dirtywick's house of awesome

These monthly updates working for you?

2009-02-26T13:57:00.004-06:00

They're going OK for me, in case you were wondering.

So, on to the big news of the month! Ossian's Mysteries of Westgate was announced to be released shortly. Whatever "soon" means, because it's certainly longer than two weeks from then. Of course, this spawned a series of "Yes it is!" "Do you think I'm an idiot?" responses. Personally, I think both are justified. I don't think anyone wants to see Ossian, or NWN2 as the case may be, fail because of this mismanaged debacle (not that the non-release of an Adventure Pack would spell doom for the game, but it's certainly not helping building confidence in the franchise or it's publisher...), even what little support pretending to be excited at this point people are mustering is, I'm sure, appreciated by the guys on the receiving end of the nonsense. Not to point fingers either. Oh, and don't take that the wrong way Ossian, I resigned to casual awareness a long time ago. Expecting excitement is a bit much, don't you think?

But on the flip side, the definition of something stupid is doing the same thing and expecting different results. This is why nobody likes a skeptic.

In other news, our BouncyRock project Shattered Dreams there's a new update out. Also, some setting information can be found here.

Enjoy.

More Regular Updates?

2009-01-26T09:33:00.005-06:00

You know, I'd imagine that there's some literary term for tricking people into thinking one thing when you read the title of something implying, through a question, that I have an answer or at least some controversy surrounding it, and the article in question is doing the exact opposite. As a more topical example:

Barack Obama Gay?

No...no he's not.

After all, newspapers do this all the time. But, regardless of my lack of knowledge on the topic that's what I did. I haven't really considered doing more regular updates and they will probably continue to be sporadic.

In any case, I've received several emails and questions as of late with regards to Subtlety of Thay. Will it be continued? Is it on indefinate hold? The answer to both is I can't really say at this point. I'd like to finish it of course, but working with this team has been a much better opportunity and that's pretty much the long of the short of it. If things change, I'll post it here. Sorry guys, that's the best I can do.

Moving on, with regards to the new project, the lack of information means we're dilegently working on it, every day. You may have noticed my good friend Elysius, despite a penchant for taking poorly written quizzes and sharing the results (I was an elf chick!), has been talking about the project a bit. So that's your information center until we're ready to start giving out some more regular updates, and maybe open a forum? Gaging the responses here guys, don't drop the ball.

Anyway, just to pad this out, the Academy of Modding Excellence is back in the delegating awards process. Their last round of awards, despite snubbing arguably the most physically attractive modder in the community, was a relative success. Question I have, though, is anyone looking forward to these?

Mod of the year is coming up also on the Vault, whereupon said exteremly attractive individual was also snubbed, and I know everyone is looking forward to that.

Finally, when are they going to have a "Most Physically Attractive" category in either of these categories?

Ah, well, one can dream I suppose.

Storm of Zehir Released

2008-11-22T11:11:00.003-06:00

One thing I've noticed since starting a blog is that nobody comes here to read about news first, so announcing that Storm of Zehir was released seems like I'm telling you something you already know. Especially since it was released four days ago.

Of course, being as how you can't really mod for NWN2 and NOT be up to date with the patches and expansions and the like, I bought it. In some ways, I feel like I'm one of the few, and depending on the social stigma carried by saying this ("Oh, he liked Storm of Zehir..." *snort* "...I bet he's never read Nietzche." *drink douchebag Starbucks frappaccino while typing on laptop in Starbucks using their free wireless*) who, in case you couldn't tell from that fictional scenario (I also went to Starbucks the other day and got some bananna mango smoothie thing), actually does like SoZ. I also liked SoU the most, and while I look for my shrugging shoulder smiley, please continue to the next paragraph:

I haven't played it a whole lot, since time is precious and all, but it's a welcome change of pace for me. There seems to have been a certain formula followed by the NWN franchise, dating probably back to BG or some other overrated game. Ruffled your feathers there? Then at least let me say this: I tried it on Gametap not long ago, being as how I missed the golden age of CRPGs apparently, and rose tinted glasses folks. That game is passable at best, but that it's propped up as one of the pinnacles of CRPG gaming is a mystery to me, it just wasn't that much fun to play. But I digress, the point here being that read a lot of questionable quality dialogue, get a quest, combat through a long dungeon with the occasional dialogue encounter where you may make a skill check comprised nearly the entirety of the gameplay of the whole franchise. The only exceptions to that really are MotB and SoZ, both of which made better use of other gameplay elements.

