My short challenge quest mod w/ new areas

[Tchos]

As I mentioned in another thread, after having been tempted to try out the DAO toolset for a long time, and especially seeing the nice quest mods in the community contest and by various talented individuals and groups, I finally sat down this weekend and watched some video tutorials for how to use the toolset. I made a little playable area with some custom texturing and such, and decided it might be feasible to actually make a quickie standalone quest mod while I still have some free time. To that end, I'm thinking small, and going for speed, so I'll consider it a self-imposed "challenge", which is the only way I believe it'll be completed.

 

Day 1:

My first area, which I designed to get away from the dirty, ugly-looking landscape of the rest of Ferelden. Seriously, there's no reason for a pre-industrial country to have such smoggy-looking skies.

 

This wasn't bad at all, and the landscape shaping and texturing was pretty much the same as in Oblivion, which I've used before. I hit a pretty big snag with the lightmapping, though, and that added at least 4 or 5 hours to work through.

 

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/7889/daorigins20110725165332.th.jpg http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/6481/daorigins20110725165118.th.jpg

 

I'm also not happy with the 8 texture limit for an area's terrain, but I'll make do.

 

Day 2:

I spent another few hours searching through the game resources, poring over the wiki, and searching the forums for information on where the terrain textures were located, so I could add my own, but had no luck.

 

Posted a couple of screenshots of my work on the forum here. DarthParametric answered my question about the terrain textures. Did some touchup work on the landscape.

 

Watched some more tutorial videos for NPC work. Created a questgiver NPC.

 

Wrote my first conversation and the bare bones of a plot. I had always considered NPC dialogue to be a daunting task, and had never learned how to make them in any game I've modded, though I came close with Morrowind and Fallout 3. In this toolset it turned out to be a smooth and easy task.

 

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/2112/daorigins20110726173127.th.jpg

 

That last line in the dialogue was a temporary option for testing one of the mechanics, by the way. I've already removed it.

 

Day 3:

Spent most of today trying to get an NPC to go hostile if you choose a particular dialogue option. Hours and hours of study, trial and error, searching and trying suggestions with custom scripts and generic ones, and nothing was working. Finally found a very simple solution that worked, on this wiki page. But wow, that was a frustrating ordeal...even worse than the lightmapping one.

 

Also spent a few hours trying to start the module in a way that lets you level up to the appropriate level for the mod, and choose your own stats and skills. I tried a few approaches, with different degrees of success, but I considered them mostly unsatisfactory, so I just enabled the ability to let the user import a character from a save in any of the user's other modules. This worked. I'll suggest a recommended level character for the user to import in my readme. Possibly also supply a premade character of my own in case the user doesn't have any.

 

Tuned my first enemy to provide a decent fight.

 

Next I'll either create another location for the quest to take place in, or create a location where the PC can hire some party members to help. I'm guessing I'll need around 7 locations for this thing total. Ideally I'd like to have one particular location with a small open mausoleum or shack with an inside and out that you can see and walk into without needing an area transition, but I'm not sure if there are any of those in the toolset.

[Thandal]

Wow! Just... wow! Tchos, that sounds fantastic!

 

You make it sound so casual (if time consuming.) But I can appreciate how much real thinking, not to mention artistry, (and trial-and-error) goes into something like this.

 

Thank you. Can't wait to try it! :thumbsup:

[Tchos]

Casual is a good word for it! Considering how many times Dragon Age areas are reused, I thought it was going to be difficult to make a new area, but it's really not. I would think that a Bioware employee (perhaps someone who had gone to school for this sort of thing, and had been trained in the use of the toolset, and paid to use it) should be able to make at least 4 or 5 new areas in one workday.

 

Just take a look at some of the tutorial videos on Youtube, and see how little time it takes. I think it would be great if a lot of people were inspired to make small quest mods like this. :thumbsup:

[Tchos]

Day 4:

 

Decided to deal with the party necessities today instead. Spent several hours studying the wiki to learn how to set up a follower system. There were no video tutorials for that subject, unfortunately, and the text seemed to leave out some information here and there. "Put this code in your event handler." Oh, okay. What the hell is an event handler? "Now make these Excel files and run them through the converter." Converter gives errors! "Oh, and if you're an OpenOffice user, it won't work. Use this program instead." Argh. Had to re-enter all those cells.

