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[ColorsFade]

Journal Entry

I'm getting some mileage out of Apep's commoners. So glad that Tchos pointed me toward them. They're going to be invaluable. I'm using them for a lot of different things. 

I spent some time documenting and developing a waypoint system for sleeping, sitting, wandering and ambient creatures. I had built all four of these systems so that I can quickly lay down waypoints in an area and have commoners spawn at those points and do the appropriate action. Sitters sit, sleepers sleep, ambient folks use the X2_L_SPAWN_USE_AMBIENT flag, and the wanderers do what I previously documented: they spawn at one wandering waypoint, randomly choose another, and then walk to that waypoint. By default they play an "open door" animation when they reach the destination and then disappear. The door animation can be flipped off with a variable on the waypoint so that in instances where the creature walks to a city gate or the end of road, the animation doesn't play. 

It all works perfectly well and makes setting up an area quite quick and painless. I end up with a lot of waypoints on the ground, but once it's up and running, it looks great. 

The wandering waypoint system had a nice use as well for a cut-scene I just finished. There's a scene you experience when you arrive in the small village of Mapleshade, where the mayor is trying to quell a crowd of villagers. I spawn all these randomly generated hafling and gnome villagers around the entrance to the town hall, and the mayor does his conversation with them all (this was fun - a lot of the villagers have a chance to speak a line, and since they are randomly generated, each time I test this cut-scene I get different villagers). The PC and a companion have some nodes as well in the cut-scene and it works quite nicely. 

The fun part comes near the end of the mayor's conversation with the villagers, about halfway through the cut-scene as a whole, when he gets the crowd to disperse. I have a flag for the area that prevents the wandering waypoint system from engaging. In the cut-scene conversation, at the appropriate point, I turn this flag off. A static camera then catches all the folks at the gathering as they randomly wander off to various waypoints around town and disappear. It's a really cool effect. Well, cool in that I had it in my head this way and was able to make it happen. I was pretty happy with that outcome. 

Which brings me to cut-scenes. I'd been dreading doing this mayor/crowd cut-scene because I knew in order to do it the way I wanted to do it, it would be fairly involved. And it was, no doubt. But it was incredibly rewarding to get it done and test it, and watch it play through, and see it work as intended. There's about three major ways the conversation can go based on two different quests, and testing it is pretty fun. And now that I've done it, doing others like it seems way less daunting. 

And as I finished the whole thing up, I just felt very good about it. I like the cut-scenes that I am putting in. There's a certain cinematic element to this stuff that I enjoy. I think I liked that about the OC as well; I like using the cut-scenes and multiple conversation members to advance the story. At first I thought it would be a bit difficult to build these cut-scene conversations because you have to have branches to account for the presence or absence of certain companions, etc. But it's really not that hard, and they add so much flavor to the story telling. The mayor conversation is a great example of this. There's at least two branches that can only be reached if you have a certain companion in your party. Being able to see those branches execute is quite fun. 

There's some more cut-scene work to do in this area and the next, but nothing as elaborate as this one was, so I'm hopeful they will go quickly. I'm getting real close to the point where I should be able to playtest the entire prologue (save for the very final area) and not have anything broken along the way. That will be pretty exciting. 

Then there's the last area to build... and I'm not quite sure how I want to do it yet. 

[andysks]

Hey Colors, I have learned that cutscene building is all about experience. To know which animation does what, do be able to build the responses and the nodes quickly etc. But it usually takes one or two complex cutscenes to get to the point where everything is automatic. That's how much it took me.
Some things I learned that I read no where:
I can copy paste scripts on the dialogues. When I discovered this I had a party.
A linked-grey nod, can have another speaker-listener. This one I haven't really tested, but I know that you can change the tag of the speaker-listener. If this is actually true, then you can make companion nods, that may say the same thing really fast.
The static camera created with the powerbar, needs always just a little bit adjusting towards up.
Rogue Dao lip flapers allows me to use the animations from this tab, and not the special animation tab.
But the flapers have range from 1-12 seconds. If you want 3 seconds for example, the convo will continue after 3, even if it's too big to read in 3.