Of course when a new gameplay element is added, people tend not to take well to it for deviating from the formula kind of explains the whole phenomena. Spirit Meter? Everything about SoZ? Alright, if that's the way it is...

So I'm sorry folks, we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. That there's no "Hey, tell me about your past..." option on the companions doesn't outweigh that there's an overland map that uses a dozen skills to influence a dozen different aspects of it. A lack of companion interjections doesn't offset the new "hey, their skills matter too and this is a huge improvement" factor we've got going on here; you did build your own party after all.

And perhaps I'm just not a hardcore/traditionalist when it comes to RPGs?

There are, however, a number of annoyances. I could easily see the load screens being annoying for the random encounters, the buff stripping of long term buffs when transitioning to the map, the slow movement on the overland map...

I'll put it to you like this, about five minutes in after you get to the shore, if you didn't like the before and during of that battle, you won't like SoZ. If you did, well there you go. As far as building goes, there's some new stuff in there we can make use of. If you're a builder I recommned playing with it some, the skill use is exactly what most people should be paying attention to as they do also, so few mods make use of skills in any way, and those that do are usually limited to dialogue skills.

Far as the BR project goes, building is underway officially. We'll begin to dessiminate new information pretty soon.

Wow, I have got to apologize!

2008-11-03T13:42:00.004-06:00

Been over a month and I have been slacking. Well, not really, but as far as blog posts got I have been slacking. So you're probably thinking, what is the hold up?

Let me get this out of the way: Subtlety of Thay Ch 3 is officially on the back burner. I've been saying I was going to switch gears for a while now, and behold, I am not a liar.

Yeah, I know, it sucks. But it may work out better!

So what have I been doing? Besides monitoring the Vault, which is actually going really well far as my mod goes; did a much better job of testing and the like this time around. Over at BouncyRock we've been pretty busy with the Halloween mod and all, which I had a hand in and made my own little house which wasn't very good (but what do you expect? Look at the dates for SoT2 and that...)

But the real news here is BouncyRock is also going to be putting out a full module in the coming months, and not with the Halloween mod where everyone is doing their own thing, but a concentrated effort on a module. It's a collaborative effort between the BR team and some folks from around the community who have volunteer to work with us as a team.

So keep an eye out for updates on that in the near future.

On the Vault

2008-09-25T15:07:00.001-05:00

Click here.

Or don't, you could also use the search feature.

Beta Is Still Up

2008-09-20T15:20:00.002-05:00

I was in a hurry yesterday, still continuing my playthrough but getting to a point where the DL would be available sooner rather than later over the weekend, and I not only screwed up the links, but neglected to mention it's on a different server. So my fault, here are the corrected links:

My email: oldirtywick@aol.com
Bouncy Rock
The Citadel

Also, a known and corrected for future/final release versions issue is the enter scripts sometimes fail to fire if you enter an area with a companion. So if you're playing 3.0 try and enter all areas with the PC character and not a companion or weirdness may result (in which case you can probably exit/reenter using the PC).

It's fixed though, so no worries.

Anyway, I've been meaning to write a more substantial blog entery for quite a while, so here are my overall impression of my own mod, after playing through it with a Warlock from Ch 1 and a Druid from Ch 2:

The combat isn't really easy at many points, and pretty difficult at others even for the guy who made it, but never impossible; most notably the beetles in the catacombs, a certain thieves ambush, Deadwood, the city attack, and the final siege. The warlock had a harder time than the druid combat wise even though the druid was noticebly more poorly equipped just using a character builder, but the lack of speech skills makes avoiding/getting desired non combat results from quests more difficult. Elephant hide is almost as overpowered as Chilling Tentacles, one you can get from like level 6 and the other at like 11 though. People who don't like difficult combat are not going to like this mod at points. Hopefully the rest will make up for that for them, otherwise it is what it is.

