1056 réponses à ce sujet

[Tchos]

Argh! Thank you, Tsongo! That's the second time I've made that mistake, with the class restrictions.

One of the tint problems was with a mask, which I copied from an existing mask, and tinted the new mask's blueprint. But I also changed the name, tags, resref, etc., and when I added it to the NPC's inventory, the old name appeared in its list, different from the name as it appeared in the selection list! Very strange there.

I'll have to watch out for the droppable items, too.

[Tchos]

As before, I didn't write a post on my P&P day. As planned, however, I completed both the downstairs and upstairs of town hall, and placed the clerk and the mayor, whose conversations and quests I had already written.

I started both areas using a prefab area as a base, but I made some significant changes to each. One of them was an area from Kamal's Path of Evil Prefab collection. The other was apparently an arena entrance, but it worked pretty well as a reception hall, once I removed the martial elements and added some more civic elements, placed a conference room behind the reception desk, and added a stairwell door.  I made rather more alterations to what became the mayor's office.



I also corrected my mistake from earlier, about giving characters armour for which they didn't have the required classes.

Of course, after hooking up all the doors and waypoints to the main module and running through it, I filled up a page of my notepad with mistakes to correct. But since these were mostly not scripting mistakes, the changes didn't have me searching for answers, and were quickly resolved.

I also spent some time today away from this module, installing Fallout: New Vegas, which I've had on Steam since last X-mas, and have never gotten around to installing. As some here may know, I did some modding on Fallout 3 a few years ago, as well as Oblivion and Morrowind. There is no fear of switching my efforts from NWN2 to Fallout, however, because the Gamebryo engine games that I've modded simply can't compare to Neverwinter Nights 2 in being so perfectly suited to making party-based quest modules. However, I did spend a few hours installing mods that already existed for the game, and played a bit of it, which took some time away from my efforts here.

[Arkalezth]

Tchos wrote...
Fallout: New Vegas, which I've had on Steam since last X-mas, and have never gotten around to installing.

Heh, same here, I bought it along with another game or two during the Christmas sales. For some reason I tend to have problems getting into Bethesda's games, but I should give this one a try.

A month has passed, by the way.

[Tchos]

Ark, see the post of six days ago, where I spoke of the deadline.

[Arkalezth]

Whoops. I took a look before posting that, but I missed that part.

[PJ156]

I have a comment for you Tchos should you wish it

If the mayor is harried then he should pace not sit ... but more to the point if a woman walked into a room I was in looking like the portrait you have I think I would stand up

It's all looking very good, your deftness with the toolset is enviable,

PJ

[Tchos]

I certainly welcome such comments and suggestions, PJ!

However, in this case, I disagree with the interpretation. The mayor is busy working at his desk, writing correspondence, drafting proposals, and trying to find ways to keep the town solvent, and that sort of thing can't get done if he were the sort of person who would leave his work to pace around. I hope his idle animation will suggest those activities when you see him in person.

As for standing, I take his position as city leader as a kind of nobility. When a person enters the throne room of a king, the king doesn't stand -- the other person gets down on his knee until the king says he can get up. Here, it's of course not a king, but it is a powerful person in his seat of power, with guards around to protect him (though the guards are not seen in the screenshot).

Now, if he knew that the player is actually the answer to his problems, I think he'd stand up immediately! But at this point, as far as he knows, the player is just another townsperson come to complain about the trade embargo.

PS: I do understand you were probably just joking around about the portrait my PC has there.    But it is possible that I could script an opposed charisma check to determine if the mayor finds the PC attractive enough to stand up or not, and script him to stand until the player takes a seat, at which point he would sit back down.  Entirely possible!  But I don't think I'll do it.

Modifié par Tchos, 10 juillet 2012 - 12:01 .

[PJ156]

Lol ... I would still stand up.

Perhaps I lack nobility.

PJ

Modifié par PJ156, 10 juillet 2012 - 05:32 .

[Tchos]

Nothing wrong with standing up!

BTW, Ark, I forgot to mention. Did you know that New Vegas was not a Bethesda game, but from the makers of our beloved NWN2, Obsidian?

[Arkalezth]

Tchos wrote...

BTW, Ark, I forgot to mention. Did you know that New Vegas was not a Bethesda game, but from the makers of our beloved NWN2, Obsidian?

Now that you mention it, yes, I knew it (at least I knew Obsidian was involved somehow), but I didn't remember. Anyway, the style, at least visually, seems to be the same as FO3, Oblivion or Skyrim. I've played those three at some moment, some briefly, some a bit longer, but I never lasted for too long with any of them.

