56 réponses à ce sujet

[Shaughn78]

It will be a lot sooner if I stop playing other games.

For the main plot line I have 4 areas left. I have 2 decent size side quest that I have to still put together, the forsaken that occasionally appear and the conclusion to Horgath (he appeared in the Community Halloween Project, SOZ Holiday expansion, and the incomplete community project.)

Right now I don't have a time frame for release but I am plugging away at it.

[Shaughn78]

THERE BE PIRATES!!  



I started work on a my small coastal village. This will be the point before the final assault on the big bad guys in chapter 2. It is also a return to familiar areas, the Sword Coast (familiar, if you played BG). The village is set just a little north of the Cloud Peaks and completely made up. I have put off making a village for a while now, mostly I have done small camps and outpost. A few NPCs then mindless soldiers or guards. As a person of small details I
knew any village, town or city would be a huge project with a few run away side plots and such.

For the village I went with Fizzbang's The Fishing Village For the exterior it had everything I was looking for.

320x320http://vnmedia.ign.com/nwvault.ign.com/fms/images/nwn2prefabareas/435/1232306477_fullres.jpg[/img]
An image from the vault page

The next step was populate thevillage and this was where it got a bit out of control, I sat down
over several days and created 60+ blueprints. After completing this feat I came to my senses and said I can't have that many NPCs running around if if a bunch are in the taverns. I still have all the blueprints but I will be doing some scripting stuff to make them appear and disappear. I will be checking out Kamal's commoner AI for a lot of their behavior. For the tavern and Inn I will have random NPCs spawn in, more at night and less during the day. I am hoping to make the shops lockup at night and there is a black market that is willing to buy stolen goods hanging out in the seedy tavern.

I have started creating the main Inn for the area, but will likely use prefabs for most of the interiors for the rest:
Seedy Tavern, Blacksmith, General Store, Jeweler, Habor Master Office, Local Lord's Estate, Warehouse, Church. Any good suggestion for prefabs?

As I was creating the blueprints the story of the village unfolded. The local lord was the first. He is a short and nasty fellow, who lives on the hill overlooking the village. He has established a iron grip on the local commerce and nearly all the merchants work for him. The one who doesn't, the general store, is plagued by regulations, threats and a difficulty obtaining quality goods.

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Lord Finnerman with his wife, timid son and estate guards.

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Local merchants. (left to right) Blacksmith, general store, Jeweler, black market, wizard, 3 street vendors with no stores (green vest is the fishmonger), then the seedy tavern bar keep and 2 bar maids.

The main adversary to the Lord is the Harbor Master. She is just as corrupt and has also claimed the title of local constable. While the lord controls the merchants and the small amounts of goods that come in by land the harbor master controls all the importing and exporting by sea. She holds the local warehouse under guard and only allows
good in and out that increase her wealth. She also controls which ships and dock in the village and ship the goods and has created allegiances with several pirate ships.

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On the right is the harbor master and the village guard behind her. On the left is dock laborers. During the day they will wander the docks loading and unloading the pirate ships.

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These are the brute pirates. They murder and plunder and sell their spoils to the harbor master.. Their captain has Volo's head and a great axe.

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These are the swashbuckler pirates. They have rapiers and are like the romantic Hollywood pirates. Unlike the brute pirates they have a mixed gender crew.

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The final pirate crew is a small all female crew.

With all the corruption in the village there are some honest people. First is the Innkeeper and his seven sons and two daughters. There is also the church of Valkur, who uses their influence to get good in and out of the village on honest ships that the harbor master usually won't deal with.

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Onthe right is a priest to Umberlee who wanders the docks proclaiming destruction of the fleet since he doesn't have a church in the village.

And finally there are the anglers who live in the town. They wander the streets during the day and mostly hangout at
the inn during the night and listen to the three bards there. The Raven, Owl and Dove.

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How much of this background will make it into the story has yet to be seen, most will likely show up in conversation when talking to the different parties. The only side quest that I have decided on so far will involve the Umberlee priest (he has a pretty impressive halberd). There may be something with the general store to help her out but not sure.

