My short challenge quest mod w/ new areas

[Tchos]

Day 9:

In between modding sessions, I've been playing more Dark Times, and I noticed I accidentally left the settings on Nightmare from my testing of my own mod, and it was unexpectedly still playable. I guess the drop in difficulty I've been experiencing is due to the fact that I had to patch DA:O to the latest patch to play Dark Times, and one or more of those patches reduced the game difficulty. So the difficulty of my mod is probably where it should be, and people who want more of a challenge can install mods that make things tougher overall.

 

Despite all the vegetation on my farm, like that big wheat field, the performance in-game seemed perfectly fine, so I'll feel free to add more grasses as I develop the last areas of this map, which should be done in this session.

 

I think the ambient character lights have been diminished somehow. I'll wait until the area's done strengthen them to intended brightness, so there won't be any more surprises. I think I should raise the gamma a bit for the rest of my screenshots, as well. Or enable the bloom.

 

One of my hills completely flattened out at some point when I was placing trees elsewhere. I have no idea how that could have happened. This wasn't a small hill, so there's no way the smooth tool could have accidentally brushed over it at some point and eliminated it. So I quit without saving and restarted the toolset, and reloaded the level, and it was back to normal. I didn't lose much work.

 

A problem with some of the better-looking grasses is that they're in wide clumps which require a flat surface for none of the bits to float, and the vegetation implementation doesn't allow me to rotate them in two of the axes to orient them on the surface, even though I have the "orient on terrain surface" option set to "true". Many of the less-wide clumps are still so tightly packed they make very noticeable patterns instead of natural-looking grass. Another problem is that there are so few decent-looking grasses, and none of the common kind that I'd like in this terrain. I think I'm wasting my time with the grasses here, and I should just move on.

 

Moving around in the landscape editor is very inconsistent. At seemingly random times, the panning amount is reduced by at least one order of magnitude, regardless of whether I have anything selected. All I can do is keep slowly moving, moving, moving at bit at a time, until suddenly for no apparent reason the panning amount goes back to normal and I can pan across the screen at a reasonable pace.

 

Finished the landscaping, texturing, and planting of the rest of the map. Now to place a few more creatures and the door to the interior of the tower.

 

Did that. Exported and tested. My vista objects aren't showing up in-game, for some reason, and I'm having trouble placing the door where it needs to go, since the tower doesn't have a door frame to let the door placement widget snap it into place. I can't find an option to disable physics on the door, so when I try to place it against the tower surface it tries to climb the wall instead, floating in front of it like they're magnets of the same polarity. Will have to deal with that after I do the room it leads into.

 

The ambient character lights are still not working, even though I brightened them when I finished the level. Will look more into that tomorrow.

 

No screenshots today. Today's work was an area about the size of the past two areas combined, but since it's just more of the same type of thing, I don't think it would be particularly interesting just to see screenshots. Best to just let you explore it yourself.

Edited August 1, 2011 by Tchos

[Tchos]

Day 10:

While I was searching for tutorials in this past week, I also came across examples of mods in Neverwinter Nights 2, and came to realise that I'd probably enjoy that game quite a bit, and it would probably be easier to make the kind of mods I'd like to make for that game, considering its larger selection of architecture, placeables, textures, and creatures. However, I'm sure we've all learned from the lesson of Duke Nukem Forever's extended development time that it's a very bad idea to switch game engines in the middle of a project. Plus, I couldn't just jump into modding it

without playing the game first.

 

I've experienced the trouble with static lights when placing the torches around the place. One lesson learned: view the boundaries of the terrain "chunks" before you sculpt your terrain and arrange your layouts so that you can strategically place your static lights to avoid the illumination limits. But baked lights simply aren't working for me. I can see them and their effect on the environment when they're set to static, and then I change them to baked, and render the light maps, and there's just nothing there.

 

Learned how to make invisible area transition objects with meaningful names for pathways, and connected the areas with them. I'll also name the door to the tavern.

 

Got the minimap working! Happy! It also doubles as the local area map, I see.

 

Raising the intensity of the character lights did the trick. Last time I tried brightening them, I had done so by making the colour lighter, which is what didn't work.

 

Semper's tip on holding down Ctrl to stop the slow panning across the screen worked a treat!

