Did you catch Southpark tonight?

It was hilarious, for real, mostly because I get to sit back and see all those stupid characters from cartoons over the years. Not as good as last weeks, but still you don't want to not catch that. But I'm sitting here wondering what the preachy point is going to be at the end of this three part episode.

So, yeah, I'm still going through this testing thing. It's coming along, the people that volunteered to beta test have been really helpful, especially dude and his brother been e-mailing me and flem. Lot of good ideas and squashed bugs have come of it, which is great.

Thing is though, I'm-a be totally honest here, beta testing is probably my least favorite part of building. Well, the post release fixes are also a hassle. Keeping with my honesty, I'm pretty lazy so I don't like to do things more than once. Get it done right the first time around has always been one of my philosophies of life, ya dig? So obviously going back and digging through things I had done months ago and trying to figure out what's wrong is, I don't know, grating? Yeah, I guess that's a good word for it. The other thing is I get a lot of "why didn't I think of that?"'s and "how did I miss that!?"'s throughout too, and most of the time it's something really simple that makes you feel like an idiot, you know?

That ain't to say I'm unappreciative of these cats because, like last time, their ideas and bug reports are a great contribution that I wouldn't want to go without. But, you know, if I can't be honest about what's going on then there's a problem festering there anyway.

Point here is next time you're playing a mod for, well, anything (not a professionally done one, though, they get paid for that! I mean, unless you want to give props to everyone who does their job adequately, go 'head.) and you're leaving a vote or comment or whatever the system that respective game uses to rate user made stuff, just remember the beta testers. I'm telling you, if it wasn't for them your enjoyment of that mod would have suffered in a big way.

Right on. In other news, I'll be putting up a new poll soon about the new "Adventure Pack" for NWN 2. I mean, it looks cool, but I'm a little tentative about buying it for a few reasons. What I'll tell you now is MotB was a bit of a headache (not even close enough to make me regret the purchase) in the way that it messed up my custom content and problems from it are still surfacing in other areas. It's all good though, they'll be worked out. But once you have that installed, it's not really an optional thing. Like I can't build for just vanilla NWN2 now, it's MotB required because it's that integrated into the toolset, which is much of a problem because most of the folks playing the community stuff will have it. But this Adventure Pack? That remains to be seen. How integrated will it be with the toolset? As much so as MotB? And will I even be able to use the stuff they're making with it? Like can I just yank some stuff out of their hak or whatever and slap it into mine? Their music?

See what I mean? Or is it going to be like MotB where a mod I make using it simply won't work unless the player also owns it. Because on the real, I could just pull things out of my MotB files and put them in a hak and you could play it with vanilla...I'm not going to because the hak would be huge and Obsidian would probably have a seizure at me. I'm just saying.

That's the kind of stuff that will influence whether or not I install the Adventure Pack. Yeah, I said install. I'll buy it regardless, Ossian is an indie studio employing (do y'all get paid cash or just a stamp on your resume?) people I e-know, so supporting both the indie studio scene and some cats I like/respect on a personal level is something I'm in favor of. So I'm all over that.

But how useful it will be to me is another story.

Finally, I have been making progress on the next mod. I have a cool cutscene finished, and have begun work on the next "area" (which is actually five areas split apart), The Simbul's Palace interior. It's coming along, it's just really, really big.