Back in business

It's been a while since I've posted an update. I was extremely busy at work, then wendersnaven.com was compromised by some spam posts and I had to take the site down. The site is back up and working fine, although I had to take down some of the images that I didn't have backed up.

Otherwise I've still been playing around with the Toolset, but I can't say I've made much progress on ASATW 2.0. I'm working on two other projects, but I don't want to talk about them until I'm a little further along. Hopefully there will be more to hear about soon.

ASATW: Valley of Torryn

It's been a while since I last posted an update. I've been getting ready to move soon and extremely busy at work (which given the state of things I guess I can't really complain). When I've had time, however, I've been working on an initial area for ASATW that will set up a few of the subplots I've been planning. I'm calling it the Valley of Torryn: a place where the road the players have been traveling down forks off to the small village of Riverstop. Here are some screen shots:

The area is roughly based on Registerdebakel's Forest Prefab XXL (Part A). There were some good thoughts in there, but I had to do a lot of work on it.

Here's a quick list.

• I cut the area down from 32x32 to something more like a quarter of that.


• I made major changes to the walkmesh to cut off areas that were not accessible and also added a road.


• I re-textured most of the map to use grass to give it a more vibrant tone than the original's goal.


• The walkmesh required some major reworks to fix a number of places where walkmesh cutters were not used and the ground looked like it was made up of hexes.


• I also ran into an issue of there being over 25 types of trees, with each tree having unique seeds. This seemed to be breaking the 5 seed rule and I had to mass edit all of the trees and remove/replace a good amount of them.

While it still required a good deal of work (I'd guess something like 50+ hours) starting with the prefab still gave me a better end product. It also took me in some directions that I probably would not have gone if I'd started from scratch.

One down side I did have is that somewhere along the way I ran into a very nasty walkmesh bug. For some reason, after placing a hay pile placeable, the Toolset would crash if I tried to delete, then bake. This actually set me back a number of revisions and made me have to work around the bugged placeable. I probably lost two full weekends and a good amount of sanity on that one. It probably had something to do with me not updating this blog for a while either. I'm feeling inspired again and looking forward to wrapping this area up and then continuing to work on the non-DM conversations in the village.

I've got three quests planned for this area. One is done, one is in testing and the third I've just figured out how I want to do it. My hope is that this will allow players to jump into some action right away to help get some momentum going. I'm also hoping it will do a better job of showing them what's happening in the area instead of just having the people in town tell them.

OK, long post, but I had a ton to catch up on there. Thanks for reading!

Waterdeep + DMFI basemod

I spent the weekend working on a new version of Waterdeep that uses Carlo's DMFI basemod. This new version also includes a few minor fixes and additions that I wanted to do in the last version, but didn't get a chance. It should also make using it much more of a streamlined process.

It should show up on the Vault in a few days.

Now I can get back to working on the non-DM required version of ASATW!

Getting back into the swing of things

Now that the holidays are over and my new job is (hopefully) starting to calm down, I'm looking forward to getting back to working some of my projects. Today I continued to work on some dialog for the non-DM required version of A Stop Along the Way.

I've got a solid method for allowing the full dialog options to exist side-by-side with the DM-friendly one-liners by adding some options in the ASATW DM tool. This should allow DMs to turn off the full dialog options globally so they can run conversations on the fly. The default will be to have the full dialog options on so that players can enjoy the game if they don't have a DM to play with. Note that a DM can leave the full dialog options on to give the players freedom to explore the town, then possess an NPC in order to override the default conversation when needed.

I'm hopeful that the non-DM version will give the module a bit more visibility (both for the module itself and DM-run games in general). It will also give DMs a chance to play through the module and see how the default action works before taking players through it.

I've got one cut scene and one regular conversation done. Now I've got about 17 more conversations to go and most of them have up to four states based on the where the party is in the plot. I'll also want to write conversations for the three companions. It's going to take some work, but I'm looking forward to making this happen.

Happy Holidays

Seasons Greetings and Happy Holidays to all. Between the holiday rush and some traveling, I've been out of the loop for a bit. I have some time off around New Years and I'm looking forward to getting some building done. Check back for more.

In other news, I finished Fallout3 right before the break. I have to admit that it was something of an accident and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I spoke with another friend of mine about it, and he had the same experience of just following the plot and suddenly feeling rushed towards the credits. We were also a bit disappointed with the end sequence. Both of us are taking a break for a while and maybe we'll fire it back up and start exploring again. I'm sure you'll be on the edge of your seat waiting to hear more. ;)

But! Until then! Have a safe and happy holiday. Good luck in any travel you undertake and enjoy any time off you have from whatever obligations pull at your throughout the year.

