13 réponses à ce sujet

[Friar]

I was hoping that someone already asked this question and that I could find it in the forums but maybe I'm not using the right wording.

As the title asks:

If I were writing an adventure why would I want to make it into a campaign instead of combining it all into one module?

The reason I have considered this is because I have had times where modules have become corrupted before I could finish. I wondered if I broke it into seperate modules I would risk losing only a prologue or an act 2 rather than a whole adventure.

Does that sound about right or are their more advantages?

Thanks!

[andysks]

Campaign offers more options, like bigger party or conversation distance etc. Many will say, that even if you create only one module, turn it into a campaign because of all these options.
I don't know how a module becomes corrupted. I heard it could be the auto save, or saving it as a module and not as directory. The auto save I have noticed myself as well, it's quite bad. Also Iveforgotmypassword said recently that he always works in module mode and never had problems. I guess it's bad luck more than anything.

[PJ156]

There are a couple of advantages I can think of:

1. testing - is easier because you can do it in chunks rather than having to wade through your whole module.
2. Hot fixing - You can use the campaign folder to hotfix the modules by over writing module resources.

PJ

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

How do folks feel about the load/save time associated with a big single module vs. a multi-module campaign?

I figured that waiting for a module to load is the most tedious part of NWN2, so if you make it just one big module, then the player just has to wait a while when they start their play session for it to load up, but after that it's just a relatively short wait for area transitions (unless they have to reload from a save). If they were doing module transitions every 10-15 minutes, then they'd have to face those long load waits all the time, like on the SoZ Overland map.

[rjshae]

koundog1 wrote...

The reason I have considered this is because I have had times where modules have become corrupted before I could finish. I wondered if I broke it into seperate modules I would risk losing only a prologue or an act 2 rather than a whole adventure.

I've had that happen a few times. A fix for me has been to export everything in the module to a '.erf' file, start a new module, then import everything back in. You then just need to manually copy the module properties. After that it seemed to work okay.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

I had a module corrupt repeatedly after a system crash during save recently, but when I looked at the actual files, it seems that a just handful of files were missing, and that caused the module not to load properly. I just copied in the missing files from a backup (it was mostly blueprints), and then it worked.

[kamal_]

Lugaid of the Red Stripes wrote...

How do folks feel about the load/save time associated with a big single module vs. a multi-module campaign?

I figured that waiting for a module to load is the most tedious part of NWN2, so if you make it just one big module, then the player just has to wait a while when they start their play session for it to load up, but after that it's just a relatively short wait for area transitions (unless they have to reload from a save). If they were doing module transitions every 10-15 minutes, then they'd have to face those long load waits all the time, like on the SoZ Overland map.

SoZ generally uses modules of around 45 areas. There are smaller modules, such as Crossroads keep (about 10). I try to keep my modules around 45 at the most (there are exceptions of course), as I figure Obsidian might know something I don't, or have some kind of load time metric they used. Or maybe that's just how their own stuff wound up and it doesn't matter?

If you are doing something linear, I'd guess it doesn't matter as much as you'd steadily progress from module to module, so all at once or 10 at a time wouldn't make too much difference. Only when you finished a game session and came back later would you have longer loads.

I tend to split my modules up geographically. In Crimmor each ward was it's own module, and everything outside the city walls was it's own module. Path of Evil split the OM stuff into eastern/western Faerun modules, and used modules for each of the major adventure areas (Neverwinter, Calimport, City of Pros, Al-Qasr, the stronghold city, the endgame areas).

Modifié par kamal_, 19 octobre 2013 - 04:41 .

[diophant]

Having several small modules not only speeds up loading times, it also runs more stable, because memory consumption is less. This holds for the game, but even more for the toolset. With large modules, I could be sure that the toolset would crash when I tried to save after the toolset had been open for a few hours (most probably due to some memory leaks in the toolset). These crashes occured far less frequently when working on the smaller modules of my campaign.

[kevL]

I've been loading Old Owl Well recently (tests on Lance's hpBars, etc) and that's about the limit for my taste. It's 13 areas but 220mb in size. I have an older computer but still think that ~200mb is a reasonable limit

On the other hand, if a story is well designed it can have natural breaks (Acts) that'd make a longer wait welcome. The 50mb mini-modules in SoZ are a hassle (especially when buffs get removed from transitioning to a new module!) Highcliff in the OC is 450mb, 23 areas... bleh

[ColorsFade]

Question:

I'm saving a module as a directory right now. If I save it as a .mod file, does that change the size at all? Is any compression done on it?

[kevL]

Highcliff is 438mb, 1134 files in directory form, 435mb as a .mod

guess not.

[ColorsFade]

Seems not then.

I had not been paying attention to my module size, but it's way too big. So I started thinking of how I want to break it up tonight, and started exporting various areas, scripts and blueprints as .erfs so I can partition it into appropriate modules... Seems I have some work to do.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

Both of my releases have been large, single modules, with LotD weighing in at 484mb and TDU at 619mb. Big modules like that might have overwhelmed 2gig machines back in 2006, but I don't think that's a real problem anymore.

I planned the modules to be big, coherent, whole landscapes, so splitting them apart into smaller chunks would have messed up the overall cohesive feel. And I think that's the ultimate issue; divide your work up into as many chunks as it naturally falls into.

Though it makes sense to use the OC as a guide, remember that it's module structure is partly due to it's team-style development. They needed to keep things separate so that different builders could work on different modules of the OC simultaneously. Some builders like to do something similar, releasing each chapter as a separate module in a growing campaign, but you shouldn't feel forced to do the same.