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

[Tchos]

I think I see what the problem was with the Heed's ship appearances I had before. When I added the RWS underwater placeables to my placeables.2da, I noticed I was getting an off-by-one problem with the appearances of the imported blueprints. I thought I may have made a mistake with my copying and pasting of lines in the 2da, but I found that it was in fact a problem with the official SoZ 2da to which I was adding my new content.

 

The problem is that the Storm of Zehir additions to the placeables.2da have one line number (2534) doubled. I don't know exactly what this does to the existing placeables, or how exactly it's shifting the custom content entries down, but it's certainly a problem.

 

In my searches, I found some offhand references to this problem, but nothing definitive. No doubt this had been discussed on the old Bioboards. Since I'm using a lot of RWS material, I decided to go with the solution RWS uses. Baron explained that the 2das they provide for their materials skip line number 2838 after the end of the official SoZ entries, to bring the numbering back in sync from that point.

 

Now, I had to see how others handled this issue, too. I opened up the 2da that comes with the Mysteries of Westgate placeables (the downloadable versions on the Vault), and saw that their solution was to renumber the entries past the first 2534 so that the first blank line at the end of the SoZ placeables is 2839. Wouldn't that mess up blueprints that use entries 2535-2837 of the SoZ campaign? If not, which is the better solution?

 

Next I added the RWS ship interiors, since you'll be going inside both of the ships. More placeable.2da additions. Every time I edit these 2das, I make sure to replace all the spaces with tabs. The file is much more lightweight that way, and works just as well. There were other 2das to edit, too, or rather to add, since this was the first custom tileset I've added.

 

I made a nice little captain's cabin for the cargo ship. I prefer smaller spaces like this, even though it more or less requires the use of the overhead/isometric style camera. When I tested it in-game, I found that it was too bright. The light shaft effects I had put on the windows put light decals on the floor (and all over the placeables) which weren't visible in the toolset. I toned it down a bit, and I think I'll go with how it is now.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a-epO-cqfr0/T-o81-FAthI/AAAAAAAADXY/XZ1adGEi_8g/s320/cabin1.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XHAOBOmiDCI/T-o82oDKhpI/AAAAAAAADXk/modFwmPvUQA/s320/cabin2.jpg

 

I also found some pirate banners in the toolset, so I applied those to the pirate ship.

 

This was also the first test of my non-opening door script that transitioned between two areas (the outer main deck of the ship and the captain's cabin interior). My earlier tests were all in the single area of Questland. I'm happy to report that they worked perfectly. I also tested the walkmeshes and the tightness of the spaces with a full party.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OUc-w4H3qpE/T-o81nJpnvI/AAAAAAAADXM/ujAcULsw50I/s320/ship%2Bboard.jpg

[Tchos]

Today I made one of the underwater areas. I looked at the "ambient sound" field for the area properties, and decided that was where I should pick an underwater sound effect. I thought that if I used that area that it would allow a stereo sound, like the music is stereo, as opposed to the placed sounds, which apparently have to be monophonic. I browsed through the ones that were already available, but of course there was no underwater sound in the vanilla game, since they didn't have any underwater areas. I thought the "Dungeon lava lake" one was pretty close, but I wanted something better. So I added a line to the ambientsound.2da and looked for an underwater sound. I checked Kamal's freesound archive first, which are convenient. I didn't find anything convincing, though, in my browsing of files with "water" in the name, so I checked Freesound myself, and found a decent scuba sound that I was able to improve in Audacity to smooth out the sound and make it more useful.

 

After several experiments (I wasn't able to find information on the required formats online), I determined that a stereo BMU just won't work for a sound effect, ambient or not. So I'd either have to use it as a music track, or convert it to mono. I wanted music in addition to the sound effect, so mono it is.

 

I actually couldn't get the sound to work as mono in the ambient sound field either, ultimately I went with a non-positional placed sound.

 

The rest was mainly set dressing. The RWS special effects really sold the underwater effect, but it also required an interesting landscape, appropriate atmospherics, and plenty of ground cover.