Right now my goals are to create a lively town that is populated during the day. At night the streets empty out
and the tavern and inn fill up. Each night different NPCs will be in the these drinking establishments. I plan to have the shops lockup at night and be able to be robbed and sell the goods to the black market. If that happens the store will change having less variety and higher prices (trying to keep out of the red).

Scope creep has hit again, but like most of the other times I find it adds to the story.


**Edit** fixing format issues. This doesn't like to be cut and paste from open word.

Modifié par Shaughn78, 17 septembre 2012 - 12:45 .

[kamal_]

"their captain has Volo's head". On a pike would be a superior use of Volo's head.

[nicethugbert]

NEAT!

[I_Raps]

If you're going to have pirates, you NEED the (Blackbeard) tricorn hat and the (blunderbuss) arquebus. Aaaaarh.

[Arkalezth]

And hooks.

[Shaughn78]

Arkalezth wrote...

And hooks.

I tried to get that hak but the link is bad and the bouncy rock site doesn't have a link to download either. If anyone has the hak I will definately make use it.

I_Raps wrote...

you NEED the (Blackbeard) tricorn hat

While I don't have the blackbeard hat I do have the acme headwear that includes a better bandana and a blind fold, which the Blind Begger is wearing. While he sits in a dark alley he will ramble about Capt'n Flints buried treasure and the dirty dog Billy Bones.

Modifié par Shaughn78, 17 septembre 2012 - 10:13 .

[I_Raps]

The tricorn is in Hatsplosion - which also has a cabasset and two turbans which may suit you well, too.

http://nwvault.ign.c...l.detail&id=125


And speaking of the ACME hats - can you - or anyone - tell me how I can widen their Sallet model?  I have no 3d program, but I'm game to try hex-editing.

Modifié par I_Raps, 17 septembre 2012 - 10:51 .

[Arkalezth]

Shaughn78 wrote...

I tried to get that hak but the link is bad and the bouncy rock site doesn't have a link to download either. If anyone has the hak I will definately make use it.

If I told you that the module Dark Waters has hooks, would that be of any help? Could they be extracted or something?

I beieve Tchos downloaded loads of modules to store them in case the Vault explodes. No idea if he also downloaded haks,etc. Maybe he can answer if he reads this.

[Tchos]

I downloaded most of the haks, and all of the English modules.  I do indeed have the hooks, but I've also found a still-online copy of them.  At the time of this writing, you can download them here.

I love the NPC design you did here, and you found a good looking fishing village.  I didn't see that one, and I was searching for that sort of thing before!

[Shaughn78]

Thanks for the links. I now have some tricorn hats and a few hooks. Two pirates ended up with hooks as did the fishmonger. Mongering fish apparently is a dangerous job...

Tchos it took a bit to find the village I have about 4 I was looking through before settling on this. After making all the areas in chapter 1 it took a while to start using the prefabs. I generally have an idea of what I want prior to starting so I need to find a prefab that meets all my requirements or can be modified to meet them.

This area has become very NPC driven, initially it was going to be a small village -1 plot character and a few venders. These NPCs took close to a week to create, when playing only the estate guards and village guards will be clones (and they have helmets), the rest of the NPCs will be unique. There is also a lot of custom content making them a bit more unique the the OC and the rest of the official releases.
-Shirtless Saga
-Acme Full Metal and Assualt & Hattery
-Aleanne's Female clothing
-Daggerknight's Dragon Pack 1&2
-godbeast's tintable red robe

Modifié par Shaughn78, 19 septembre 2012 - 12:17 .

[I_Raps]

"What?! No shirtless female crew??" - Rand al'Thor

Modifié par I_Raps, 19 septembre 2012 - 06:41 .

[Shaughn78]

SWARMS

• A few spoilers ahead but if you rememeber them when I finally release this good for you.

While working on the fishing villiage inn I thought it would be funny to have the innkeeper offer you a few gold pieces to clear some rats out of the cellar. My original plan was if a party did this they would end up finding something worth their while, since they would be a lvl 10 party doing a lvl 1 quest. A little bonus something that was more interesting than useful. As I designed the basement a secret passage showed up. The simple rats now turned to a more exotic vermin, cranium rats.