It took me 22 hours to finish Chapter 2, and I know the most efficient routes for doing quests and my warlock had Flee the Scene in the city and Warlock Buddy. But I'm also a bit OCD about inventory management and hot buttons and all that, I like to have everything just so, so I adjust things frequently. So it's really long either way. Also there's a slew of other quests if you do things differently. How much content? I have no idea, probably at least 25 hours for the average guy on one play through for Ch 2 and at least 8 for Ch 1. That's over 30 for the whole campaign, easily.

I think if you just follow the flow of the quests starting with the House Locke quests you can get most of the sidequests. Some of them maybe not, but they're mostly marked with map pins and it's a matter of tracking down the right NPC or saying the right thing, there's nothing really hidden except for the easter egg item hunt; I put 15 items in the mod that are essentially worthless unless you find the right NPC who wanst them. You'll have to look for them. I wanted to do more but it's pretty tiresome actually.

There's a lot of loot, you'll probably be decked out. Thing is, a lot of it is situational and not super good. You won't be wearing +3 of much, there's maybe three +3 items and you can't get them all (I think a +3 STR belt, a +3 heavy shield, and a +3 chainmail is all). The rest is +1-+2 with some special powers or bonuses, there's also a lot of scrolls and wands to find. There's also a huge variety of items in the random loot and stores, so you probably won't be able to afford everything you want; also because of the combat challenge your companions will need some gear as well, hand me downs probably won't cut it for the most part. I'm going to exploit this, as most of the items are X/day or X/charges per use, so in Ch 3 there will be almost no stores and you'll need that stuff to get from one point to the next.

I went from level 8-11 in both play throughs. So the starting level for Ch 2 will be 7-9 and ending 10-12. That's not a bad spread, you get to spend a lot of time on levels where your character has a lot of options.

Alright, so that's what I got out of it, biased towards awesome as I am.

Beta Is Up

2008-09-19T21:48:00.003-05:00

Though I haven't finished my two ongoing play throughs, figure it's a weekend and what the hell. The full beta is now up. Contact me at one of three places if you want in:

My email: oldirtywick@aol.com
Bouncy Rock
The Citadel

From there I'll supply you a link and you're off. Of course, by downloading said you file you're implicitly agreeing to actually provide feedback and not just burn your weekend. If you want to do that, may I recommend frisbee golf?

Thanks everyone.

Ingdal's Arm Siege

2008-09-14T01:52:00.003-05:00

Alright, so basically where I stand now fifty scripts later is the siege mechanics done and working, and the balance is getting there (it's really not easy!). The area is almost complete, meaning I have placeholder conversations and cutscenes but the texturing/placeables/whatnot is done and the bad guys after yelling "Test!" come to get you, then their boss's henchmen, then the boss himself. That's a huge bulk of it finished, and it was a phenomenal pain in the ass. That said, check out some screens:

I expect to have this last little bit done by tomorrow or Monday; it's just a few bark convos and a handful of cutscenes; frankly after how taxing scripting the damn thing was this will be easy. After which time I'll take a test run to make sure everything is working, upload it for testing and post the link liberally, and work on the finish touches (custom load screens are sounding like a huge hassle I really don't want to deal with right now, but that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about when I say finishing touches) as the bug reports roll in. Maybe it'll be on the Vault as early as next week. How exciting is that?

I had a comment from last blog (you guys don't like screenshots? Almost nobody said nothing! If a picture is worth 1000 words, I wrote 13000 words last blog!) from jameso asking me if after my break the mod got any bigger. I'm not really sure what s/he meant by bigger (what, like in file size? scope? which break?) but I'm going to guess in scope, so here's the deal:

When I plotted this joint out last year, I had it loosely planned out by chapter. Considering I didn't really know what I was doing at the time, it was all loose guesses and I stuck with it as well as I could. The first chapter, though shoddy and weak in comparison in my opinion to this second one, I broke where I wanted to. Here, however, it's another story. It was supposed to be longer than it is now as far as the storyline, but I went a little (lot) overboard with the sidequests in the city; there's just a ton to do there. It kind of ate up my energy and was taking way too long (and there's a lot left to do), and so I cut it short.

Then I was set to cut it off at the end of the city, but that was a bad ending to the mod so I tacked this siege battle on at the end instead. I decided to do that after my last vacation; so yeah, it's bigger than it is but smaller than what it is, if you follow me. This extra siege will probably take 30-45 minutes and I doubt anyone will get it on their first try, because it'll probably kick your ass. But you probably won't find anything like it in a single player mod for a while (hopefully, got to have something, right?), so I think it was worth the effort.

