September was a long month

I think I've worked more in September than I ever have in my life (and probably more than I ever thought possible). My 90-hour weeks have finally come to a close and I've vowed to never do that again to myself and my boss. With a few days off around this weekend I was able to pick the Toolset back up and play with the VS project so I thought I'd give a quick update.

Attack and Defend

Before I got so busy at work, I was able to rework some scripts and create a scenario that was both attack and defend. In a riff on classic RTS style, you must build up your defenses to hold against the attacking computer until you can begin to assault the enemy resource points and weaken their supply chain.

Similar to the previous defense-based scenario you must still position allies to defend your resource points, but you can also choose to have them spawn in a circle on the ground. Any creatures spawned into this circle join your party as henchmen. You can have five at a time and lead them into battle to weaken the enemy defenses.

Custom Feats Instead of Items

Originally I was using items to cast unique powers that fired scripts to summon allies, but I found several issues:

1. Having someone targeted would set the location to that target, which could lead to unforseen results.
2. Having someone targeted who was out of range would mean that your character would run towards them, which seemed frustrating.

Firing up tlkedit and creating some custom feats based on http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?forum=115&topic=549395 turned out to be a great solution. The feats are set to location only, so both of those issues are addressed.

I think I need to take another look at the keys I used in my feats.2da, spells.2da and vs.tlk files so they won't conflict with some of the bigger custom content out there. I've been looking at these two threads, but I haven't made any changes just yet:

• Reserved 2da lines: http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=591224&forum=115
• Reserved tlk lines: http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=576626&forum=115

Custom UI for Tracking Resource Points

One of the last big things I want to do is create a custom UI for tracking your current resource points. These usually tick up at a rate of 10 every 6 seconds (that's two per resource point you hold), and should be updated as you go. Right now this is a standard message to the pc in their message box, but having a UI box that updates whenever a change happens would be a really nice addition.

I've been looking at BB's Music Player UI (see http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2UI.Detail&id=131). I've got a UI element appearing when I want, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to get the dynamic variable string to show up. Hopefully, I'll make some headway today.

Otherwise, things are moving along and I hope to have a proof-of-concept release soon!

Continuing work on VS project

I just wanted to post a quick update on where things on with me these days. I've been traveling a lot, but have made some time to keep working on the versus project that I mentioned last time.

My main focus has been moving towards creating some sense of variety and progression in the module. At the very least I want this to be a few different types of battles. Instead of just defending against waves of enemies, I wanted to add a type of map where you attack a defending enemy, both attack and defend across a map and maybe even add some dungeon crawls based on these mechanics (similar to the old "assault the base" maps in Starcraft.Taking this further, this would give me the basis to add a full story. It would also create a nice basis for a player vs player style of play if I wanted to go there.

One of the first hurdles I came across was having two maps with the same waypoints means that spawned creatures only respect one of them and just stand there for the other. This lead to a whole naming convention rethink and a good amount of rework of code. Most of this was for the better, however. Some run away loops and some oddities with how using the same set of waypoints for multiple creatures with the same tags now works also set me back a bit.

Once I got all that worked out, I had a "attack the enemy" map that was basically working how I wanted it: Create troops in a certain spot, and they'd advance on the enemy along a set of waypoints. I pretty quickly found that this was a terrible idea. The fog of war left me running back and forth with no sense of the bigger battle, much less any enjoyment.

After doing some additional thinking, I've decide to use henchmen instead. Creating troops in that same area gives you a set of henchmen to control. I was able to lead them into battle and weaken the front lines. This gave me a better sense of controlling the action and I think it will work.

Next steps will be working on the math involved and coming up with a way to make the battle more dynamic. One idea is occasional events where the enemy occasionally launches counter attacks. Work is looking to be pretty busy over the next two weeks, so I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to put against this, but hopefully I'll get a chance to play around a bit here and there.

New versus project

In my last post I mentioned a new project that I've been playing with, and I want to share some details. A short while ago, I had been playing a lot of PopCap Game's "Plants Vs. Zombies" and it got me thinking about some of the old capture the flag modules that were around for NWN1. A quick search on the vault showed no such modules around and I started to wonder what it would take to build one.

Not wanting to take on another project, I tried to just leave it as something I would think about on the way to work or before going to bed at night. Despite my efforts, I found myself cracking open the Toolset and playing around with some blueprints and scripts. Eventually I found myself with an almost playable game that my friends have spent that last two weeks testing.

The idea is that you are the commander of a small group of troops who must protect the Kingdom's borders against invading skirmishers. A portal system powered by enslaved elementals provides you with resource points over time that you can spend on various troops that you can place on the battlefield to protect strategic points. The enemy sends waves of troops in an attempt to batter down your defenses. Survive through the final wave, and you'll be rewarded and move on to the next mission. Fail and you must retreat through the portal and try again.

The game is currently set up for one to four characters, optimized for level 3. I've got the orc "campaign" in place, which consists of five levels and I'm in the process of creating an undead "campaign" as well. I've also got a few tweaks to make before I can release a beta version.

Down the road, I've love to see this converted into a player vs. player game, but that will take some restructuring of the code and I'd probably need someone who is a bit more familiar with team-based modules to help me with some of the party and faction coding.

For now I'm back to work, but hopefully I'll be able to post something to the vault soon!

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.