1056 réponses à ce sujet

[Dann-J]

I've since mentioned the SnipMDB procedure here.

[Tchos]

@Dann: Some good stuff in that thread.  I'll keep an eye on it.  I'll want to get/make blueprints for those later.

I created several rooms of the second lighthouse level. This is where you have some quest advancement, and fortunately the quest conversation is already mostly taken care of from before (you may recall the caged people in an early screenshot). This level has been heavily damaged from the ogrish occupants, who have wrecked most of the furniture and set up a shrine to their god Vaprak, and repurposed a hazardous equipment locker into a tiny jail cell for the lighthouse keepers.

Consequently, the barrels and flasks of lamp fuel are all freely accessible if you want to pick some up for later, or cause an explosion that kills everyone on the level, including you.

I hope to finish building and populating this level in one more day, then it's off to the loft, with the boss and the lamp.

[Tchos]

I checked the wiki for reserved ranges, and didn't see any reservations for the restsys_wm_tables.2da, so I hope it's safe to assume no one is putting that file in their override folders. The only reason I can think of that someone would is if they're playing MotB and they want to change or disable wandering monsters in the resting system. At any rate, I'm just modifying the existing spawns in it.

I again ran into a lack of certain shapes of objects that I could use to create the placeables I needed for this module. In this case, I was looking for a cylindrical object that I could use as a metal cistern for holding lamp fuel. I tried the bedroll, but it was too organic and soft-looking for the purpose. I settled on this large bowl with a lid, but I need to add pipes to it, so I'll have to install one of the custom content packs that include pipes, whether it be the MoW placeables or Amraphael's placeables pack. I'm thinking the latter, since it also includes a nice trapdoor and lantern.



The conversation on the door didn't work with the usual talk-to-placeable script, but I found a script called gp_talk_door that says it starts a conversation with a door. The comments don't say which event it's supposed to be attached to, though. Open? Use? Click? I put it in all three.

I'm very, very glad that the walkmesh didn't give me any trouble this time.

I've finished the area, except for the pipes, and a new list of things I noticed need fixing. For one thing, while preparing these screenshots, I noticed that I forgot to change the area's display name to "level 2". I also capitalised the word "ogre" in a description for some reason.

That's something to mention -- everything that's interactive has a description that tells you something about it if you examine it before you decide whether you want to "use" it, because, clearly, there is something special about those objects.

Modifié par Tchos, 31 août 2012 - 11:59 .

[Alupinu]

"I again ran into a lack of certain shapes of objects that I could use to create the placeables I needed for this module."


 

Have you looked at these? Maybe they’ll help.
 
nwvault.ign.com/View.php

Modifié par Alupinu, 01 septembre 2012 - 04:02 .

[Tchos]

Hmm, good idea. In fact, that made me think of something else that would work...

[Tchos]

I set up the wandering monsters for this level, so resting will be a bit risky.

I designed a better cistern, using Amraphael's pipes and some other placeables I found in the toolset. I'm much happier with this, than with the bowl from yesterday. It's sort of a cross between a cistern and a boiler. (Lightened up the screenshot a bit for easier viewing.)



The door conversation still didn't work, even with the script on all three of those events. I fixed it by defining the door model as a placeable in the placeables.2da, which I learned from Crystal Violet's door placeables, to deal with the problem. This door doesn't need to open, and I can get conversations to work fine on placeables.

I went back and looked over a script I had started near the beginning, while I never got to work, which would handle situations in which the player attacks a non-hostile creature. Looking at it now, I could easily see the mistakes I had made that had caused it not to work. Very silly mistakes, like getting the target creature from a tag that doesn't exist instead of OBJECT_SELF. It'll still take a bit of work before it'll do what I want it to, though.

For now, I'll just have it automatically turn the creature hostile, but ideally I'd like it to check several things, such as alignment, level comparison, set variables from earlier encounters, etc., and use that to determine several outcomes. One would be automatic hostility, but others would include issuing warnings before attacking, or fleeing and getting help from the City Watch, and ultimately either healing themselves with their own inventories or powers, or going to the temple to get healed if they're no longer in combat, and eventually reset their hostility and allow the player to make amends.

