The Joy of Prefabs (and intermission)

Had quite a productive past ten days, despite spending a lot of time bug hunting and testing in game. The Forgotten Ziggurat I mentioned in the last post is finished, and I've gotten a 4 level Worg Warren and 4 level Dungeon of the Hark completed, scripted and 'encounterrified'. On top of that, having seen Lugaid's post about a new prefab he's come up with, I decided it would be a nice way to join the Worg Warren and the Dungeon of the Hark together (as they were in the Living Forgotten Realms campaign I'm loosely following for this) through a jaunt into the Undermoor. This of course mean that I had to go back and ensure that encounters fired regardless of the direction the player chose - which can require quite some mental gymnastics to visualise sometimes.

None of this would have been possible without the prefabs. I'm guessing I now have 5 modules with on average 12-15 areas each maybe, perhaps 60-70% of those are prefabs - the only times I rush to delve into area design myself is actually in White Plume Mountain itself where I'm following the canon maps. That isn't to say that I can always just plug and play these prefabs in - most of them I've spent time playing with the lighting, walkmesh, chucking in some custom content placeables or added a little of my own touches. But man that's such a more relaxing way to build areas for someone like me - I know where to hang a painting but don't let me near the brush, mkay?

The Dungeon of the Hark


In the lost sewers under an abandoned town...


The eagle-eyed will spot a gelatinous cube filling the corridor in the distance


The lycanthropic hordes are under the Hark's command


Showdown with the Hark himself

The Worg Warrens




Goblins and goblin worg-riders stalk the plains


Bugbears defend the snowy pass

Undermoor

Through buried elven ruins...


A fire giant camp

And with that, I'm soon off on belated honeymooon to Egypt for two weeks! A Nile cruise and exploration of Egypt awaits! A long held ambition of mine so really looking forward to it. One last foray to the toolset over the weekend to finish off the areas and encounters in this region of the overland map - then that should mean all the content is in place for the campaign, and all that remains is to go back and finish off placeholder conversations and script some battles. A little intermission in the building should be good, and then I can come back and press on with the final round of polishing and testing balancing and debugging. Hmm... maybe I'll just stay on holiday...

Against your better judgement...

Found myself convincing myself I needed to add in some new locations to the overland map - trouble is the last thing I need now is to add more content... But, it makes sense - there are some spots in the overland map are feel a little empty (plus some key canon locations that I'd be neglecting if they weren't included). SO rather than making progress it's kinda been running to stay still.

Here's some screenies from a new location, that's turning into a homage to another classic module, the Isle of Dread. An ancient tribe have turned to dark powers instead of their old ways - go teach 'em a lesson...

Progress update

I realised the other day that I don't think I'd gone much into the Overland map I'm using for WPM. I used the 'tracing technique' described on here previously and in the shot above you can see the area map alongside the tracing template. There's some colouring and texturing to be touched up, but I'm fairly happy with it. You'll see in the swamp a slight ridge that is unfortunately due to the terrain megatiles and the need to lower the water level, but its not really noticable in game.

Sidequest encounters covering the southern part of the map are done - barring some dialogue I keep putting off. I'm currently working on the NE swamp sidequests and these are ~80% done, then there's just the NW swamp side quests, of which there are only a few - areas prepped for 60% of the quests, but no dynamic content as yet.

Some shots of the locations on the original map that have translated into the game are below (still playing with overland scripts so there is double the XP at the moment but that will be fixed). Bah, my texturing always looks so much better in the toolset than in game... Lighting settings aren't final, I need to get back to that.

The weekend was spent working on a quest around House Orogoth which as a sidequest has been jumping between the include/drop list more than the others, but I found two prefabs that were just right, and I figured I needed more BIG dragon encounter (now there are 2 at CR > 15 plus one CR 11 and one that's a dragon but then again not...). So Orogoth was slotted in. Then I moved on to some mines occupied by the Zhentarim - who really should have got more love in the existing FR games as bigger villains, although their presence to the west is less than in the Dalelands. I'm playing on the link to Darkhold nearby to justify the presence and give people the chance to kick some Zhen butt. Overland map sidequests are bigger than in SoZ - this Zhent one covers 1 exterior and 6 interior levels, and hopefully sees the challenge increase significantly the deeper the player ventures. This is all part of the goal to allow players (and multiplayers) to pick and choose sidequests if they only want to play for 1 hour - 3 hours on something they can drop in and out of, rather than the core central plot.... which I really should get back to at some point...

b0U/\cYrOc/<: m|sErY sTo/\e

I'm on a break from Dragon Age as it lost a lot of charm for me slogging through the Deep Halls. Story was fun, but too much tedium and repetitiveness in combat meant I needed a break. Which has been good for WPM - an Underdark sidequest nearly finished, and some of the subsystems I implemented later on in development now included in the earlier areas.

