560 réponses à ce sujet

[ColorsFade]

Good question Andy. I've never used the template function before. I'll see what I can do about that. 

[Tchos]

To make templates, drop the uncompiled scripts into [Neverwinter Nights 2 installed folder]\NWN2Toolset\Templates\

[ColorsFade]

I had forgotten how big the prologue was... dang. I did some work. 

 

Nothing drives me to the toolset quite as much as trying to play something else, and getting aggravated. I downloaded a game off Steam last week, something that looked interesting and fun. Instead, as much potential as the game had, it ended up just being frustrating to play. I like challenges. I don't like impossible. 

 

Something I'm trying to keep in mind while building encounters.... 

[ColorsFade]

So much writing... I hope people like dialog

[GCoyote]

I can do 'color'. Things the NPCs should say, ask, or do to make a scene more believable. I have a very hard time with plot. How much to reveal. Necessary vs obvious. Actual clues vs plot misdirection.

The prologue was very good Imo. Looking forward to the next installment.

[ColorsFade]

Good lesson to remember: don't build areas unless you absolutely need them. It's wasted time if there's no reason for the PC to ever go there. 

 

Reminding myself of this has helped me move forward on some things this week. 

 

Another lesson to remember: don't build a big area when a small one will suffice. 

[PJ156]

I very much agree. I spent many hours learning that lesson in my earlier modules.

 

PJ

[ColorsFade]

I very much agree. I spent many hours learning that lesson in my earlier modules.

 

PJ

 

I've been very stuck for a while on area-building. In fact, it was a handful of particular areas that I felt I *had* build that caused me to take a break from building way back after the prologue was released. I just felt a bit overwhelmed by the size and scope of these areas. I'd made good progress on two of them - two areas that will be heavily visited by the PC - but it was a very daunting task to have staring at me every day, thinking I needed to build these massive areas that were related. 

Then, a couple days ago I was working on some dialog, and thinking about the story elements, and realized: I really only need half the areas I planned. Realistically, the PC would never have cause to visit some of these. The action, the NPC's, the side-quest locations - none of them take place in the secondary areas I had planned to build. 

 

Once I decided to scrap half these areas and focus on the core areas being fully realized, I felt a huge weight off my shoulders. And focus returned; I now have a much clearer picture of how to proceed. 

 

Pretty happy about all of that, because there's a lot I want to get done and these areas not being done were holding me back quite a lot. 

[kamal_]

Placeholder areas are your friend.

[ColorsFade]

Placeholder areas are your friend.

 

How do you mean Kamal? Can you elaborate on that?

[kamal_]

How do you mean Kamal? Can you elaborate on that?

The first step in professional game map design is to come up with an extremely rough layout. Basically the first version of the map is untextured and only the major objects of the area are in place (often even these objects are just placeholders because the actual objects are still in the process of being made). The main purpose of this initial map is to test the flow of players/creatures around the map. A lot of map testing goes on in this phase (especially for fps and 3rd person shooter games). It's only once the dev is happy with the basic flow of the map that detail starts getting added, no point in painting down a street texture if you are not sure where the street is going to need to run. If the map doesn't "work" for what they need then they can toss it and won't be throwing away a lot of the mapper's time.

 

It's only once the dev determines the map is needed and "works" that the mapper really builds it out. In this case you built out the map before determining what was really needed. If you're like me, making the maps is fun! I like to work on them more than say write scripts. And of course since it's fun I tend to want to do it first, and like you can discover that I spent time building stuff I didn't really need.

 

As builders we get emotionally attached to the things we make, and so we don't want to cut them out. (argh! I wasted x hours making y!). But good editing removes the extraneous stuff, and we have to learn that sometimes things need to be cut to make realize our visions better. It hurts, but it also helps improve the final product. It's hard to think of cutting content as productive towards the end product, but it is.

 

This apocryphal quote sort of explains the process:

After marveling at Michelangelo’s statue of David, the Pope asked the sculptor, “How do you know what to cut away?”

Michelangelo’s reply? “It’s simple. I just remove everything that doesn’t look like David.”

 

Now of course he almost assuredly didn't actually say that, but the basic idea is he knew to cut out everything that didn't contribute to what he wanted to make. In modders terms, before he started making areas, he wrote out the entire plot etc. Working in marble he didn't get much chance to make mistakes (eg extraneous areas for nwn2), so all the editing was done in his head and sketches before he started cutting the marble. Fortunately we can edit as needed at any time.