I don't know why exactly, but I never could get into them. Maybe it's the visual style, maybe the RP (which I found rather lacking on Skyrim overall, but I won't go into detail for the sake of not going too much off-topic), or maybe something else, I don't know. I'll have to give New Vegas a try, I might like that one... or I might not, we'll see.

[Tchos]

@Tsongo: That's one of the things I found particularly remarkable about this toolset, and that of its relative, the DA:O toolset -- the excellent conversation editor. I found it extremely confusing and cumbersome to try to make a conversation in the Gamebryo games, not to mention the fact that they're designed for very short responses, and very few of them as well. And since I've tasted full-party chat, I don't think I can settle for anything less anymore.

I play in hardcore mode, myself, requiring food, drink, and sleep. But what you mention could explain why most of the mods I've installed for all of those games added new locations or lands, but very few included any new quests, conversations, or anything to actually do when you get there. Possibly because it's just too much of a pain. With NWN2, those are prefabs, and the author invites people to add quests and such, but that's rarely so with the Gamebryo games.

@Ark: I'm not too concerned about some digressions in my topic. They do all have a very similar feel, though I personally tend to prefer the Elder Scrolls games over their Fallout games, just because I prefer nice colours and intact buildings and such. With me, I've spent many hundreds of hours playing them, mainly due to the exploration factor, crafting, and interior decorating. With each, though, I've run out of things to do, or places to explore, and it all starts to look the same, and that's when I stop. Until that point, it's a fun ride.

I can't say if I can recommend New Vegas at this time, though, since I haven't played much of it. And as yet, I have not been tempted to buy Skyrim, though I have it on my Steam wish list on principle.

[Tchos]

Today's work, aside from fixing up a few more of the errors I found in town hall, was to create my temple of Sune.

I looked briefly at the prefab collection, but I didn't really expect to find anything I could use, because I wanted a circular interior to match the cylindrical exterior building, and such tilesets are strangely rare in NWN2. I took a look at the metatiles available in the vanilla game, and there was the King of Shadows' sanctum, which is certainly round and domed, but it is, of course, gargantuan.

There was a curved tile in the sunken ruins set, though, and even though it seemed intended for the curved walls to attach to larger floor sections, and it didn't seem to have any tiles with floors that would allow me to use it at its minimum size, I used some placeables to patch it up, and ended up with an interior of a sane scale, which is actually cylindrical.

Sune being the best goddess in the Forgotten Realms, I wanted to do her temple nicely. I've read the 3e Faiths & Pantheons, the only sourcebook to go into any detail about her temples and type of followers and worshipers, and although it doesn't include a map or drawing of a temple's interior, it does go into detail about their beauty and purpose, and one thing I can say for certain is that Sune's temples do not have hard wooden benches for people to sit on while listening to a cleric preach. Such seating would be appropriate for a god that values poverty or suffering, like Ilmater, or a god that stands for discipline or militarism, like Helm, but Sunites are aesthetes and hedonists. Thus, I'm making her temple as luxurious and pretty as I can, as well as comfortably furnished, where people can go to sit or recline in small groups or in pairs with the Sunite priestesses. As far as I can tell, Sunites do not preach their message, either, but promote their ideals of beauty, love, and romance through example and actions, so there would be no purpose for a central speaking stage.

I consider the diverse and fantastical temples in Baldur's Gate 2 (and certain temples in BG1) to be the model for other games to follow in terms of making temples that appropriately reflect the views and actions of individual gods and goddesses. So the temples I'm building here (Sune and Valkur) will strive for that goal, as far as the resources I have available allow it.

I have it lit and partially decorated, but it needs more placeables and NPCs before it's showable. I also need to look through the clothing mods and see if I can find something appropriate for the priestesses and heartwarders to wear.

[Tchos]

I continued working on my temple of Sune. One of the reasons this is important to me is that I've never seen a temple of Sune in one of these games yet, and as I was saying in another thread, being able to explore new areas is important to me.

My recent playing of Fallout: New Vegas reminded me of this in a big way. It began well, with a freshened setting and quests that introduced new game mechanics, but soon enough I was sent to Primm, and my first "dungeon crawl" there was exactly like every other ruined building dungeon crawl I'd experienced dozens of times in Fallout 3. Same boring loot, same rubble-filled rooms (which didn't even make sense to have in this place where no bombs hit), same locks to pick and terminals to hack with the same pointless minigames that I was sick to death of from the previous game. Shortly after that, I went to a little camp called Sloan, and one of the buildings I explored there was immediately recognisable as the Regulator HQ from FO3, except here it was empty and pointless.