I'm still having trouble with Commoner-faction NPCs suicidally running to join combat that happens near them. I want them to stay out of the fights.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

RE Suicidal Commoners: Setting the commoner-commoner faction rep to 50 should prevent that, or maybe giving each commoner a level of commoner. It's hard to tell, with the over-patched AI and all.

[Tchos]

That second idea sounds promising. I'll try that first, because right now, their levels do not include commoner levels.

[kamal_]

Npcs with class levels other than commoner will fight. The commoner class has special ai.

[Tchos]

Today I worked on the last level of the lighthouse -- the loft with the lamp and wall-to-wall windows. Since this level is all one big room, and it's at the top of the lighthouse, I made the room slightly smaller than the base of the previous two levels. The stairwell ends just below the floor here, and the loft is accessed via a trapdoor. This trapdoor is the one from Amraphael's placeable pack, and it's animated to open and close. I'm going to replace the crate-as-trapdoor in the magic shop with this one.

I have the lamp, the windows, and the trapdoor set up, but I need to consult some reference to see what the rest of a loft like this should look like.

By the way, try not to let your companions cast area of effect spells in the fuel depository, like what happened in my last playtest of the area (to test a conversation). At least, not when she's standing in it. It would be bad.



BTW, the change of the commoners to use nothing but commoner levels fixed the problem.  Now they run away from a fight in progress, and don't try to join in.  I'll have to investigate that behaviour further in the future to see how to handle NPCs that I want to run away sometimes, but fight other times.

Modifié par Tchos, 02 septembre 2012 - 10:48 .

[Dann-J]

There's also an OnSpawn script in the game that sets the 'coward' behaviour flag to TRUE. That'll cause any creature or NPC, regardless of their levels, to flee from their enemies. Although if they have missle weapons with ranges greater than their coward range, they'll stop and get a couple of shots off before running away again.

The keyword 'coward' should help you find the right script if you're interested. The comments at the top of the script say something like "I'm a frightened, frightened little boy".

[Tchos]

Excellent news!

[Tchos]

I found a pretty wide variety of images of lighthouse interiors showing the loft with the big lamp/lantern. Most of them were very small rooms, with just enough room to walk around it, probably for maintenance reasons, but there were some that had larger rooms. I'm definitely going with a larger room, since there's a fight to be had up here, and you need more room than a little walkway for that.

I also saw quite a variety of lamp styles, so I think the version I managed to cobble together from various placeable parts should be of a plausible design.

The main thing that will require a suspension of disbelief is that the windows are of the frosted, non-transparent kind that we generally have to use in these games, because the outside would be a lot to render, and I don't think I could believeably use a backdrop to simulate it due to the freedom of the camera.

Here's a peek at the unfinished loft. The lighting is not final, and there's almost no set dressing. The human is included for scale. I could have made the lamp look more interesting if it were using magic or magitech, but it's a flame-based lamp. I'm not sure if the lamp reflectors look properly capable of rotation as it needs to, for the beacon. Opinions?



I've decided to use version numbers for my NPCs, putting the number in the NPC's comment field or in braces in its name, so that if I pick up a placed instance, I know whether or not it's the latest edit from the blueprints.

I had to divert some time from this module to get a new version of my HD UI mod ready for release, after Arkalezth reported a problem. I had accumulated several other additions and fixes to it since the last version as well, so this is as good a time as any to release them.

[Tchos]

No opinions, I see. Well, here's another silly mistake that had me troubleshooting unnecessarily for a while. I was fixing a script's method of playing a sound, and went to place the items into Questland to test them out, but when I tried, I clicked, and nothing appeared in the world. The loot bag was there in my cursor, but I clicked and clicked, and nothing was placed. I thought maybe I may have hit a limit with a number of objects placed in the area, so I tried deleting some, but it still wouldn't work.