NWN2 Toolset vs Fallout 3 GECK

I've been quite for a while. Part of this has to do with the holidays, taking a break after the Halloween project and releasing Waterdeep, and starting a new job. Part of this also has to do with playing quite a bit of Fallout 3. I've even got past the constant crashing and been able to really enjoy the game thanks to some help from the forum (see http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=920596).

So... imagine how happy I was to hear that Bethesda released a toolset for Fallout 3, called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK). Now I'm in trouble! They even have a great tutorial site at http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/Main_Page. People are still just cracking it open, and it might be too soon to really tell what people think of it. I cracked it open yesterday and today and found the tutorials to be good, the interface to be decent for what it is and the entire prospect of building my own mods for one of my all-time favorite settings intriguing. Of course this brings up a big question: Do I continue to focus on NWN2, or is it time to switch? Let's compare the two games:

Best setting: Tie
Both games are set in imaginative and rich worlds with endless possibilities.

Best mechanics: Tie
Both games have underlying systems that I sometimes enjoy and sometimes dislike. NWN2's basis of the 3.5 rules can be both entertaining and limiting. On the other hand, Fallout3 does feel like a hybrid of the old Fallout rules and a recycle of Bethesda's older games (Oblivion, etc.).

Best gameplay: Fallout3
Let's face it. There's been so many complaints about the camera, the interface and the pathfinding in NWN2 that Fallout3 just wins. It's just overall more fun. The targetting mode implementation does a great job of brining back the old turn-based Fallout games, but the focus on something that plays like an FPS gives it a much more immersive feel.

Best tactical gameplay: NWN2
Having said that, you can't deny that the focus of NWN2 is tactics and control of companions, which is something that Fallout3 lacks. Being able to pause, take direct control of followers and even just having the party health always displayed in the interface makes it play like a much more tactical game.

Best toolset: Tie
I don't know enough yet to really asses Fallout3, but at first glance it seems they both have places where they shine, and places where they fall down a bit.

Best overall art direction: Fallout3
I just think that some of the art (placeables, NPC models, items) in NWN2 aren't that great or don't fit into a unified vision. The community can always make more, but then you're talking about a much bigger project. Fallout3 had a lot more to pull from in the previous two games.

Best multi-player support: NWN2!!!!!
And here is the big one for me. Fallout3 is single player only. From what I can tell, the way the game was built mandates that. It will never be multi-player. Obviously I'm more interested in playing this type of game with my friends, so this point might have less weight with other builders, but for me this is very important.

Best community: Unknown
The NWN community seems much more active and has much more history than any of Bethesda's games. However, the NWN2 community seems to be slowing down. There have been a few posts lately about this. Personally, I'm not 100% sure why. If the GECK is even half-way decent to build with, then Fallout3 single player mods could really give NWN2 a run for their money. This has the potential to further weaken the NWN2 building community.

What does this mean for NWN2? Personally, I think Obsidian needs to finally deliver on the multi-player support and focus on the DM client. That's really what sets this game apart from other games. The NWN1 Toolset was popular in large part for how easy it was to build with. Moving towards the more complex exteriors has taken that away, even though we have a lot of other benefits and more options. Now its the multi-player element that is really the thing that can save NWN2.

Of course, this is all a bit oversimplified and coming from my perspective. Still, I'm curious to see how things unfold over the next year.

New project: Non-DM version of ASATW

Now that Waterdeep is released and the Halloween project is up, I've decided to get back to work on creating a version of A Stop Along the Way that does not require a DM. Today I spent some creating the first cut scene.

It took me just over two hours to get it set up and it goes by pretty fast. It's a simple conversation between three locals that sets up some of the characters the players interact with during the game. I still need to flesh out the the end where the players get a chance to ask some questions about what they heard. I also want to try and get some sort of skill check in there. At the end of the conversation, each of the three say goodbye and walk away to be jumped into their respective homes for later. It does a good job of setting everything up, but as I write this I'm thinking I need to do something to make it a bit more memorable.

The next item on my agenda will be to work some options into the DM tool that allow DMs to turn this conversation on or off. From there I have a few other conversations like this to do, and I need to write default conversations for each character, along with options in the DM tool to globally turn these on or off.

My goal is going to be to get something that can be played in multi-player and enhanced with a DM. It won't stack up to some of the big hits in single-player mode, but I think that's OK.

I'll let you all know how it goes!