The Black Scourge of Candle Cove -- Tchos' development diary

[Marzipanic]

Retexturing can go a long way. Keep up the good work.

 

Your mod is looking and sounding better with each post. Can't wait to play it. :biggrin:

[Tchos]

More quest and conversation-related work. This is going to require some playtesting, because it grew pretty complicated.

I wish there were certain items with a gently swaying animation. Usually there's the opposite problem, such as trees swaying as if in the wind, where maybe there shouldn't be any, especially indoors. But inside a ship on the water, it would be nice to have, for instance, the placeable hanging lantern on a rope/chain (plc_mc_lantern03) swaying gently back and forth for better ambiance. Same for free-hanging ropes or chains, or other such items.

The floors in the RWS ship interior tileset have some strangeness about how they handle lighting, so I covered the floors with BCK II wooden floor tiles, which receive light correctly.

There was no really suitable wooden texture built into the BCK II floor tiles, so I installed Mokah's New Wooden Floor Texture for the E group (one of the tiles made for users to supply their own custom textures). This has a good texture, as well as a good tint map, allowing me to create a wooden floor with patches of algae. However, the normal map and specular map did not create an appropriate effect, so I made new ones. After that, it looked fine, though I would have preferred the texture seams to be along one of the gaps of the wooden planks, and I would have preferred the planks to be segmented lengthwise, because currently the planks are continuous along their entire length. Broken up with floor clutter, though, it's not too noticeable.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-o7aU2TeiJ5A/USHk2agPVBI/AAAAAAAAE14/6wJdmzCl6Xk/s320/bcocc+belowdecks.jpg

One bit of philosophy regarding my lighting -- if I'm taking the time to create lighting that evokes a particular mood (and using light to draw the eye to important places), what could quickly ruin that mood by washing out all of my lighting? A light spell, perhaps. Or an equipped torch. When would a player be tempted to use one of those things? When they can't see, of course. So, then, the player should never be left in so much darkness as to be tempted to break out the torch or light spell.

That's not to say there can't be dark places, of course, but there needs to be light visible beyond those dark patches.

There is, of course, the danger of players having light-emitting gear equipped, but at level 10, I would expect many players may eschew such gear for ones that have more enchantment slots free for other kinds of enchantments. At any rate, my readme file will suggest that players leave off any light-emitting gear, since they won't be needing it.

I was troubleshooting one of my companions, who wouldn't actually join the party when I give the command, and I found that the chief difference between this one and the one that worked was that this one had a last name. When I removed her last name, she joined properly.

Edited February 18, 2013 by Tchos

[Tchos]

I finished up the ship interior mini-dungeon I mentioned before. A couple of interactive mechanics and other such things that required writing some more scripts, but nothing major. I hope it'll be a pleasant extra diversion, if I can say that of a dungeon crawl.

Something I need to be sure is in the readme file and elsewhere -- examine everything that can be manipulated. They all have descriptions, and you'd be missing out on some context if you don't take a moment to look over an object before you activate it.

For one of the scripts, I noticed I had been doing some repeated tasks with a certain situation (that I don't want to divulge for the sake of spoilers), and decided that this time I'd write a generic script to get the basics out of the way for any future situations like that. I've generally been building my variable-based generic scripts to be both expandable and also able to fire off additional scripts if necessary, also from the variables, so that they're as flexible as possible.

I might have to tune one of the encounters a bit, because I found it a bit too difficult for my mostly level 10 party, even with a couple of level 20s thrown in. It's possible I'm just lacking the appropriate form of protection, though, and it's a bonus, entirely optional encounter, which you don't need to take unless you want some extra XP and loot, so I think I should just leave it as it is. It would be fine if not for some aggro issues, I think. I separated the mobs and put a wall between them, and made their perception ranges short, but they still attack together.

I checked the Monster Manual III to read up on some specifics about these creatures, and I found that despite being CR8, they have 20 HD (some of you now know which creatures I'm talking about, but I want to keep it vague). It seems a little excessive, so I removed one of them, and that made the fight much, much easier. Maybe too easy now. It was the difference between party wipe and total victory with no deaths. No happy medium? I'll put the one back in. Between the two options, I think I like it better as a tough challenge.

That time, they did not all attack together, but the first one sought my party out once I started to move, despite still being on the other side of a wall. Now I'm thinking they just have high listen checks, and this is working as intended.