Then I thought to check the area contents, and I found that there were in fact several copies of the items placed in the spots where I had clicked, but they were invisible. So my next thought was that I had messed something up in the placeables.2da file during one of my recent additions. Seeming to support this hypothesis was that the items had nothing listed in their Appearance field.

But I didn't see anything wrong in the placeables.2da file, and custom items that appeared late in the file showed up fine in other areas. While I was in one of those other areas, I tried placing the item again, and this time it placed! Was it because I had restarted the toolset, I wondered?

I went back to Questland and placed it again. Still nothing! I found a nearby invisible placed smith hammer and placed a new copy of the smith hammer -- also invisible.

That's when another thing occured to me to check. It was the Show/Hide control. Items were set not to display, thanks to an earlier attempt at loading this large area without crashing.

So that was the silly mistake.

The thing I was fixing was that I had an item that was supposed to play a sound when you activate it (amongst other things), and the sound wasn't working. I saw a tip from Morbane today that explained that inventory items can't play sounds, which explains why this item was silent. I assigned the command to the PC, and it worked after that.

[kamal_]

There are a couple vfx ways to make "proper" windows. Since the room is round, you'd need a custom vfx based on something like the force field textures or the light rays (I tend to use the light rays for the glass of windows). Then you could have open/roofless tiles for some range around the lighthouse. Since this is the top of the lighthouse, there's not really a need to place anything in the area outside the "window" unless you wanted to put in some type of sky placeable. You could theoretically rotate the lighthouse lamp, and have a vfx light ray to rotate around as well.

All ideas are extra work though.

[Tchos]

You mean light rays of a perpendicular orientation to the plane where the window would be?  That's a clever idea.  I'll have to try that somewhere.

Fortunately, the lamp will not have to actually rotate, since the background setting for this adventure is that the lighthouse is occupied by hostile forces to prevent its operation and interrupt the sea trade, and it would not become active again until the end of the module.  As long as it looks like it conceivably could rotate, it's enough. 

[kamal_]

Correct. You can see my faking glass via light rays in the first floor dioramas in this prefab. http://neverwinter.n...ods.com/mods/40

The light rays represent the reflective shine of the glass, so you place them where the "glass" is and use a walkmesh cutter if needed.

Modifié par kamal_, 06 septembre 2012 - 01:18 .

[Tchos]

I've been playing more Fanglewood. I find it inspiring, and it reminds me why I love this game and this toolset so much. With all its flaws, NWN2 is the best party-based RPG out there. If not for the toolset, I would probably give that accolade to Baldur's Gate 2 for its smooth movement, combat system, and freedom, or to the Temple of Elemental Evil for its turn-based structure and the sheer number of D&D moves they managed to make available (trip, 5-ft step, grapple, full attack, etc.), but nothing beats NWN2's customisability and extensibility, not to mention ease of building new areas, while retaining the full party control of its predecessors.

Note that, for this to be fully true, the modules must include the Storm of Zehir party chat to enable you to choose the speaker character, so that the main character doesn't always need to be the one with the social skills, lest the party be socially crippled as if they didn't have one, even if they do. But since any player can just open up a module in the toolset and click the "party chat" box for the dialogues, this is easily accomplished.

Now, as for my own module, I spent the whole time poring through AI scripts in the OC and MotB, as well as several modules, to try to better understand how to handle my boss AI. I saw that several used modified versions of the troll damage script, since it has some special conditions to deal with for its regeneration and special vulnerabilities. The Batha fight in the OC was a good read. It uses a user defined event script, which is a category that I still don't entirely understand, but I'm learning a lot about it now.

Then I found some global AI scripts that seem to do what I want, but they have the code in the spawn script of all places! I guess it must signal it to check it and change the conditions somehow. It doesn't use a user-defined event script like the Batha one does.

I tried it out, and it works, but I have no idea why it works. I thought the spawn script was only run once, and I can't imagine how it could adapt to the condition statements in the spawn script if it's not running more than once. But for now, I suppose I don't need to fully understand it, as long as it's working, and creates an intelligent boss battle with multiple phases.

