it took a long time to install, although judging by what I've read, I got off easy: the game installed and ran the first time around, and I didn't have any problems patching the game. However, the big problem is that the graphics are fucked up. In outdoor areas, there are "patches" on the ground - small areas in various geometric shapes - where instead of grass or road or whatever else should be there, I'm seeing blue-ish triangles. It's like someone sliced out parts of the terrain. I'm seeing a similar effect on characters as well; there are literally holes in the characters, like parts of them simply aren't being drawn by the graphics card. Indoors, I sometimes see odd bands of color cutting across the screen. Although I set the video settings way down, the problems are still appearing.

Aside from that, my reaction is somewhat mixed. The graphics, those that aren't fucked up, that is, look great. The difference between NWN and NWN2 in this area is like the difference between Diablo II and NWN. The exception is how character's faces look: although they're more three-dimensional in NWN2, many of them look butt-ugly, and the hair looks terrible as well, and there just a great selection of choices. What's more, there are no character portraits either, which is a sad loss. Character creation is richer though, with a new base class, a number of new prestige classes, two new races, and a bunch of sub-race options. You can now also select a diety and a personality type, the latter of which gives minor advantages and disadvantages to your character. Faces are also much more customizable, which choices of eye and hair color and hair highlights. There are also new feats, skills, and spells, and what looks like a bigger spell selection at each level. I particularly like how they changed the Ranger so that instead of always having dual-wield, at level 2 the player decides whether or not to focus on dual-wielding or bow use, with appropriate free feats at different levels.

Gameplay isn't too different, although I'm still adjusting to the absence of the radial menu. I love that there are a lot more quickslots, although I suspect that accessing what you want in the heat of battle may be trickier, since you have to scroll through them instead of using Tab or Ctrl. Also, it took me a while to figure out how to add and remove things other than items to the quickbar. The Inventory section is a lot neater, with everything now using an icon that takes up one spot. However, the icons are kind of small, and I kept running into problems finding my crossbow, because the icon for it doesn't really look like a crossbow. I like the quickcast feature, and the mode bar is kind of interesting. I don't like that I can't use Tab to highlight all the characters, items, and useable placeables in an area: it's more realistic, but it also means I have to mouse over everything to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Camera views have been something of a problem in the game, as it seems like the camera is constantly zooming in, changing elevation and angle, and so on. It's particuarly annoying in indoor areas, much more so than in NWN. I like that I can actually take over and control my henchmen. I don't like that if I want to manipulate my henchmen's inventory, I have to take control of him first. In NWN (well, in the expansions), I could just use the radial menu to access a henchmen's inventory by right clicking on him or his portrait, and then open mine as well and swap items between them. Right-clicking like this in NWN2 does nothing, and I don't understand why simple shortcuts like that were eliminated.

I mostly like what I've seen of the storyline so far. The village faire makes for a useful tutorial, but I like being able to skip it (although I noticed that I miss out on getting an item or two as a result). I also like that the game starts realistically, in that I can't go shopping for whatever I want in my home village. This breaks down a little though, when the wizard starts selling me things, and it breaks down a lot when I get to the first Inn, and I see that the Innkeeper has a bunch of magic items for sale (and yet, doesn't have an ordinary rapier available). Also, I'm not so thrilled with the fact that your character begins as a small-time villager since, if nothing else, it makes playing a barbarian unrealistic. At least in NWN, you could play any class, and the premise was such that it was believable.

Anyway, I'm interested in playing more, but until I can resolve these graphics issues, I think I'll hold off. In fact, I started playing through A Hunt Through The Dark again instead. I'm starting to feel like I blew 30 bucks. At least I didn't pay full price, and if I can't get the game to work smoothly now, maybe I'll be able to play it when I get a new computer... which, admitedly, isn't likely to happen any time soon.

Update to Last Post

2007-07-19T10:32:00.000-05:00

I remembered one other module that I started but didn't finish, and I finished two more since I wrote the post.

A Halo of Flies
A Hunt Through the Dark, Pts 1-5
A Tangled Web
Against the Cult of the Reptile God
Aylomeiger's Magical Curios
Beneath the Spine
Blackguard I
Blackwall Keep
Caereena - Krakona Rising
Captain's Choice
Cormyrean Nights
Crimson Tides of Tethyr
Dark Fortress
Darkness over Daggerford
Dastard's MorrowDream-land: By a Route Obscure and Lonely
Elena's Tale - Roses For Rosa
Glorious Rejuvenation
Guild War
Ill-Fated in Innesbrook
In The Company of Thieves: Grand Theft Otto
Into the Toadshade
Kingmaker
Kunoichi
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 1
Midnight
Midwinter Festival
Mountain of Mirrors
Perchance to Dream
Portals: A Prelude
Red Moon Rising
Rose of Eternity - Chapter 1: The Coming
Saleron's Gambit, Pts. 1-5
Sands of Fate I - Shadows over Heliopolis
Shadow From a Soul on Fire
Shadowguard
Siege of Shadowdale
Tale of a Mage, Chapters 1 & 2
The Aieland Saga, Act 1-3
The Aieland Saga, Act 4, Pts. 1-2
The Art of Death - Back in Black
The Breach
The Cave of Songs
The Citadel
The Cup of Akbar
The Dark Ranger's Treasure
The Fate of Neverwinter
The Island
The Sultan's Guard
The Way of the Open Hand
The Winds of Eremor
Threat of Dreams I - The Hunger and the Sickness
To Heir is Human
Twilight
Tyrants of the Moonsea
UK2 - The Sentinel
UK5 - Eye of the Serpent
Witches Wake

Modules I've played but didn't finish (or which I haven't yet finished):

A Dance With Rogues, Pt. 1
A Hunt Through the Dark, Pt. 6
Aiar 0: Youth
Almraiven
An Ancient Heart
B2: Keep on the Borderlands (Can't remember which version)
CC1: Gates of Myth Drannor
Desert Madness - Dark Summoning
Desert Rose
Eye of the Beholder
High Adventures with the Baronness DeCallya
Island Adventures: The Horns of Craven
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 2
Lords of Darkness I
Orcs - The Awakening of Arak-Hur
Rose of Eternity - Chapter 2: Cry the Beloved
Subterra: Manastone
The Battle of Kadir Pass, Ch. 1
The Last Inn
The Paladin War
Tomb Raiders

Played: 90
Finished: 69

Modules I've Played

2007-07-17T21:06:00.000-05:00

I was kind of curious to see how many, and which, modules I've played, so I figured I'd make a list:

A Halo of Flies
A Hunt Through the Dark, Pts 1-6 (didn't actually finish part 6)
A Tangled Web
Against the Cult of the Reptile God
Aylomeiger's Magical Curios
Beneath the Spine
Blackguard I
Blackwall Keep
Caereena - Krakona Rising
Cormyrean Nights
Crimson Tides of Tethyr
Dark Fortress
Darkness over Daggerford
Dastard's Morrow
Dream-land: By a Route Obscure and Lonely
Elena's Tale - Roses For Rosa
Glorious Rejuvenation
Guild War
Ill-Fated in Innesbrook
In The Company of Thieves: Grand Theft Otto
Into the Toadshade
Kingmaker
Kunoichi
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 1
Midnight
Midwinter Festival
Mountain of Mirrors
Perchance to Dream
Portals: A Prelude
Red Moon Rising
Rose of Eternity - Chapter 1: The Coming
Saleron's Gambit, Pts. 1-5
Sands of Fate I - Shadows over Heliopolis
Shadow From a Soul on Fire
Shadowguard
Siege of Shadowdale
Tale of a Mage, Chapters 1 & 2
The Aieland Saga, Act 1-3
The Aieland Saga, Act 4, Pts. 1-2
The Art of Death - Back in Black
The Cave of Songs
The Citadel
The Cup of Akbar
The Dark Ranger's Treasure
The Fate of Neverwinter
The Island
The Sultan's Guard
The Way of the Open Hand
The Winds of Eremor
Threat of Dreams I - The Hunger and the Sickness
To Heir is Human
Twilight
Tyrants of the Moonsea
UK2 - The Sentinel
UK5 - Eye of the Serpent
Witches Wake

And I'm just about done with The Breach

Also, these are modules I've played but didn't finish (or which I haven't yet finished):
A Dance With Rogues, Pt. 1
Aiar 0: Youth
Almraiven
An Ancient Heart
B2: Keep on the Borderlands (Can't remember which version)
CC1: Gates of Myth Drannor
Desert Madness - Dark Summoning
Desert Rose
Eye of the Beholder
High Adventures with the Baronness DeCallya
Island Adventures: The Horns of Craven
Legacy of the Draycn, Pt. 2
Lords of Darkness I
Orcs - The Awakening of Arak-Hur
Rose of Eternity - Chapter 2: Cry the Beloved
Subterra: Manastone
The Battle of Kadir Pass, Ch. 1
The Last Inn
The Paladin War

I may have missed one or two as well. So I've tried out 89 different modules and finished about 70 of them (and, of course, I've played the OC, SoU, and HotU as well) since I first got the game back in October or November of 05. That's a lot, and yet, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what's out there.

Anyway, so far my favorite modules have been Cormyrean Nights, A Hunt Through the Dark (pts 1-5), The Aieland Saga (all of it), Saleron's Gambit pts 1-5, Tale of a Mage ch. 1 & 2, Caereena - Krakona Rising, Crimson Tides of Tethyr, and Darkness over Daggerford, with honorable mentions to Twilight, Midnight, Red Moon Rising, A Tangled Web, and The Art of Death: Back In Black

The End?

2007-07-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

It's been over a month since I've worked on the module. I've had long gaps before, but this time, I think I may be abandoning the project. I've got a girlfriend now, which means I'm spending most weekends with her. I don't have a lot of free time during the week, and the time I do have I usually prefer to spend playing NWN - and now NWN2 as well.

I have the whole weekend free, so I may actually put some work in on it. I hate to leave it completely unfinished. I was already planning to truncate it, and so now I might just truncate it severely and make it a strictly linear module, rather than putting in different paths for proceeding through the module. Even then, I'd still have a lot of work ahead of me. *Sigh* Why can't I just win the lottery so I can quit my job and spend all day working on this module, and then on all the other ideas I had for modules as well?

I think I might keep this blog around, and use it to review the modules I've played. I doubt anyone is actually reading this, but maybe I'll do it anyway.