So for playtime, I've been venturing into the mists of Misery Stone. Been reassuring for the NWN2 community to see the reception and appetite for this. I've got about as much playtime as I had during testing of this under my belt, and am having fun - the difficulty is toned down significantly from what I recall of my testing, tho. But scenery, atmosphere, custom content and execution are top notch. A few niggles for me in terms of combat variance and companion interaction (and psst! the dryad's animal companion is still nameless ;) ) but nothing to detract from it being a great fun game with bags of character.

But as I stood in the whispering woods area early on in the game I got to thinking. The area is great - looks stunning visually and had buckets of atmosphere. And you know I kinda prefer the areas I've seen here (and from other work e.g. by Anduraga, Azenn, Maerduin and Chaos Wielder, and Amraphael's exteriors for Zork) to anything I've seen so far in Dragon Age. But, DA does have better looking character faces - but hang on, Misery Stone has custom faces for the companions that look amazing... So you know what? Misery Stone, just ended up making me want to play DA but in the NWN2 engine. Three years on, it's shown that the engine has a lot to offer still and look current.

Kudos to the team and all involved, especially Jclef.

edited to include authors I shouldn't have forgotten - thanks Starwars!

Loadscr... nah, only kidding! Manticores!

Had a little departure the last couple of days to work on something slightly different but related to WPM - Manticore! Hellfire of Robinson Worshop fame had kindly got in touch and offered to give me an advance showing of the manticore model he was working on as I'd mentioned it in relation to WPM. Indeed, the manticore is an encounter inside the mountain, and it's image graces the cover of the original and second printing module itself




These images might have more to do with a misinterpretation of the first encounter which is actually listed as a gynopshinx. But the tail spikes are clear to see. So it was my hope to use the manticore model here and in the later encounter to replace the Spectator Beholder placeholder I had currently -the cover images are to iconic in relation to this module not to use it. The creature in the first encounter is described as mangy and bedraggled and sitting atop a pile of bones. So here we are:

The later encounter occurs in the Terraces of Doom (a level I'm fond of and may release as a prefab)

the terraces from above - run the gauntlet from the entrance to the exit in this inverted ziggurat!

In return for the favour, I offered to work up the creature blueprint and AI. Coding the AI was fun and I emulated Dirtywick's approach to implement the tail spike attacks without using 2da modifications (essentially spell creation) so the model is more widely usable. The script got a little cumbersome to take certain things into account such as deflect/protection from arrows, but now seems to be working fine - while it has tail spikes left, the manticore will unleash them and try to keep at range. If caught in melee, when it gets badly injured and has spikes left, it will try to flee to fire them again. Here some screenies showing the test module I used for trialing this out.

(Without resorting to bundling up more custom content and custom vfx I can't have the spikes fire from a tail node, sadly, but I think this effect works well and is less noticable in game. For scripters, I'm using the SpawnProjectile function and manually coding hit/damage in the custom AI)

This aside, I've also just made 7 stores for a hidden market to be found in the game at later levels. Store building is mind-numbingly time consuming if you want them to have flavour or a theme, so a trip tothe gym might be in order to wake me up.

Loadscreens 3

Couple more shots trying ideas out - but I could easily get caught fiddling with this forever without making any real progress. I've made the logo slightly transparent, and tried a frame and title. Kamal's been helping out toy with hiding the logo in the image too. So I guess I'm now left to decide on the presence/absence of the frame, logo, and text.... and after all of this, I think I'm prefering the simplicity of the shots in the previous post, but with the new faded logo)... as ever, comments/thoughts welcome






(FYI the font is that used in the 3rd ed Forgotten Realms logo)

Right, this weekend I stop messing about in photoshop and focus on the content!

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