1056 réponses à ce sujet

[Tchos]

I have not modified the release date, though I haven't been completely specific about it, either. Initially, I allocated a total of 4 weeks, and since my first post here was on the 6th, that means I would have until the 6th of June. In this thread, though, I only said "The beginning of June", which I could stretch to mean "by the 10th", if June has a beginning, middle, and end.

I'm not sure how feasible it is, but neither can I say it's infeasible! If nothing else, I need to finish it quickly so that people don't get tired of my daily posting on the subject.

[I_Raps]

Tchos wrote...

I have not modified the release date, though I haven't been completely specific about it, either. Initially, I allocated a total of 4 weeks, and since my first post here was on the 6th, that means I would have until the 6th of June. In this thread, though, I only said "The beginning of June", which I could stretch to mean "by the 10th", if June has a beginning, middle, and end.

I'm not sure how feasible it is, but neither can I say it's infeasible! If nothing else, I need to finish it quickly so that people don't get tired of my daily posting on the subject.

I hate to break it to you, but June is just about over.  Maybe you meant "the 6th of July."  Or else ... just how tightly tethered to that desk are you?

[Dann-J]

You may well get the first draft of the module built in one month, but it'll take at least another month to thoroughly test the module, fix bugs, fix bugs that arose from the first bug fixes, etc.

I managed to squeeze Shaar Moan out in three months, and I considered that to be quick. Isle of Shrines took me around a year.

Modifié par DannJ, 28 juin 2012 - 04:51 .

[Tchos]

Yes, I meant July.  The 6th of June is when I began.

Modifié par Tchos, 28 juin 2012 - 05:44 .

[Tchos]

To answer one of my own earlier questions from day 19 ("there's no toggle to turn C2 collision display on and off?"), I found there is such a toggle, and you don't need to go into the preferences to show it, at least while using Grinning Fool's Usability Tools. Maybe it's also in the vanilla toolset, but with that plugin installed, it's the little icon to the right of the grid toggle buttons, and it's called "collision".

Today I thought I'd start a very important part of most modules -- the stores. I read Bob Hall's section on stores in Toolset Notes vol. 1, and went through the ones provided with Bonus Blueprints, and also exported the ones from SoZ. I also installed Lazgen's CPS Inventory Manager plugin, which makes it much more convenient to add quantities of items other than "one" or "infinite" to a store, and shows the items' properties as well! It's not updated for toolset version 1.23, but it seems to work fine with the config file.

I tried out a shop prefab, but I ended up pretty much completely remodeling it to better suit my aesthetics. I really liked the small shop Chaos Wielder made in the Halloween special, and I consider it a model to emulate. This is an outdoorsman's shop that caters to rangers and druids. You'll find the basics, as well as magic druid gear, and some flavour items.



I also created the NPC you can pick up here for your party, but I haven't yet looked into how to set her up as a companion.

[Tchos]

Today I started by importing selections from BCK. That part was simple enough, thanks to its very good naming convention, but the editing of the placeables.2da was a huge chore. I made a mistake during my edits which resulted in none of my placeables (including the vanilla ones) showing up in the toolset. It was a search/replace error that messed everything up. I went back to an earlier one, and redid the work, and now it's fine.

I discovered, though, that the RWS ship interior files that I imported have a set of oars model with the same filename as one of the vanilla game's rowboats, so it was overriding the rowboats I had placed in my areas. I renamed it to eliminate that conflict.

It's time to start placing my locations in the actual game world, so I merged the main module with the separate module in which I had been working on the town.

I also tried importing a prefab area for another shop, but it started causing the toolset to pop up these huge error boxes saying "system.reflection.TargetInvocationException" blah blah, which persisted when I closed and reopened the module. I traced the problem to a few blueprints that came along with the prefab that shouldn't have been there, and deleted them manually. That fixed the problem, but it took a long time to figure it out.

A lot of the placeable houses in NWN2 have signs attached to them, which makes them natural shops, but for the fact that you can't change the texture or make those parts selectable to have hover text. Signs that provide information to the player are very important to me, so I was putting a few placeable signs down for that purpose, but it bothered me to have two signs, one of which was useless. I checked the Vault for some more sign options, and found Crystal Violet's signpost construction set, which was just what I needed. She had numerous shapes in there, and although they weren't exactly the shapes of the ones on the buildings, I was able to make do. I put those signs around the house ones, and made them selectable for the hover text, so now those attached signs have a purpose.