 

But after dealing with the troubles and finding the missing info I nevertheless got a functional framework in place for hiring party members and choosing them on the character select stage.

 

Next, I created four new hireable NPCs, two male, two female, each suited to a particular archetypal role in a party: Tank, rogue, mage, and healer. Since you can import whatever class you like as your PC, this lets you pick 3 out of the 4 for your party, leaving behind the one whose role you plan to fill yourself.

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nVyeIQZ4f-s/TjBmo5c8AYI/AAAAAAAACMs/WZf3RKizjKc/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-27%2B12-14-22-12.jpg

 

I wrote some flavour dialogue for each of their conversations when you hire them to give them some personality, but the main purpose was to get it all functional, which I did. More flavour can come later, when I've roughed out more of the overall mod. Best to get everything working first before doing the little details, to maximise the likelihood of completion in my limited time. Full steam ahead! For now, say hello to Flint Vanderhuge, Speedy Lightfingers, Sigil Flamerune, and Salve McHealy. I'll probably replace the names with more conventional names later, but I needed to have a little fun after dealing with the whole party thing.

 

Also created a new item for the healer to wear. I enchanted one of the noble dresses with stats similar to a mage robe because I'm tired of the best mage robes being those things with the furry shoulder pads.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tZ3qMICm03Y/TjBmoTbg1bI/AAAAAAAACMU/tkB9DsqVHoo/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-27%2B01-24-15-43.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RLQee-o58n0/TjBmoceCxSI/AAAAAAAACMc/UA9nBi41Wgk/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-27%2B01-24-48-66.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-R7vIlann-PQ/TjBmopJT8MI/AAAAAAAACMk/0sui_cTf7Vw/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-27%2B12-17-26-72.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AlncHSp4R3I/TjBmoN7T-aI/AAAAAAAACMM/rqi_h9hT3FE/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-27%2B01-24-00-30.jpg

 

Next up is the tavern where you'll find these people to hire, and the first enemy encounter area.

Edited July 27, 2011 by Tchos

[amycus]

Just posting to say that I appreciate this little diary of yours. Very interesting, especially since I hope to one day have the time to make my own quest mod.

[Tchos]

Thank you for saying so. It is a more enjoyable experience for me to know that there are interested people watching as I do this. It also raises the stakes of this self-imposed challenge. :happy:

 

The "event handler" I mentioned, for the record, is the script specified in the module's properties, from the "Manage Modules" screen.

Edited July 28, 2011 by Tchos

[Tchos]

Day 5:

 

Numerous times now I've run into the length limit for dialogue lines. This impedes my writing of roleplaying options. I shudder to think how much the BG Redux team has had to truncate the long options available for the player to choose in Baldur's Gate 2 for their remake.

 

I think I have a title and theme for this mod now, but I'll hold off on saying so just yet, because it depends on whether I have time to add something. For now, I'll just focus on the main quest and worry about frills later.

 

The plot I've settled on, by the way, is that old Narham Galthach here is having some trouble with some distant relatives who have moved into his home and won't take the hint and leave. In other words, the angry undead spirits of his ancestors have crawled out of the family catacombs and infested his tower and its environs, tainting the local area.

 

I drew an ugly little topographic map to guide my landscaping for this area. I'm going for some varied, Duskwood-like geography here.

 

Landscaping went fairly smoothly, but I've only textured a bit of it so far, because it's a pretty complicated layout, and much larger than the first one.

 

Ran into another slowing snag. Seems like there's something for each task. This one was in placing props. For some reason, the toolset slowed to molasses every time I expanded a prop folder, taking at least 30 seconds to make each prop appear in the world, and this was just to see what some of them looked like, since the wiki doesn't show pictures of every prop. I should try out the model viewer if this persists. Once I got the props into the scene, they moved normally, though.

 

Lightmapping and posting to local takes a long time on a level of this size (16 minutes, according to the log). I won't be able to do test runs as frequently with this landscape, or else perhaps I can just redefine the exportable area size for small local tests. That could work.

 

Worked on the lighting for the area to get the effect and colours I wanted. With the lightmaps on, and in-game, it shows up much brighter than I wanted here, so I actually had to reduce the sunlight to nearly nothing, and raise the ambient light strangely high, and I'm still getting very dark shadows (on the objects, not the characters. I haven't set up the character lighting on this set yet).