 

Area building can be one of the last things you do. My building strategy has become to outline what I think is the bare minimum in terms of npcs, items, and areas based on the plot and build those first. I can grow things from there if needed. You can write out and test to completion the entire plot/conversations/scripting etc in a single empty area, never building an actual area until the end of the campaign building process. It greatly speeds up development and testing when you can run through the entire plot and all sidequests by having the pc walk around a few rooms worth of space.

 

Any area you are not 100% positive you need, you can just put in an empty area (single tile or tiny exterior). You presumably know what it would be, but there is no need to build out the area until you actually are sure you need. I tend to do this for sidequest related areas I'm not really sure if I want to include or not.

[ColorsFade]

Thanks for all that Kamal. 

 

I've used empty areas a lot for testing purposes, to test dialog and especially my AI scripts. 

 

It greatly speeds up development and testing when you can run through the entire plot and all sidequests by having the pc walk around a few rooms worth of space.

 

 

 

That's a really interesting idea. I may have to try that a bit. Like you say, for side quests and stuff, I can see it working well. 

 

I've been going through feedback from the Nexus posts of the prologue, fixing bugs. Lots of minor stuff, but it's helped me reacquaint myself with certain tools, like Tani's packer and the TLK editor. Someone noticed some spells were missing... spells introduced in SoZ. I knew I'd edited a few lines in spells.2DA, but I couldn't remember what they were. So I had to find an online excel diff tool. My spells.2DA seemed to have been an earlier spells.2DA, possibly from the OC or MoTB, so it was missing a lot of stuff like Mass Aid. I found the three lines I edited, and got a new spells.2DA put together. 

 

Scornubel is getting built brick-by-brick. I try and add a few buildings and placeables every day. Then take a break and work on an interior.

 

And then there's the dialog stuff; trying to get a lot of party scenes together, like Baldur's Gate 2, where the party members talk to each other, and the PC, etc. 

 

I'm itching to build some encounters. Almost have the whole pirate cove areas ready to go for those.. Finally some combat work!

[PJ156]

Big outdoor area can be miserable to have to do. I try to alternate too.

 

Good luck with getting this finished.

 

PJ

[ColorsFade]

Thanks PJ. 

 

Trying. It's a lot of work. I've written a rough outline of the entire campaign, chapters 1, 2 and 3. So much work to do... 

 

But, every time an area/encounter comes together, and I run through it and test it in the game, it sure feels good to see it working and "finished". 

[ColorsFade]

[Update]

 

After some deliberation, I've decided to add crafting to the campaign. 

 

The artifact system will remain - it's fun, I like it, and in the grand scheme of the game it's pretty minor. I don't know how many artifacts I'm going to create and make available, but it's not a lot. Some players are probably going to end up calling them "overpowered", but I intend for them to be fun and unique, kind of like Crom Faeyr or the Carsomyr from Baldur's Gate 2. 

 

Crafting is just fun, and one of those things that I think adds a lot to the resource management of the game. I've added crafting stations in two places I think the player will frequent often, and not it's just a matter of setting everything up, adding the appropriate vendors, etc. And then, of course, drops in the right places... 

 

The other newsworthy item, well, I have to wait and test something, but pretty excited if it works... 

[ColorsFade]

Woot! I got something working! OMG, so happy. 

 

Okay, so the long story here: I have always wanted to use the Roster GUI in my campaign. But I've never been happy with the way it works once you choose your party configuration, because once you close the Roster GUI, it immediately despawns the companions not in your group and saves them out of the module. That's not a big deal, but it looks dumb to me when the party members despawn like that. What I want them to do, instead of despawning, is simply go to their hangouts... 

 

And that is why, in the OC, the developers put the Roster GUI on the tavern door, so you have to choose your party before exiting the tavern. This was extra-dumb in my book, because the crafting benches are inside the tavern, and quite often all I wanted to do was swap party members for a moment, so I could do some crafting. But in order to do that, you had to swap them from the door, so then you would exit, and then have to re-enter. This was particularly troublesome if you exited with your "crafting party" and a cut-scene happened (like the one with Qara). Annoying, to say the least. I want to save the user from making excessive exits and entrances to particular zones. 

 

So what I've always wanted to do was use the Roster GUI inside my taverns/strongholds, from a registry book sitting on a pedestal, and not have to put it on the door and exit the area, and not have to deal with the disappearing companion members. Instead, I want them to appear at their hangouts, all without ghosting on the PC. Basically, I didn't want the player to have to see this transition happening. 

 

Today, I got it working. 

 

The trick was to create a conversation with a TGA image, and put an iPoint speaker in the inn/stronghold with this conversation. The TGA is just black, and says "Configuring Party" on it. The conversation only shows for a couple seconds, just long enough to handle the companions after the Roster GUI is closed. 