I also learned that changing the colour of the flag on a map marker waypoint changes the colour of the marker in-game on the minimap. I've been colour coding my waypoints for their different purposes (door/teleport, spawn, etc.) to better tell them apart at a glance in the toolset, but it looks like I'll have to leave those as white.

Now I'm starting to attach the conversations I had written earlier externally to NPCs like the innkeeper and the city watch, and placing them (or rather, spawn points for them) into the world. Using spawn points means I don't have the confusion of having both a blueprint and placed instance with possibly different settings (doubles my chances of mistakes), and also means I don't have to open an area to edit an NPC's properties. I think beginners' guides should stress that concept.

[kamal_]

Waypoint color doesn't matter to the player. Only the color of things that can be mapnotes. You can leave them as is, probably easier to work with.

[Tchos]

That's what I'm talking about.  I'm leaving the colour coding on all waypoints except for map notes.  Sorry, I should have worded that differently.  "I'll have to leave those particular waypoints (map notes) as white."

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

In the Danaan Unvanquished, I took a taxidermy boar head and flattened it, then positioned it on one of those building signs. It looks like a carved bas relief, and I could make it selectable with the hover text and description. I used the same technique to make other signs using statues.

[Tchos]

Clever! I like it!

[Tchos]

Yesterday was my P&P day, so there was nothing to report here.

Today, I continued with creating and adding the necessary shops to the module, with their requisite shopkeepers. This one is a shopkeeper with a quest. It's another quest with multiple approaches and outcomes, but I won't spoil anything about it.

For this shop, I used the BCK resources to fashion the room into a shape that matched the building's exterior, and in a reasonable scale, rather than what the gigantic tiles would otherwise allow. I also built myself a doorframe for the door, out of posts from the sign post construction kit.



I needed a trapdoor in this floor, and unfortunately the standard wooden floors provide an embarrassment of riches in that regard. I only wanted one, and it needed to be clear that it wasn't just a decoration like they usually are. I ended up covering the floor with stone pieces called "floor mats" that basically replace the floor texture, since the other available standard textures weren't what I needed, and if I tried to use a floor texture from a different tileset, they weren't tintable. Then I took the suggestion of Bob Hall in the Cheap Placeable Tricks thread to make the trapdoor.



I wanted the vendor here to give the player a key. But I also want that key in his inventory so the player can pick his pocket. The standard conversation scripts aren't very well-suited to deal with that, unless the key is the only item the NPC is carrying, in which case I could use ga_give_inventory. I'll check other resources later.

The regular ga_give_item script malfunctioned, too. It filled up my character's inventory with copies of the key, and dropped countless more on the floor. I told it 1 copy! So I checked it, and it all seemed fine, but a happy accident revealed what had happened. The accident was that while looking into it, I looked in the script list to see if there was another item script I could try, but didn't find any, and when I clicked off the list, it cleared the script from the "actions" panel. So I put it back in, and hit "refresh", and it told me that there were some incorrect parameters that needed to be corrected. So it was because I had originally tried using ga_give_inventory, and put parameters into that script, and when I switched it to ga_give_item, similar-looking parameter fields were already there, so I hadn't refreshed it. The script worked after refreshing.



Another thing to solve was that since I was using a placeable as a door, I wasn't getting the expected feedback messages when I tried to unlock it without the key (or with the key, for that matter). I tried to create a door with the right appearance, but for that I guess I would have to edit doortypes.2da again. Maybe I should, but I didn't here. Instead, I just clicked the "Has inventory" box, and selected no UI for the inventory screen, and now it provides all the appropriate feedback. It also behaves like any other door, with my door script attached to it as before, except that the cursor is the generic star shape instead of the door shape. The cursor is the only reason I'd take the trouble to define it as an actual door, but I think I'll just let it slide this time.

On an unrelated note, you know how the Windows start menu moves frequently-used applications up in the list depending on how often you use them? For a long time, the NWN2 game occupied the top slot, but as of last modding session, the toolset finally usurped that position. By the way, if anything I've been doing in here is an interesting idea that hasn't been done yet, please feel free to use it in your own modules. I'm not putting all these things in to be Unique Selling Points...I'm doing it because I want this sort of thing in modules. Not to say that there's anything particularly unusual in today's post, but overall.