Well, I don't know if this helps anyone, I just wanted to share .

[ColorsFade]

andysks wrote...
A linked-grey nod, can have another speaker-listener. This one I haven't really tested, but I know that you can change the tag of the speaker-listener. If this is actually true, then you can make companion nods, that may say the same thing really fast.

I did not know that. I'll have to see how that works. 

I keep forgetting that I can copy/paste a dialog node. Which is actually faster if you have stuff you want to setup and remain the same, for instance camera use, speaker and listener strings, etc. It's much better to copy/pwaste a node and change the dialog than to write new dialog line and then re-edit all the variables that would have been the same. 

[ColorsFade]

Journal Entry

A lot of stuff done the last couple of days. This prologue feels so much closer to an end. 

Multi-Companion Conversations

I had a conversation that I wanted to fire after that team clears a certain encounter. At this point in the prologue the PC can have as many as 4 companions, or they could be soloing (I'm not sure soloing is feasible with the encounters I've created, but some nut will probably try it). 

Anyway... I wanted this conversation to fire if the cleric is in your party, as a sort of way to advance that companion's story, and to see if you want her to remain in the group. And if you have other companions in the group, I wanted them to have a say too. And since I had no idea who might be in the group at the time, I had to account for all possibilities. 

I'm pretty certain there's some places in the OC where they do this, but I didn't want to take the time to look them up. As I write this, some corner of my brain is thinking such conversations might have taken place in Ammon Jarro's lair, since you could potentially take several different party members with you. 

Since I didn't want to look it up, I just wrote the conversation with various gc_is_in_party checks. 

Funny thing was, when everyone was in the party, the conversation fired (and for the first few nodes, they are all cleric nodes). But if anyone who might be in the conversation was not in the party, then the conversation faild to trigger at all. 

I came to the conclusion that an IPointSpeaker was necessary. And sure enough, that fixed the issue. I added some lines to a test script and gave the cut-scene a lot of testing with different party configurations, and each time the lines fell through appropriately, skipping the companions that weren't in the group and without breaking the conversation. So now I have a blueprint for future use when the number of potential companions is much higher. Happy about that. 

Tag-Based Scripting

Up until now I haven't used any tag-based scripting. I didn't even know what it was. Well, I am finishing off items on my to-do list in Excel and I had a note in there about updating a Journal entry when a letter is looted from a chest. I was certain there was a way to do it. At first I thought maybe items had script slots, but they don't. So then I did some research and found the tag-based scripting stuff. Wow, that was easy! 

So, again, pretty happy about that, and happy I know that I have that tool in my toolbox for when I need it in the future. 

Wrapping Up

There's only one major area left to create (well, two probably; an outer and an inner). I'm trying to finish everything else in this prologue except for Load Screens, which will be the absolute last thing that I do before I consider it done, because I just want to do them all at once since it requires editing a 2DA and making a HAK. 

The to-do list is so much smaller now. I keep adding things to it, as I find them, but so far my adding isn't outpacing my crossing-off. I'm hopeful that by next weekend I could be able to give it a full playthrough with the exception of the final area. 

[andysks]

ColorsFade wrote...

(I'm not sure soloing is feasible with the encounters I've created, but some nut will probably try it).

Always consider these nuts . I was at the ToEE Circle of Eight forums the other day, and there are people soloing that game...

And if you have other companions in the group, I wanted them to have a say too. And since I had no idea who might be in the group at the time, I had to account for all possibilities.

I did something similar to that, to give the companions some more flavor. I have many triggers spread all over, that will fire if certain two companions are in the party. They will talk with each other about something, their lives... anything, and the PC an interfere. I made a couple of convos for every possible combination. The inspiration for this was BG2, where companions sometimes do this, out of nowhere they start talking to each other.

 

The to-do list is so much smaller now.

Check what I saw today at the Project Eternity update . Feel good about your to do list... there's always worse!
Of course, that's a whole game and not just a mod, but still .

http://media.obsidia...n-1920x1200.jpg

Modifié par andysks, 15 novembre 2013 - 07:55 .