 

There was a problem with one of the textures for the RWS placeables, though. The texture for the fan-type and flat elk corals had a transparent texture matted to white, leaving an unintended white halo around the whole thing. I rematted them to their own like colours. The tint maps were also done incorrectly, with the tints being copies of the textures themselves, again leaving an untinted halo at the edges where the transparency didn't exactly coincide with the end of the texture, compounded by a copy of the transparency map being in the tint map's alpha channel. Also, as I understand it, the tints are 256-tone gradients in each of the three channels (R, G, and B), so if there's no difference in image between one channel or the other, there's no point in having them in two different channels, since it just makes it so that you have to tint both channels to get a blend of colour, instead of tinting a single channel to get the colour you want directly. The time you'd use two or three different channels is if there are little details in one of them that you want to tint differently than the rest of the texture. Several of these did not have that kind of detail, though one did. I corrected the tint maps by making the ones that were identical be full-on in one channel and not the other two, while having the other detailed one use two channels, and I removed the tint map's alpha channel entirely.

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wME4UIz-_m8/T-ts6ELwDWI/AAAAAAAADX0/w2EZLZ5_IS8/s200/coral%2Bbefore%2B%2526%2Bafter%2B2.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EQhcZLXkwbo/T-ts6muxPzI/AAAAAAAADYA/Uh_vDUXhXuE/s200/coral%2Bbefore%2B%2526%2Bafter%2B1.jpg

 

There's still one problem with the flat elk coral, and that's the strange triangular shapes around the edges. With their sharp edges and strong untintable black outline on two of the sides, I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to be there, but I can't find the location in the texture where it's getting that image, or I'd remove it.

 

After dressing the set, I started scripting it so that it would change all party members to the swimming appearance. That took some investigation, because I'd never used a "while" command before.

 

I also added the tour guide NPC, also set to be swimming, and wearing the diving helm.

 

I created some quickie waypoints and dialogue to test it out. Next task is to create the points of interest and waypoints, expand the full dialogue, write some scripts, and place triggers and add the things to do down there.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Une7GYlXt_U

[Tchos]

To answer one of my own earlier questions from day 19 ("there's no toggle to turn C2 collision display on and off?"), I found there is such a toggle, and you don't need to go into the preferences to show it, at least while using Grinning Fool's Usability Tools. Maybe it's also in the vanilla toolset, but with that plugin installed, it's the little icon to the right of the grid toggle buttons, and it's called "collision".

 

Today I thought I'd start a very important part of most modules -- the stores. I read Bob Hall's section on stores in Toolset Notes vol. 1, and went through the ones provided with Bonus Blueprints, and also exported the ones from SoZ. I also installed Lazgen's CPS Inventory Manager plugin, which makes it much more convenient to add quantities of items other than "one" or "infinite" to a store, and shows the items' properties as well! It's not updated for toolset version 1.23, but it seems to work fine with the config file.

 

I tried out a shop prefab, but I ended up pretty much completely remodeling it to better suit my aesthetics. I really liked the small shop Chaos Wielder made in the Halloween special, and I consider it a model to emulate. This is an outdoorsman's shop that caters to rangers and druids. You'll find the basics, as well as magic druid gear, and some flavour items.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9r5XsFDueCQ/T-zjZkU_n_I/AAAAAAAADYQ/0kyDeiZkB6E/s320/ranger%2Bshop%2B1.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DQkY-Oh9taA/T-zjaD7a1xI/AAAAAAAADYc/y0NM3xXIUwY/s320/ranger%2Bshop%2B2.jpg

 

I also created the NPC you can pick up here for your party, but I haven't yet looked into how to set her up as a companion.

[Tchos]

Today I started by importing selections from BCK. That part was simple enough, thanks to its very good naming convention, but the editing of the placeables.2da was a huge chore. I made a mistake during my edits which resulted in none of my placeables (including the vanilla ones) showing up in the toolset. It was a search/replace error that messed everything up. I went back to an earlier one, and redid the work, and now it's fine.

 

I discovered, though, that the RWS ship interior files that I imported have a set of oars model with the same filename as one of the vanilla game's rowboats, so it was overriding the rowboats I had placed in my areas. I renamed it to eliminate that conflict.

 

It's time to start placing my locations in the actual game world, so I merged the main module with the separate module in which I had been working on the town.

 

I also tried importing a prefab area for another shop, but it started causing the toolset to pop up these huge error boxes saying "system.reflection.TargetInvocationException" blah blah, which persisted when I closed and reopened the module. I traced the problem to a few blueprints that came along with the prefab that shouldn't have been there, and deleted them manually. That fixed the problem, but it took a long time to figure it out.