Trying to put these creatures together I ran into a bit of block. I had 2 different source books I was looking at, both with differet ways to impliment the critters, The Planescape Campaign Setting and the Fiend Folio. THe PCS was for ADD and the rats were similiar to the rats that appeared in PS: Torment, individual creatures that grew in difficulty with increased numbers. The FF was 3rd edition and had the creature as a swarm. After going back and forth between the two  I obvious went with the swarm approach, hence the title above. The individual creature approach posed several issues, first was having 100+ rats in play with game engine (I wanted them to be able to cast fire ball and lightening bolt), dealing with hive mind properties like a single saving throw and distrubiting area effect spells across the group. A fireball would do 1 damage per rat instead of torching a dozen rats. Plus a heartbeat would be needed to track the rat numbers and adjsut their special abilities as they were killed off each round.

As I started to script the swarm I decided that creating a base script that could be applied to all swarms would make more sense then trying to create a script solely for cranium rat swarms.

-Swarm Aura: This controls the damage that swarms cause to all creatures within their area of effect. The damage is applied automatically and there is no save or benifit for high AC, the only protection is damage reduction and immunity. The damage amount is based on the swarm's level. All creatures within the effect must also make a save to avoid being distracted, a failed fortitude with result in being dazed for 1 round. Using ints on the swarm poisons, diseases and bonus damage can be added as well. The aura is applied in the on spawn script. I take the right side of the swarm tag to determine the size (Lesser, Regular, Greater) and that will change the radius of the effect.

-Swarm skin: Since a swarm is a mass of creatures there are no critical hits or sneak attacks. Tiny creature swarms (rats and thier likes) take half damage from slashing and piercing weapons while fine creatures (inspects) take no physical damge. They also have a -10 penalty to reflex saves, making it harder to have reduced damage.

-Spell Hook: Swarms can not be attacked with single or mutiple target spells only area effect spells. Using the spell hook script I have I had the script check the spell cast, using the TargetType and Catergory colums in the spells.2da I identified spells. If the spell is cast at a swarm and not an hostile aoe spell it fails. I identify the swarms by their tag, I decided not to create a new subrace type, it checks the left side of the string for my swarm tag "rh_swarm".

-What is needed:
To start I need to test this as everything is untested, plus I need to create a user defined event script for cranium rats. Since they are smarter than the average swarm and have a number of spell like abilities I want to define their targets and actions a bit more.

Visual effects. Insect swarms are easy and not an issue, there are some effects on the vault I plan on using.
I need to get some visual effects for a rat swarm.
I am looking 2 visual effects. The first is the swarm itself, the mass of swirling rats. The second effect will be applied to creatures in the area. It will be a particle system swirling from the ground up to the waist of the effected creature.

I have spent a little time but the VFX editor isn't a specialty of mine. I can make a mass of rats using  flat image of a rat but can't fingure out how to make the particles  use a model instead of just a texture file. If anyone has any ideas throw them out. .

If anyone wants a copy of this once it is done let me know. It will require a spell hook and vfx_persistant.2da. With the 2da I have created a number of defined effects that have set radiuses for custom aura.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

If the VFX doesn't work out, you can always do the swarm with a bunch of 'drone' rats with stripped down AI, and a single master rat that does all the thinking. You could even have the master rat casting the fireball spells, but have the origin of the blast randomly set to one of the drones.

You might have to make the master immortal until the rest of the swarm is killed, or even make him script-hidden with AI enabled. You might rig up an on-damaged script to redistribute damage amongst the swarm.

[kamal_]

Interesting. Cranium rats of course aren't the only swarm creature. In fact the dnd sourcebook Cityscape suggests using swarm type rules to handle mobs of people, abstracting the many individuals in a mob to a few creatures that represent the mob to make things easy to handle in pnp. A big mob of indivual creatures is beyond stock nwn capabilities as well (csl ai can handle it). There even a swarm template provided, so a dm can swarm any arbitrary creature type.

[Shaughn78]

Cranium rats was just the starting point. The focus at this point is on tiny and fine/diminutive creature types. The cranium rats will likely be the last one complete, as their AI will be a bit more tailored with this super intelligent hive mind.