I don't want my module to elicit that same feeling of apathy that I experienced in New Vegas. The recycled environments wouldn't have been so bad if there had been something new or interesting to do or see in them. I repeat my previous statement that in my module, each area should have something unique to see, do, read, fight, or talk to in it. Preferably several of those things at once.

With that in mind, perhaps I shouldn't be showing screenshots of so many of my areas, even though I'm very happy with the way my temple is looking. But, then again, seeing these places may raise interest to play it where otherwise people would not have cared to try it.

As I was populating the temple, I decided I would have to include at least some of the Kemo animations after all, because it's just perfect for what I envision here. I think I can get away with using just a small subset of the files, since primarily humans and half-elves worship Sune (full elves go with her elven counterpart, Hanali Celanil), so it won't add 80 MB to the module as the full package would.

[Tchos]

There aren't enough statues in this game. Not a wide enough variety, at any rate. So I have to learn to make an NPC into a statue, without making her look like she was hewn from asphalt with a blunt instrument. I seem to recall the ancient Greeks and Romans had a pretty good handle on sculpting smooth surfaces and fine detail in their statues with mundane tools, so I expect nothing less from our magical fantasy setting. The Iron Body spell effect looks pretty good.

I imported some of Aleanne's clothing and armour, some of which look appropriate enough for Sune's priestesses and heartwarders. I had to do some retexturing on them, though, since one of them uses Torio Claven's dress as a base, and I had to get rid of that ugly patchwork quilt pattern on the skirt, and replace the tint maps, because the included ones include complete copies of the diffuse map, making tinting unpredictable and cumbersome.

Well, I tried out some statue code, and it works okay, though I couldn't actually get the animation frozen into a decent artistic pose. The problem is that I couldn't get the statue up on a pedestal, because it destroyed the walkmesh. I needed to use a walkmesh helper to get this room walkable in the middle, and it seems to create terrible conflicts when I also want a spot in the middle where a statue can stand. So I had to go with the closest statue that exists in the toolset (a gold one), which doesn't need a walkable area for it to stay where I place it. I spend more time fighting with walkmeshes than anything else in this toolset.

Next problem -- Aleanne's clothes aren't appearing on the NPCs in-game! And this time it's not a matter of armour proficiency, because these are cloth items with no item properties specifying any restrictions. They appear fine in the toolset, but not in the game. And I checked and double-checked to make sure I had the MDBs, UTIs, and DDSes in the proper locations, and did it without anything in my override. They also don't appear on my character, if I put them in the game world for myself to wear. Just the default "underwear".

Okay, after investigating the problem enough, I determined that one of the missing outfits was due to me copying the elf version of the MDB instead of the human version. I'm not sure what caused the other outfit's problem, since it's a different MDB, but in fixing the first, I also fixed the other. Now they're properly attired. Quite a relief, considering I spent many hours retexturing them and creating the new tint maps!

I experimented with the statue script, testing it with different delay values. The idea is that it starts by playing an animation, and then applies the freeze effect after a short delay, corresponding to the part of the animation I want to use as the statue's pose. So I copied the statue NPC several times and put different delay times into it. When I ran it in the game, there was no difference between any of the copies, so the animation was clearly not playing at all before the NPC was frozen.

I switched the script to run on area enter instead of on spawn for the NPC, and that worked. It just seems I won't be able to put it on a pedestal.

This is what some of the temples from BG2 look like, by the way (Helm and Lathander, respectively). They're animated, as well, with atmospheric sounds.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

PlayCustomAnimation should help you pose your statues, though you might have to work out some sort of delay to get them to freeze right.

[Dann-J]

OnSpawn scripts can be notoriously unreliable where animations are concerned. Even OnEnter might cause troubles for complex areas that take a while to load. A one-off OnClientEnter routine might be more reliable, as it only fires once everything is fully loaded.

[MokahTGS]

Yes the OnSpawn method of statue creation was broken by a patch a while ago and never fixed. The issue was the animation timings. DannJ's suggestion might be the best. A reliable way to do this would be much appreciated especially with Kaedrin's new VFX pack.

Also, for pedistal statues, you need to use a walkmesh helper.  NPCs cannot stand on no-walk areas.  Placing a walkmesh helper on a stone pillar will allow you to get the desired affect.  I do it in Jabberwocky with a suit of armor.

May I ask in what room/tile/area you are trying to get this to work?  I have extensive experience with swearing at the walkmesh.

Modifié par MokahTGS, 13 juillet 2012 - 03:38 .