Conversation Conundrums

2007-06-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

Spent a lot of time over the weekend working on the module. I finished up two more areas, wrote two new, relatively short conversations, and finished up a lot of other things. I ran into a big stumbling block when I tested the Bertram conversation. When the PC first talks to him, there are four responses to his initial greeting. I found that, depending on which one I chose, sometimes the conversation would go the way it should, but other times it would play out as if the PC had a certain variable on him that he shouldn't have. After asking around, I thought what had happened is that I had made some bad links from the original conversation node to the node that only appears when that variable is set. However, after painstakingly testing out all the conversation options, I discovered that, in fact, the conversation was beginning on the wrong node, and that that node had some bad links to the original one. As it turned out, the problem was with the item OnAcquire script. I tried to write it so that when the PC picked up item A when they had variable B set to 1, then it would set the variable to 2, but if they didn't have that variable set to 1, it would set it to 3 instead. However, the way I structured it, it was setting variable B to 3 on all my items when the game started (I didn't know that script always fired at the start of the game). Someone on the forum rewrote it for me, and it works now, although when I first tried it something very weird happened: all the NPC's began attacking each other! I have absolutely no idea how this happened, because the script that was changed had nothing in it that would make the NPCs attack each other. I went in and discovered that the "dead" NPCs were in a different faction than the living ones, and once I changed that things were fine, although even so, I still don't know why they attacked each other because A) The two factions were friendly to each other and B) There was nothing that should have set them against each other. All I can think of is that at one point the toolkit didn't shut down properly, so maybe that caused some temporary weirdness.

Things to fix

2007-06-03T17:52:00.000-05:00

Thaddeus is not quitting as a henchman, nor is he returning to the temple at the end of the interjection-trigger conversation.
The sound object is not firing when the PC enters the trigger outside the cottage.
The sound object did not fire when Derwin was killed.
The "Anna Shrieks" sound object continues to fire, even after it should have stopped.

Note: The two orcs will almost certainly kill Derwin before the PC can kill them. I'll either have to make them goblins, or give Derwin a lot more hit points.

Contest

2007-05-29T17:35:00.000-05:00

Spent a lot of time finishing up Bertram's conversation, which ended up being a little more complicated than I thought because I had to account for the fact that a player might go to the bandit camp before going to the monastery, pick up the cup, and then put it back. It's also possible that they might see the cup and not pick it up, but I'm not going to bother accounting for that. I also got another area 95% completed. I'm starting to find area creation tedious, mainly because I'm just recreating the same rural areas over and over again, and there's only so much I can do to make them look different when they're basically a bunch of flat plains with a road and a few trees. Fortunately, this is the last Kingsroad area I need to do, although there are still plenty of other rural areas to work on.

I just saw this weekend that Bioware is having a module-building contest with an eye toward hiring a world designer to work for them in Austin. As such, once I'm done this subquest with the bandit camp, I'm going to start working on the forest section - which I hadn't planned to get to for some time - next, but with a few changes. I'm going to build it as a self-contained module, and it won't have any custom content. The beginning is also going to be very different from what I originally planned - there will be a cutscene but there won't be any elves, and I'll probably replace the first challenge with something else. The other two challenges will probably be designed as I originally envisioned them, and I'll import them into my current module once I'm done with the module for the contest. I figure the chance of me winning is slim to none, since I don't really have the technical chops, but I do have the creativity, and I think I can do dialogue better than most. Besides, it's not like I have anything to lose.

Simplification

2007-05-24T21:30:00.000-05:00

After writing down everything I needed to do for the cupquest, I figured out a way to cut out a lot of the complexity by exploiting an aspect of my module usually not found in other modules. All (or almost all) of the north/south transitions along the Kingsroad will let the PC go north, but not south. Once the PC has left an area going north, he can never go back to that area again. The idea is that the PC is fleeing northward, and so they wouldn't ever want to go south. Because of this, I realized I could completely cut out the possibility of the PC killing Thaddeus and then going back to the monastery by placing the henchman interjection trigger in the area immediately north of the area with the monastery. That way, if the player decides to go north after accepting the quest, in the next area Thaddeus will abandon the PC, and the PC won't be able to go back to the monastery. More importantly, if the player decides to go north after retrieving the cup, Thaddeus will attack him, and if the PC kills him, he won't have the option of returning to the monastery.

This cuts out the need to keep track of all sorts of variables in all sorts of places, and also cuts out the need to write a big chunk of dialogue. Best of all, it prevents the player from doing something weirdly irrational. As such, the conversation nodes and variables I need to deal with are a lot simpler, and look like this:

1) The PC has accepted the quest, but hasn't completed it. (Cupquest = 1).
2) The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest. (Cupquest = 2).
3) The PC has finished the quest (Cupquest = 4).
4) The PC has the cup, but never recieved the quest to begin with (Cupquest = 5).
5) The PC returned the cup, having never recieved the quest to begin with (Cupquest = 3).

Cupquest = 3 was originally supposed to be set if Thaddeus was killed by an NPC. However, I realized that wouldn't work and didn't make sense. Instead, I added a line to Thaddeus' OnDeath script that sets the variable "thad_dead" to 1. That way, when the PC returns the cup to Bertram, I can reference that variable to include a conversation thread that acknowledges that Thaddeus is dead.

I've modified the OnDeath script and the Acquire_Item script to account for the necessary changes. I also turned Bertram and the other monks into genuine clerics and assigned them to their own faction. I now have to write all the necessary conversations for Bertram and Thaddeus, and include scripts to make them go hostile, and to have Thaddeus run off, when necessary. I'll also need to create a new area and put the Henchman trigger for Thaddeus in there. Being able to cut out a lot of that chaff has definitely brightened my mood.

Conversation Complications

2007-05-23T12:45:00.001-05:00

Working on the Cup sidequest last night, I began to see that the conversation with Father Bertram is going to end up being much more complicated than I thought. Initially, it seemed pretty straightforward: The PC talks to Bertram and is offered the quest. If he takes it, Brother Thaddeus offers to go with him as a henchmen. So the conversation nodes have to cover the following:

1) The PC meets Father Bertram for the first time.
2) The PC has taken the quest, but doesn't have the cup.
3) The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest.
4) The PC has finished the quest.

All of these, except for the first, need to be tracked with a variable. 'The variable is called "cupquest," and right now the values assigned to it work out like this:

1 = The PC has taken the quest, but doesn't have the cup.
2 = The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest.
3 = The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest, and Thaddeus is dead.
4 = The PC has finished the quest.

Number 3 is where the complications start to creep in. Thaddeus is only meant to be a henchman for the duration of this one sidequest. I don't want the PC to be able to hire him, then ignore the sidequest and carry on with the main quest. So I set up a trigger similar to the one I set up for Jocen & Crissa, where if the PC makes like he's going to leave the area by following the road north, Thaddeus will interject and then leave. This itself isn't complex, except for the fact that I had to learn how to set up a non-random interjection trigger for the henchman, and I don't fully understand the instructions. What gets complex is if the PC recovers the cup and then decides to run off with it instead of returning it. Actually, this wouldn't be a big deal, except that he might have Thaddeus as a henchman. Not only will Thaddeus have to interject, but it'll have to be a different interjection than the one that comes up if the PC decides to bugger off before he gets the cup.

Now, if the PC tries to leave without the cup, then Thaddeus will simply return to the monastery. The variable won't change, and if the PC changes his mind, he can go back and rehire him, and there's no problem. However, if he tries to leave with the cup, Thaddeus will actually try to stop him, and may get killed. If the player does the logical thing and moves on, no problem. However, I have to allow for the fact that the PC might kill Thaddeus, then change his mind and go to the monastery and talk to Bertram anyway. This wouldn't make much sense, and in fact, I'm not sure how to write the dialogue for it, but a player could concievably do this, so I have to allow for it. And, in order to maintain some kind of realism, I have to allow that the PC might talk to Bertram after killing Thaddeus and then decide not to return the cup (if they kill Thaddeus, that is; if he just goes straight to the monastery to return it, I'm not going to allow for the option of the PC not returning it in this case, because if they wanted to keep it, there's no reason for them to go back to the monastery at all). In fact, since they'll only kill Thaddeus if they were planning to bugger off with the cup, there's no reason to assume they'd then give the cup back. In fact, it makes no sense that they'd go to the monastery at all, but again, I have to allow for this. My only other option is to simply not let them go back into the monastery after killing Thaddeus, but that isn't realistic either.

Anyway, I was simply going to add a bit of script to Thaddeus OnDeath event that would change the value of cupquest to 3 when Thaddeus was killed. Then I remembered that Thaddeus might very well be killed by an NPC. Obviously, I don't want dialogue to come up suggesting that the PC killed Thaddeus if they didn't, but I do want Bertram to ask about Thaddeus if he's dead, so in fact, I'm going to have to write a couple of scripts that essentially say the following:

1) If the PC tries to leave (i.e. follow the road north), but doesn't have the cup, Thaddeus will return to the monastery (if he's been hired as a henchman).
2) If Thaddeus is killed, set the value of cupquest to 3.
3) If the PC tries to leave, and has the cup, Thaddeus will attack the PC.
4) If the PC kills Thaddeus (which can only happen if #3 happens first), set the value of cupquest to 5.

Numbers 1 & 3 when the PC steps into a trigger, and I've already begun working on that. To handle this, the PC will be assigned the variable "quitter" with a value of 1 (if they try to leave without the cup), or 2 (if they try to leave with the cup) Numbers 2 & 4 will have to be written into Thaddeus OnDeath script, which will end up looking something like this.

If
Thaddeus is killed,
and the value of quitter is not 2
set the value of cupquest to 3.
Else
set the value of cupquest to 5.

This means I need the following conversation nodes for Bertram:

1) The PC meets Father Bertram for the first time.2) The PC has taken the quest, but doesn't have the cup. (cupquest = 1)3) The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest, and Thaddeus is alive. (cupquest = 2)
4) The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest, and Thaddeus was killed by an NPC. (cupquest = 3)4) The PC has finished the quest. (cupquest=4)
5) The PC has the cup, but hasn't finished the quest, and the PC killed Thaddeus. (cupquest = 5)

The last option is extremely annoying, because it might very well lead to the PC getting into a fight with Bertram, which means that now I have to recreate Bertram as an actual cleric, rather than as just a commoner.

Now, aside from all this, I just realized there's another possibility: the PC could wander into the area, and then decide to head west, toward the bandits, without going into the monastery first. That means the PC could get the cup without ever recieving the quest, and then they might decide to go to the monastery and talk to Bertram. At the moment, I have a script that triggers a journal entry for the quest when the PC acquires the cup. If the PC never got the quest, this won't make sense, so I'm going to have to rewrite it so that it looks like this:

If
the PC has the value of cupquest set to 1
set the value of cupquest to 2
and add the journal entry
Else
Set the value of cupquest to 6

Then, I have to add a sixth conversation node to Bertram to cover the PC having acquired the cup without ever recieving the quest. In this case, the PC might decide to mention the cup, or not. If they do, then they might decide to give the cup to Bertram, or not. If they don't, then I need a script which makes everyone in the monastery attack the PC.