[ColorsFade]

andysks wrote...

Always consider these nuts . I was at the ToEE Circle of Eight forums the other day, and there are people soloing that game...

People are free to try, but I'm not going out of my way to balance encounters for soloers. I've created several companions, and more are coming, and the whole point of the game, the way it's designed with the custom AI, is for people to take the companions and play that way. 

So... soloers - go for it. I can't guarantee it can be played that way, and I won't actively support it. But they are free to try

andysks wrote...
The inspiration for this was BG2, where companions sometimes do this, out of nowhere they start talking to each other.

Same inspiration spot for me. There are going to be triggers in certain places that will cause conversations to fire that happen amongst the various companions in the group. Some triggers will only be for certain companion combinations. If you don't have that combo, the trigger won't fire. I don't know how many of these I'll do, but enough for the flavor to come through.

I finished a couple of these yesterday (well, finished is a loose term) and I was happy with the execution. 

I've discovered two things about my conversation-writing skills. 

First, all my initial conversations were totally wrong in structure. I enjoy reading and writing, and have written some fiction before, and I love writing dialog. And my conversations read very much like dialog from a piece of fiction. But that's not how conversations work in a game. The NPC's do all the talking, and you make conversation choices to provide short answers, ask questions and direct flow. So I've had to go back and re-write all of the first conversations I wrote. Fortunately, those are basically done now. 

Second, I've learned that I need to just write something fast to get the conversation in place and tested, and then come back to it later to actually make it sound good. I read a similar piece of advice on a NWN2 toolkit page about dialogs: just get something in place, and get the particulars done later. This has helped me more forward with at least having the conversation in place and being able to construct the cut-scene, as opposed to not doing work in a particular area because I'm waiting for inspiration regarding the exact nature of the dialog... I find that if I just put somethign in place, the specifics manifest later on. 

andysks wrote...
http://media.obsidia...n-1920x1200.jpg

Funny, I have similar sheets on my Excel. 

Good to keep track. 

[PJ156]

Since my earlier mods I have tried very hard not to have companion conversations advance the plot. They seem to be very fussy in game and 90% of my rpeorted bugs are based on conversaions and cut scenes failing to fire. Coneversation I had tected into the ground myslef and clered by playtesters failed on some peoples machines and not on others.

I don't understand why but it does not matter so long as the conversations don't advance the plot. If there is a great need to do so I have nw started to include a way round if it fails, i.e. another way to transistion or a second way to fire the conversation.

I think npc led conversations are fine. There is not always a need for the PC to interject. For me it is better for the npcs to take the conversation that to give the PC a choice of several pointless nodes or, worse still, a single node with no choice at all.

PJ 

[ColorsFade]

I've had a rule, so far, that the companion conversations don't advance the plot, or if they do (there is only one instance so far) there is a 2nd way around it (and there is).

It's good to hear about your issues PJ because it will keep me from using the companions to advance the plot.

Mostly the companion conversations exist for flavor.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out in testing.

[andysks]

I learned this the bad way as well. PJ's convo broke when he was testing my prologue, and he had to fix it to continue . Since then I always offer an NPC owner line as an alternative for every time the companion might say something. When I want just a line for the flavor of it, I put it in the end of the dialogue, after quests are given and so on. If you have the companion, you'll see it, if not it doesn't matter.

Colors, you should feel thankful for not knowing that Project Eternity existed. I know it since founding stage, and I cannot stand the torture of waiting . But kidding aside, I think it's a game worth tracking. The crew is simply legendary. One more that might interest you is Torment:Tides of Numenera. Also KickStarter project, also great names on the crew .

[andysks]

I think the meaning is that the convo will brake if the companion that is supposed to talk is not in the party, and the written forgot to put an alternative. At least this is why PJ's convo broke when he tested my prologue.
The tag of the speaker... yes, it's a common mistake that's why I always add the speaker-listener tags when a convo is finished, by placing the first, stare at it for a minute to make sure it's correct, and then copy paste it to where needed .