 

Now, by default, the game calls DisplayGuiScreen when it wants to show the Roster GUI. However, one can call ShowRosterSelect instead (from the roster registry book I placed in the inn), and pass it a callback script that will execute when the Roster GUI closes. This is critical - it allows me to do two things: (1) Call the "Configuring Party" conversation, which blocks the screen for a moment, and (2) Allows me to call PutRosterMembersInPlace(), which automatically spawns the non-party roster members back at their hangouts!

 

So when the conversation fades from black back to the PC, the new party members are standing by, but even better, the old ones are now standing at their hangout spots. All without the ugliness of the actual companions fading in and out... (yeah, it's minor, but that's the sort of stuff that bugs me). 

 

The only caveat with this is that, upon module unload, we have to call DespawnAllRosterMembers() to make sure non-party roster members get saved out before the module transitions. Easy enough!

 

This has been eating at me since the start of this campaign... The Roster GUI is so much nicer for dealing with companions, and now I don't have to mess with all the dialog necessary to manage each one individually. Hallelujah. 

[ColorsFade]

Update

 

Well, learned something about large city areas... the hard way. 

 

Scornubel is a big town, and I was attempting to be fairly true to the layout of the official maps. I wanted to have the roads bumped up against each other from area to area, and have them transition from map-to-map. To do that, I needed to put a lot of houses and buildings in the surrounding non-walk space. 

 

I was a bit concerned about how it was going to perform, especially considering I'm using a lot houses and buildings from city HAK, etc. And sure enough, it was really, really laggy (and this is without any NPC's yet). 

 

So, I nuked everything in the surrounding non-walk space and replaced it all with the city cards. 

 

 

I avoided using these before because I was concerned about how it was going to look, and I was trying to (faithfully) map the city areas in an adjacent fashion. But performance is king, so I had to compromise. I had to fudge the streets that leave the areas, because in Scornubel those streets run off in long stretches. With real houses and buildings used in the non-walk mesh areas, you get the effect of a long road beyond the walkable area. But again, performance stinks. With the cards, I opted to block those roads off and make those streets appear as if they turn around the corners. The effect looks like this: 

 

 

I'm really happy with that shot, because only the houses before the intersection are real. The rest are city cards. And the performance wins. 

 

So now the Docks and The Walk are usable, though I need a lot more placeables and vegetation to fully decorate. But I'm pretty happy. The Walk is ready for merchants and shop waypoints: 

 

 

 

And the exterior of the Nightshade is underway: 

 

 

And the work goes on...

[andysks]

A city of mine is also heavy on city hak Cristopher. Tchos figured out how to solve this. Something with polygons or whatever... I don't get these modeling stuff. The fix, or basically optimization, should be somewhere around available for all to download. The cards though look great. I had also hesitated about using cards, but in game they don't look bad. This if one uses them right of course .

[ColorsFade]

A city of mine is also heavy on city hak Cristopher. Tchos figured out how to solve this. Something with polygons or whatever... I don't get these modeling stuff. The fix, or basically optimization, should be somewhere around available for all to download. The cards though look great. I had also hesitated about using cards, but in game they don't look bad. This if one uses them right of course .

 

Yeah, I saw Tchos city hak lower polygon post. I considered that (and will probably still do that), but I think even with lower polygons, I had way too many buildings. The engine just isn't very good with that many buildings. 

 

I'll be adding the low res textures at some point. 

[ColorsFade]

Development Update
 
A lot of different things getting done this past week. 

 

Area Adoption
 
I spend quite a bit of time examining and downloading a lot of prefab areas off the new vault this past week. Anything that looked like it might work for a given area, I downloaded it, and then notated it in my excel sheet, describing which particular area/story element it might be useful for. A lot of people have built a lot of really neat prefabs, and it seems like a waste not to use them, especially if something comes close to what I need. Making modifications to a prefab is way easier than building one from scratch. 
 
An example is this: 
 

 
This is actually a modified version of Grumpy Strumpet's prefab: "The Crystal Citadel". Grumpy's prefab, however, is red crystals and a fairly barren landscape of hills. I needed green and a lot more trees (this area is for a lead up to an encounter with a certain emerald-colored dragon in a forest to the north of Scornubel...). 