And finally, theres the matter of the reward: a holy symbol which only works if the PC is one of the faithful or is favored by Naamar. I wrote it this way because the PC could concievably kill Thaddeus and take his holy symbol, and it didn't seem right to me that Naamar would offer his protection to the PC after the PC just killed one of his servants. If the PC takes the quest and returns the cup (without killing Thaddeus), he gets this boon. If he kills Thaddeus... well, I might not put in the option to return the cup. Or maybe the PC feels remorse and does have the option to return the cup, but if he does, the holy symbol won't work (I think I'll need a journal entry to explain this, since the PC could lie to Bertram about killing Thaddeus). If the PC brings back the cup without ever having taken the quest, he doesn't get the holy symbol at all.

Oh, and on top of all that, I need to make a custom faction for Bertram, Thaddeus, and the monks, so that they can all go hostile if need be.

So to sum up, I need to include scripts and/or conversation nodes to handle all of the following:

The PC has Thaddeus as a henchman and tries to leave before acquiring the cup.
(req: henchman trigger, conversation node)
The PC has Thaddeus as a henchman and tries to leave after acquiring the cup.
(req: henchman trigger, conversation node, Thaddeus turns hostile, set variable "quitter" to 2)
The PC kills Thaddeus.
(OnDeath script, set variable "cupquest" to 5)
Thaddeus is killed by an NPC.
(OnDeath script, set variable "cupquest"to 3)
The PC talks to Bertram after he has the cup, and Thaddeus is alive.
(Conversation node, set variable "cupquest"to 4)
The PC talks to Bertram after he has the cup, and Thaddeus was killed by an NPC.
(Conversation node, set variable "cupqest" to 4)
The PC kills Thaddeus and refuses to return the cup, and Bertram turns hostile.
(Conversation node, set variable "cupquest" to 7)
The PC kills Thaddeus, but then decides to return the cup anyway.
(Conversation node, set variable "cupqest" to 4 (?))
The PC acquires the cup after recieving the quest.
(OnAcquire script, set Journal entry, set variable "cupquest"to 2)
The PC acquires the cup without recieving the quest.
(OnAcquire script, set variable "cupquest"to 6)
The PC returns the cup without recieving the quest.
(Conversation node, set variable "cupqest" to 4 (?))
The PC refuses to return the cup, and has never recieved the quest, which makes Bertram and everyone else in the monastery turn hostile.
(Conversation node, set variable "cupqest" to 7 (?))
The PC acquires a holy symbol without accepting and finishing the quest, so it doesn't work.
(On acquire script, journal entry)
The PC acquires a holy symbol, having accepted the quest, but then having killed Thaddeus, so it doesn't work.
(On acquire script, journal entry)
The PC acquires a holy symbol, having accepted and finished the quest, and it does work.
(On acquire script, journal entry, set variable "favored" to 1)
(There is no way for the PC to get a holy symbol if they returned the cup without having accepted the quest first).

I think that about covers it.

Henchmen

2007-05-22T14:57:00.000-05:00

Achieved a small success last night in that I figured out how to add an NPC as a henchman while in a conversation with a different NPC. It was actually pretty simple to do. What threw me off is that I used the Module Builders Henchman Kit, which, in retrospect, was a mistake. It's a useful system for a module that relies heavily on henchmen, but mine only uses them in a limited way, and so I don't need the level of complexity it offers. Also, because I'm new to this, I couldn't really understand the scripts used in the kit, which are very advanced. In fact, I ended up slightly modifying the basic add henchman script from the game and using that instead.

I also added in a new bit where one of the NPCs walks over to a holy water basin, does a short animation, and then returns and gives the player two vials of "blessed water," which are basically just cure light wounds potions. I was able to re-use an older script, so that was easy, but I also had to add a few new conversation lines, then cut the remainder of the conversation and paste it to the last new line. This, unfortunately, broke all the links in that part of the conversation, so I had to waste time recreating them all. Other than that, I had to do a bunch of tweaking so that the NPC who gets the water actually faces and stands near the basin, and I also so that the second NPC doesn't come over too soon (because it looks odd with him just standing there), or too late (because then he starts talking before he's next to the PC).

Overall, though I didn't work on it long, I felt like I achieved something positive, and that my momentum is returning.

Long Hiatus Over

2007-05-21T12:53:00.000-05:00

After neglecting the module for a long time, I finally got back to work on it this weekend. Most of that work involved working on a complex conversation. It's mostly done, though I might add a little more to it. Also, I might break it into two different conversations. As it stands, a second NPC interrupts the first conversation and starts a new conversation with the PC. However, since the first NPC doesn't talk again, I may as well just make it a seperate conversation. More to the point, the PC has the option of adding the second NPC as a henchman, but since the conversation begins with the first one, the PC ends up hiring him instead. So I either have to figure out how to change the script so that the PC hires the right NPC, or I just have to split the conversation. The second option doesn't require any script changes, but I may have to rewrite a lot of the conversation, since I don't think I can copy nodes from one conversation to another.

Other than that, I did a bunch of minor things: fixing up things that broke when I had to reinstall the game, figuring out how to have a magic item only work when used by an NPC, and other stuff like that. It feels good to finally get back to work on this project.

Has It Been a Month?

2007-03-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

I guess it has been a month since I last wrote something here. It's not that I haven't been working on the module, I just haven't been writing about it. I started this blog because, when I first started work on the module, I really wanted to have a place to write about the things I was learning and doing, and now I guess I feel less of an urge to do so.

Anyway, in the last few weeks I created two new areas: an outside area with a monastery, and the monastery interior. Creating the latter was kind of frustrating because of the lack of options in the tile sets. I could either use one of the prefab interiors, none of which were really to my liking, or I could use something from the castle interior tileset, which also wasn't to my liking. I finally went with one of the prefabs, then played around with the tile properties to create a sort of dim, candlelit interior. I think I eventually went with "interior: sewers" to get the effect I wanted.

The scene inside the monastery is that it's been attacked by brigands, and several of the monks have been killed or wounded. So first, I put in a couple of dead monks. I already knew how to make face-down corpses, but I wanted some of them to be face-up, so I consulted the scripting guide. Turns out that the script in the guide had an error in it (not the first time this has happened), so with some help from the forum, I figured out how to make that work. Then I added in a few other monks: some tending to the wounded monks, one of them praying over a dead monk, and one just sitting against the wall in a daze. Getting each to work quite right was a minor challenge. For the sitting monk, I wanted to make sure he stayed seated when the PC talked to him, and I wanted him to reply with just one line. That wasn't hard, but when I tested it out, the monk turned toward the PC addressing him while remaining seated. I eventually solved this by applying a paralysis effect to him, though when I first tried that, he wouldn't say his line. I can't remember how I resolved this, but I did. I'll have to look at the script again.

For the other monks, I first tried putting the requisite animation scripts in their OnHeartbeat slot, but that didn't really give me the effect I wanted. So I put it in the OnSpawn script, and that made it work. The only reason I didn't try that at first was because I had tried it previously in another area, and it hadn't worked, but looking back now, I realize the problem was that I had set the duration way too low, so that by the time the PC got in range of the NPC, the NPC had already finished performing the animation. Anyway, once I got that done, the next step was to set up how they'd interact with the PC. I wanted them to speak one line without interupting their animation and without turning to face the PC. I tried a one-line conversation first, but the problem was that they would turn to face the PC, so I switched to a ActionSpeakString script in the OnConversation event. Then they wouldn't change facing, but also wouldn't speak at all. Finally, I figured out that the animation script in their OnSpawn was overriding the OnConversation script, so I put ClearAllActions at the start of the OnConversation script, and everything worked fine.

Oh, and I also learned how take the candle placeable - which appears as lit - and make it unlit.

I also worked on creating what will be the first of two, limited-term henchmen in the module. The first is a 3rd-level cleric that will accompany the PC for one sidequest. Because henchman creation seemed very daunting, I decided to go with one of the pre-made ones on the Vault, and I ended up choosing the Module Builder Henchman's Kit because it was the most popular one available. This may or may not have been a good choice. It's a very full-featured system that allows henchmen to do a lot of things and gives me a lot of control over how they behave. However, it's possibly a bit too full-featured for my needs, considering the henchmen aren't going to be a big part of the module. I'm going to have to do a whole lot of editing on the conversation that came with it to eliminate all the options I don't need, and it might have been easier just to write the conversation and then put in the scripts I need. I also might just write the conversation and then copy over only the scripts I need, rather than trying to cut down and rewrite the one that comes in the system. I also had to mess with some of the module scripts to integrate my changes with the changes in the henchman system, but I think that may have been mostly unnecessary, as I simply don't need all the functionality the system offers.

Finally, I also learned how to incrementally increase the value on a variable. This was actually one of the more frustrating things because it looked simple, and I felt like it was something I should have been able to figure out on my own, but I couldn't. I tried following the example in Celowin's tutorial, but the problem was that I followed it too closely without truly understanding it, so as a result, it didn't work because it wasn't written to do something similar to what I wanted to do, which isn't the same as doing what I wanted it to do. It turned out that the problem was simple - the script was refering to the trigger when it should have been refering to the player character - and someone on the forum showed me how to rewrite it both to make it work and make it more elegant.

I'm actually trying to focus a lot more intently on this project now. I'm trying to work on it after work, instead of just on the weekends. To that end, I'm actually taking a bit of a break from playing NWN, because when I'm in the process of playing a module, I find that it tends to suck up a lot of my free time.

Back in the Saddle Again

2007-02-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

After more than a month of inactivity, I finally got back to working on the module, and while it was good to take a break, it felt great to get back to work. I did more work on the conversation in the Inn, and also (mostly) finished a new area. In the conversation, I had to work on getting one NPC -named Eldin - to kill another - named Leon - during a conversation, and also write a script to have Eldin walk over to the body, search it, and then walk back to the PC, and give him some money, all without breaking the conversation. I managed to mostly achieve both with some help and a lot of fiddling around. At first, the big problem is that after Eldin killed Leon, the conversation wouldn't continue. That is, the next dialog choices wouldn't appear in the dialog box. Also, a third NPC, Sarah, was supposed to cry out when Leon was killed, but she wasn't doing that either. As for the second script, I initially ran into some problems where it wasn't executing. The problems with both scripts were solved by putting in a DelayCommand. I also had a problem with the animation in the second script, but that was solved by tweaking the running times for the animation. The problems aren't completely solved: After Eldin kills Leon, he doesn't turn back to face the PC, and I haven't figured out how to make Sarah face Leon, but it's moving along.

The new area was pretty simple, since it didn't involve any scripting, just painting. It took a while to do though, because I had to paint down a ruined caravan, complete with bodies and bloodstains. I was re-using a simple script to make the NPCs into corpses, and then I had to do a bit of tweaking to make sure that the bloodstains and arrows and so on were in the right places. The only problem I'm having with this is that I want to have the orcs and goblins rummaging through the wreckage when the PC shows up, and so far, I can't get the animation to work, even though it's just one line of code.

Long Hiatus

2007-02-12T13:51:00.000-05:00

Haven't written for a long time, because I haven't been working on the module. Been on a long hiatus, more or less. Haven't really had time to work on the module, and haven't made time either. Been too busy with other things', and I've been having some computer issues that'll require me to reinstall Windows. I'm not abandoning it, and I still have lots of ideas for future projects, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to get back to work on it. Maybe Monday.