[ColorsFade]

I do a lot of testing to ensure conversations, and their variations, work. I have a test script I run (well, severally really) that will form my party and jump them to waypoints throughout the game, and this allows me to repeatedly test conversations.

As far as plot-advancing: they're all cut-scenes.

I've become a bit fan of cut-scenes while coding the prologue. At first I was not sure which way I wanted to go, classic NWN1 style conversations, or cut-scenes. But as I put things together, I prefer the cut-scenes for anything involving plot and multi-character. I use NWN1 style cut conversations only for minor characters and vendors.

I haven't spent a lot of time yet on conversations that take place via clicking on a companion. The skeleton is there, and I intend there to be some stuff, but for the most part, I am planning on cut-scenes to be the primary vehicle for these sorts of things.

[ColorsFade]

andysks wrote...
Colors, you should feel thankful for not knowing that Project Eternity existed. I know it since founding stage, and I cannot stand the torture of waiting . But kidding aside, I think it's a game worth tracking. The crew is simply legendary. One more that might interest you is Torment:Tides of Numenera. Also KickStarter project, also great names on the crew .

There are certainly some big names on that crew. And looking at the blog, I was intrigue. I was kind of surprised to see them use the classic 2D painted areas, but I also understand their motivation for doing it that way (it's easier to code, for one thing, and it does have a good look). I'll definitely play it when it comes out. 

What I found most interesting was how I felt about seeing the intro video and seeing that is is a KickStarter project. My first reaciton, almost immediatley, was, "I wish I was working on that team". But they're in California, and moving is not an option for me... 

My next thought was, "I am making my own game. And I hope the campaign I'm making gives a certain amount of fun/joy to players when they are done, because I think what I'm building is pretty cool". 

I may not be those guys, and I may not be a member of Obsidian, but I very much come from that line of thinking, that line of game playing... and I hope my campaign gives off some of that glow when I'm done. 

I have a lot of other thoughts on this topic, but will save them for later when I can actually articulate them. Right now I'm riding the drunken high of another Seahawks victory. 

[andysks]

I know what you mean. I literally check every week to see if there is any new such game coming out. And it saddens me that the majority of anticipated games are shooters. I enjoy all kinds of games, but there was nothing like these good RPGs. My hope if that I will make something like that, and you as well. Because I really know how you build and what your goal is .

Another big hope, is that these two games will make a good explosion when they come out, so that the publishers might take the RPGs and the D&D genre seriously again. We'll see.
In any case, we got our work here, so I guess in a way, people who make mods keep the thing alive enough .

[ColorsFade]

andysks wrote...

Another big hope, is that these two games will make a good explosion when they come out, so that the publishers might take the RPGs and the D&D genre seriously again. We'll see.
In any case, we got our work here, so I guess in a way, people who make mods keep the thing alive enough .

It would be neat for someone to notice the work. No doubt. But I don't think either one of us, or any of our fellow modders, can be guided by that light. 

You have to build for yourself, and hope others appreciate it. 

That said... I very much come from that Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Torment style of gameplay. I prefer it. Those games have given me so many memories. 

I do like some shooters. To this day, no game has made as big of an impact on me as the very first System Shock. The 2nd was also very good. Both of those games stuck with me. They were awesome in every way (for their time). 

When I was watching some of the Project Eternity footage on YouTube, I was thinking about how I'd give anything to be in a position to make a killer RPG. 

And then I thought, "I'm making it! I am actually doing it. I'm using the NWN2 engine, but I'm making it. I'm making a game based on a story that has been inside my head for years...  I'm really doing this."

My goal, from the beginning of this, was to make the game I always wanted to play. Like if I could DM a huge campaign, this would be it. There's going to be so much in here that I hope people will think is cool. So many tactical battles... a huge, sprawling city to investigate, forests of great depth and mystery, companions that have quests and stories of their own... a fun stronghold and a neat story to obtain it... and a huge story arc that has far-reaching implications. 

And dragons. Lots and lots of dragons. 