[Dann-J]

I've been experimenting with creating model VFX statues. You have to have several model VFX nodes in the SEF for playable races (body, head, gloves, boots; capes, wings & tails optional), then choose the same animation for them all. The poses you can adopt are limited by the last frame in the animation you choose though.

There are downsides to the method. You can't scale the statue up or down, so it's always human sized (dwarves or gnomes are bigger than life-size, iron golems smaller). The placeable effect also goes through the animation once before coming to rest at the last frame, so you sometimes notice it moving briefly if it is in view when you first load the area it's in.

I use it mostly to create placeable corpse effects, using various knock-down or death animations. The advantage of the placeable effect method is that you can place them in unwalkable areas, or sink them halfway into the ground (two things you can't do with creature-based statues).

[Tchos]

As I left it there at the end, the animation does play and freeze with the On Enter (and I'd probably move it to On Client Enter per Dann), and all I would need to do to get it in a pleasing pose, is to do as I did before and place a few copies down with slightly different delay times specified. Then I can pick which one has a pose I like better, and remove the others.

Being able to do it as a placeable effect would be nice, for evading the walkmesh issue, but in this case I need the statue to be larger than life, and at a pose other than the last frame in the animation.

Mokah, this is in the shadow fortress tileset (I mistakenly said it was sunken ruins before), and the tile in question where I want the pedestal is Floor_4_Corners, variation 2. The problem is that I already have a walkmesh helper under the whole floor, which I needed to do so that I could make the whole thing walkable. The Floor_4_Corners tile is surrounded by metatiles whose floors do not match up to the central floor. There were none that I found which would join with it, so I covered the whole thing with floor placeables and put a large walkmesh helper down.

The problem came when I put down another walkmesh helper, raised to pedestal height, floating over the existing one that covers everything. It just didn't do anything. I then tried attaching it with a ramp, and it still didn't make a walkable platform -- the ramp walkmesh stopped at the edge of where the pedestal's bounding box began. So I made the pedestal walkable so it couldn't interfere, and that's when the whole central tile became cut off from the walkmesh. I then tried removing the one large helper I used for the floor, and instead covering the area with several helpers sized and rotated to exclude the pedestal area, which I then placed alone. That caused the toolset to have a huge fit, and I'll just say it didn't work.

[Tchos]

Through voodoo, I managed to get the pedestal to work, after I had given up on it. This, however leads to a new problem, in that the animation freezes at different times from test-play to test-play. In other words, it's impossible to get a consistent pose. For some players, it may be a good one, while for others, it may be a rather inartistic pose.

[MokahTGS]

Tchos wrote...

Mokah, this is in the shadow fortress tileset (I mistakenly said it was sunken ruins before), and the tile in question where I want the pedestal is Floor_4_Corners, variation 2. The problem is that I already have a walkmesh helper under the whole floor, which I needed to do so that I could make the whole thing walkable. The Floor_4_Corners tile is surrounded by metatiles whose floors do not match up to the central floor. There were none that I found which would join with it, so I covered the whole thing with floor placeables and put a large walkmesh helper down.

The problem came when I put down another walkmesh helper, raised to pedestal height, floating over the existing one that covers everything. It just didn't do anything. I then tried attaching it with a ramp, and it still didn't make a walkable platform -- the ramp walkmesh stopped at the edge of where the pedestal's bounding box began. So I made the pedestal walkable so it couldn't interfere, and that's when the whole central tile became cut off from the walkmesh. I then tried removing the one large helper I used for the floor, and instead covering the area with several helpers sized and rotated to exclude the pedestal area, which I then placed alone. That caused the toolset to have a huge fit, and I'll just say it didn't work.

Are you using or have you seen the BCK 1&2 placeable sets?  There are placeable floors that have walkmeshes that play much better together in the toolset.  I've done complex multi-level designs with it, and never use a walkmesh helper.  If you look at my Lost Crags area prefab you'll see them used a lot.  It might be a better solution than trying to get walkmesh helpers to play nice together.

[Tchos]

Tsongo: I can speculate why the second one runs around the room -- the script (assuming you haven't altered it) will only get one object with a particular tag, and will ignore the rest of the objects with that same tag.

Unfortunately, I don't think the conversation idea is viable in this case, since it's a building the player can enter multiple times, and it wouldn't be nice to the player to force a conversation each time. Plus, the whole area is visible at once, with nothing hidden behind walls.

Mokah: Ah, yes, I am using the BCK sets, but I forgot about those floors it includes! I'll try those out on my next room like this. For the moment, I think I have a workable solution for this particular place.