T is for Testing

(download details reproduced at bottom of post)



Testing is still underway, though the forums and community seem a little quiet generally and in terms of playtesting. From my own testing, I've been really enjoying playing on the overland map, which is getting me quite psyched about the eventual release. Bugs seem relatively minor so far - couple of stupid things like me setting doors to static - but no game breakers so far. I'm updating the files in the links below as I go so they should always have the most recent version.

Last night I tested the assault of a Zhent stronghold which was great fun for mass combat play. The battle set-ups worked quite well; as I ran the gauntlet towards archers, manticores and Zhent Skymages peppered me with spikes and spells from the hills to the side. Talos bless Chain Lightning is all I can say.

This weekend I focus down on the White Plume Mountain module itself and bringing that up to scratch - there's a few subsystems that I implemented later in development I need to go back and include in these areas, some quest scripting, and a final battle to script. I'm hoping its a good indication the buzz I'm getting seeing this get so close! And hope that entusiasm will hook the players too!



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Hak file 1 (78Mb) - put in hak directory
Hak file 2 (176Mb) - put in hak directory
Campaign folder (21Mb) - put in Campaigns directory
Sidequest module folders (216Mb) - put in modules directory
Overland map module folder (70Mb) - put in modules directory

Brief walkthrough for sidequests including recommended party level can be downloaded here (Word doc) . Quests range from level 7 to level 16-18, so try any PC group you like and dive in.

A Readme can be found here - please bear in mind my design goals when giving feedback.

Please use the following format for reporting bugs - feedback form

Testing - Part 1: The Sandbox

Well, well. Here goes!

As mentioned before, I'm opening up the sandbox portion of the campaign for testing, and would be really grateful for any and all help and feedback. Not just reporting bugs but also mentioning gameplay elements that do/don't work or could be improved. In particular let me know about combat balance and variety, treasure/weapon/armour balance and variety, areas that feel empty or needing a little more attention. And of course the numerous spelling errors that will no doubt creep in.

I've uploaded the overland map, and all the sidequest areas for testing. The main plot (White Plume Mountain itself) is deliberately missing, and I'm finishing off that whilst this test is ongoing. Overland encounters are currently placeholders and will be changed (made more thematic to each area).

Hak file 1 (78Mb) - put in hak directory
Hak file 2 (176Mb) - put in hak directory
Campaign folder (21Mb) - put in Campaigns directory
Sidequest module folders (216Mb) - put in modules directory
Overland map module folder (70Mb) - put in modules directory

Brief walkthrough for sidequests including recommended party level can be downloaded here (Word doc) . Quests range from level 7 to level 16-18, so try any PC group you like and dive in.

A Readme can be found here - please note, I try and set out my design philosophy in it, so don't test this expecting a tight plot and varied romances; and please bear in mind my design goals when giving feedback.


Please use the following format for reporting bugs - feedback form

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help with this!

Joyous sight to behold

My notepad checklist - full of ticks. Felt damn good checking that last box off today!
What does that mean? I now have a functioning overland map with ~25 sidequest locations ranging from 1 to 6 linked areas each. Checking my loadscreens.2da, and adding on the main quest areas, that's ~95 areas in total across the campaign. This looming testing phase is starting to scare me...

Dungeon of Swords loadscreens

I'm at that stage where there's no real new content to add (barring something I plan to do whilst waiting for bug reports), and I'm left to go back through the content so far and polish off all the blanck conversations I left as placeholders swearing I'd finish later, and tidy up the journal, then tackle the overland map and all its intricacies. It's all getting there but this last stretch is a bit of a slog - plus trying to complete it on top of work and the looming spectre of moving house is leaving me a little frazzled!

The last sidequest area I finished was the Dungeon of Swords - the loadscreens of each area involved in this overland map location are below. It started off as a mid-level dungen crawl, but then I got kinda vindictive and threw in some higher level beasties with tricks up their sleeves to spice things up a bit, including a half-balor half-dragon I thought would be fun!


Back to it - and hopefully some clear time over the weekend to focus. Been starting to think how I'll handle hosting the campaign for testing; any good reccomendations for hefty filesizes (haks total ~250Mb compressed, and modules more) with stable connectivity (had too many clunk out on big downloads)?

Back from Egypt

It's been a long-held dream of mine to travel to Egypt - there's a version of me in a parallel universe that ditch biochemistry at school and ran with my passion for latin, ancient history and archeology instead. True that version is likely broke, unemployed and with moth-eaten straggelly beard, so perhaps I shouldn't feel too regretful, but still...

And so Egypt was our choice of honeymooon destination, to cruise down the Nile and see the sites I'd read of and the depictions of all the deities that captured my imagination from a young age. We started off in Luxor (to see the Valley of the Kings, Colossus of Memnon, Hapshetsut's Temple, Luxor Temple and Karnak), sailed upstream to Edfu (Temple to Horus), onto Kom Ombo (Temple to Sobek, crocodile headed deity), then to Aswan and the Temple of Philae (dedicated to Isis). A selection of snaps below.

And it was all I had hoped for. I love poking about these places, and it was awe inspiring how huge and intricate they were. And what I loved the most was finding these patches of heiroglyph-covered wall that still had the original paint on (see second shot below) - these places weren't just beige stone covered in carvings, they were brightly coloured and intricately patterned. And the detail is incredible. Sights that I'd definitely recommend anyone to see.


















So, now its back to reality with a bump. I always find that a break from the toolset means that you then approach it with a bit of trepidation and fear over what you've forgotten. Just before I left, I finished off a dracolich lair that the party might stumble upon. That now brings me to the last couple of areas to flesh out the sandbox. And hopefully i'll have some screenies of those soon.

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.