The treasure to be had here, by the way, is mostly "fun" treasure. At level 10, gold may no longer have the kind of allure that it would have had at earlier levels, when you're still struggling to outfit yourself with decent gear and consumables, but at the same time, I don't want to be dropping powerful magic items left and right. The bosses carry good items, but if it doesn't happen to perfectly match your character build, you may want to sell it anyway, and use the money to pick up something more appropriate at the well-stocked port town shops.

I started adding companion environmental interactions, so that the companions you can pick up will have a few lines to say in certain situations, such as observations on the new locations, and at the same time throwing in some that player-created party members can say, based on their attributes. For the former, I'm using the SoZ method, with specially-named dialogue files for each companion, with gc_node conditionals marking which line to use in which situation, with the standard gtr_bark_node script. This way, your characters (whether created or recruited) will be able to notice things that they should notice due to their skills, and inform the player.

I found an item in one of my shops was selling for only 1g, despite the base cost being much higher. Based on an incident earlier, I thought it might be set as a plot item, but it's not. I decided to just remove it from the shop.

Er...I decided to make another new placeable (or two). The pirate treasure really needed a grinning human skull watching over it, and the skullpile wouldn't cut it. Neither would Myrkul's skull scaled down, since scaling something down that much makes it hate lights, and of course it has all those spikes all over it. So I took a human skeleton and isolated the head. The jawbone is broken on the skeleton, and the head is rotated to the side, and I saved one placeable with that being the same. Then I made a second one with the skull rotated so that it would rest properly on the ground upright. Also reattached its broken jawbone, though I think it might have a bit of an underbite.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y-IIamuShHs/USfuXrgHrkI/AAAAAAAAE2M/Dm7rgQ-dfrw/s320/bcocc+pirate+skull.jpg

[Tchos]

On the subject of the crypt tileset, I finally got around to fixing something that had bugged me since I first saw it in the OC back in 2011. Someone's probably going to tell me this has already been done, too, but again, I've never seen such a fix.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--9JPlqu7mQA/TmKgAye7l7I/AAAAAAAACPc/xM6cjkpcZ40/s200/nwn2main%2Bcobwebs.jpg

Those ugly, jagged cobwebs in the default crypt texture set. I complained about them in my first post about NWN2. The texture files themselves have very artisticly drawn, nicely antialiased cobwebs, but as we know, the decision was made at some point for alpha channels in placeables/tilesets to be only 1-bit, meaning no antialiasing.

So why did they leave these horrible cobwebs in the tiles? I can see from the later official crypt texture sets that they recognised the problem, and didn't include cobwebs in them. They could have removed them from the existing tiles, but didn't. I got rid of them by just blacking out the alpha channel in the texture where the cobwebs were.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ercmrEY7PAE/USlZJR5x1WI/AAAAAAAAE20/rsU8dX-Un3o/s320/crypt+no+cobwebs.jpg

Not as creepy or old-looking as it would be with cobwebs, obviously, but there are much better cobweb placeables out there than what was built into the tileset, and it's up to the builder to use them.

[Tchos]

Today, after loading up the game to test some more additions and changes, I was greeted with a dreaded warning -- " Could not load the Module. Module file might be corrupt."

The last thing I had done was to delete an unneeded area, which I had been keeping around because it was a copy of the earlier version of the bard shop, with the shelves I had so carefully placed and then found would not properly contain the instruments I wanted to display, and I thought it could be useful for something later. I finally exported it to ERF and deleted it from the module, because it was taking up unnecessary extra loading time.

So, when I got that warning, I figured it had something to do with the now-deleted area, and it did. As I've mentioned before, I use the -home command line switch to keep my user files on a different (bigger) hard drive than C:, but this switch doesn't seem to work for the toolset, so I've been keeping an extra working copy of my module's campaign folder and hak file on the C: drive, and using a folder-syncing utility to keep them synchronised, but the trouble is that I have to manually tell it to sync each time. This time I forgot, and this is apparently the first time that something so major was missing that would cause that kind of failure. After syncing, it was fine.

I worked on the second underwater area. First order of business was just to get the important points of interest added and made functional, and connecting them to the overwater map and the final location.