Complications

2007-01-18T17:52:00.000-05:00

When I set out to create this module, I expected to run into problems, most of which I figured would have simple solutions, and that my difficulties would come from a lack of knowledge. While this has been true to some extent, it also seems that I have a knack for stumbling into problems that even expert builders have trouble tackling. In this case, I'm trying to set up the following situation: the PC enters an inn and sees four people arguing, which is represented by the talk_forceful animation. When the PC steps into a trigger, the four NPCs are supposed to stop arguing and turn to face the PC, and one of them is supposed to approach the PC and start a conversation.

I got all of this to work, except for the part where the NPCs stop arguing. They turn to face the PC, but except for the NPC that approaches the PC, the animation doesn't stop. I've sought help and tried out a bunch of different things, and none of them have worked. Apparently, ClearAllActions doesn't work when it comes to animations.

Another problem I had was that, in the course of the conversation, it's likely the PC will end up fighting two of the NPCs (soldiers gone bad). I put them in their own faction so that they would both turn hostile at the appropriate time to the PC. They did, but only one of them attacked, while the other just watched, and wouldn't attack until the first one was killed. Again, I sought advice, and after a couple of attempts, I finally got this to work.

I can already see the next problem with this one situation looming on the horizon. One of the possibilities is that the PC will join those two soldiers and attack the other two NPCs (an innkeeper and his wife). I've got to write a script, so that when the innkeeper and his wife are killed, one of the two soliders will then approach the body of the innkeeper, perform the searching the bodies animation, and then go back to the PC and start a conversation. First, I've got to figure out how to trigger this, which I think I maybe can do, but I'm not sure about. Then I've got to do the animation, which I also think I can do, except I'm not sure you can have an NPC walk to a dead body (which, I believe, is a destroyed object). My other option is to have the one solider tell the PC to search the body, but I'd have to put in some method by which that soldier knows that the PC has searched the body, so that he says something different afterwards. Short of creating a unique item for the PC to find on the body, I'm not sure how this could be done.

There's also a very remote possibility that the Innkeeper could kill the soldier that does the talking after you've taken his side. I should technically write something that will account for that, but it's so unlikely that it may not be worth the effort.

Orcs

2007-01-08T13:06:00.000-05:00

Been working on the module here and there, but didn't get much done because I got too absorbed with one tiny aspect of the module. It started when I was playing a module called The Fate of Neverwinter. The module was ok, but the Orcs in the module really jumped out at me. I wasn't really happy with the orcs I was already using, and the Orcs in that module looked amazing. I checked out the module to see what hak they came from, but found that it only used the CEP. So I opened up the module and checked them out, and discovered that they were actually half-orcs colored green, using the custom half-orc heads from the CEP, wearing customized outfits. So I went into my module, made my own orcs in the same way, and then began creating custom outfits for them. What should have taken an hour at best became a long, multi-hour project. Just as with the peasant outfits, I got very fixated on creating the orc armor, mixing and matching the various parts and trying out various color combinations. I like doing that stuff, but I also get way too wrapped up in getting it just right, and I took up a lot of time that I could have spent working on the rest of the module.

I did get two more areas created: an exterior area and an inn. No real innovations there, just tileset placement (the city interior tileset continues to annoy the hell out of me) , painting placeables, and creating a few characters. The next step will be to set up the conversation and associated scripts, which looks to be complicated.

Yet Another Lesson About the Smallest Things Can Become The Biggest Headaches

2006-12-25T12:58:00.000-05:00

It's Xmas day and I did not end up getting NWN2, but I did get a new graphics card so that when I finally do pick it up, I'll (hopefully) be able to run it. But anyway, over the long weekend I put in some time on the module, and finally created two new areas and started work on a third. I would have had more done, but I got very caught up in mapping out the course of the module in Paint. Doing this was not only useful, but necessary, as I now have a sense of how many exterior areas I need, where different encounters will take place, and what the terrain should look like in each area. However, I got a little too obsessive doing the map, and spent way too much time tweaking it and changing it and so on.

The three areas I worked on were an outdoor area, an abanoned house, and a cellar for the house. One of the more frustrating things I had to deal with was setting up a few triggered encounters of the sort where "If the PC has variable X set to number Y, then trigger the encounter, and then change a different variable so that if the player passes over the trigger again, it won't go off again." I've done this a bunch of times, but I've done it in different ways, and part of the problem is that I don't fully grasp how if/else works in conjunction with "GetIs" functions. I know that sometimes you want "GetIs" before an if/else statement and sometimes you want "!Get/Is" before it, but I'm having trouble sorting out how it works. I recently discovered a trigger wasn't working because I had the former when I should have had the latter, but every other time i've used the former.

Anyway, as it turned out my real problems weren't with that, but with paying attention to the little things. I couldn't get the first trigger to work until I realized that I had typed the variable the script was looking for in all lowercase when, in fact, the first letter should have been capitalized. The second trigger, however, nearly gave me fits. The idea was simple: when the PC walks into the house, he gets a variable put on him set to the value of 1. When he walks out, he steps on a trigger that checks for that variable, and then activates the encounter. Since the PC won't have the variable on him until he goes inside, he can pass over that trigger on the way into the house without setting it off. It seemed simple enough - and in fact, I'd done it before - but I simply could not get the thing to work. At first I thought it had something to do with the arrangement of the code, and so I copied a script that worked exactly the same way as I wanted this trigger to work, but it still didn't work. The variables matched, and everything looked ok. I finally figured it out by accident: after the encounter didn't trigger for the 10th time, I didn't log out of the game for whatever reason. Suddenly, my PC was attacked, but the attackers came from the opposite direction of the spawn point. I tried it a few more times, and got the same results - the reason it took them so long to show was because they were stopping to attack a bird. Then, I finally figured out what happened: when I was setting up the spawn point, I accidentally moved it off the edge of the area, at which point the game automatically puts it in the lower right corner. Instead of deleting it, I just created a new spawn point, figuring that it would automatically eliminate the old one. It didn't, and the monsters kept spawning at the original point. At least a half-hour of agita could have been avoided had I not made this one tiny mistake.

Desigining the interior of the house was easy, and it also wasn't too hard to figure out how to set up a secret trapdoor to take the player down to the cellar. Designing the cellar was a lot tougher, because I couldn't find a tileset that I liked. I finally ended up going with the kitchen tileset, which wasn't ideal because I had to make the area much larger than I liked. I could have gone with a one-tile kitchen room, but that has a fixed doorway, which I didn't want. I tried using some placeable walls to cover it, but that just looked stupid in the game. I also tried partitioning off a smaller section of the larger kitchen room with placeable walls, but that looked even worse. So I'm stuck with a large cellar. It took a bit of trial and error to set up a placeable ladder that, when clicked on, would take the PC back upstairs; although the code is simple, I put it in the OnClick event instead of the OnUsed event, and then forgot to change the script to use "GetLastUsedBy" instead of "GetLastClicked." Ai yi yi! But I finally got it all working, and was pleased at having done something new. The last thing I did was start putting down some placeables. Next, I have to finish with the placeables, and then I want to set up an encounter with a ghost. I just haven't decided how to trigger it yet. I might have it go off when the PC opens a chest, or I might have it go off when the PC picks up a piece of jewelry, or I might just have it activate when the PC passes over a trigger, but have it delay 30 seconds before firing.

Reworking

2006-12-20T13:31:00.000-05:00

Did some work on the module last night that actually amounted to a reworking of certain things I had already done that I'd never been quite satisfied with. Specifically, I wasn't happy with the first area after the cutscene. In that area, the PC runs into a group of peasants being attacked by goblins. After helping them defeat the goblins, he learns that they're heading north for the safety of the castle. The PC also wants to go to the castle, but the peasants warn him that the goblins and other creatures are moving up fast, and that the road is dangerous, so the PC might want to head Northeast thruogh the forest instead, which is a longer trip, but potentially safer.

The problem I always had with this is that if the road isn't safe, then why would the peasants head that way. The excuse was that because they didn't really have any choice, since they couldn't go through the forest. That's fine, but the thing that bugged me is that after the conversation, the peasants head north and vanish, to simulate that they're moving on. However, if the PC does the same, he moves onto the next area, but the peasants are nowhere to be seen. That bothered me: if both the PC and the peasants are heading north, then why do they disappear? They're both on the same road, after all. For that matter, why doesn't the PC just travel with them?

After thinking about this, I decided to change things so that the instead of heading north to the castle, the peasants are now heading west to a neighboring village, to escape the monsters, which are coming out of the east. This actually resovled a couple of issues: since the PC's goal is to make it to the castle, he won't have any reason to travel with the peasants. Since the monsters are coming from the east, it makes it more believable that they might intercept the PC before he can make it to the castle (beforehand they were coming from the south, and yet for story purposes, they had to get ahead of the PC, even though the PC has a lead on them). And since the monsters are coming from the east, it makes sense that the peasants would move away from them, rather than heading in a direction where they know they'd likely be putting themselves in danger.

Changing the module to accomodate this largely involved resizing the area, adding a new road going west, and moving the peasants and some triggers and placeables. The most onerous part was actually one of the most trivial: replotting the flight path for the two blackbirds that I included for a little extra color. I had to do a lot of tweaking to make sure they didn't run into any trees. Then, when I tested the area, I discovered that my peasants were vanishing a few seconds after my character spawned in. It turned out one of the birds was passing through the trigger that destroys the peasants. I don't know why the bird would trigger it, but it did.

Other fixes involved rewriting some of the journal entries (including changing everything from first to second person) and conversations, and moving the south gate in Cheswick to the west wall, since it no longer made sense for it to be in the south wall. I also put up some signposts and discovered, to my irritation, that I don't know how to make it so that when the player "uses" the signpost it says "X - North" and "Y - West" with the former appearing over the latter. It's a minor thing, but very annoying. It's also annoying that the palette only has one roadsign placeable. Speaking of minor but annoying details, I realized that the reason the peasant women stops walking away if you talk to her, but the peasant men don't, is because the women have a custom script in their heartbeat event. It's a small thing, but details matter, so I'll have to set up the heartbeat script as a user-defined event. Fortunately, that's a fairly simple matter.

Really and Truly Almost Finished With the Village

2006-12-17T12:38:00.000-05:00

I think, finally, that all the problems I was having finishing the village of Cheswick have been overcome.