 

Grumpy's area made use of two things I really like: RWS's cliff walls, and ZSpirit's Crystal Placeables. So, with some slight modification, this works really well. And Grumpy's area gets some use

 

Companion/Cohort Management

 

It's been a long time since I've played a module that let you build your own party companions. I cracked open Tcho's campaign the other day with the intention of playing through it, and instead I got caught up in the idea of a campaign that lets you mix and match player-made companions with cohorts. I've resisted that idea for a long time, due to my affinity for games like Baldur's Gate and such, which only let you create the main PC, and then supplement the rest of your party with campaign companions. But as I play through Tcho's mod, and some of SoZ (the latter mostly to get ideas in area design), it occurs to me that there's just too many great race/class combinations to limit players that way, especially if someone wants to play through with Kaedrin's PRC (which my campaign should be able to fully support when I'm done). And I thought, why not just support it after all? It can't be that difficult, can it? 

 

And it turns out, it's really not. The inn in SoZ gave me all the scripting tools I needed, so I set about getting it working in my campaign, and it didn't take it long to get it working. I had most of the code in my own scripts for party management anyway, so I only had to adopt a couple SoZ pieces. The most important part of that equation was the SoZ conversation that pops when you click on the Guest Book, and then dealing with the appropriate script calls.

 

It had always been my intention to support a full party of 6 in my campaign, due to the nature of the campaign and the planned large-scale encounters. Now the player will be able to craft four of those companions, if he/she so chooses. The other two slots can go to cohorts from the story (a necessity in some cases). 

 

The biggest thing this does is relieve some stress on my end, because I was feeling pressure to create enough companions to fill a lot of class roles, should the player want class X for some reason. And for every companion I create, there's a desire to give them a very good back story, story arc, and personal quest. At some point it gets to be too much. I want the cohorts in The Darkening Sky to matter, and for people to want to take them into their party. So they need to be good, and not just fillers. To create good, quality companions takes time, and I think this is possible if one focuses on only a few companions. So that's the direction I'm headed in right now. 

 

Party Chat

 

I haven't played SoZ in forever. I'd forgotten what party chat was. I'm all for it. so it's being adopted in The Darkening Sky now. I'm going back through some conversations in the prologue and adjusting them for party chat, and adding lines for certain skills/races/etc. It's a fun process. I still will make use of cinematic cut-scenes, as there are a lot of opportunities in the campaign for those. I just like the cinematic style when there's a long scene to be played out. But I am reserving these, for the most part, for scenes that deal with the main quest. Everything else should end up being a SoZ style in the end. 

 

Effects Creation

 

Thanks to some help from kamal_ I was able to finally create the large cloud effect that I've been needing for an area. 

 

 

The area is not an official area, just a proof-of-concept, which is why it looks so rough. I was mostly interested in seeing how the large clouds would look and work. And I was pleasantly surprised by the final product. In a properly designed area, this is going to give me exactly what I was hoping for. 

 

Dragons

 

One of the things I was really happy to find on the new Vault was Clash of the Dragons pack. I don't think it's too big of a secret (given the history of this journal) that The Darkening Sky was mean to spend a quite a bit of time dealing with dragons. But until now I didn't have what I needed. I really needed dragons of different colors, especially green ones (Forest of Wyrms is nearby, and some central story elements take place there). Fortunately, this pack is awesome, and gives me some neat dragons to use. I have a green dragon now... and that's great. 

 

Summary

 

A lot of different things going on with the campaign at the moment. It's moving forward. I'm happy to be working on it and still believe it's going to be pretty fun. 

[GCoyote]

 

It had always been my intention to support a full party of 6 in my campaign, due to the nature of the campaign and the planned large-scale encounters. Now the player will be able to craft four of those companions, if he/she so chooses. The other two slots can go to cohorts from the story (a necessity in some cases).

 

Another good idea I need to try out. If I can modify my convo's to use the cohorts to feed info to the player, the other slots can be opened up to player created characters.

(Added to To Do List.)

[Tchos]

Yeah, I saw Tchos' city hak lower polygon post. I considered that (and will probably still do that), but I think even with lower polygons, I had way too many buildings. The engine just isn't very good with that many buildings.

 

I cracked open Tchos' campaign the other day with the intention of playing through it, and instead I got caught up in the idea of a campaign that lets you mix and match player-made companions with cohorts. I've resisted that idea for a long time, due to my affinity for games like Baldur's Gate and such, which only let you create the main PC, and then supplement the rest of your party with campaign companions. But as I play through Tchos' mod, and some of SoZ (the latter mostly to get ideas in area design), it occurs to me that there's just too many great race/class combinations to limit players that way. And I thought, why not just support it after all? It can't be that difficult, can it? 

 

It had always been my intention to support a full party of 6 in my campaign, due to the nature of the campaign and the planned large-scale encounters. Now the player will be able to craft four of those companions, if he/she so chooses. The other two slots can go to cohorts from the story (a necessity in some cases).

