Not a very exciting update, but hopefully some screens will distract you from that fact.

Well, what can I say? I've got a lot of the scripting done for the thieves/thieves/guard quest chains. I actually combined three quests into one, so you can pick which side to take and then it's basically the same quest from three different points of view. Which isn't to say it's any less work, and it required a lot of scripting...you know, like "what if they do it like this?" type thing that I need to account for. But that's mostly done. Tomorrow I'll be building an area, and doing the final stage of that quest, then I need to backfill some pre-req quests for both thieves guilds that will be rather simple (I already got the guard stuff done!) and that will wrap it up. Then I will finally be on the noble houses, and after that this whole city adventure thing will, thankfully, be behind me.

It's not that I don't like doing it, I'm just running out of steam here, but this close to completion a break wouldn't be prudent. But, man, I don't remember how many quests I've done to date, though I've counted them a while ago, it's just...a lot. And I'll be glad to have this open ended business behind me. Too much to keep track of, and doing the same thing three/four/more different ways, frankly it gets exhausting.

I was talking to my wife today, and I told her I'm just tired in general. I haven't seen her since September, I've been running this house since then by myself. Between trying to keep up with appointments, doing the things everyone needs to do like groceries and laundry (which reminds me, I have a load in the washer now that's going to stink if I don't take care of it. This is a note so I'll remember when I proofread this post.) and mowing the grass, whatever, school, and the full time/over time work hours I've been putting in to getting this project done (which, the one year anniversary of the first Chapter is coming up soon, this month I think), it's mentally tiring. I've just been feeling sluggish lately is all.

And I'm not searching for pity here, you can just chill with that because I don't need it, I've been working harder than ever to get this taken care of and I'm not complaining. Another two months of hard grind on it at the most, which isn't so bad in perspective. Like, this is what it would be like to be a single parent. It's f-ing crazy! I wouldn't want to do that my whole life. Just eight more months of it to go, about half way done with the deployment.

I don't know, I don't really have people to talk to, whatever, feels good to get stuff off your chest from time to time though.

Moving on, I promised the screens. These areas you've already seen, but this is what it looks like with characters in them. Actually, a year ago, whatever, when I started out adding custom content there wasn't really a whole lot out there, and it's grown considerably in terms of item models and such for NPCs. Most of the NPCs I create now have custom weapons, like I'll take a +1 sword and give it a different model so it looks different. I've created several "sets" of items, like +1 chainmail, +1 shields, +1 silver longsword, etc., about three or four for each + for each piece of equipment I have a handful of models for. Varies things a little bit. I'm tempted to go and redo a ton of NPCs so they all have custom stuff, because honestly I find a lot of the models Obsidian did a little ridiculous, or a little ugly, with some exceptions, but man, I might just save that for another project, go through and put together a new override with some of the better models and weed out the early ones that, no offense to anyone, aren't so hot. For instance, I've got this cloak override that has like 80 cloaks for each race which just bloats the hell out of everything (I used some of them, but not nearly all of them), and this huge shield one that I don't use much of now because there have been a ton of quality shields on the vault recently. A lot of that would have to go.

Also in there is the Shadow Dragon, a little surprise for those of you who like to steal things! I wrote a post about the AI and some tricks about it here if you want to learn the very basics of custom AI and some 2da editing tricks.

Whatever, I'm rambling.

Anyway: