Loadscreen take 2

Having played with borders and not found one exactly right, I've come up with the following as a sample - using FilterForge's 'Film effect' (at minimally intrusive seting as I didn;t want it too stylised) and I've added the symbol of Keraptis - the arch 'villain' from the White Plume Mountain modules. There's a sample below. The scheme seems to work well, especially given a lot of the interior loadscreens are quite dark, and it's not too intrusive.





I feel I should also throw in the disclaimer, that there's several prefabs in use, albeit most modified to vary degrees - so I haven't suddenly become some mad area-baking fool...!

Loadscreens

OK to make up for lack of screenshots, and to give me something to do with the 30 minutes I've had on the toolset before work for the past week or so, I've been starting to collect the loadscreens for the areas. I'm still torn about how to to display them - whether to add a border, if so what type (a full blown WPM border was what I'd err towards but is beyond my artistic skill sadly), whether to 'artify' the images e.g. stain glass, mosaic, brush-strokes etc - or to leave as is. I've be keen to hear any thoughts on this. The basic images I'll use to create the loadscreens from roughly a third of the areas so far are below, some you'll recognise form prefabs/earlier screenshots. These correspond to ~50% of the sidequests done so far, none from inside White Plume Mountain itself just yet.

































































SO let me know if you have any thoughts about how you like your loadscreens to look

Rock and Gnoll

Keep forgetting to take screenshots when I'm testing things in game, which isn't very helpful. Couple of shots above from the latest work - fleshing out the cave known as Dead Gnoll's Eye Socket from the original White Plume Mountain map - see below.

I've used this map as the basis of the overland map as the sandbox for the player to explore, and its regions like Dead Gnoll's Eye Socket that I'm populating at the moment. Gnolls are nice in the NWN2 toolset as they are one of the few 'monster' creatures that let you play with different armour appearances so you get a bit more variety.

Not had as much time on the toolset as I'd hoped over the holidays. But did get to contribute to the SoZ Expansion project led by Chaos Wielder and play through Trinity by E.C. and GPS, both of which I highly reccomend and urge you to check out - those of you still with an eye for NWN that haven't been comepltely seduced by the harlot that is DA:O - be a lady/gentleman and keep in touch with your old loves, especially when there's such great stuff they have to offer you now. Don;t worry, I won't tell ;).

Merry Christmas one and all

Mine will be spent recovering from flu, dabbling with White Plume Mountain, and trying to help out in the following quest from Dragon Age (ok, it might be one of the DA modules ideas I've got....)

An Apt Quotation

A quote I came across today on a training course at work gave me a wry smile and seemed very suitable to the modders life

"Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. And the nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression."
- Sir John Harvey-Jones

Community SoZ Booster Pack

Chaos Wielder, currently developing Shagret, has cried out the immortal lines "Modders ASSEMBLE!" in a post over at the forums . The idea is a nice one - and it echos a recent contribution by sterling community contributor Kaldor Silverwand and his NWN2 SOZ Makeover. The idea is to add more content to SoZ by letting players bolt-on community made dungeons to the overland map. In one fell swoop, increasing the content, playtime, and refreshing the game for players. As White Plume Mountain will contain a lot of overland map-linked sidequests, it's the kind of project I'm doing already and am keen to contribute. I have lots of side-dungeons I could contribute, but instead I've decided to do a new specific dungeon for this project, which I'll submit soon, but incorporate into White Plume Mountain too. I've been doing a lot of Yuan-ti quests for the Serpent Hills recently, so I decided on a Coiled Cabal Outpost, which should fit the SoZ plot nicely, plus some Viper's Fangs assassins. Was a nice buzz to be working on something 'new' but that would also fit in with my own project - so I'd urge any other builders that may have/need dungeons for their own projects to see if one can be cropped out to contribute to this idea.

Some screenies below, initially from a WPM area, but the from the in-progress area I'm going to send to Chaos Wielder. And yes, I am too addicted to the jungle fog vfx. It's too good and hides too many sins. Hell, I could be happy just putting down caves filled with that fx and nothing else sometimes....

Thissss issss lassst weeksss progresssss

(including a wicked exterior of the Great Petrified Serpent courtesy of Amraphael again! Now populated with appropriate nasssstinessss)