I don't know if that answers your question or not. If it was about file size, yeah it's another 50MB. There's about 600MB worth of mod, cleaned up the item override to about 600MB and the hak is 800MB. Once it's all zipped up and whatnot it's like a 300MB download, which is big but this mod is like 30-40 hours long; there's like 70 areas. Haven't timed it yet, but it's around there.

So, there you go. Thanks for giving me something to ramble about.

Alright, then, ah, keep an eye out for the final beta within the next week or so.

More Update Type Whatever

2008-09-08T12:12:00.002-05:00

Tick, tock

2008-09-02T17:40:00.002-05:00

Hmmm, where do I begin today? It's been a very busy NWN2 related week. I guess chronologically? Why not.

Those are a few screens from the "evil ending" area. It's basically serving as a cutscene area. Pick the evil path, do it, go there, game over. So the evil ending is completely finished, and go me.

So, we need a "good ending" a.k.a. continue the mod. So I've begun that. Basically I'm going for a go to this area and defend a fort from a horde of demons and such. So in order to do that, I needed formations, arrow towers, catapult towers, etc. and an AI that chooses targets and attacks the towers and defenders. Basically what's going to happen is the assault is going to come in waves of 5, I don't know, squads at a time around the fort, and try and kill the commander. You have to defend the commander and suvive the waves...then something else you'll have to do that I haven't decided yet. Then the mod ends after a suitably epic battle.

Yeah, sounds like a big project, right? Well, it is. But I've made a lot of progress, highlighted in these screens:

Look, they move as a unit, see? They're in a "loose" formation there, but their formations change as they progress through the fort.

Oh, look, they knocked down the gate. Cool. See, they'll react accordingly based upon what's around them. If a gate blocks their path, they'll knock it down. If they're being fired upon by an archer's tower, they'll try to destroy it. If they see a defender, they'll try and kill it. All as a unit. Until the leader is killed, then they gain their own AI and act as individuals.

You can also see the catapult firing in the distance.

A dead archer's tower. There's three types of towers, archer, scorpion, and catapult. The catapults fire arrows at nearby enemies, and long range catapult shots at locations and they take a while to get there, but pack a punch, but they can't shoot things with catapult shots that are too close. The catapult shots are indiscriminate, though, so don't get too close. The scorpion chooses a single target at a pretty far range and fires a bunch of extremely accurate arrows. The archer tower chooses up to three targets and fires arrows at each.

Just an arrow/catapult shot, and a shot of the guys assaulting a tent. There's arrows flying everywhere when this sequence is running.

Tents serve as respawn points for the defenders (since you don't want too many objects fighting at once, you see. Kind of lame but the lag is a real issue.), spawing troops as they die. Those are targetted also by the attackers. There's several throughout the camp, so you'll want to defend those so they can distract the attackers from taking down the towers. Once those are gone, it's a leisurely stroll up to the commander.

Finally, I'm helping a bit with Misery Stone, found here. You know those fancy new models? The awesome looking areas? Custom music? I'm not doing any of that. I'm scripting a single encounter that needs a special AI.

That's it.

I'm Back

2008-08-24T13:11:00.002-05:00

And I have been for a few days, and frankly I thought you guys deserved an update at that point. And I would have, but it seems I'm fresh out of laundry and unpacking jokes. This, though, I can show you:

The area looks a little different than in those screens, because I populated with NPCs and did all the scripting for it and whatever. Additionally, I've finished up a few other things, which puts me precisely _____ far away from release. I'm really close is basically the, ah, main point I'm making here.

This area is a little superflouous to the mod. There's a few things I decided to move to it instead of somewhere else simply because I made it. It's more of a...hallway. Like say you have two rooms which both have something going on in them. You've got to connect the rooms. Well, you don't have to, could just jump between the rooms, but that's stupid. So my link to the next mod as it stood was stupid by association. This area is pretty much a fancy hallway is the, ah, theme here.

Also, check this out by clicking this link. You should, you know, try and do it. I'm going to.

So anyway, the vacation was good. Went to Disney, dodged a hurricane, came back here. Now I'm in the drivers seat, freshly rested, and motivated to get done. And on that note, it's back to the toolset.