Anyway, I'm in the middle of building an area right now, so off I go. But for readers of this journal I leave you with this (I am enjoying feeding some information along the way, and the wine tonight is loosening my lips):

I do plan on putting a trailer together for this mod when I get further into it, and the trailer will probably start with this quote: 

"And naught will be left save shattered thrones with no rulers. But the dead dragons shall rule the world entire..."

Modifié par ColorsFade, 18 novembre 2013 - 03:30 .

[Friar]

So looking forward to your campaign!
I'm glad there are guys who see what a treasure the D&D world is.
But I just have to say one thing after reading that proverb ColorsFade wrote..
Please! those words are not meant to be said so flippantly!
I don't think any of us here are prepared for what horrors you may be calling forth.

(sigh) This can mean only one thing.. I must prepare for a time when I will need to find each keeper of the secret hoard and plow through them like fresh wheat leaving a trail of red mist.

[ColorsFade]

haha! koundog1, you know where the quote comes from! I love it!

Yes, the Wearers of Purple... Keepers of the Secret Hoard... There will be a reckoning.

I've had a loose story in my head, as I said, for a long, long time. But I didn't have any specifics. It wasn't until I started to seriously consider using the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine that I started to do research to see if any existing Faerun lore fit my idea.

Faerun, and the AD&D world, is a very, very rich place when it comes to story and lore. And sure enough, there was an existing framework that very nicely dovetailed with my idea. And there was plenty of room to maneuver.

I needed the story framework to be something I could build upon and make BIG,and something I could tweak to fit my own goals and ideas. I wanted to tell a very, very big story... You start at level 1, literally with nothing but the clothes on your back, and by the end, well, you can imagine

I wanted a framework that would allow me to, somewhat logically, setup epic battles. This certainly fits the bill.

And Scornubel, and the Western Heartlands, are a great setting. Scornubel itself lends to a lot of side-quests and city-related lore, what with the sewers and the Crypt of Wondermen.

And nearby are the Reaching Wood, The Misty Forest, and of course, the Forest of Wyrms, all of which will figure prominently.

And not too far away, the Well of Dragons, where there are rumors...

[andysks]

Ellipsis at the end... is like... hey... what's in there...?

[Friar]

Oh this adventure is going to be epic!
I'm not sure there is going to be a happy ending to this one. Happy endings are overrated anyway.

Tackling this segment is pretty smart.
So much deserved credit has gone to Skyrim, but what people don't realize is that the very story of a dragon resurrection was first told here in the D&D world. The D&D story exists in my mind as being infinitely more terrifying because, it captures my imagination a little better, but also... these dragons...
Well lets just say, they are a little different.

[ColorsFade]

koundog1 wrote...

Oh this adventure is going to be epic!
I'm not sure there is going to be a happy ending to this one. Happy endings are overrated anyway.

Tackling this segment is pretty smart.
So much deserved credit has gone to Skyrim, but what people don't realize is that the very story of a dragon resurrection was first told here in the D&D world. The D&D story exists in my mind as being infinitely more terrifying because, it captures my imagination a little better, but also... these dragons...
Well lets just say, they are a little different.

Yeah, I agree. 

I enjoyed Skyrim quite a lot, but never finished it (that will be remedied someday, because it does deserve to be finished). 

I've always been a big dragon guy. I just feel like they're the ultimate challenge (or should be). When I was heavily into Everquest and EQ2, I was really happy with the way they made the dragons a big part of the game world and the lore, and made them fierce encounters (Vox and Nagefan were two of the first really hard raid encounters). The first really great piece of loot my toon ever got was from a Nagefan raid... 

A lot of the AD&D games, IMO, have failed to make the dragons as big of a deal as games like Skyrim or the Everquest MMO's. Baldur's Gate 2 came the closest. You get to battle three dragons and there some of the classic dragon banter going on. They're really fun fights, IMO. I enjoyed the dragon encounters in BG2 way more than fighting Irenicus. 

Of course, Dragon Age fixed that a bit. I enjoyed playing that game quite a lot. 