 

Spent an hour or two looking through text tutorials, wiki info pages, and videos, trying to find information on how to place practical lights (like torches). None of them explained that step. All the tutorials that showed lights at all just placed lights with no physical light source. I found torches and fire pits in the props and placeables, but none of them had fires attached. I thought maybe they'd show up if I placed them correctly, but I couldn't tell if I was supposed to put them in the level designer or the area designer.

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R3hbDXsyfdo/TjG8JD69d0I/AAAAAAAACM0/AZ0wKrq5iFU/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-28%2B12-32-31-90.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FIw4ia8LimI/TjG8JSv0KVI/AAAAAAAACM8/_GhbzaoG9BM/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-28%2B12-32-56-22.jpg

 

Ultimately found animated fire effects separately. These, unlike the props, are scalable (the inability to resize normal props and pieces of architecture is another unpleasant limitation of this toolset). Tried it out, and determined that to make a fire pit, I had to place the pit, then the animated fire, and finally an animated point light over it to actually generate the light. Same with torches: Torch + fire + light.

 

Began populating the area with mobs to fight. Need to find out how to assign movements to them, so they can walk around. Also need to lower their perception range and possibly tweak their abilities.

Edited July 28, 2011 by Tchos

[Tchos]

Day 6:

Built my first interior level: the tavern where you'll find your party members, and where the bartender will serve your vendor needs. I based the interior on the shape of the building I used for the tavern, with minor liberties. Again, the lightmapper was my enemy here, and I had to use the workaround where you render the lightmaps in the Single Player module, and move the generated folder manually. A painting on the wall fails to appear in the area layout, inexplicably, showing only the shadow behind it, but it appears normally in-game. There are still some black spots that I can't get rid of, and which I'll try to cover up. It's a small place, and rather plain at the moment, but I think the size is all right for a small roadside tavern.

 

Somehow I lost the character ambient lighting and water from the first exterior, and will have to replace it.

 

Figuring out how to place and use doors was another lengthy task, especially since the wiki page for "doors" appears to be based on pre-release information and isn't written very well. Apparently there are no area transition doors ready for use in the toolset, if I understand correctly, so I followed Qkrch's instructions on making one in one of his videos.

 

The name of the location doesn't appear on the tooltip when you hover over the door. For that matter, I can't get the minimaps or local area map to show anything, and I have tried setting the minimap area and posting the minimap to local. The wiki entries on "maps" only talk about the world map with the pins for different locations, which I'm not using in this mod.

 

Looked into ambient animations and movement for both the party NPCs and the mobs. Would be nice if the poses, at least, would show up in the area layout so I can see if they're positioned properly in relation to the props. Spent way too long getting a character to sit in a chair. Had to disable physics on her, which works, but as soon as she goes into conversation, she stands up. I've tried all the possible variables

for her ambient system state, and none of them seem to help.

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v9ax0kGNxbQ/TjMqvt_NhnI/AAAAAAAACNE/umkzPqAoZug/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-29%2B14-41-46-01.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0BHlhZ7VKGc/TjMqvzdCX7I/AAAAAAAACNM/5w_ljXn90lc/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-29%2B14-43-39-68.jpg

 

The lighting is getting darker as I work on it, probably due to the lightmapping. I had to remove some props because they became covered with shadows despite being under a light. It's much darker than it should be. Here's a brightened up version of the screenshot that shows what it should look like. I'll have to increase the brightness of all the lights to compensate, and hope that doesn't screw up the lightmapper even more. I hate pitch black shadows!

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ru3Owxnu7SI/TjMtk5fDCfI/AAAAAAAACNU/pExX1iz11VE/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-29%2Bbright.jpg

[Tchos]

Day 7:

Got the lighting in the tavern acceptable by changing the animated lights to static lights. Believe it or not, after working on it some more, it had gotten even darker than the previous screenshots! Some of the ambient occlusion shadows are still a bit ugly, but I'm done with it.

 

Started on one of the other locations, and it's one of the exterior locations used in the main quest (a graveyard), where there will be some fighting and a mini-boss. I like exterior level designing much better than the interiors. Sculpting the landmasses, texturing them, and placing vegetation and props is rather enjoyable, actually. I'm dreading the prospect of dealing with the light mapping on this level before it's done, though.