Fixing the trigger/conversation problem was simply a matter of putting in a ClearAllActions line. I don't know why this worked, but it did.
Crissa wasn't following because, as I suspected, I had a custom script in her OnHeartbeat event. I moved that to the OnPerception event, and that solved that problem. However, it created a new problem: if I tried to leave the village with her, but without Jocen, she wouldn't run up and initiate a conversation. So I eventually had to add a switch case to her UserDefined event that would handle the stuff in her OnPerception event script. Then I restored her OnPerception script to the default, and that problem was solved.
I ran into a few conversation problems, such as journal entries not being added, missing sound effects, etc... but they were just minor issues that were easily resolved.
Taking a cue from Saleron's Gambit, I added in more detailed descriptions of the NPCs. Unfortunately, this meant putting in a new conversation node in Jerym's conversation tree right at the start, and then cutting and pasting the existing conversation into that node. This broke all the links in his conversation. Fixing them all was a big pain in the ass.
The encounter triggers kept re-firing every time the PC passed through them. I eventually fixed this.
I decided to strip the cure light wounds potions the PC starts with and give him a medicinal broth to start with instead. I ran into a couple of problems with this, and eventually decided to just clear the PC's inventory at the start and then give the PC all the items I wanted him to have. I also stripped his gold and then had him start with a lot less (once again taking a cue from Saleron's Gambit).
I changed the trigger that fires when the PC enters the village to give a longer description, rather than a line of floating text. This meant changing it to an ActionSpeakString command. I also added a second trigger that does the same thing in the middle of the village, but which only fires if the PC makes a relatively easy listen skill check. In theory, it'll only activate once, whether or not the PC makes the check.
Did lots of minor tweaking, including changing music, changing some items in containers, adjusting the inventory in Jerym's store, adding descriptions, changing movement speeds of some of the NPC's, and so on.

The only things I might still have to do in the village is add some music to some or all of the buildings, and possibly tweak some of the items. I've done some testing, and so far everything is working the way it should. I think I can finally move on to new areas. I'll be happy to do so.

Of course, as old problems are fixed, new ones arise. I just discovered the cutscene isn't working the way it should. The NPCs just stand around instead of fighting, until they finally flee. This makes no sense at all. I haven't changed anything since I last tested it (I think). Also, I have no idea why the NPCs are ignoring the fighting part of the script but not the fleeing part. The script is obviously being executed, and the tags are obviously correct too, so what the hell could be causing this problem?

No Time to Work on the Module

2006-12-08T14:32:00.000-05:00

It's been well over a week since I really worked on the module, and I may not be able to work on it again before the weekend after this one. I have a four day weekend starting tomorrow, but I'll be away for much of it and I have a lot to do. This is just a hectic time of year, and I'll probably be putting in OT at work, which means that by the time I get home, I won't be in the mood to work on the module.

As it is, I'm also feeling discouraged by the project. When I last left off, I had run into two problems that kept me from finishing the village. The first is that the trigger I set up in case the PC tries to leave the village with only one kid in two isn't working the way it should. It does make the kid initiate the conversation, but he doesn't run off at the end unless you talk to him a second time. Also, I decided that, instead of having the kids be henchmen, I'd have them follow the PC in the same way the mule does, since I got all of that to work. So I copied all the scripts I needed and tweaked them and put them where they should go. After a lot of mistakes, I finally got Jocen to follow the PC. However, I can't do the same for Crissa, and I have no idea why, as I've checked and rechecked the scripts to make sure they're ok. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the custom script in her heartbeat event is somehow messing things up, but I have yet to test that theory. I haven't even tried getting them both to follow the PC, or having one or both of them follow while the mule is also following. I'm really sick of working on this part of the module and frustrated that this has become so difficult to accomplish.

I've also been thinking a lot about the design and feel of the module. I just finished playing Saleron's Gambit Chapter 1, and I was really blown away. The module is practically a case study in how to bring a setting to life, and how to do a low-magic, low-gold, low-xp setting. These are all things I've been going for, except for low-xp, and now I'm reconsidering that aspect of it as well. I’m thinking of taking out the magic potions that appear early in the game, and reducing the amount of xp players get for kills. I don’t want it to go quite as low as Saleron’s Gambit, but I think it may be a bit high at the moment; I think I’m aiming to have the PC reach 3rd level by the end, depending on how long it ends up being. I may revise the areas to make them a bit more gloomy, as I don’t quite feel like the game is capturing the feel of tension I’m trying to instill. I also may copy the descriptive techniques from Saleron’s Gambit as well, although I don’t know how well they’ll translate over, since in that game the PC is surrounded by people he’s known all his life, whereas in my game, the PC is travelling through unfamiliar territory.

Part of the problem with setting the mood is that most of the module is supposed to be sort of tense and gritty, hence the low treasure/magic/xp. However, the forest area has a much more fairy tale feel, which is at odds with the realistic feel I’m trying to produce in the rest of the module. I’ve been wavering between which feel to go with for the whole module, but haven’t been able to decide. I think I might try to make the forest sinister and more foreboding, and try to achieve a dark fairy tale kind of feel. That’ll probably mean heavily revising the riddle challenge with the faeries at the end. On the one hand, I was never thrilled with this, as I don’t care for puzzles and riddles myself. However, I like the idea I had for the PC to potentially acquire different items along the way, which can be traded to make up for getting a wrong answer.

Almost Finished With The Village

2006-11-25T23:10:00.000-05:00

After working on it for weeks, I'm just about finished with the village of Cheswick. The following things are finished.

All interior areas have been painted, as well as the village exterior.
All triggers, encounters, and scripts associated with them are finished. Much of the time I worked on the module this weekend was spent fixing this. At first, I didn't have the full code to make sure no trigger went off more than once. Then I had to change a ton of variables. Then I had to rewrite several scripts. I even turned deleted a couple of them and replaced them a script that goes in the OnEnter event for the area. Now they all seem to be working, and they all seem to be working only once. Well, one of them didn't seem to work at all, but at this point I don't care.
The conversations for Jocen, Crissa, Jerym, and the mule are all finished, and all the scripts associated with these conversations are in the right places.
The journal entries for the Jerym subquest and the children's subquest are finished and set to go off at the right places.
All the dozens of minor fixes have been taken care of, at least until I find some more that need fixing. This includes uncluttering the shed Jocen is hiding in - in one test, I went in there after I had the mule following me, and found I couldn't reach Jocen because the mule was in the way.

Of course, not everything is done. Jocen and Crissa still get into fights with the monsters. The fact that they have scripts that are supposed to make them cower makes them behave oddly: they'll cower, then lash out and attack. In turn, the monsters attack them. They can't actually die, so it looks stupid to see them taking a lot of hits and damage, but never dying from them. I also apparently put the scripts that removes them as henchmen in the wrong places. I think I fixed that, but it's likely to be a moot point: I'm probably going to change them so that they follow me around in the same way the mule does, rather than make them henchmen. In theory, that'll keep them from getting in any more fights. Also, I still need to write a script that will make peasants spawn and walk by while the PC is conversing with Jerym the first time. However, other than that, the village is finished. Now it just needs to be tested. More specifically, all the iterations of the two subquests need to be tested, i.e., bring the children to Jerym but not the mule, and vice versa, and bringing both at the same time. I allowed for all this in the conversation. Hopefully it'll all work.

Although this took much longer than I expected, and I got hung up repeatedly fixing a few things, and on some very dumb mistakes (incorrect tags, missing semicolons, etc...), I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. The mule subquest worked fine the first time I tested it, as did the script that makes the children run off if the PC decides to abandon the quest while one of them is following him. Except for the henchmen thing, the conversation with Jerym that ends the subquests also seems to be working properly. I suppose I could do more work tonight, but I think I've done enough for one evening. Now I think I'll actually play for a little while.

New Accomplishments

2006-11-19T23:00:00.000-05:00

After a lengthy hiatus, I was able to find time over a couple of days to put some work in on the module. I finished painting all the areas except the two large barns, and then I got to work on various scripts and conversations. In the process, and after a lot of research and trial and error, I accomplished the following:

Put the command to change the music in the conversation with Crissa. Instead of messing around with user-defined events, I should have thought of this to begin with.
Learned how to make a hidden trapdoor. Instead of taking the PC to a new area, when the PC clicks on it, it reveals a hidden stash of gems. I had a hard time with this - no matter what I did, I couldn't get the trapdoor to open - until I realized that I needed to change its facing: the front of the door was against a wall, so the PC couldn't open it.
Turned the kids into henchmen, and added the script to have them join the PC.
Set up a trigger near the gate which activates if the PC has Jocen with him, but not the other. Basically, it makes Jocen start a conversation, and then leave the PC, run a short distance, and vanish. It also destroys Crissa (or at least it should - I forgot to check), and applies an alignment penalty to the PC. I also wrote the appropriate conversation thread for Jocen to go with this. This was another excercise which reminded me to always make sure all my semicolons are present.
Figured out how to rearrange the conversations so that only the options that should come up, do come up when the PC meets the kids.

And of course, there were the usual minor fixes, including having to tediously go through each area in the village and check every container - seems I forgot to remove the scripts that generate treasure on most of them.

This was the first time I actually got to test most of this stuff, and I can see that I'm going to need to do a lot of testing for bugs, as well as for difficulty. I found another conversation problem with Jocen, and what appears to be a repeating trigger, even though all the triggers are set to single shot. Things I need to do next time include:

Fix Jocen's conversation
Fiddle with Jocen and Crissa's scripts so that they don't get into fights. Not sure why this is happening as they have the herbivore onspawn script, which should prevent this.
Add an interjection trigger for Crissa like the one I have for Jocen, and write the conversation node to go with it.
Add a journal entry for when either kid leaves the PC when the PC activates this trigger.

And after all that, I then have to deal with the other subquest, which I'm sure will have it's own set of problems.

Back to Work

2006-11-06T13:06:00.000-05:00

I finally got in a good solid day of work on the module this weekend, although the pace is still agonizingly slow and I've accepted that there's no way this will be done by the end of the year, as I intended. I spent most of the time working on two specific, complex conversations. Mapping them out as very tricky, as I had to account for a variety of possibilities: the PC could talk to Jocen and agree to find Crissa, or they could talk to Crissa and agree to find Jocen. They could refuse to help Jocen, then later find Crissa and change their mind, and vice versa. This required a lot of juggling of variables to make sure that the right conversation node comes up where it's supposed to. I also had to make sure the right sounds, animations, and alignment shifts were in the right places.

The next step is to figure out how to actually make them follow the PC. I've seen some things on the forum, but I'm finding them too complex to understand. As such, I'll most likely make both of them into henchmen. This has its own set of complexities, but since they aren't "real" henchmen, it should be a lot simpler than it would be if I was creating a real henchman, since I don't have to worry about them leveling up, nor do I have to give them a bunch of conversation options and scripts that a real henchman would have.

I also painted down a bunch of triggers that'll incrementally increase a variable on the PC, and a bunch of encounters that will trigger based on the number of that variable, the idea being that the longer the PC explores the village, the more likely he or she is to run into more monsters. I also did the usual tweaking, including fixing the scene with Crissa so that both hobgoblins taunt her (I forgot to give one the correct script), and also changing it so that Crissa will react appropriately - her script was set to trigger if there were enemies nearby, but since I didn't want the hobgoblins to attack her, I changed her faction to be non-hostle to them, with the result that she didn't see them as enemies and thus didn't react to them.