When the OC came out for NWN2 I was hopeful the dragons would make a big appearance, but like a lot of things in the OC they exist mostly just to show you what the toolset can do. There's not a lot of story there, and the battles themselves are pretty tame. 

I wanted dragons for my campaign, and obviously more than a couple. Dragons are, by nature, very hermit-like, of course. And for good reason. They really belong on Faerun's episodes of "Hoarders".

But the cult kind of changes all of that. There's a larger purpose and it gives me, from a story-telling point of view, a mechanism for bringing lots of dragons into the picture. 

There's a certain point in the story here when you're going to start facing many of these dragons, and their assorted allies, and it won't be just a one-off thing. It's going to be a major part of the gameplay, and I'm hopeful the battles will be sufficiently challenging and epic. 

The story of the Cult, as you mention, did the same thing to me: it captured my imagination quite a bit. When I read about the Cult and the lore and history, I immediately started thinking about all these scenarios in my head, and how all the cult cells might work, what they might be doing, and to what larger evil purpose they would all be working toward. And it just really got my imagination going in the right direction.

The question I asked myself was, "Clearly the cult cells operate independently of each other, but what would happen if a leader came along and united them? And how dangerous might that be? And what would that look like on the landscape of Faerun?"

And with that I had my story. 

And the thing is, from a storytelling point of view, that there is a clear beginning, middle and end. So it all plans out very well in terms of making a campaign. A prologue and three acts, and it should wrap up nicely.

And maybe the biggest thing, at least for me, is that you'll get to build a character and feel epic about it. You're going to watch your toon grow from level 1 to level 20 or so, and you're going to go from fighting rats (literally) to fighting dragons & liches. 

My only issue, right now, is I need a green dragon model, which the OC doesn't provide, and I have not seen on the vault. So I'm eventually going to have to break into GMAX and see if I can't figure out how to copy and edit one of the current dragon models and make it a green dragon, with the appropriate head. 

Fortunately, there exist two dracolich models. One is all bones, and one is a red dragon model that was made to look like it's in the early stages of decay. I need to see if I can borrow from that and create a black dragon version as well. 

But these concerns are a ways off. I'm just finishin the prologue now, and then ACT I has to get done, and that is going to be a lot of city work and such. 

[Friar]

You are so right,
Dragons should never be just thrown in as a sort of "side dish." A wyvern I can understand.
Wyvern's deserve special mention, though.
When I was a little kid I thought the Wyvern in Pool of Radiance's kobold cave was a dragon. I thought I'd accomplished an amazing feat.
Then came Tyranthraxus.
So in a way, by the author making the Wyvern fight seem sort of like a big deal, it helped me really appreciate the presence of a real dragon when the time came.

If you get over the learning hump with GMAX and are able to do that with dragons I could see that as being kind of fun for you. For me my only motivation has been to figure out how to make a camel. Seemingly essential? maybe. Remotely fun? definitely not!

As a matter of fact, I'm really surprised no one has made a compendium of dragons. That seems like it would be the most fun of any modeling contribution.

[ColorsFade]

I just did some more looking and amazingly our very own DannJ has done a couple. It turns out that the Red Dragon Dracholich I was planning on using is his work. And he has posted Shadow Dragon model and Bronze Dragon model. I had not seen the Shadow Dragon model yet. Very cool. 

I'm going to ping him and see if he has any interested in doing a Green Dragon and a Black Dragon Dracholich. 

I really need both of those bad. There's several green dragons in involved in this, and the Black Dragon Dracholich... is kinda important

Maybe DannJ can save me from having to Gmax this myself. I'd rather build areas and encounters

[PJ156]

I concur with Tsongo.

But I am not sure anyone should be playing with Gollum's ring.

By my preference as well dragons should be heard of and not seen but I am low fantasy module maker and I struggle to put things like dragons into a mod. It would be impossible for a creature that needs several cows a week for food not to have a huge impact on thier local ecosystem. When one of them comes into contact with humans there is going to be sparks and the dragon will eventually lose. Same with wyverns but on a smaller scale.

PJ