No PC, No Toolset - keeping myself busy...

Computer round at a friends as we work on building me a new one - so no toolset for a week...! Idle hands and all that..

Made a start on my entry for the BouncyRock Halloween Experience (see previous post) before I started taking the old PC apart - going to be one house with two themes 'Trick' and 'Treat'. I couldn't keep my love of the Army of Darkness under wraps, so the Treat section is a homage to that - the other slightly more serious in tone. Should be fun!

From little seeds, giant pumpkins grow

It started as an innocent request on the forums. Irradiated by a mysterious green light from outer space, it mutated, and grew into the vast despicable be-pumpkin-holder you see above.

Jclef and the bOuNcYrOcK massive are organising a special event for Halloween and calling all builder to contribute. Check out the links above for more details. I'm going to skim through Heroes of Horror to flesh out my ideas - one of my favourite 3.5e splatbooks actually. Readers of my blog last Halloween will know I'm a big fan of the Evil Dead films, but might try a different tack here. Looking forward to seeing how this comes off - I've talked before about how I think it'd be good for the builders to work together more, and hopefully this could be the start of beautiful sweaty limb-thrashing gore-filled relationship

In other news, I officially threw a girly hissy fit during a toolset crash on saving an area after updating to 1.13 the other day. Two crashes since updating which doesn't bode well - but what annoyed me more was that I'd just gotten back into it after a break from building and written two conversations with companion interjections i was quite proud of... Luckily no on around to witness my tantrum... and fortunately the folder I was left with was recoverable, and all the dialogue work was there. A new computer is due in the coming weeks, so really hoping the extra memory will sort out any remaining toolset woes.

Tristor village finally finished

The more astute among you will notice the area hasn't change dmuch from the post a few below. Mainly i've been toying with the lighting settings and finishing up texturing on the swamp. Lighting has such a dramatic change on an area (and can cover a multitude of texturing sins). In many ways, I think there should be a DayNightStage section on the vault for people to share their work and findings - areas are given a new lease of life by merely straying from the standard settings - but finding the right settings for lighting one stage of the cycle e.g. daylight is hard enough, let alone sunrise, moonrise etc... I enjoyed playing with them in DA2 for the abandoned gnomish village and the interior smuggler's cave to get the darker, bleaker feel - two areas that look and fell very different under normal lighting! I'd bet this goes for the Misery Stone guys too.

Anyway, the village is bordering a desolate swamp and beset by troubles, so I decided against the sunny disposition of the earlier shots and went for more doom and gloom. Which is a bit of depressing theme I seem to be in.... would be nice to write characters that aren;t quite so broken... But then I have always felt you have to be broken to be an adventurer - stomping into sentient creatures homes and slaughtering them...

So speaking of broken characters, the final companion Ruevena is now finalised - after working through many iterations using Elysius' Battle of the Builds, which handily lets you restart the levelling process if somethign goes awry, and gives you the epithet feats for all PrCs. Ruevena will be Ranger 1 / Sorceror 6 / Eldritch Knight 1 / Shadow Thief of Amn 1 - which trust me fits with her backstory quite well. I also like to give enough leeway in the companion's classes that the player can then adapt them to fit into their party in several ways by selecting their level up package. What I'd love to do is give her a themed spelcasting list as a sorceror, which is a fun way of adding personality to them, and explaining what fuels a sorceror's power, but i'll have to stick with defining her selection for now.

Vowing not to touch the toolset until I've done a bit more planning now - I have 4 areas i've been building, and not filled them with any activity yet, so need to get back to that

NOTE: Any players out in Australia... check out the latest copy of Hyper (issue 179) - I was contacted by a journalist who's written a piece on NWN2 modules for that issue, and asked for some DA screenies. Good to see the community being highlighted!

Foraging, complete with tacky cover image

quite proud of how retro/tacky I got that to look!

Been meaning to share this on the vault for a while - the foraging system I use in Dark Avenger. It's not what you'd call an amazing feat of scripting, but there ground work is there with 29 different plants/molds/fungi placeables that can be gathered and harvested for their respective produce, and it's really simple to add more. Figure it'd be useful to someone, as an easy add-in or a starting point for their own system. Click on the image to head to the Vault.

Interview trifecta now in play: AME!

Another interview I did for the Academy of Modding Excellence has been posted on their forums!

Check it out here

Thanks to Ben for his orgainisation of the awards and the interview.

Podcast is up

Enjoy my less-than-dulcet tones!