I also finally found information on a bit of code I had seen references to in the default script sets, which I couldn't figure out how to activate -- where you can cause a creature to bark something when it perceives the player. Useful in cases where you want a friendly NPC to say something like, "Come look at my wares!" or an enemy to say something like, "How did you get in here? Now you die!" without having to touch the On Perception script. For the latter, either put SetSpawnInCondition(NW_FLAG_SPECIAL_COMBAT_CONVERSATION); into the spawn script, or just add the integer 262144 to the NW_GENERIC_MASTER local bitwise variable on the creature, which does the same thing. And then of course you'll need a conversation attached to the creature with the line you want it to bark, which you can optionally put the condition nw_d2_gen_combat on, to prevent it from showing otherwise.

I'm not sure which is more convenient: using the NW_GENERIC_MASTER for everything it can handle, from AI behaviour to activating user-defined event flags, or if I should use custom spawn scripts. The latter is much easier to read and understand which flags I've set just by looking, while if I use the master and don't document which flags I'm using, then I'd have to subtract out the bits to see. But if I use the master, then I can just save it as a saved variable with a name describing what it does, and load it on any creature as needed.

[Shallina]

NWN2 got a major flaw, the engine performs poorly. So just for this reason it might not be the best.

There are other good toolset that can be looked for moding for exemple : DAO, Skyrim and soon TW2 toolset that is supposed to come this year.

Modifié par Shallina, 06 septembre 2012 - 11:12 .

[Tchos]

Those games don't have a party system. That is much more important to me than its engine performance, and I did say "party-based RPG".

Edit: Except for DA:O, of course.  But I left DA:O to come here, and there are many reasons why I don't want to go back to it.

Edit 2: Prior to modding for DA:O, I modded for Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Morrowind, so I know what the Bethesda toolsets are like.  I took that into consideration when I made my conclusion about the best game.

Modifié par Tchos, 06 septembre 2012 - 11:54 .

[Shallina]

Nevers forget the goal of a mod is to be played.

Even if NWN2 toolset capability are amazing and it's probably the toolset that offer the most freedom, the way how the game performs is really important as well.

Modifié par Shallina, 07 septembre 2012 - 06:27 .

[Tchos]

Yes, it is an important consideration. And having considered it, my opinion is that its performance is sufficient for my preferences and purposes (note that I limited my initial statement with the words "With all its flaws..."), while I find it to be superior to those other games in the majority of the other important respects for my preferences.

This is a conclusion that was years in the making. If you read my blog over the years, you can observe how and why my opinion reached this point, but otherwise, I can only ask that you take my word for it that I've looked, and found none better in all of the elements that are most important to me.

[Shallina]

I want DAO in game performance, and NWN2 freedom. I just started to look into the skyrim toolset as well wich is more powerfull that Bentheda previous tools and also very interesting.

[Tchos]

I would love for NWN2 to have DA:O's character movement and pathfinding. That's one of the few areas where DA:O has an advantage over NWN2.

Regardless of its power, performance, or visual aesthetics, Skyrim's toolset is of no consideration to my needs, as that game is not party-based. If you want to suggest other game engines, please restrict your suggestions to games that include fully-controllable parties of player characters.

[Shallina]

My approach is more based on what could be done, and not necessary on what I really want.

Toolset which ever it is, aren't made for our "dream game", so we must compose with them and work within their limits.

They all have different limits beceause they all catter to different needs.

That's why claiming one is the best isn't good. Today we got  more than one good option and the one to choose is the one that can provide the closest result to what you want to do. It's your goals that dictacte the choice of the "best toolset", the answer won't always be the same.

For your goals, you concluded that NWN2 is the "best" toolset, but this won't be true for "every goal".

The toolset that everyone has his eye on at the moment is this one :

http://segmentnext.c...-the-witcher-2/

What will it allow us to do that others won't ?

Modifié par Shallina, 07 septembre 2012 - 08:11 .