By necessity, there's no underwater combat. I think there's some existing code that would accomodate changes to game rules in an underwater environment, but the animation isn't suited for underwater combat. Story-wise, it's required that the players must wear a diving suit and stow their gear in a magic bag of some kind, and have no weapons or cloaks equipped. I justify this in the dialogue in that if you're wearing armour or carrying heavy weapons, you'll just sink to the bottom of the ocean, and that much is reasonable, I think. In practical terms, though, some of this is necessary because of serious clipping and limitations in the animation set (cloaks make it glitch). You will not have to actually place all of your gear into a bag, and remove it afterward, but in dialogue, it should be "understood" that that's what you're doing, and you can do so for RP purposes. The On Enter code will unequip the problematic gear, and equip a diving suit for you, which will be removed On Exit.

I was going to have a couple of other options for this part, such as a Necklace of Adaptation that could be crafted at the local magic shop by request, or a water breathing potion that could be crafted by the local alchemist, but in the end I went with the less complicated solution. All of those things were going to be expensive, too, and would have required the player of average wealth to raise money via the side quests.

Next up is creating a new VFX for use in a spawned item in the overwater map for the underwater quest, and more work on the underwater area.

[Tchos]

I thought it would be best if I relegated my talk of game design philosophy to my own thread. The topics are the role of the game designer, the role of story, and the role of player-created party members whether being used instead of, or in combination with, author-created NPC companions.

First I must say that my personal preference as a player is to take author-created companions along, even when there is the ability to create my own party, because I prefer to experience as much content as possible. However, player-created parties have a long and important history in RPGs, from the Infinity Engine games to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and going back to the venerable SSI Gold Box series, and I personally know people who prefer their parties to be made that way, and that's why I offer that option, and I speak as an advocate on their behalf.

I certainly do not build all possibilities or "what-if" situations into my work. Only specific ones that either I think are important, or that take so little effort that there's no reason not to, such as this.

Now, this leads on to the role of the designer in the equation. As I've said before, what I am making is a game. And I'm designing the kind of game that I want to see as a player, but that doesn't mean that I want to prevent other players from enjoying it in any way they happen to prefer. Bioware's recent statements indicate that they want to tightly control the player's experience, and have them experience the game in the way that the designers envision it. And that's why I haven't bought any of Bioware's more recent games (past Dragon Age: Origins). I want to play, not to be led along by the nose.

I find myself in agreement with something Chris Avellone said on the subject. Chris worked on several games that I really like, such as Planescape: Torment, where he worked as lead developer. He said, in an interview on Matt Chat:

You have to be able to make meaningful choices in constructing your character and developing the character in the game. That's the first part. The other part is that the game world -- dungeons, people -- have to react in meaningful ways to those character choices and how your character is developing. I would even argue that having a strong storyline in an RPG is absolutely secondary, or even tertiary to those things. It's the game system, it's allowing the players to develop, and it's allowing them to see the consequences of that development in the RPG.

Most RPG players will form a stronger narrative themselves, based on actions that occur in the game, that have nothing to do with the NPCs they talk to or the big "wow" moment you threw at them. They don't care! What they care about is their 3rd level dwarven fighter that was able to fight off those 20 orcs in a corridor with a ball-peen hammer. And that's the story that gets them excited. That's the story that they tell, because they were able to pull it off with their character build and their game mechanics. And I totally respect that, and I'm fine. I mean, I'll still try and do a good story, but chances are, your experiences are going to trump anything I try and throw at you.

Consider that this is the person who brought us such story-heavy and character-focused games as Planescape: Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, who is arguing that story and NPCs rank second or even third in importance, under giving the player freedom, choices, and the ability to develop their characters as they please, and having the game react to that.

Now, I think he might be exaggerating a bit when he says that most RPG players feel this way, but I do agree that it's a significant portion, and it's a portion that I believe have precious few modules made in such a way that they can enjoy them in the way that they prefer (in this case, creating their whole party). Especially since only the final expansion (Storm of Zehir) made that option available to them, and perhaps the majority of the modules currently in existence were made before that expansion came out.

This all, I think, falls under one of my primary design rubrics for my work, that being player freedom.

[Tchos]

I'm still in the process of relocating, and much of my time is occupied by household work. I also don't yet have internet access here, so everything I'm doing and writing is offline, waiting for me to have some kind of access so that I can upload/post it, as I'm doing now.

Recent work (and I wish I could show a screenshot for this, or a video): The first thing I did was create a new VFX marker for a spot on the sea where the player will be told about as a diving spot. X marks the spot! I tried to make it look like the kind of X you'd find on a treasure map. This clickable spot and its map pin only appear when you've been told where to find it.