 

Got the door to the tower positioned correctly, after trying in vain to attach it to the ball in the door frame. It just refused to get close enough to the tower to snap it into place, even with a frame there. It only occured to me later that the rotation and translation tools also worked on placeables. Usually, for doors, you use the arrow tool

because of the snapping, which is why it took that long to try it. It was still difficult, since it kept snapping up the wall or completely out of sight whenever I moved it sideways or forward (which I had to do to place it manually, trying to match it at non-right angles), but it still obeyed my command to go down into the frame when I moved it vertically.

 

My vista objects still aren't showing up in-game, even after expanding the yellow and red borders of the area. They appear in the area layout view, though. If necessary, I'll just reshape parts of the map so they hopefully won't be necessary.

 

If I didn't need a circular room for the tower, I'd be tempted to use Semper's library level resource for the wizard's study. As it is, I spent several hours trying to get the tower interior pieces to fit together properly, but had to sort of fake it. There shouldn't be any skittering textures, though. I was thinking of extracting one of the original campaign tower levels, but decided it would take too long, and I had a reasonable solution at hand anyway. My tower interior needs to be smaller than any of the ones in the original game anyway. There'll still be a bit of a TARDIS effect, but that was an issue with the original game as well. This is not the main fighting area, so it should look like a normal living space, if a bit disheveled from the recent ruckus. It's still unfurnished as of this writing, but I'll post a screenshot anyway so no one thinks this project is tapering off. I think it's safe to say this will have been a 2 week project.

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tuL2m_fhTYY/TjikjuWATgI/AAAAAAAACOk/sC3T3etlAPg/s200/daorigins%2B2011-08-02%2B18-27-17-77.jpg

 

Spent (wasted?) some time fixing things like floating trees and sharp edges on parts of the landscape that I noticed in the last playtest, even though that's low-priority stuff that should be done in the final polish pass.

 

Linked the tower interior and exterior with the doors. Next I'll finish furnishing the tower interior, figure out how to put items in chests, and start on the final area where the quest objective is.

[Thandal]

Just want to say, Good Job. I enjoy my daily dose of "Diary of a Mad Modder". (You are mad, aren't you? All the best modders are. :tongue: )

 

Keep it up!

 

Thx :thumbsup:

[amycus]

Agreed and kudos.

 

Also, I never used the toolset much for NWN2 and the game does have some good points, but if you are thinking of buying it I should warn you: It's horrible optimized. When I got my latest gaming computer (less than a year ago) I thought I would install NWN2 there with the hope of finally playing the game on max settings. The result? Massive lag. Had to turn it on medium settings and turn of all shadow and blooming effects, as well as reducing the distance rendered. Oh, and the main campaign had an ending that made me want to throw the computer out the window. Considering that I'm still playing it I suppose it did something right though...

[Tchos]

@Thandal: They said I was mad. But I'll show them. I'll show them all! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

 

@Amycus: Well, I do plan to get it very soon. My gaming computer was top of the line a few years ago, but is starting to have trouble with the newest releases. We'll see how it goes. And I've heard the OC isn't the main draw of the game, but the thousands of adventure mods and the persistent worlds, so perhaps the end of the campaign won't bother me so much. (Won't stop me from writing a critique about it if it does, though.) ;) Oh, and I guess if I do make a NWN2 mod, you might play it?

 

Thanks for letting me know you're still reading. ^_^

 

Day 11:

It turns out the door on the exterior of the tower that I was having trouble getting up against the wall is still giving me trouble, because when it's inside the collision mesh of the tower, you can't click on it to open the door! This was the subject of consternation for much of the day, since I couldn't tell why the door wasn't activating. I thought I might have misnamed the waypoint tag, or something like that, and spent some time investigating that. It wasn't until I got up to get something to eat that it occurred to me that it might be the collision mesh blocking it.

 

I entertained the idea of putting an invisible placeable in front of it that you could click on instead, but then the door wouldn't light up when you hover over it, and it would look strange, so I've spent yet more hours hacking together an extension for the door frame with what parts are available in the toolset, made irritatingly difficult by the fact that you can't do any scaling on the models. And they didn't see fit to include something like a simple small stone block to fill in gaps, so I had to make one myself out of planes at right angles. Complicating this is that the toolset has taken it upon itself to start crashing on me now, when I use the object list filtering more than once. If I could just disable the collision on the tower, for which I've looked in vain for an option, then I could place some collision barriers of my own where they need to be, and none of this would be a problem at all.

 

Rendering the light maps in Single Player didn't work this time to stop the explosion of incorrect shadows for the tower interior. Interiors are a beast in this toolset. I removed the ceiling and tried again. I actually sighed in relief when it worked after that. The design of the interior living space is still not done, due to the troubleshooting above, and I want to do the final area so I can hook together the quest pieces and dialogue.

 

Semper told me how to get rid of the collision on the tower, which I rebuilt manually with the terrain collision tool to give room for the door. Now that I know what that scratch pad area is for, I'll actually put it to some use. Now you can click on the door. It's a very poorly lit door, though, which may or may not have anything to do with the light maps, since doors are placed in the area designer, and not the level designer where the light maps are built. It could be due to the dark sunlight colour I used for this level, with the high ambient. The extended door frame is unnecessary now, but I don't think it's worth removing it, since I've wasted too much time on that bit already.

 

Putting items in chests turned out to be just like adding items to the NPCs' inventories, so that went fine. Made a required key for the door and tested that out, which also worked.

Edited August 4, 2011 by Tchos

[Tchos]

Day 12:

Learned how to make a merchant. Used that to make the bartender for the tavern. He sells health and mana potions and injury kits at standard markup.

 

http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/3699/daorigins20110804075559.th.jpg

 

Started on the catacombs, and did some more design work on the tower interior.

 

Added a sign to the tavern. Still finding the inventory of models to be far too limited in the area of simple small shapes to use to construct things that aren't provided as a whole unit, like a simple signpost. I have a pole to hold it up, but there's no short length of wood or metal that's really suitable for the horizontal part. Ended up with this. Also, my trees have disappeared from this level in the area editor, and when I try to repost them from the level editor the speed tree packager complains that it suddenly can't load one of the textures that worked fine before.

 

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/489/daorigins20110804131106c.th.jpg

 

I was planning to have a job board out in front of the tavern which would be where the player would first learn about the quest, but I don't want to actually give the quest until you talk to the questgiver, so instead I think I'll have the bartender direct the player toward the questgiver.

 

Discovered that spiderwebs cast solid black shadows when lightmapped. Looks like another job for the scratch space. Or a good argument for not using spiderwebs.

 

Made trapdoors to get to and from the catacombs, and placed the boss. I'm still fumbling around with things like the doors. It took a couple of tries before I figured out why the trap door was only letting me examine it, and not go through it, when I playtested it. It was because I had selected the appearance "trap door" instead of "area transition - trap door" when I created it. They should have called that something other than "appearance", like perhaps "function".

 

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5858/daorigins20110804130646.th.jpg

 

I have the catacombs set up now, though they're not yet furnished or populated except for the boss area, and they need lighting, too. I'm thinking of having a little cutscene trigger when you enter that chamber, if it doesn't take too much time to learn.

 

Also corrected some more floating plants. Some of them are very difficult to select.

 

Worked on the conversations and plot files of the main quest, and journal entries. This part of the toolset is smooth and well-polished. It's a pleasure to work with it.

[Tchos]

Day 13:

I rebooted the computer and tried posting again from Single Player, but it still complained about being unable to load the tree texture. It posted anyway, to my relief, and my trees are back in the world.

 

Worked on the lighting for the catacombs. The spiderwebs look fine now with their lightmapping set to false.

 

http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/2655/daorigins20110805000750.th.jpg http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/6126/daorigins20110805031858.th.jpg

 

Added to the dialogue, journal entries, and plot flags. I think I'll leave the party member names the way they are unless it would seriously disrupt a player's fun to have names like Buffington Healswell or Ailmender or something. I'm not really adhering much to TheDAS, such as it is.

 

Scripted it so that when you accept the quest you get a down payment of a weapon. Because what good is getting a piece of gear after you've finished the main quest, right?

 

Did some decorating of the catacombs.

 

Minimaps have sky blue in any area not covered with ground, regardless of my atmospheric settings. Is manually editing the DDS really the only way to fix them?

 

Examined Sunjammer's developer demos to see how to make a creature's death trigger a plot flag, and implemented it for the boss. Spent several more hours trying to get a plot flag to trigger when you acquire an item, but nothing was working, despite trying 3 or 4 variations on the script that I found in various places. I was all set to give up on setting that particular plot flag, but I read Sunjammer's summary again, and noticed the bullet point "configuring items to fire the module's "item acquired" event". You have to configure the item? Okay, so I opened the example module again and checked the item. Clicked "variables". Aha! Had to set "ITEM_SEND_ACQUIRED_EVENT" to 1, or it doesn't bother telling the script that it happened! Tried it, finally worked. Yay.