 

A lot of the placeable houses in NWN2 have signs attached to them, which makes them natural shops, but for the fact that you can't change the texture or make those parts selectable to have hover text. Signs that provide information to the player are very important to me, so I was putting a few placeable signs down for that purpose, but it bothered me to have two signs, one of which was useless. I checked the Vault for some more sign options, and found Crystal Violet's signpost construction set, which was just what I needed. She had numerous shapes in there, and although they weren't exactly the shapes of the ones on the buildings, I was able to make do. I put those signs around the house ones, and made them selectable for the hover text, so now those attached signs have a purpose.

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t5e0_FPhZyI/T-4R4qvnbvI/AAAAAAAADY4/Jjzou4VOtRI/s200/sign1.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GzBW_fCiOvk/T-4R4yClftI/AAAAAAAADZE/Njmt11AGq00/s200/sign2.jpg

 

I also learned that changing the colour of the flag on a map marker waypoint changes the colour of the marker in-game on the minimap. I've been colour coding my waypoints for their different purposes (door/teleport, spawn, etc.) to better tell them apart at a glance in the toolset, but it looks like I'll have to leave those as white.

 

Now I'm starting to attach the conversations I had written earlier externally to NPCs like the innkeeper and the city watch, and placing them (or rather, spawn points for them) into the world. Using spawn points means I don't have the confusion of having both a blueprint and placed instance with possibly different settings (doubles my chances of mistakes), and also means I don't have to open an area to edit an NPC's properties. I think beginners' guides should stress that concept.

[Tchos]

Yesterday was my P&P day, so there was nothing to report here.

 

Today, I continued with creating and adding the necessary shops to the module, with their requisite shopkeepers. This one is a shopkeeper with a quest. It's another quest with multiple approaches and outcomes, but I won't spoil anything about it.

 

For this shop, I used the BCK resources to fashion the room into a shape that matched the building's exterior, and in a reasonable scale, rather than what the gigantic tiles would otherwise allow. I also built myself a doorframe for the door, out of posts from the sign post construction kit.

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-97Xa0-0g8co/T_DLI0OXIbI/AAAAAAAADZs/-wHK1G1A9_8/s200/bcocc%2Bmagic%2Bshop%2Bmap.jpg

 

I needed a trapdoor in this floor, and unfortunately the standard wooden floors provide an embarrassment of riches in that regard. I only wanted one, and it needed to be clear that it wasn't just a decoration like they usually are. I ended up covering the floor with stone pieces called "floor mats" that basically replace the floor texture, since the other available standard textures weren't what I needed, and if I tried to use a floor texture from a different tileset, they weren't tintable. Then I took the suggestion of Bob Hall in the Cheap Placeable Tricks thread to make the trapdoor.

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wMajbTd4pkc/T_DLIBKjz_I/AAAAAAAADZU/h7sAOqOuANA/s200/bcocc%2Btrapdoor.jpg

 

I wanted the vendor here to give the player a key. But I also want that key in his inventory so the player can pick his pocket. The standard conversation scripts aren't very well-suited to deal with that, unless the key is the only item the NPC is carrying, in which case I could use ga_give_inventory. I'll check other resources later.

 

The regular ga_give_item script malfunctioned, too. It filled up my character's inventory with copies of the key, and dropped countless more on the floor. I told it 1 copy! So I checked it, and it all seemed fine, but a happy accident revealed what had happened. The accident was that while looking into it, I looked in the script list to see if there was another item script I could try, but didn't find any, and when I clicked off the list, it cleared the script from the "actions" panel. So I put it back in, and hit "refresh", and it told me that there were some incorrect parameters that needed to be corrected. So it was because I had originally tried using ga_give_inventory, and put parameters into that script, and when I switched it to ga_give_item, similar-looking parameter fields were already there, so I hadn't refreshed it. The script worked after refreshing.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-afMWHFCcAoo/T_DLIunvO7I/AAAAAAAADZg/4I_FaxhS3i8/s200/bcocc%2Bkey%2Btrouble.jpg

 

Another thing to solve was that since I was using a placeable as a door, I wasn't getting the expected feedback messages when I tried to unlock it without the key (or with the key, for that matter). I tried to create a door with the right appearance, but for that I guess I would have to edit doortypes.2da again. Maybe I should, but I didn't here. Instead, I just clicked the "Has inventory" box, and selected no UI for the inventory screen, and now it provides all the appropriate feedback. It also behaves like any other door, with my door script attached to it as before, except that the cursor is the generic star shape instead of the door shape. The cursor is the only reason I'd take the trouble to define it as an actual door, but I think I'll just let it slide this time.