 

My dread was justified already. I had to render the light maps in Single Player again for this one, due to a gigantic black square appearing on the landscape.

 

I placed the mobs on the map, and learned how to make them patrol the area. Did the long process of posting to local, copying the folder to my mod folder, reopening my mod, reposting to local (otherwise my trees were all gone!), exporting, and finally got the graveyard in-game.

 

Finally a chance to have some fun with this! I hired my party and tried it out. The rendering came out very nicely, but I think perhaps I should turn bloom on, and maybe increase the fog. The patrols worked, though it seems the game makes them stop patrolling once the party is "in combat" even if they haven't spotted us yet. I think I may have made them spread out a little too far, but then again maybe I should just add more of them, because it was over a little too quickly. Usually I play on Hard mode, but for this I actually took it up to Nightmare (which I never use usually), and it became quite a fun experience! I'll try to scale up the difficulty a bit, if possible. I'd like it to be tuned nicely for a level 11 or 12 character, so the party can have access to some decent abilities.

 

Need to find a way to specify what abilities the party members pick when they autolevel. Also need to be able to specify their default tactics, or else I'll just put my suggestions for what to pick in my readme. Still no luck with the map or minimap.

 

Next area will either be the farm or the tower exterior, then it's on to the interiors. I have 2 of those to do, or 3 if I have time. Then I'll do some touchups on the rest of the landscapes, distribute loot, rewards, keys, etc., and fill out the dialogue, and it'll be done. I'm deliberately not showing the entirety of the graveyard here, so some of it will be unfamiliar when you play it. :)

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h2NovBl59SQ/TjSG7Xs8R7I/AAAAAAAACNs/KTFLgrMnQ5I/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-30%2B14-58-52-58.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nSAZQVEzFz4/TjSG7uDxiJI/AAAAAAAACN0/SLmCVF-xKkQ/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-30%2B15-11-36-59.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_YKZ-PfM79U/TjSG7A0vnQI/AAAAAAAACNk/45VwC-Ksycc/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-30%2B14-56-43-23.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EC8ydpfGaxc/TjSG67ARq1I/AAAAAAAACNc/TAe1uf-WowU/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-30%2B14-52-29-38.jpg

Edited July 30, 2011 by Tchos

[Tchos]

Day 8:

So I've been at this for a full week. I'd better hurry it up.

 

Anyone who's read my blog posts on the subject can already guess that there won't be voice acting in this mod, because in general I find V/O in my games to be unnecessary, to say the least. I won't prohibit other people from adding voices if they really want to, but how likely is that?

 

Decided to do the farm, due to its placement on the map. Finished that, and did a little work on the tower exterior as well. Need to look into placing ambient sounds and see how to choose the music. No big constrast in colour scheme between this new area and the previous one, since it's a different area on the same map, which is the case for the tower as well.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ShOC1uiwrW0/TjXN8GZIs3I/AAAAAAAACOE/Wlsjeu0XB_Y/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-31%2B01-09-51-49.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-D9vfuaCsljE/TjXN8qLhytI/AAAAAAAACOc/3cdx7gkvwjs/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-31%2B01-22-34-02.jpg

 

One thing that I liked in the Oblivion construction set which seems to have no equivalent in the Dragon Age toolset is that there's a set of landscape textures that you can pick which generate grasses on the terrain in-game. I don't know how much grass I can have in a level like this before it affects performance, and the farm area is already pretty packed, so I'm going easy on the grass.

 

There's a haystack in the toolset that I'd like to use as set dressing (pictured below), but it's astoundingly low resolution, seemingly due to bad alpha channels. Possibly I can fix it, if no one else has already.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1VLZaD86bvg/TjXN8YcvuuI/AAAAAAAACOM/glAZRIA8SbQ/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-31%2B01-17-23-77.jpg

 

I'm getting to like this area! It could support more quests than I have planned. Possibly I could revisit it as an additional add-in in the future. Here's a bird's eye view:

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dAnwsiaO0Rs/TjXN8ZRpb5I/AAAAAAAACOU/1AdjTZLRrOI/s200/daorigins%2B2011-07-31%2B01-20-31-39.jpg

Edited August 1, 2011 by Tchos