 

Troubleshooting the conversation for the end of the main quest. I can't seem to get the questgiver to pay the reward money, either by using AddCreatureMoney(40000, GetHero(), TRUE); or UT_AddItemToInventory(R"gen_im_copper.uti",40000); or even RewardMoney(0, 0, 4); either in the main event script or the NPC script, checking for a case from the included plot flags. It's really just a formality, since the adventure is over and there's nothing to spend it on, but I'd like to know why it's not working.

 

Aside from that, the main quest and all the plot and conversation stuff is finished. Just need to finish decorating the catacombs (not much left for that), finish the tower living space (boring, but doable), and touch up the first landscape and set the ending event. Also need to fix a room visibility. If I have time in the last day (seeing as we're at the 2 week mark tomorrow), I'll try adding that cutscene I was thinking about, or add a side quest that could be done quickly. Probably the side quest would be the better choice.

 

Tomorrow I'll read the step by step instructions on the wiki for exporting the module to a .dazip file.

[Tchos]

Day 14:

Finished decorating the catacombs. Rendered the light maps and posted to local. I hope the visibility and connection is fixed between the rooms, because I'm not entirely sure I'm doing that right. Will see in the next playtest.

 

Working on the tower interior. I split it into 4 areas: Reception area, alchemy lab/reading room, bedroom, and storage. I figure this character doesn't have a serving staff or cook his own food, so he goes to local taverns for meals; therefore no kitchen. Lab is done. Working on the reception area now.

 

Finished the tower furnishing and lighting, and adding black boxes all around the circumference. Now another long lightmapping process. Read the step by step for making a .dazip while I waited.

 

Had to re-render a couple of times due to some objects getting pure black shadows rendered on top of them for no reason. Tower done now.

 

Doing the last pass on the big exterior landscape. Not sure how long that and the local posts took, but it was long enough to prepare and cook a batch of fried potatoes and onions.

 

Extended the first area, since it was a bit cramped, being my first area. I hope it still looks picturesque. Now for the long posting process. What kills this whole experience is all the waiting. No engine I've ever modded for has made me wait this much. I hope NWN2 is better. It needs an option to play a sound when it's done with whatever it needs to do.

 

It's getting too late. I'll have to package this up tomorrow when I can write the readme. Didn't have time to add the side quest I had in mind, or the cutscene. There are a couple of scripts I haven't tested yet for the ending event, but I can't test them until all this rendering is done, which I'll let run while I sleep.

[Tchos]

Day 15 (last day):

More troubleshooting and re-rendering and re-posting for missing trees, etc. Not sure what fixed it, so I'll call it voodoo.

 

Used some alternate approaches to work around some of the issues I was having with the quest resolution and such.Wrote the readme file for posting the mod.

 

Did another playtest, and found a few more bugs to iron out. Fixed those, and added some music and sound effects while I was at it. Found a few more bugs, and did another playtest.

 

Everything's working now except for the pathfinding in the tower interior. Keep running through walls even though the pathfinding grid shows shouldn't be able to, even after multiple complete posts to local and re-exports. I'll spend maybe another hour trying to fix that, and then make my first attempt at exporting to .dazip and posting. I'll mention it here when I do.

Edited August 7, 2011 by Tchos

[Tchos]

I cleared out both the override folder and the addins folder and installed the mod from the .dazip, and played it through once more to make sure it all works. It does, but something strange happened with the trees. Somehow, it has added a lot more trees into my layouts than I actually placed. This isn't so bad, though some of them are awkwardly placed (there are some right at the edge of the pond, for instance), a couple are slightly off the ground, and the ending scene has gained maybe 4x as many trees. I'm guessing this might have something to do with the workaround for the problem with ERFs not allowing the [filename].gpu.rim files because of the double extension. Possibly I doubled some files while I was manually adding the ones that couldn't be packaged as ERFs?

 

But it's good enough for release, I say. I'm uploading as I type this.

 

Unbelievable! The BSN uploader doesn't allow .7z compressed files, and it waits until it's fully uploaded before rejecting it! It's 10 MB smaller with 7zip!

 

Okay, it's up:

BSN: http://social.biowar...m/project/4951/

Nexus: http://www.dragonagenexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3036

Edited August 7, 2011 by Tchos