 

On an unrelated note, you know how the Windows start menu moves frequently-used applications up in the list depending on how often you use them? For a long time, the NWN2 game occupied the top slot, but as of last modding session, the toolset finally usurped that position. By the way, if anything I've been doing in here is an interesting idea that hasn't been done yet, please feel free to use it in your own modules. I'm not putting all these things in to be Unique Selling Points...I'm doing it because I want this sort of thing in modules. Not to say that there's anything particularly unusual in today's post, but overall.

[Tchos]

I hope those of you who have also experienced item-duplicating troubles got a chuckle from my own travails! Sometimes, it's funny because it's true. :)

 

So I changed the conversation distance in the campaign editor back down to a lower number, because the 100 unit distance didn't seem to be necessary, and was more likely excessive. I had only done it to ensure that characters could talk to NPCs who weren't reachable. After changing it, in my next playtest I found that the party size had been set down to 4 again, though I hadn't touched that setting. It doesn't look like any other settings were affected, but I need to watch out for that.

 

I created the basement for the magic shop quest and hooked up some more conversations. I found that I was a little unclear on how to handle the interaction for that quest, but I eventually decided that the conversation-before-fighting option was really the only way to approach this one, though I'm building in other options besides fighting.

 

I was having trouble getting a neutral NPC to turn hostile when attacked, but then I noticed that I had written, but not actually attached, the necessary script.

 

I assigned a bark conversation of useful tidbits to all of the unnamed citizens in town, and made sure the city watch worked. All of the city watch patrols will give the player directions to various places of interest in town, if asked, and if you're on certain quests, they may become involved, either for or against you.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t8Z7I8FVbOM/T_Iy5Lbre7I/AAAAAAAADaM/UBKn2ol68pc/s320/bcocc%2Bguard%2Bdirections.jpg

 

I found some of my interiors were lacking windows that should be there, based on the exteriors. There were no placeable windows in the toolset. I found some placeable group solutions using curtains, but I didn't want curtains, I wanted actual windows. BCK has some windows, and so does one of the RWS tilesets, but they're fancy ones, not suitable for standard interiors. The City Hak has a set of placeables called "window", but they're not just windows -- they're exterior architecture with windows in them. I looked around for some other packs, but could only find people wondering why there weren't any.

 

Finally I decided it would be faster just to bloody make one. The texture in the City Hak was a good basis. I took a standard NWN2 painting, cloned it, and made a new set of diffuse, normal, illumination, and tint maps using the City Hak window texture as a basis to replace the painting texture. This tutorial explained to me how to properly make glow maps.

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pEx5QuxsBFE/T_Iy5vyDfEI/AAAAAAAADaY/yqHrAAlHFLQ/s320/bcocc%2Bwindow.jpg

 

I probably shouldn't have spent all that time doing that. It's an unnecessary distraction from my goal.

 

I spent the rest of the time on the magic shop quest. I ended up scrapping one possible resolution in the interest of time. Some of these shop quests have no material reward, but of course yield experience, and ingratiate the merchants to you enough so that they'll sell to you from a "private reserve" of high quality items that they otherwise have been keeping for themselves as part of their collection. Depending on your actions or philosophical position, though, you may decide to give up such a reward, and instead make yourself unable to buy from that shop at all.

 

Does anyone have an opinion on whether I should use an INT check or a spellcraft check to see if a character knows (or can figure out by looking at it) how to breach a magic circle? I have it using INT at the moment, but it just occurred to me that spellcraft is an option. Though since that skill is mostly useless for its original intent, perhaps some players don't train it, and shouldn't expect it to be useful in a module.

 

Happily, I found that "DestroyObject" works on placed effects. I wasn't sure if it would, or if I had to use some special effect command. I also had a successful implementation of a collision box which blocks a path until it is destroyed via script. This thread was full of useful information on what settings to use for that.