[Dann-J]

I modified the door 2DA in Isle of Shrines to include one of the sewer grate placeable models. It was easy enough to do. The model lacked any animations, so it simply turns black when you 'open' the hatch. I wasn't able to figure out how to make an animated placeable like a chest into an equally animated door (not that I spent much time investigating it).

Modifié par DannJ, 01 juillet 2012 - 11:10 .

[kamal_]

I recognize the prefab group used in that shop. I use the same group. :-)

[Tchos]

DannJ: I think my script would prevent it from turning black, since it halts the opening animation by design. If I come across a way that does what you want, I'll let you know, but that's the opposite of what I'm going for.

Kamal: Do you mean the little table off in the lower right hand corner of the 3rd picture? (The lighter small table in the far corner of the room in the following picture.) That is indeed a prefab group, though I'm not sure which one it is of the ones I installed. The rest of the shop, though, (the countertop and bookshelves behind it) comes from the SoZ "basic trading post" area file, with my modifications. I wasn't aware it also existed as a placeable prefab group somewhere, but it does seem like the sort of thing that would be useful as one.



I forgot to show the other side of the room, which is the one that is constructed from pieces.

Modifié par Tchos, 01 juillet 2012 - 11:51 .

[kamal_]

The whole bookcases/candles on them, platform. Maybe someone took it out of the basic trading post.

[Tchos]

I'm also going to use one of the SoZ inns as the basis for one of the fancier inns in my module, so I'd be interested to know if there are prefab groups made out of those, too.

[kevL]

Tchos wrote...

that feels familiar ....

[I_Raps]

Reminds me of Misery Stone. There was a lich (I think) that just kept replicating himself instead of dying. I put up a picture of a "short stack" of ca. nine liches.

[Dann-J]

It's a great idea for a new spell though - Keys of Doom! The target gets slowly crushed under an unending flow of keys. A successful reflex saving throw allows you to escape with nothing but a mild case of lock-jaw...

[Tchos]

Yes, especially if the Keys of Doom is triggered as a trap. Imagine a tempting, key-required chest in some dungeon, with a placeable key right there on a table, but when you pick it up...

(Of course, for that, we'd need a placeable key object.)

[Tchos]

I hope those of you who have also experienced item-duplicating troubles got a chuckle from my own travails! Sometimes, it's funny because it's true.

So I changed the conversation distance in the campaign editor back down to a lower number, because the 100 unit distance didn't seem to be necessary, and was more likely excessive. I had only done it to ensure that characters could talk to NPCs who weren't reachable. After changing it, in my next playtest I found that the party size had been set down to 4 again, though I hadn't touched that setting. It doesn't look like any other settings were affected, but I need to watch out for that.

I created the basement for the magic shop quest and hooked up some more conversations. I found that I was a little unclear on how to handle the interaction for that quest, but I eventually decided that the conversation-before-fighting option was really the only way to approach this one, though I'm building in other options besides fighting.

I was having trouble getting a neutral NPC to turn hostile when attacked, but then I noticed that I had written, but not actually attached, the necessary script.

I assigned a bark conversation of useful tidbits to all of the unnamed citizens in town, and made sure the city watch worked. All of the city watch patrols will give the player directions to various places of interest in town, if asked, and if you're on certain quests, they may become involved, either for or against you.



I found some of my interiors were lacking windows that should be there, based on the exteriors. There were no placeable windows in the toolset. I found some placeable group solutions using curtains, but I didn't want curtains, I wanted actual windows. BCK has some windows, and so does one of the RWS tilesets, but they're fancy ones, not suitable for standard interiors. The City Hak has a set of placeables called "window", but they're not just windows -- they're exterior architecture with windows in them. I looked around for some other packs, but could only find people wondering why there weren't any.

Finally I decided it would be faster just to bloody make one. The texture in the City Hak was a good basis. I took a standard NWN2 painting, cloned it, and made a new set of diffuse, normal, illumination, and tint maps using the City Hak window texture as a basis to replace the painting texture. This tutorial explained to me how to properly make glow maps.



I probably shouldn't have spent all that time doing that. It's an unnecessary distraction from my goal.

I spent the rest of the time on the magic shop quest. I ended up scrapping one possible resolution in the interest of time. Some of these shop quests have no material reward, but of course yield experience, and ingratiate the merchants to you enough so that they'll sell to you from a "private reserve" of high quality items that they otherwise have been keeping for themselves as part of their collection. Depending on your actions or philosophical position, though, you may decide to give up such a reward, and instead make yourself unable to buy from that shop at all.

Does anyone have an opinion on whether I should use an INT check or a spellcraft check to see if a character knows (or can figure out by looking at it) how to breach a magic circle? I have it using INT at the moment, but it just occurred to me that spellcraft is an option. Though since that skill is mostly useless for its original intent, perhaps some players don't train it, and shouldn't expect it to be useful in a module.

Happily, I found that "DestroyObject" works on placed effects. I wasn't sure if it would, or if I had to use some special effect command. I also had a successful implementation of a collision box which blocks a path until it is destroyed via script. This thread was full of useful information on what settings to use for that.

This particular fight will see if people remember how to fight in close quarters, where you can't just surround the enemy with your whole party. Ever played games where you could only have two characters out in front to engage in mêlée (as a game design, with the idea that the hallway doesn't have enough room for more than two people swinging weapons around side by side), and the others were required to stay in the back and use ranged weapons, magic, or healing? I have a choke point in this place to require that kind of strategy.

[Dann-J]

If you choose the 'select tiles' tool, then click on an interior tile, you can cycle through alternate versions of that tile type with the up and down arrow keys. Some of the regular interior house tiles have multiple versions available with windows on different walls.

The biggest problem I usually have is with the 'tardis' nature of the buildings - interiors are often much larger than the exterior models. This means that you frequently can't match the number and placing of exterior windows with the interior ones (since you can only have one window per tile wall). That's where your window placeable would really come in handy.

Modifié par DannJ, 03 juillet 2012 - 05:13 .

[Tchos]

Okay, well, I guess I hadn't cycled through all of the alternate tiles of the pieces I checked.  In the few that I did, I didn't find any windows in them.  Now that you've said this, Dann, I've gone through and systematically checked each tile of the standard interior set, and found numerous tiles that included a window, which I'll write here for easy reference: "Hallway" (4 variations), "Door Hall End 2 Door Variant" (2 variations), "Doorway Hall End No Doors" (2 variations),  "Door Hall End 1 Door Variant" (2 variations), 2 Walls (5 variations), and "1 Wall" (8 variations, one of which has two windows in it).

Thank you for informing me of that.  I'll see about using those where they make sense, though I'll still use mine for places where I want a particular placement. 

I've written about my dislike of the TARDIS buildings many times on my blog while playing the OC and expansions, and the main reason I have to alter the prefab interiors I'm using is that they're too big for my purposes and aesthetic, especially in the case of shops.  The exteriors I'm using are often several building models placed together to create a larger building appropriate for the interiors, since the doorframes make just scaling the building infeasible, though the interiors still need to be small enough not to make me think I'm shopping in a convention hall.  That's why I really like these placeable walls, so I can make proper sized hallways, niches, and alcoves.

PS: Speaking of things I've looked for and not found, did I overlook any mugs/steins?  I was going to put some in my taverns.

Modifié par Tchos, 03 juillet 2012 - 05:44 .

[Dorateen]

Tchos wrote...

 After changing it, in my next playtest I found that the party size had been set down to 4 again, though I hadn't touched that setting.


Does anyone have an opinion on whether I should use an INT check or a spellcraft check to see if a character knows (or can figure out by looking at it) how to breach a magic circle?

I've messed around with party size a lot in the campaign editor, and yes it does seem to always revert back to the default 4. Even though it allows a higher number in-game once it's been changed. Just to be safe, any time I go into the campaign editor, I would reset it to the desired number and save.

I think spellcraft is the correct check to make for breaching a magic circle. I enjoy stat checks, because they remind me of 2nd edition (when there were no skills!) but I do like skill rank checks as well. Since using skill rank checks in these type of conversations, I've come to see skills as another way to add dimension to a character, rather then just a dice roll game mechanic.

For what it's worth, I always boost up spellcraft on our party's wizard.

Beautiful screenshots, too.

Harumph!

[Arkalezth]

Spellcraft. An INT check may be passed by a barbarian and missed by a sorcerer. Maybe a class check could work too, but spellcraft is your safer bet.

Though since that skill is mostly useless for its original intent, perhaps some players don't train it, and shouldn't expect it to be useful in a module.

More like the contrary, original intent or not, it's a powerskill (if such a term exits) as it improves saving throws. So I'd expect most characters with it as a class skill to invest on it, and the ocassional non-caster with half ranks.

Modifié par Arkalezth, 03 juillet 2012 - 04:41 .