Late to the Party

[TheWilloughbian]

Greetings. I thought I'd take a moment and introduce myself to the NWN2 community. I just got the game a couple of months ago and I am having great fun with the toolset and all the mods out there. I use to play NWN1 back in the day and had fun with that toolset as well. Anyhow...... just saying hello.

[Tchos]

The party never ends, so don't worry about being late. :) I came relatively late, too, but plenty of other new people have showed up since then, so I daresay you won't feel late for long. What have you been doing with the toolset?

[TheWilloughbian]

Hello. Mostly I've been trying to get used to the terrian editor. The nwn2 toolset is a different animal from nwn1. It takes a lot more time to build a decent exterior than it did with the nwn1 toolset. I have managed to build a few decent looking ares. They get better as I learn.

 

Lately I have been searching for tilesets, tools/utilities and other modifications/bug fixes. There is some well done stuff out there, but a lot to pick through.

 

Any recommendations?

[olnorton]

Anyhow...... just saying hello.

Gidday mate, it's always good to see new people coming to the game.

[Tchos]

My main recommendation is to use directory mode for your modding, instead of the default of saving everything into a .mod file. It lets you save just the part you're working on instead of resaving the whole thing each time, making it faster and in my experience more stable. Plus you can just open the folder in Windows explorer and add or remove files as you like that way.

 

Second recommendation is to make your module a campaign, even if it's not a multi-module effort. It gives you access to the campaign folder, which I consider superior to .hak files, and you can drop almost everything into it aside from areas themselves, and keep your module folder small, which cuts down dramatically on the size of save files. It also allows you to include the Storm of Zehir party system.

 

There are some very nice tilesets out there, but I generally prefer to build my areas (interiors included) out of placeables. There are a good number of packages of building blocks of architectural pieces you can use for that purpose, and I've made a number of them for my own work as well.

 

For utilities, I recommend the GrinningFool's Usability Tools, and the PowerBar plugin. And also the mod that makes old plugins that were never updated to the last version of the toolset work with it anyway.

 

Depending on your scripting ability and the aim of your modding, I might recommend either LilacSoul's Script Generator, Legends NWN2 plugins, or my own set of systems designed to automate the creation of common quest types (the latter involves being comfortable with local variables and reading documentation in the form of script comments).

 

If you want to see a little speed-building of an exterior area I did for my campaign, it's here. Who knows, it might help speed up your landscaping. Also keep in mind that there are many landscapes in the official campaigns that you can start with if you want a head start. You can clear out the placeables and replace them with your own, repaint the textures, and/or change the grass and trees and end up with a very different area in a fraction of the time. There are a lot of well-made exterior prefab areas available to use, too, which can be modified for your own needs. There are even some retired persistent worlds that have been uploaded for people to use as they please, full of areas that can be used in the same way.

[TheWilloughbian]

Yeah I learned to make backups of my mods pretty quick. The toolset has it's quirks. Are you saying I can open a hak up and put its contents into a campaign folder instead of using the hak files?

I have LilacSoul's Script Generator. I used it back with nwn1 as well. I don't really have any ability when it comes to scripting. I can read it somewhat, but that's about it. It's one of the things I'd like to learn.

I haven't gotten into collecting placeables yet. There's a lot of packages out there. Searching them takes time with way the mod sites are set up.

As for my aim with modding I'm just doing it for recreation and to exercise my brain. I enjoy the problem solving and figuring out how to do stuff. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get an On Player Respawn script to work. I found a script on the vault but, it's way more complicated than what I need or can understand. I found that you need to tell On Player Death script to fire it somehow, but I can't figure it out. My success today was fixing the Heed's PC Tools KEMO override so looping animations would work.

 

The thing about exteriors that takes time, I've found, is texturing. Some of the areas I've downloaded set the bar pretty high. SGK73 has some crazy good stuff on The Vault. Still, I've managed a few areas that look pretty good. I'm not devoid of artistic talent.

[Tchos]

Are you saying I can open a hak up and put its contents into a campaign folder instead of using the hak files?

 

 

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get an On Player Respawn script to work.

 

The thing about exteriors that takes time, I've found, is texturing. Some of the areas I've downloaded set the bar pretty high. SGK73 has some crazy good stuff on The Vault. Still, I've managed a few areas that look pretty good. I'm not devoid of artistic talent.

 

Yes, that is what I'm saying. You can open a hak and extract its contents using NWN2packer, for instance, and put the contents into the campaign folder. The campaign folder can have subfolders as well, so you can put each hak into its own folder if you want.

 

The script generator will work in most cases, but there are some minor things that are different in NWN2 that the generated scripts won't do, such as special effects and some animations.

 

I changed the default death script for my campaign, too, but it was just to change it to use the Storm of Zehir death and bleeding system, so it was just a matter of changing it to match the ones used in that campaign. I don't remember what that entailed, but I believe I documented it in the first few entries of my development diary, which I wrote partially to help anyone else who was new to the toolset, to see problems a beginner might encounter and how to solve them.

 

On the matter of texturing, I'd like to see more people using the tinting to add a little saturation to the textures. Many of the default terrain textures look intentionally desaturated to allow variation to be added by using subtle colour tints to them in spots. Storm of Zehir used this to good effect.

[TheWilloughbian]

Yes, adding some color really helps to add some variation to the textures.

 

So I figured out more when it comes to making a custom respawn. Apparently you have to use the script associated with the GUI box that pops up when you die. I found a script on the vault that does what I want it to do more or less. Which was to jump the PC to a waypoint on respawn. Now I just need to work out how to add visual effects. So many tutorials so little time.

[Tchos]

There's a very handy visual effects browser as part of the PowerBar plugin. I use them with the NWN2 effect functions:

ApplyEffectToObject(iDurationType, EffectNWN2SpecialEffectFile(sEffectName), oTarget, fDuration);

and

ApplyEffectAtLocation(iDurationType, EffectNWN2SpecialEffectFile(sEffectName), lLoc, fDuration);

depending on need.

[TheWilloughbian]

I'll have to try out these plugins. There's just so much stuff to learn, I've been hesitant to go installing new functionality until I learn how to use the stock toolset.