I have downloaded Tink's Insect swarms as a starting point for some of the visual effects. I will need to increase the radius of these swarms to match the aura effect. I am also using Amraphael's A Cloud of Bats for the rats and a starting point for the rats.

I image by the end of today or tomorrow I should have working blueprints for centipede, spider, locus and hellwasp.

Modifié par Shaughn78, 24 septembre 2012 - 06:16 .

[kamal_]

Ah, I may have used those specific things for some insect swarms in path of evil. They had the odd bug (hah! Pun!) that the player controlled character could not target them.

[Shaughn78]

The targeting will be a bit of an issue with the swarms. I was going to look at the invisible creature or the air elemental (since it is entirely a VFX) for the insect swarms. The the vermin swarms bats, rats and snakes I was going to use the base creature appearance. Attacking and AOE spells will need to hit the center of the swarm to damage it since it will be represented by a VFX. CLipping the edge of a swarm with a fire ball will do no damage currently.

[kamal_]

Could you check the fireball against the aoe of the swarm?

Modifié par kamal_, 24 septembre 2012 - 10:50 .

[Shaughn78]

Swarms continued: (since its a continuation no fancy bolding)

Swarms are moving ahead. The VFX editing took a little longer than I had hoped for, but I have 36 vfx to handle most any type of vermin.

Each swarm type also has a vfx to apply to the creatures/players in the area of effect. For flying swarms there is a swirling mass that circles the creature and for ground swarms a vfx that climbs up a character, a little over the waist on a human.

Ground swarms: Centipedes, rats, insects (red, green and black)

Flying: Bats, insects (red, green, black)

Each swarm has three sizes: 3 meters, 5 meters and 10 meters.

I have created blueprints for all the monster manual I swarms:
bats, centipedes, locust, hellwasp (without infest ability), rats and spiders.

I still need to test these, but after I get some cranium rat swarms created I will start running test.

[kamal_]

Are there better vfx for the ground critters than what's in that hak? The "black mass" representations isn't the best. Having the vfx working up to waist level is appropriately gross!

[Shaughn78]

The swarms are coming along. I have run into a few scripting issues. I have fixed and broken the aura heartbeat a few times now. For a while I was killing off the swarm with the aura, but since it was an invisible creature I was ripping apart the on spawn script assuming it was applying the visual effect. Still some work on the scripting front, but it is getting close.

The ground visual effects use 2 effects, a dust cloud kicked up by are the crawling critters and for fine and diminutive critters it has a bunch of twisting dots. Right now I need to increase the density to make them look better. The effects on low on the ground, but when a creature enters the aura an effect will have the swarm crawl up to a human waist. I need to modify those effects as well, in game they are knee height.

The VFX editor definately isn't a strong point of mine but these swarms are coming together. After some play testing I discovered I need to have a disperse effect for the swarms on death. I removed the decay time because the swarm would be dead but would still have the effect swirling on. The disperse will be a explosion VFX, ground swarms on the X and Y axises and flying swarms in all directions.

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Centipedes, again I need to increase the density

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Spider Swarm, CR1:

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Bloodfiend Locust Swarm with a bloodfiend zombie spawn (Ree's vampiric zombie model). The swarm's aura will ignore the zombies within the AOE.

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Bat swarm with an abyssal ant swarm in the background

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RAT SWARM: the whole reason I started this project.

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The rat model is a simple rat picture. It spawns in random angle between 30 & -30 of the base image. The rat climbing effect is in the pictures but only goes up to the knees and is hard to see. Those rats climb nose up the legs.

I started playing around with the appearance.2da to see if I could increase the creature selection area. I have made it some the area that the aura covers highlights when the creature is selected, but this doesn't make the creature selectable in that area and AOE spells will not damage it without hitting the center, so I still have some work there.

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[kamal_]

Gah!!

[Tchos]

That sort of thing would probably have been very handy for the Elemental Plane of Rats. 

[Shaughn78]

Tchos wrote...

That sort of thing would probably have been very handy for the Elemental Plane of Rats. 

I was humming that song to myself as I was making the swarm. Rats, rats the elemental plane of rats, rats.