 

This particular fight will see if people remember how to fight in close quarters, where you can't just surround the enemy with your whole party. Ever played games where you could only have two characters out in front to engage in mêlée (as a game design, with the idea that the hallway doesn't have enough room for more than two people swinging weapons around side by side), and the others were required to stay in the back and use ranged weapons, magic, or healing? I have a choke point in this place to require that kind of strategy.

[Tchos]

Today I focused on one of the inns. This place has no quests, so it's all about atmosphere and providing the necessary inn/tavern services, such as the party registry book, the ability to get a good night's sleep, and a safe place to store extra items if you don't want to carry it all around. It also offers entertainment, and is a good place to find additional adventurers to join your party.

 

As part of the atmosphere, I wanted NPCs to be sitting at the tables and doing animation, so I perhaps unnecessarily tried out and tried to understand several sitting systems, when in fact there's a script in SoZ that makes NPCs sit at a table and eat animatedly. But oh well. It just means you'll be able to sit in the taverns, if you want. Nothing unusual, since I've played numerous modules that include that function, but I like having it in there. Only two of the stools at the bar won't be sittable, because making them work required adding walkmesh helpers to raise the elevation, but in the tile that two of them occupied, the walkmesh went insane if I placed a helper anywhere in it, and made the whole tile unwalkable.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yuWVOJ9MiGc/T_OCeQhFAKI/AAAAAAAADao/Xrwg9I6biBo/s200/bcocc%2Bstool%2Bsit.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ctqWiW4c3_s/T_OCe_mgtlI/AAAAAAAADbA/a_qJXh0s0Dg/s200/bcocc%2Bbooth%2Bsit.jpg

 

This is my first implementation of an alternative stairwell to use instead of the stair tiles.

 

I have two small notepads here on my desk, and each time I playtest, I tend to fill a page with a new checklist of things to fix, or things I forgot to include. If I don't write them down, I'll probably forget to do them.

 

I had some trouble with one door, which appears unaffected by shadows and is fully lit at all times, until it's opened (the orange one in the screenshot below). I tried replacing the door entirely, and adjusting the fog settings, but it didn't help. I ended up disabling the fog entirely to get rid of it.

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M4I3eMBZczY/T_OCemZkvZI/AAAAAAAADa0/Ectlo9kaYts/s200/bcocc%2Bstairwell%2Bwith%2Blit%2Bdoor.jpg

 

That reminds me that in the previous interior, I had a problem with the water. It basically turned black if I lowered it below elevation 0, which is where it had to be.

 

Even though it doesn't include quests, I wasn't able to finish it today, because I was fiddling around too much with the sitting ability and the ambient NPC behaviour. Plus, the toolset has been crashing any time I try loading the large town area after having loaded other areas, even if they're closed. It might be a memory problem. Since I had to do this to check the exterior of the building as a guide to the interior design, and also to place the waypoints and destinations on the doors on other occasions, and to remind myself what I called those waypoints (I've started a text file to keep track of all my waypoint tags), I think I may have lost upwards of an hour today just on toolset crashes and reloads.

 

I still need to add the storage, the innkeeper conversation, and the audience reaction to the entertainment.

 

Given how long these town interiors are taking, if I can only do one per day, then I'll have to stretch my deadline to "before July has ended". My original plan was to make heavy use of prefabs, but the tools are just too tempting to make them the way that I want them.

[Tchos]

I replaced the fog that I had to remove from the inn's interior with a placed fog effect that I think may be an improvement. I also noticed after I posted that screenshot of the stairwell door that those wooden beams shouldn't have been behind it, so I replaced that wall texture.

 

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2VvDq-18wqc/T_S_mLMIDKI/AAAAAAAADbQ/7A5NO5EbuJ0/s200/bcocc%2Bnew%2Bdoorframe.jpg

 

I applied the stein model to a VFX, and now I can place it as a placed FX, but the model is not quite resting on its bottom. I think it may have been made that way intentionally to fit better in the hand when used in an animation, and that's why it was never included as a placeable. If we could rotate objects in all three directions, it would work fine.

 

Unfortunately, in my tests with non-human characters, I found that the invisible sitting boxes weren't suitable for the barstools, so unless I made them usable for tall creatures only, they're out. The alternative of shrinking the stool just doesn't look right at a bar counter. It's noticeable here on my dwarf. (The pink hair on the barmaid in the background is due to conflicting naming in my hair models.)