Finally, I got information on how to disable respawning, so that's one more problem solved. However, I still can't figure out how to set up a user-defined event to make the music change after the hobgoblins are killed. If I can't get clarification on this, I'll probably script the music change in the conversation with Crissa. This isn't ideal, and it irks me that I can't figure out how to make the user-defined event work, but such is life.

Bad Weekend

2006-10-30T13:58:00.000-05:00

Had planned to do a lot of work on the module this weekend, and ended up doing very little. Slept late on Saturday, and then my allergies took a lot out of me. I didn't start until the evening, and hoped to work out the music-switching problem following the suggestion of scripting a user-defined event for the area. However, I wasn't quite able to figure out what to do. I still don't really truly grasp the logic of scripting, and so even though I read the lexicon entries over and over again, I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. This sent my frustration meter through the roof. I tried to switch over to item scripting, using the scripting guide, a sample script I lifed from a module, and a script generator. Problem is that they all seem to be doing things differently, and I couldn't figure out how to do exactly what I wanted, so finally I just gave up.

The next morning I tried again, and I figured out how to do item scripting, so I made a couple of custom items and placed them in the module. That's all the work I did. Next weekend is a 3-day weekend for me, so hopefully I'll get more caught up.

Small Steps

2006-10-24T17:10:00.000-05:00

Got to do a little work on the module last night, though I got distracted and didn't get as much done as I would have liked. Still, I accomplished two new things last night. First, I set up a transition that works if the PC has accepted a quest. If the PC hasn't, it won't work, and it'll display a floaty message instead. The second thing I did was create a trigger that only works if the PC has a variable set to a specific value. Yesterday I said that I couldn't see why this wouldn't work. I learned that just copying a script that works in one module doesn't mean it'll work in mine. I didn't really look at what was in the script, and so it didn't work. When I took another look, it become obvious why it didn't: in the module I stole it from, the variable being called was stored on the module, whereas in my module, it was stored on the PC.

I also tidied up a script, cleared out some of the placeables from the cutscene area, in hopes that it'll clear up some of the problems with the NPCs not running offscreen at the end, painted all the placeables in another area, and discovered that the orcs are too much for a first level fighter to handle. I'll have to stick to goblins and hobgoblins early in the module, until the PC reaches a point where they're likely to be at 2nd level.

Back to Scripting

2006-10-23T17:04:00.000-05:00

Got in some work on the module this weekend, though not nearly as much as I would have liked. There are a bunch of things I want to do, so I'm having to force myself to be methodical. Since I've been doing lots of area painting lately, I decided to put that aside for now and get back to scripting and dialogue. I specifically focused on the scene where the PC encounters Crissa being menaced by a pair of orcs. Because of the faction weirdness in NWN, that was tougher to do than I thought. I made a custom faction for Crissa that was 100% friendly with every other faction, but when I attacked the Orcs, she turned against me. So I used the "herbivore" script as her onspawn script and took out most of her other scripts, but that just meant that I couldn't talk to her after the battle - she didn't attack, but she was still hostile. Finally I lowered her friendliness to hostiles to 50%, and that seemed to work.

There were other issues to contend with though, such as making her cower and say random things like "help" when being menaced by the orcs. I also wanted to have a crying sound play. I recycled and tweaked the cowering peasant scripts for this, but I couldn't get the sound to play, or so I believed. Actually, it was just that I couldn't hear it over the music, so I just took it out. I also modified the script for the orcs, so they would taunt her verbally and play the taunt animation. It works, but the taunt animation doesn't look good, so I'll probably change it to the laughing animation. I might also increase the frequency at which they say things.

I also started working on her conversation, and the associated journal entries, and I can see this is going to be complex, since I have to account whether the PC meets her or Jocen first, and which quest he takes first: the PC could meet Crissa and take her quest, or he could meet her, refuse her quest, and then meet Jocen and decide to help after all. The reverse is true too. Also, I realized there's another snag: the quest is supposed to end with the PC leading the kids to Jerym and he volunteering to look after them. However, it's possible that the PC could refuse Jerym's quest or even kill him, and still go to the village. As such, I'm going to have to figure out to only have the transition work if the PC takes the quest, and have a message appear if they don't. Fortunately, I know a module where this happens, so I can check it out to see how that author did it.

Other than that, I ended up laying down a lot of waypoints, so that when the monsters spawn from an encounter trigger, they don't just stand in place. I also set up my first trigger with a variable: if the PC refuses Crissa's quest, then when he leaves he'll trip a trigger that'll spawn some monsters. I haven't tested it yet, but it's a short script that I stole from another module, so I don't see why it wouldn't.

2006-10-17T14:52:00.000-05:00

Continuing to put in time on the module here and there, rather than in one big chunk of time. Most of it has been area painting, which is becoming tedious. Partly that’s because I’m a perfectionist, and partly because I feel like my selection of placeables is limited, despite the huge amount of placeables in the CEP. I really, really wish that placeables could be rotated 360 degrees, instead of just on the horizontal. That would go a long way toward the “ransacked house” effect I’m looking for. Instead, I can only use what’s available – broken furniture, toppled chairs, broken plates, garbage… speaking of which, I wish there were more garbage placeables, as using the same one over and over again doesn’t look all that great. Also, I’ve just been spending a lot of time trying to get the right look in general by creatively using and positioning placeables. This involes a lot of placing of placeables on top of each other, which is a time-consuming process. I blame this on Almraiven: playing it has really opened my eyes to how good a module can look, and I’ve been trying to recreate it in my own area design.

I also finished up the cutscene, which is to say, I’m at the point where I just have to accept that it’s imperfect, because I can’t fix the flaws. I reduced the size of the area and changed the camera movements so that it starts right on top of the player at about waist level, then slowly moves up and back a few feet in a short, slow pan. I also crowded the combatants into a small area, reduced their numbers, and shortened the length of the cutscene overall. The result is that it kind of looks a little more like a crowded battle, and the camera doesn’t seem to stutter. However, when the retreat call is sounded, some of the combatants on both sides inevitably get stuck in place instead of running. Also, there are still sometimes instances of the combatants jumping from one place to another. And finally, I still can’t get the camera to change to the top-down position when it transitions to the next area.

Been working on a lot of small things too, such as adding in birds and having them fly to different waypoints, then putting the herbivore script in their OnSpawn event so that they don’t attack the goblins, and also changing their flight path so that they don’t fly into the characters. I started placing a bunch of things like grains and flour and sugar and so on in various containers, then realized that opening up all those crates and finding a bunch of worthless junk, however realistic, would be annoying, so I went back and took most of it out. I did, however, create a few custom items that actually are useful, which I’ll use in the module. I wanted to create some things that had both a positive and negative effect when taken, but in order to do that, I’ll have to learn how to script in the game. The script generator might be able to handle most of it though.

And speaking of scripting, I feel like I’m starting to forget how to do it, because I haven’t done it in so long, so I’m going to try to get back to it by tackling both the find-the-mule and the find-the-girl subquests. I decided to put Crissa in one of the houses and have her cornered by a pair of orcs. I re-used and modified the script I used for the pleading peasants to have her cower and cry for help, and changed her faction so that the orcs wouldn’t attack her (I just want them to taunt her). I’m thinking of adding in sound to make her cry as well, but it has to turn off at a certain point. I can do this in one of two ways: the first is to script it so that it shuts off when the orcs are killed. That’s more sound, but I’ll have to figure it out. The latter is to set up two triggers, one of which turns it on and the other of which turns it off. If I put the trigger around her, then the PC probably won’t trigger it until after he kills the orcs, but it isn’t guaranteed. It’s not a big issue though, so it’s really a matter of how much I want to challenge myself. I also have to decide how I want to handle the orc taunts. I could set up a triggered conversation like I did with the hobgoblins, but then once it ends they’ll just stand there, so more likely I’ll just have them randomly say things. Or maybe I’ll set it up so that the speech of all three characters takes place in one triggered conversation, and then they’ll attack Crissa at the end of it. Since I made her immortal, it’s not like she can be killed (though maybe I’ll just give her a ridiculously high AC, to simulate the fact that she’s quick and nimble).

Fun With Items

2006-10-10T09:44:00.000-05:00

Since I didn't have the time to put in a full day working on the module this weekend, I instead decided to work on it in spurts. I'd open up one area and add in all the placeables and such, and then be done. I managed to finish up five areas that way, although I'm not 100% happy with the results - the outdoor areas are kind of dull, because they're all flatlands. Still, there isn't much I can do about that, since the terrain is supposed to be flatlands. I also put off redoing the cutscene for the time being; I'll probably work on that this weekend, when I have more time.

I did, however, end up spending more time on the module than I expected, because I got caught up with making custom items. Specifically, I realized that the CEP opened up a vast array of possibilities for clothing customization. I must have spent an hour or two making and tweaking various peasant outfits. This was partially because even though there are a lot of clothing options, most of them don't look right for a peasant, so it took a lot of fiddling to create something I was happy with. The good thing is that now all my peasants don't have to dress identically. I also got obsessed with making custom items - specifically, with creating various foods. I made about eight different items before I realized that Sharon's 1600+ Module Items, which I'd already downloaded a while back, already had all that stuff. Why do the work if it's already been done for you?

Disappointing

2006-10-04T22:23:00.000-05:00

I finally finished up the cutscene tonight and tested it and... it was disappointing. First, the camera motion stutters as it's swooping in for the first couple of seconds, probably because there's just too much going on in the scene. All the soldiers and creatures attack each other, but once they've killed their opponent, they tend to just stand around instead of attacking someone else (esp. the ogrillions). And when they do finally break and run, at least a half dozen of the creatures just stand in place instead of pursuing.

I think the problem is that I just have too many NPC's in the scene, because I need to fill up the battlefield. I'm going to have to cut a bunch of them, which means the battlefield will look fairly empty. To compensate for that, I'm going to try reducing the size of the field. Also, instead of having the camera start high above and far away and have it swoop in slowly, I think I might set it closer to the action and have it swoop over the action slowly at a fixed height and angle. I may also shorten the scene. Hopefully, if I pack things in tightly, it'll create the illusion of a crowded battlefield.

It's Finally Out

2006-10-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

CEP v2.0 was finally released this weekend. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to download it until fairly late on Saturday, so I didn't get much chance to use it. Most of the work I did was on the opening cutscene, as I finally started painting down all soliders and monsters in the battle. I decided to use some of the orcs included in v2.0. They're actually the same ones that were in 1.0, but I selected some models that looked good but didn't obviously look like uruk-hai. I painted everyone down and began updating the script for the battle, but I made the mistake of not keeping track of who was put where. Since I'm dictating everything that happens with the script, I need to be able to give specific instructions as to who attacks whom and who goes where. Now I'm pretty much going to have to go through the tedious effort of repositioning everyone and noting the specific tag of each creature, and writing their directions into the script as I go.