I made a marker like this instead of the usual overland map spawning placeables because it's the site of a sunken ship, where nothing should show on the surface of the water. The idea is that the captain of the ship follows a map to this location, which is explained in the dialogue.

Certain transitions are also handled by dialogue, but these are special transitions that involve relaying important information to the player before actually going in. This is also accompanied by a faded-to-black screen and appropriately atmospheric sound effects.

[Tchos]

I wanted to do a test to make sure I could add new content to the module after its release. The way I set up this framework, I like the idea of making little extra quest add-ons for it, such as for holidays or special events, based around this sizable town.

Now, part of what I've done here was also necessary since the town keeps crashing my toolset, and I didn't want to have to try loading it anymore, so I thought that if I can just add anything else I need to it via scripting, I won't have to open it ever again. And I think I can do that, even though I neglected to add any phantom scripts into the area's On Exit, On Heartbeat, or On User Defined Event fields. It does have custom scripts in the Client Enter and On Enter, though, so that'll probably be enough for my purposes.

Even though I placed dozens of tagged waypoints and tagged non-static objects all over town, there are still many areas where I'd want to place things that don't have anything convenient nearby, so I needed some other way to reference specific locations, and I knew of one method from looking at the script for the icicle melting quest in MotB, which provided an example of how to get a location from a specified vector. Great! Then I just needed a way to pinpoint a vector for any given location.

I looked around in scripts and includes for a while, before finally going in-game and checking the command console. I found the "loc" command there, which reports the vector of wherever the PC is standing. So I stood in a particular place, and wrote down the vector. Then I moved out of the way and saved my game, so that I could test this spawning in a saved game.

Next I added a few lines to the On Module Load script, which is a campaign script. For an add-on release, I'd distribute this modified script to replace the one already in the campaign folder. The new lines first check to see if a tagged add-on object exists, and if not, it spawns it at the location derived from the specified vector.

So I loaded my saved game, and indeed the new object was there. So this bodes well for adding post-release content, modifying the contents of the town area through scripts.

A couple of things that aren't ideal -- the spawned placeables of course have no effect on the walkmesh, so if I don't want the player to be able to walk through them, I'd have to set them to dynamic collisions, and I'd rather not do that for performance reasons.

Also, I couldn't find a way to check the angle my PC is facing, for specifying the heading/rotation in the location, so I had to eyeball it based on the direction of the arrow on the minimap.

I added a shady goods dealer to provide your rogue supply needs. This character is a friend (or at least an "associate") of the rogue companion that you can recruit.

Mm...some interesting troubleshooting I had to do for the overwater map. My tests had revealed some problem when I transitioned to the map using a character other than the main PC, and a different-seeming problem if I used any character other than a dwarf.

I found one problem quickly -- I was setting the ship VFX on the PC object each time in the while loop, and not the party member object, which cycles through the party.

The other problem was that different character races created different sized ships, and any player-created characters that had used the height or girth sliders caused noticeable distortions in the ships. I determined that this is because EffectSetScale() is relative, while SetScale() is absolute.

I fixed this by first getting the current absolute scale of each PC with GetScale(), and saving the floats to local variables for later, then resetting the scale with SetScale() to 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 for while the players are on the overwater map. With all party members at a standard 1.0 absolute scale, I then applied the EffectSetScale() on top of that. That part might not have been necessary, but it saved me from rewriting too much code. On exiting the map, the original scale values are read from the variables, reapplied to each PC, and the effects are stripped. On testing, this worked. The ship now looks correct no matter which race of PC is controlling it, and whether the party members are player-created or recruited companion, and the original scales are correctly reapplied after existing.

[Tchos]

I'm still in offline mode except for brief periods, but that should be taken care of by this weekend. In the meantime, here's some of what I've been working on.

More troubleshooting, this time in the underwater areas. Player-created party members (and the player) were using the swimming animation correctly, but recruited NPC companions were not. In fact, if any of them were in the party, no one swam.

I first checked to make sure the NPCs actually had the correct numerical appearance set with a little debug script. The script reported that the values were as expected.

After several experiments, I determined that the problem was that I had put the animation-switching script in the wrong slot. I had put it in On Enter, and while that was sufficient for certain party members, it wasn't for the others. All I know is that the party is not guaranteed to be present by the time the On Enter script is fired, thanks to Bob Hall. So I moved it to On Client Enter, and then all party members were swimming correctly.