 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SCvy_TT8awo/T_S_mdSBFRI/AAAAAAAADbc/_-n0v0b57Fg/s200/bcocc%2Bdwarf%2Bbarstool.jpg

 

One thing's for sure -- I'm glad I didn't start with an inn first, because it seems tailor-made as a modding time sink, with its NPC activities, services, and little touches like seating which can get out of control. I'm done with the seating here. It's too bad about having to remove the sittable stools, but the chairs work for all races using the resizing method.

 

I had to write a new script for the hearthstone so that I could set its location from a generic "inn" conversation. I used custom tokens in local variables on the innkeeper to determine what services the conversation will offer, so I can use this conversation for all of my inns and taverns.

 

I also applied Uncle FB's barmaid scripts to liven up the place, but I need to put something in there to make her face the bartender when she goes up to the counter, because she's not facing in the direction of the waypoint she walks to.

Edited July 4, 2012 by Tchos

[Tchos]

I got the waitress to face the direction of the waypoint (which is toward the bartender she's supposed to be talking to) by adding the line "ActionDoCommand(SetFacing(GetFacing(oBar)));" to her code, where "oBar" is the waypoint. I found that command by following three levels of includes in a script. I had tried just adding the variable X2_L_WAYPOINT_SETFACING to the waypoint with a value of 1, as it was described here, but that didn't work. It probably only works if the waypoint was arrived at as part of the waypoint patrol behaviour.

 

I also corrected the grammar and punctuation in the barmaid dialogues with customers and the bartender.

 

The rescripted hearthstone took some trouble to figure out why it wasn't working as it worked before. Apparently GetNearestObjectByTag doesn't work as well as the normal GetObjectByTag. It should be fine to use the latter. The player should never have more than one hearthstone, because the dialogues check for the party already having one, and there should be no reason to drop the one you have or put it in storage and ask for another one.

 

In making the safe deposit box for the inn (accessed by speaking to the innkeeper, as in The Witcher), I was surprised to find there was no command in the conversational scripts to just open a container's inventory. Ideally, I wanted this to open a container that didn't necessarily exist in the area, but when that was evidently impossible, I still found that I couldn't just open a container's inventory like I can open a store's inventory. The best I could come up with was to have a hidden container flagged unusable, but when the dialogue command is issued, it sets the container to usable, and forces the player to "interact" with it, which opens its inventory. After that, it sets the container to unusable again, so it can only be accessed via conversation, and can't even be seen otherwise. It took a while to find that command, since they spelled "usable" as "useable".

 

Spent more time fine-tuning the seated customer animations. The heartbeat script for that purpose from the SoZ inns turned out to be flawed, as they never did anything other than a single particular idle. It appears that they had a fallthrough animation set to play, which was overriding the random selection. I tried removing that, and then they started picking random animation, but also kept standing up and sitting back down. The problem was that the random picks were set not to loop. I fixed that, and now they do an assortment of animations without getting up. I'm also making a variant of this script to use for audience members to react to the entertainment with vocal emotes.

[Tchos]

Today I made the second of the taverns/inns. Technically, I have 2 inns and 2 taverns in this module, and what I've made so far is one of the taverns and one of the inns. The Drunken Dragon is the new tavern, and it's a dwarf-run tavern serving strong, dwarrrrrrrven ale!

 

This tavern is entirely oriented toward the shorter races, and the customers are a mix of dwarves, gnomes, and halflings. There is one token table in a dim corner for the "giants". What took most of the day was getting the chair resizing code working for both NPCs and PCs. It took a lot of experimentation, but eventually I understood what it was doing, and how, which allowed me to have the same kind of lively animation and also have resizing chairs. I put one small group of adventurers comprised of a half-orc, an elf, and a human at a cramped little table to ensure it worked, and I sat my diverse party at the chairs to test them as well. All is well.

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-keGEEDoi42o/T_d0f7_J1rI/AAAAAAAADb8/lEbs2_mtBZ0/s200/bcocc%2Bdwarven%2Bwalls.jpg

 

This is another place where I used placeable walls to make a room of the size and shape that better fit the exterior. I made prefabs out of the walls that I constructed from tinted signpost beams, BCK wall sections, and crates.