Other than that, I also worked on enhancing the existing areas. This included painting some additional animals into the first scene along with trees and foliage. I also finished up the storage room where the PC will meet one of the children. I still have to finish up that whole subquest as well.

Building a Village

2006-09-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-17T17:56:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-13T10:39:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-10T16:21:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-05T16:31:00.000-05:00

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.

Lots of little things learned, and a new area almost finished

2006-08-28T22:13:00.000-05:00

Been over a week since I was able to update here, as real world stuff didn't leave much time for working on the module. I managed to do a little work on it here and there, and was able to get in a lot more time on it than I expected this weekend (since I expected to have little to no time at all).

I've done as much as I can on cutscene area and the first area until CEP 2.0 comes out. I think I finally got the camera problem solved: I used SetCameraFacing instead of SetCameraMode to set the camera angle where I wanted it to be. Why the former worked and not the latter I don't know. Everything is pretty much done in the first scene except one of the transititions (since I haven't yet made the area it's transitioning too). I wasn't able to 100% resolve the disappearing peasants problem. I tried a suggestion from someone in the forum, but it produced a weird effect wherein half the peasants would disappear when they were supposed to, but the other half would sort of jump into the center of the trigger and then just stay there. So I went back to the old method, and that's that. I also set down two map pins and learned how make them appear during a conversation.

The player can go into two directions - north or northwest - from the first area, and I decided to work on the latter first. In this scene, the player comes upon two hobgoblins arguing over the body of a soldier. After dispatching the hobgoblins, the player can talk to the solider, who is on the verge of death. The soldier gives him his wedding ring and asks it to return it to his wife, then dies. The player can take his armor and weapons and stuff afterwards. In putting the area together, I learned how to make NPCs talk to each other and how to trigger their conversation. I learned how to do alignment shifts in a conversation, and how to use an invisible object to simulate the player talking to the nearly dead soldier. In short: a script "kills" the soldier as soon as it spawns, and since a PC can't interact with a corpse, I put an invisible object in front of the soldier, so that when it falls it lands under it. PC's can interact with an invisible object, and so that's where the conversation takes place (Ghostdreamer spelled this all out, so I can't take credit for figuring it out myself).

For the most part everything worked, but there were a few glitches. The dumbest one had to do with the conversation: in order to make two NPC's talk, you have to put blank lines for the PC between their lines. However, I forgot that when you add a line it says "," so when I tested it the first time, that kept popping up in the conversation. Some of the other problems are more difficult. For one, I can't get through the whole conversation because the hobgoblins keep spotting the PC and attacking it. Also, I noticed that they keep talking a little longer even while rushing the PC, which looks odd. Also, there are some problems with the soldier. The invisible object should destroy itself at the end of the conversation, but it doesn't, so when the PC tries to loot the body, they get the invisible object's inventory instead, which means they get a second copy of the ring. Meanwhile, the PC can't get at the soldier's inventory at all.

Nonetheless, whereas it seemed like it took forever to put the first area together, I got through this one very quickly (though the first one was more complex). I feel like I'm making progress here. Of course, these are very simple areas, and I've been skipping over the placeables for now, but still, I think my skills are improving.

New Things Learned; Problems Still Unsolved

2006-08-19T17:16:00.000-05:00

Got in about six hours straight working on the module today. In terms of getting it done I actually made very little progress, but in terms of learning it was very productive.

The big thing today was working on getting the non-combatant peasants to not fight back and also on getting them to walk away and disappear on cue. I had more success with the latter than the former. First I had to figure out how to make something happening in one NPC's conversation affect all the others. The first part of the solution was realizing that it's easy to call a variable from any object. I'm not sure why this didn't click to begin with, since it's pretty obvious. The second part was discovering that you use the AssignCommand function when you want a script on one object to make another object do something. In this case, I set a variable on the PC during a conversation with an NPC. At the end of that conversation, I used a bunch of AssignCommands to make the other NPCs walk away. If the PC tries to talk to them, the variable tells them to say one line and keep walking, rather than stopping. It took a while to iron all the bugs out though, and I got a very good lesson in the importance of making sure that a tag in a script exactly matches the tag on the object I'm calling, and that just because you think you spelled it right, it doesn't mean you did. Also, although I got everything to work the way I wanted it to, I wasn't exactly able to get it to work how I wanted it to. For some reason I couldn't get DestroyObject to work with AssignCommand. I solved the problem by doing things the way I originally intended, i.e., by having a trigger destroy the NPCs when they walked over it, but I'm left wondering why it didn't work.

Getting the non-combantants to be non-combatants was a stickier problem. I went into the OC and found a peasant who cowers and calls for help when attacked and exported her to my module. It turns out she had no scripts in her event slots except for one in the OnAttackedEvent. So after tinkering with it for a bit, I tried it out. It worked in the sense that the peasants didn't fight back. Unfortunately, they don't do anything else either unless directly attacked, and even when that happens, only the one being attacked will respond. What's more, the goblins pretty much ignore them and only attack the NPCs with weapons. The rest just stand around. I tried to fix this by calling the script in the OnPercieved event, but all that did was fire the script once at the beginning (and since they all act in unison, it looks more like a group prayer session). So I read up on loops and tried to put on in that would make the animation fire repeatedly until all the goblins were dead, but I didn't do it correctly, and so it caused a lot of errors. Ironically, I accidentally put the OnPhysicallyAttacked script in the OnPercieved event for one of the peasants, and it did create the kind of loop I wanted - except that it didn't stop firing after the battle was over.

I also went through my scripts, deleted ones I wasn't using, backed up ones I was using, and then ended up making more that I ended up not needing. I also did a lot with conversations; specifically, setting and calling variables and having scripts fire in them. I'm looking forward to getting past this area, as I don't think there's any unusual or complex scripting coming up for a while.

Oh, and script to set the camera mode in the trigger doesn't work after all.

A Valuable Lesson

2006-08-18T09:49:00.000-05:00

Last night I learned that when I'm trying to get a script that's supposed to fire in the OnEnter event of the area to work, it helps if I actually put the script in the OnEnter event.

Just did a bit of clean-up last night: deleted all the unnecessary NPCs from the palette and then repopulated the area using copies from one blueprint. Added a script for the journal entry, and edited that entry to make it more concise. I may have solved the SetCameraMode issue by using a trigger, but I can't be sure without more testing, since beforehand it was only sometimes dropping into chasecam mode. I was about to change the peasant conversations from a one-liner to a random selection of one-liners, when I realized that the changes I made to the story means they probably aren't necessary. Well, strictly speaking I should have them say one line after the battle and a different line once they start walking, but that's too much work for something that probably won't come up.

I couldn't get a script using OBJECT_SELF to compile last night, but it turns out that may just be a quirk, since the script is working for other people who tested it. Also, I broke down and asked for a script that would count the NPCs left alive and then award XP based on that number. Someone responded, and now having seen the script, there's no way I would have figured it out on my own.

Learning About Custom NPCs, Journal Writing

2006-08-17T10:55:00.000-05:00

Finally got to do a little more work on the module last night. I'm starting to get the feeling that I may just have confine work to the weekends and days off. Revised the OnClientEnter script using part of Sir Elric's script, so now the PC loses, gains, and equips his gear all at the start of the module, and all in one script. Went on to do a lot of twiddling and tweaking of the NPCs in the next scene, and began to learn about the vagaries of "update all instances" and "edit copy." I changed the voiceset of my soldier from "Aasimar, Male" (the first on the list) to a more appropriate voice, and then did an update all instances. When I tested it, I discovered that not only did the voice not change, but the cutscene wasn't working again! I realized that changes I had made on the soldier I had painted down were not changes on the soldier in the palette, so when I updated, it changed the former to match up with the latter. As a result, the tag, faction, and voiceset all changed, which is why things weren't working.

After spending a long time fiddling with the various peasants and goblins in the second area, I realized I was doing it all wrong: instead of creating one model, painting it down several times, and then tweaking each model, I was making a new copy of each model on the palette and then painting it down. As such, I've got a bunch of unnecessary NPCs cluttering up my palette. I'm going to go back and fix that tonight, but that means I'll have to be careful about updating all instances in the future, so that I don't reset everyone again. Still can't get the peasant women and children to stop fighting the goblins though. Someone noted that there's a scene in the OC where peasants who are under attack don't fight back. I'll have to check that out.

Also wrote my first journal entry. That took a long time, because I suck at coming up with names for things on the fly. I got the first entry down, but didn't have the time to write the script that calls it when the PC enters the first area. I also accidentally deleted the script that sets the camera mode, and my attempt to recreate it didn't work. Someone suggested this may be a flaw in the game, and suggested I use a trigger instead of putting it in the OnEnter event. Another peson suggested putting a short delay on the command. I'll have to see if either works.

Frustration, Then a Partial Rebound

2006-08-12T23:46:00.000-05:00

Of the things I hate, one of them is not knowing how to do something I need to do, and another is not being able to figure out why something isn't working, especially when it looks like it should. That pretty much defined the first part of working on the module today. I wanted to write a single script that would destroy some of the items on the starting PC, then give him new items, and then finally equip those items. I didn't think it would be two hard; I already had one script to handle the item creation and another to handle the equiping of said items (albeit in seperate places), and they both worked, and the DestroyObject command looked pretty simple. Plus, the module I'm currently playing does the same thing, so I went in and copied the script the author used.

It turned out to be not easy ast all. The script from the module destroyed all the items, and I didn't want to destroy the PC's healing potions, so I added some code to create them along with the other items, but it didn't work. Also, I couldn't figure out how to combine the scripts - no matter what I tried, the PC wouldn't equip the items. So I had to split them again, and this time, since all the items were being destroyed in the first area, and the PC doesn't equip until the next area, there's a moment where he appears in his underwear, which was not what I wanted. And I still couldn't create the potions either. This put me in a very bad mood.

After taking a break for a while, I decided to try Lilac Soul's script generator. It couldn't write the full script, but I did have it write me a script to destroy a specific item. Then I replaced the destroy everything code with those lines, and it worked. In one stroke that solved both the potion and the nudity problem. I still have two scripts instead of one, and there's also a weird fluke where it looks like the PC hasn't equiped his armor even though he has, but at least it all works.

The next step was to put in a command to return to camera to top-down mode after the cutscene, since sometimes it would start the next scene in chase mode, with the camera right up against the PC's back. I don't know for sure if it worked, but so far, the camera has started in top-down mode every time, so I consider it a success. Next, I started tinkering with the first area (after the cutscene), in which a band of goblins and orcs attacks a group of peasants. I figured out how to make the peasants randomly say things when they're hit only 25% of the time (though in retrospect that's unnecessary, since they generally die after one hit). I also figured out how to fire a specific animation when they fall under attack. In the process I learned how to set multiple user-defined events and something about how the switch command works, though I ended up not needing it, since I decided to have both the speaking and the animation happen when the PC gets attacked. However, I couldn't figure out how to make some of the peasants not fight back. They're supposed to cower, but instead, I've got children and old people beating up goblins. I already asked about this on the forums, and I don't know why this won't work.