However, now the tour guide wasn't in her starting spot, and the swimming animation did not switch back to normal after leaving.

I split the script up into three fields (On Client Enter, On Enter, and On Exit) for its different functions, where previously it was all the same script. Now On Client Enter and On Exit just handle the animation-switching, and On Enter handles the tour guide initialisation. Now it all seems to work in all combinations of companions, and it also sends the guide to talk to the currently controlled PC, instead of the first.

I observed some local beta testing from a friend, but not much, since visiting time was limited. We did catch one pricing issue, though, which again was caused by the item being marked as Plot, which sets its price at 0gp everywhere except on a vendor, who marks it up to 1gp.

I filled out the barks in the tavern. I wish there were more "sitting" emotes that can be called from a seated NPC that wouldn't cause them to stand up to perform the emote. A laugh, in particular, would be useful here.

I filled out a few flavour items -- the resting and the meals. I had done a resting scene before with a Targa file of the rest scene from Baldur's Gate, but during that beta test I mentioned before, the tester mentioned that he liked the rat in BG that runs across the floor when you rest. I told him I couldn't do that because it was just a static image. But tonight I took another look at the image, and determined that it wouldn't be a big task to just recreate that scene in the game, and put in a rat running across the floor. It went pretty smoothly, and I ended up with a reasonable approximation of that scene that plays when you rest at the inn. For consistency, I added similar scenes to play when you rest in the other beds in the game, and other scenes for the meals that you can order at the inn and the tavern. These are basically "slides" to illustrate and represent the action you're taking.

As far as the meals themselves, this involved writing a script to randomly select 8 meal offerings from a total of 46 (2 each from 4 categories). Meals are purely RP-oriented flavour items, and have no in-game effect. You pay a token amount, and get a small scene and description. All of these meals should cost less than 1 gp (much less in some cases) but since there's no currency in NWN2 that's smaller than a gold piece (unless I were to add one of the available money systems that add copper, silver, and platinum coins), my choices were to charge nothing (since the cost would be negligible to a level 10 character), charge the lowest possible amount (higher than it should be, but this is consistent with other mundane in-game items that sell for 1 gp even though they should cost less), or include meals with the cost of renting a room (this would not work here, since one of my places that offers meals does not offer rooms for rent).

Anyway, this seems like the sort of place where a new meals.2DA would be useful, but I opted to just include the menu items in the script itself. Maybe in a future module, I could include the P&P currencies and use a 2DA to put in all the menu items, giving each an appropriate price instead of having a flat fee for everything.

These were items that have been on my to do list for a long time. Glad to finally get them taken care of.

I also filled out the Witcher-style safe deposit boxes that I had implemented early on. They were already functional, but they were free, and I also thought it might not be completely clear that the two locations that offer them do not share their contents. I added more explanation for them in dialogue, added a modest fee, and a key requirement to access them.

[Tchos]

The past few days' updates:

A lot of my design work has always been stymied by two things -- the inability to rotate placeables sideways, and the lack of bottom faces on all rock placeables (and placeables in general). Often, I want to place some items above eye level, but I cannot because it would reveal the nothing underneath. Well, at least now with Gmax I can provide myself with the necessary placeables.

I modified some RWS cliff faces to face downward for use as roof fillers, patches, and overhangs. An important note: When modifying a copy of an existing mesh like this, it's not enough that the file name be different (even renamed with MDB Cloner is not enough). The mesh's selection name (not sure of the terminology) within Gmax must also be renamed, or the toolset will not allow both separate appearances to exist in the same area at the same time. The effect seems to be that whichever one is loaded first, if the selection names are the same, the toolset will use the data for the first one on both of them, even though the meshes themselves are different (different meshes, different filenames, different lines in the 2DA). I had encountered that effect before when trying to adapt some MotB flat plane ("card") placeables, but at the time I didn't have Gmax, nor any experience with it, so all I knew was that those placeables were somehow different from other ones that I had successfully modified using MDB Cloner.

These new placeables should afford me a similar level of freedom of design for natural interiors to what I've been enjoying with the placeable walls for manmade interiors. I've opted for the method of using the exterior area terrain deformation in lieu of the cavern tilesets, for the sake of freedom of elevation. There are several methods out there for simulating cavern roofs in such situations, such as skyboxes, domes, dark fog obscuring where the ceiling would be, or roof placeables such as Ar Pharazon's cave roofs. The ceilings are important here and part of the design, so I'm going to try a combination of these new placeables along with Ar Pharazon's cave roofs. If I can make an interesting area to explore, it'll be worth it. That's assuming, of course, that I can make it so that it doesn't introduce any navigational or camera-related annoyances not present in the standard tilesets.