 

Glad you changed your mind on that.  As I was saying before when I suggested it, it's very simple to support it.  Mine does the mix & match cohorts with player-created party members exactly as in SoZ.

 

Baldur's Gate also supports playing with a fully player-created party, not just the main PC.

 

My City Hak mod adds LODs.  It does not reduce polygons on the regular meshes.

[ColorsFade]

And Update And Some Screens

 

I was messing about with my safe room code in one of the prologue zones, and also trying to track down the roots to a user-reported bug, when I started having issues with wandering monsters not working at all. It took quite a bit of debugging to figure out what was wrong. The area variables were correct in the debugging script, but the wandering monster table was empty. I added a couple lines of debug output to the related ginc_ files so I could see what was happening when the scripts tried to read and load the 2da. The lines were empty; it wasn't reading the 2da correctly. In the end, I had the official wandering monster 2da open in half my window, and my 2da open in the other half, and I kept looking at them back and forth until I noticed that my file was missing the first row, first column "2DA" text. Without that, the reading routines fail. 

 

Once I got that done, I made some adjustments to my safe room scripts and blueprints. Much faster to lay it down, and now it works, even if monsters are right outside the door (they get script hidden when the door shuts). Should make resting in safe rooms in dungeons and such a very nice and useful way to dungeon crawl in the campaign. 

 

Companions

 

I spent quite a bit of time in the Neverwinter Nights Character Builder, crafting out companions, figuring out stats, feats, skills, and potential multi-classes and prestige classes. The tool is way too much fun and a guy can lose himself for a while just trying out builds. It's nice to try these things out, so you can see if you need to make an adjustment to a companion to open up a prestige class further down the line. Most companions are going to be restricted, a bit, in what they can do, and for that, this little mod has been really handy. I'm loving it.

 

One thing I've discovered is that, much like Everquest, my favorite classes tend to be evil ones. Some of my favorite companions that are yet to be revealed in The Darkening Sky are going to be evil. For that reason, I'm reworking a lot of prologue dialog so players can approach the game as an evil class/race. You might not like the way most NPC's respond to your evil ways, but hey, that's the life of being evil... 

 

Pirate Grotto

 

This area has been a right pain in the ass to finish and bake (I mean I had to bake this thing like 50 times to get walkmesh helpers to join just right at docks and bridges), but it's totally been worth it. 

 

 

 

 

 

The only thing is, it is so big (probably bigger than I needed) that even with the fog distance turned up to max, you can't see the whole thing when you're in the game (the last two shots here are from the toolset). So some of the grandeur of the cavern is lost in the blackness of the clip plane. 

 

But it's still really cool. It's a good lesson to me to not build zones so big. 

 

I have a few more tidbits to add, and the doors need to join to the module areas, but it's basically ready for encounters at this point. The ship has three areas: forward, aft (with captain's room), and below decks. The warehouse is basically done, and the captain hideaway is almost ready as well. Should be a fun encounter as one of the first things you do after reaching Scornubel. 

[Kaldor Silverwand]

If you decide that you want to allow the party editor to be accessible in ways other than just the guestbook you could easily incorporate something like my Deck of Trumps item which opens the party editor and/or also my MoW Party Editor Menu. A blog post about those is here.  In my Harvest of Chaos campaign I allowed a mix of provided companions and also provided the party editor so that people could have the most flexibility for their party.  I think it is a good idea to allow that flexibility.

 

Regards

[ColorsFade]

If you decide that you want to allow the party editor to be accessible in ways other than just the guestbook you could easily incorporate something like my Deck of Trumps item which opens the party editor and/or also my MoW Party Editor Menu. A blog post about those is here.  In my Harvest of Chaos campaign I allowed a mix of provided companions and also provided the party editor so that people could have the most flexibility for their party.  I think it is a good idea to allow that flexibility.

 

Regards

 

I thought about that, but the inns will be enough (well, there's a stronghold too... ). There's a lot of Guest Books available in various locations. 

 

Scornubel is an inn-heavy city. I didn't replicate the entire town (which was how I first approached it). The edges of the city - the "greens" (staging areas for caravans) - only have a few locations of note, and none were crucial to the story, so I ended up not making areas for them. What I've done is taken the middle part of the map, from the docks and moved north, and split it into three sections: Docks, The Walk, and The City Center. 

 

Even with just those three areas, there's still five inns where the player can access the Guest Book and perform party changes.

 

The player will be able to visit two other smaller towns in the campaign, Soubar and Hill's Edge, and each will have an inn capable of allowing party changes. 

 

So there should be ample opportunity for party configuration.