Finally, I did a lot of tweaking and fine tuning, and generally put in all the peasants and bad guys that I want in the scene. It's tough balancing it out though: presuming the PC acts, I want most of the peasants to survive. However, with too few monsters, they win too easily, and the PC doesn't have to help. Too many monsters, and most of the villagers get slaugtered, even when the PC does help. Also, while the peasant leader should die if the PC doesn't intervene, I do want to keep him alive as much as possible, since he gives a reward to the PC, and, in theory, other stuff will trigger off of him. Come to think of it, I should probably just make him unkillable, since I also need him to have a conversation that will trigger a journal update.

I checked the forum when I was done, and SirElric had written up a script that handled my problem. Unfortunately, although I'm sure it works, the scripting is too advanced for me to understand, which bums me out. However, I saw how he combined item creation with item equiping, so I can probably use that to turn my two scripts into one. Also, he explained why the potions weren't being created, although again, I don't entirely get it.

Looks like CEP 2.0 won't be out for a few more weeks. That's a bummer, because I basically have to use placeholder creatures until it does. I can't change the appearance of the Uruk-Hai, and I don't want to use the regular orcs, and there's no point trying to merge the hobgoblins hak now, since it might not work with CEP 2.0 (or the CEP might have something I can use, which would make importing something else a waste of time).

Custom Content, Hakpak merging

2006-08-10T10:24:00.000-05:00

Got started late again last night - weekdays are just not really ideal for getting any work done. By the time I get home and eat dinner, it's already late, and I'm usually kind of worn out by then. I really didn't do any work on the module. Instead, I just messed around with various haks. My original intention was to try to keep the custom content in my first module down to a minimum, but I started rethinking that yesterday. Partly that's because I'm playing two modules - Almraiven and Blackwall Keep - which both make effective use of a lot of custom content. Blackwall Keep uses a custom tileset to create a swamp that's better looking than any other I've seen. It also has custom items and custom rules for eating, drinking, resting, climbing, and fishing. Almraiven uses colored spell icons and custom rules for spell components, potion brewing, and money. It's also the most visually stunning module I've ever played (not that I've played a lot, but still). The use of custom placeables and the incredible attention to detail are just amazing, and it makes the game incredibly immersive - I just want to stand around and look at everything. My own efforts seem crude and feeble in comparison.

Playing these modules, and reading the comments on them (as well as from other things I've picked up) made me realize that players - especially veteran players - like custom content and are willing to download large haks. Aside from this, there are a number of haks that I'd like to use in this module. For instance, this ogre, and these fantastic dynamic goblins, which I had a lot of fun playing with last night (in fact, now that I've discovered dynamic creatures, I want to use them as much as possible) - they're definitely going in, as the Bioware models don't even come close. I'm also unhappy with the orcs in the game. The CEP does have a bunch of custom orcs, but most of them are modifications to the standard model, while the really cool ones are basically Uruk-Hai (right down to the white handprints), and I don't want something that obviously comes from LOTR, since the module isn't set in Middle-Earth. I tried using a custom orc hakpak, but I couldn't get it to work. So I might just go with these hobgoblins instead.

So in order to try and make this work, I decided to try to learn how to merge haks last night. Specifically, I tried to merge the DLA Ogre with the CEP, because I knew that they had conflicting 2da's, and I knew I'd have to learn it eventually. I read two tutorials on the subject, but they were somewhat confusing, and I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing. I found the non-matching lines, but I was sure what to copy into what and then what to do with it and so on. Ghostdreamer sent me a link to this utility, which makes 2da merging easier, but I'm still kind of shaky about the whole process.

As it turns out, I might be able to put much of this off for now anyway: it looks like CEP 2.0 is going to be coming out any day now, and it looks like they're going to be including a lot of the content that I either wanted to use in this module or in the future, including the DLA Ogre, so I won't have to worry about merging it. Not that this gets me off the hook entirely - the dynamic goblins work fine with the current CEP, but it's possible they might conflict with 2.0, and the Hobgoblins don't work with this version. So for now, I think I'm going to put off working on the module for the most part, until CEP 2.0 comes out. Then I'll see what new models are included, and from there I'll be able to decide what else I might want to use. Until then, there's still plenty I can do: I have a lot of scripting to do - specifically, I need to see if I can figure out how to make certain things work. My module is getting cluttered with scripts, many of which aren't currently in use, so I need to clean that up. I need to see if the custom tilesets I want to use are going to conflict, and if so, I have to merge them, and I still need to learn how to merge haks in general. And finally, I have plenty of reading to do as well.

Cutscene Perspective; Discipline

2006-08-08T17:34:00.000-05:00

Wanted to get the cutscene done last night, but I got home late and, thus, got started late. Worked on the layout and physical features of the cutscene. I decided that I wanted a tower in the background because A) it would look dramatic and B) it made sense to me that the two armies would fight at some key area. As I sort of knew, the rural tileset didn't have much to offer, so I ended up using the Wizard's Tower placeable - which just looks like a tower, and not particularly wizardly - from the CEP. Then I decided that I wanted it on a hill, so I added the Hills of Wayland hakpak to the module, because I wanted the tower to sit on a gently sloping hill, rather than the chunky, squarish, built-in variety. Then I decided that the scene would look better if there was a forest behind the tower, so I started throwing in a bunch of tree placeables. I also wanted the battlefield to have a bleak, smoky, Excalibur-esque feel, so I spent a long time adding and removing various fire, smoke, and scorch mark placeables.

One of the things I quickly learned is that what you see in the toolset isn't necessarily what you're going to see in the cutscene. Because of the way I have the camera movements scripted, you don't even see the trees or tower or first. It's only as the camera swoops forward that they emerge out of the mist, along with the sky. It's a very nice, dramatic effect, but it also made me realize that a lot of the background stuff I was futzing with isn't going to be visible anyway. For instance, I wasn't happy with the fact that I couldn't place a pathway on the slope of the hill. There's actually a hak that would let me do this, but it looks like you have to have another hak to make it work, and the player probably wouldn't end up seeing it anyway.

When it comes to custom content, I'm finding that I need to have a lot of self-discipline. Although some modules use a lot of haks, I'm trying to keep this one relatively simple. Also, the more haks I include, the more likely I am to end up having them in conflict, which means I'd then have to go in and merge them. I'll have to learn how to do that anyway, but it's still something I want to avoid if possible. So whenever I see some cool piece of custom content, I ask myself if my module really needs it. Sure, the module will look cooler if, say, I use nothing but custom tilesets and placeables and so on, but for the first time out, I'm thinking it's better not to go overboard until I know exactly what I'm doing.

As it is, I might end up undoing all my work from last night. I don't know if I want a tower after all; the original vision was for an open battlefield, and the tower might be superfluous. If I dump that, I'll probably drop the Hills hakpak too. Yeah, they look good, but I don't really need them anywhere else. The landscape is supposed to be flat plains, and in the places where I do want hills, I actually want the rougher default style, rather than the gently sloping variety. However, I'm also going to try increasing the size of the area and moving the trees behind the keep. I'm hoping that'll make it look more like a distant forest. However, it's also possible that they simply won't be visible at all.

The first post: A breakthrough

2006-08-06T22:21:00.000-05:00

Started work on my module - currently entitled "Behind the Lines" - a few weeks ago, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the toolset and no idea how to do scripting. So of course, I decided to start with a cutscene. This is like trying to learn how to use Microsoft Office without knowing how to use Windows. Needless to say, I got frustrated very quickly, and realized that A) I needed to learn more about module building and B) Needed to learn scripting. There's no lack of resources for either, it was just a matter of picking the right one. I ended up going with The Hermit's Chalice, a tutorial that walked me through every step of building a fairly simple module, covering almost all of the basic stuff.

Once I was done, I went back to my module, and back to work on the cutscene, using the Gestalt Cutscene Scripting System. However, I couldn't quite get the cutscene to work right. The cutscene was supposed to show an army of humans and an army of orcs fighting with each other (I started with one of each). After 30 seconds, the human soldier was supposed to sound a retreat, and then run off with the orc hot on his heels. At first the problem was that the soldier and orc wouldn't do anything except fight. I fixed that with the help of John "Gestalt" Bye, the guy who wrote the system, but then the next problem was that he'd say his line, but not run off. I fixed that, but then hit a new problem: the two would fight, and then the soldier would say his line and then... sometimes he'd run off, sometimes he'd just stand there, and sometimes he'd run partway but then stop and turn around. Same thing with the orc. This left me baffled.

My three biggest obstacles when it comes to learning how to build are impatience, frustration, and inundation. When I want to know something, I want to know it now - I hate having to sift through tons of stuff to find out what I need to know. When something doesn't work, I get easily frustrated. The more I learn, the less this is a problem, but there were times this weekend when I just wanted to quit. And finally, just trying to find the right information can be overwhelming; not because there's too little, but because there's too much. There are dozens of tutorials, guides, FAQ's, and resources online. Trying to dig through them all is a pain. I spent much of Saturday looking at this stuff, only to discover at the end of the day that someone had compiled most of it into one document.

On the other hand, when I get the info I need to do what I want to do - or better yet, when I figure it out myself - I feel elated. For instance, I spent a lot of Saturday trying to figure out how to make NPC's randomly say something (from a list of possible sayings) without having anyone initiate a conversation. Someone in the forum posted a script which handled it, but by then, I had changed my plans: now I wanted the NPCs to randomly say something when they were hit by an enemy. I did some research, learned how to create user-defined events, adapted the script, and was able to figure out how to make this happen. I also found out how to put certain items in a PC's inventory when the game starts, and I figured out how to make him equip those items in the first area. Relatively minor stuff, but considering I didn't know a thing about scripting a week or two ago, it felt like a triumph. I've been slowly reading Celowin's Scripting Tutorial, and while I don't quite have a good handle yet on how to write my own scripts, at least I can now look at simpler scripts and understand what's going on in them. Sometimes.

And tonight, I made a breakthrough on the cutscene: after appealing to the community for help, Roybos, the author of Red Moon Rising - a great module that makes fantastic use of cutscenes - looked at my script and fixed it up. However, although it worked for him, when I tried it, my two combatants would simply stare at each other for 30 seconds before running off. I finally figured out the problem: my game was set on normal difficulty, and the two combatants were set to be part of the same faction. Normal rules don't allow player vs. player, so even though the script was telling them to fight, the game's restrictions were overriding it. Once I set my difficult to hardcore, the script worked the way it was supposed to. It feels really good to finally get past this.

Next up: populating the cutscene with my armies, and amending the script to handle all the NPCs. Also: figuring out how to destroy items on a PC, figuring out how to set the camera, figuring out how to have a PC receive an XP award based on the number of NPCs left alive in a scene, and figuring out how to make most of them leave the area once the award has been given.