AP's cave roofs required some modifications. They were double-sided, and their fade property was set to false. This means the roofs block the camera if they're close enough to the ground, and they also blocks the map. Changing the fade property was just a setting in the placeables.2da, but I had to use Gmax to make them single-sided. Opening them up, I found that the polygons were not actually double-sided, but that there was an intentionally-added extra copy of the ceiling mesh (in the same element) floating slightly above the down-facing one, with flipped normals. I deleted the extra one. While I had them open in there, I also saw that they had some extra phantom objects with the names HP_DR_STD01 and HP_DR_STD02 that I couldn't see a use for (they didn't contain any points or polygons), and also had some standard sub-objects that I don't think are necessary. For instance, this is to be used as an environmental object ceiling, and thus I don't think it needs a walkmesh.

There were also a few stray polygons in separate smoothing groups that were causing some noticeable triangles. I changed them all to a single smoothing group. The revised models seem to work fine with the walkmeshes and C3 collision removed.

I also made a couple of full floor-to-ceiling rock columns (the meeting and fusing of stalactites and stalagmites). I found, after I had made those, that Botumys' Drow Cave set includes several of these, as well as another set of roofs and other placeables that are useful for any kind of cave -- not only a drow cave. It saved me the trouble of making some stalactite plane "card" placeables like I was going to, since it already had that and a few others. I added a few of them to the palette, though I had to correct the 2da listings so that the appearances didn't all use the StrRefs of default toolset placeables (before this fix, the appearances all had duplicate names like RuralBHouse01 for the cave roof and rock columns, making it difficult to find the correct appearances in the toolset). Also made them tintable.

Back to the default resources. In general, most of the rocks in the toolset are upright. Most of the time, I don't want upright rocks -- I want more flat-topped ones. Also, they're in clumps with smaller rocks and surrounding dirt. This, combined with their lack of bottoms, makes it difficult to use them on slopes, because there are parts at the bottom sticking out of the side of the hill unless I move them so far into the side that there's hardly anything showing above the ground, or create a special flattened terrain spot just to put rocks on. There was another modder I was talking to a few months ago who was looking for more general-purpose rocks. Maybe now I can provide him with some.

The mushroom clusters have a similar problem with slopes, since they seem to have been designed to be used on flat cave floors or flattened areas of exteriors. The area of the clusters is too large to put them on sloped terrain. In most cases, I want to put small mushrooms as decorations in places that are not flat, and in non-walkable areas, as a visual cue that the player should not try walking there. Reducing the number of mushrooms in the clusters will fix that, just having two or three right next to each other instead of a dozen in a wider area.

Sometimes I regret this being a level 10 adventure. My next one will definitely be for lower-level parties. The toolset's selection of monsters and other enemies that fit this modules environments (such as the aquatic ones) aren't typically of a high enough level in the Monster Manual to properly challenge a level 10 party, even with the addition of some custom monsters. What I've been having to do in some of these cases is create tribes of stronger variants of these creatures, which I prefer not to do. The most recent ones are the kuo-toa, which are typically CR2. It does make reference to kuo-toa of "7th level and higher", though, so there are clearly some out there, and it's probably fine to have a tribe of toughies here at the bottom of the sea, where ordinary folk would never see them.

I did my best to make the kuo-toa match their Monster Manual stats and abilities. In some cases, I used approximations. Some feats were irrelevant to this environment (you won't be fighting underwater). Next I need to set up the sahuagin blueprints. I checked the monster packs first for blueprints, and then Krondorl's D&D Monsters Compilation and Wild Bill's Monster Manual Series, but didn't find any blueprints for sahuagin.

Unfortunately, the drow cave stalactite columns were unsuitable for this cave in terms of how the light illuminates them, so I'll just stick with the ones I made. Unfortunate, since I spent most of the day working with them to try to get a compatible texture on them, seeing how they and the other placeables were used, and reassigning the 2da entries. I may still have a use for one of its ceilings, since it has a shape that can make it easier to connect to differently-angled ceilings, and the big glowing mushrooms are nice, as well as the particle effect they come with.

I was supposed to have internet back by now, but they're showing a lot of incompetence getting it installed, and wasting a lot of time.