Ran out of Time

2008-08-01T20:09:00.002-05:00

That's it, my wife is coming even earlier than expected: tomorrow.

So I'm out.

Anyway, I got pretty far, far enough to test some stuff if that's what you all want to do. If you're already down with me for that, I'm uploading a new one. If you want to get down, you'll have to get at me before tomorrow morning or you're at the mercey of whenever I feel like getting at you.

Take care, see you all in a few.

A Couple of Days

2008-07-29T14:43:00.002-05:00

It's the 29th today. Should be seeing my wife on the 3rd or so. Apparently it can be quite a process to make it to here from across the world. I don't remember it being that difficult when I came back from deployment. Basically I showed up at the airport in Bagram, Afghanistan, got on a flight and left. Of course, I took a three week detour in Germany, then went to Qatar for a few hours, then left.

See, when you're deployed, you don't pay taxes. So I jerked around for the better part of a month until the 30th on "official" business, went to Qatar for a few hours until the 1st of the month, then left 5 minutes later, netting me a whole month of tax free pay.

So yeah, I kind of scammed you tax payers. My bad.

Now here's something that's always kind of gotten me. Alright, so if you can travel the world in 24 hours, and if you're always going backwards through the time zones, is it the same day when you get back to where you start? You know what I'm saying? Because if you leave like Atlanta at 4, and travel 4 hours to Los Angeles, it'll still be 4 o'clock when you get there, which is kind of weird. So I figure if you leave Atlanta at 4, travel around the world in 24 hours, it'll be 4 in Atlanta. But will it be the same day?

Because Superman may have been right in Superman 2 when he spun the world backwards to reverse time if that's the case. Because if it works that way, you could travel around the world really fast, and get off of a plane like 50 years later and be really old, but it's still the same day! Weird, right? Of course, you'd probably be an idiot for doing that, unless like you really, really need to grow a long, white beard for some reason.

I don't think it works that way though. It's probably the same time the next day, which really offers you no time travel advantages.

So, with all that in mind, I'm going to completely switch topics. The "good" path for the main quest in the city is completely done, and the "bad" quest has a small section to add. I could be done with it tonight if I don't decide to play Civ 4 instead, which is looking likely.

So what does that mean? I'm probably not going to be done in a few days if I do my list and extras. I could just finish up the "bad" way and call it a day, but I'm not going to do that. Probably won't get a good test in that way either, and frankly the section can be failure prone and I'm doing a lot of new things I haven't tested past my computer (which, I learned from Ch 1, doesn't mean it works everywhere. This engine is...not so good I think). I built in some fool proof stuff that's a little cheesy in case it does and all of the journal entries fire regardless instead of being planted into the cutscene, so even if it fails you can still continue. Do you know how hard it is to start a cutscene in the middle of a battle? I've pulled out some stuff, but Chain Lightning, Weird, Circle of Death and a few other spells have a propensity to fail it for some reason...a lot of stupid delays in the damage scripts I think that keeps the player in a combat state despite scripts to clear that state. It's only a handful of classes that can cast these spells, and they may be beyond the level range of the mod, but better to be safe. So I leave them immortal, change their faction instead of dying, so you can talk to them instead of the death script failing and you being stuck, which is corny but a middle ground.

But it's good progress, the end is near.

Anyway, since I won't make my deadline I'll just wait and add another small section like I was talking about and do my list of extras. It's really not much, but with 4 days left, it's not going to happen. Plus there's been some new mods out so it's all good, right?

How many text tags can exist at once?

2008-07-21T21:46:00.002-05:00

That's five.

Well, anyway, after pulling my hair out for the better part of the week, I've finally made some progress. As many of you know, or not depending on if you've been paying attention (and really, the literacy rates these days...) I'm on the last leg of the journey that is building a mod too big for one person to build. I expect to have the critical paths "done" by the end of the week. That is, if things go differently than they did this week. Because it was a huge pain the ass.

But, y'all cats will see why. You're going to trip.

In retrospect, I think I'm doing it the stupid way. The final (not really, I'll come back to that) quests of the mod modify the mod so much that I should have just made another mod with duplicate areas and just filled it in. Now I'm paiting hundreds of waypoints and spawning and deleting stuff every other cutscene. But screw it, it's already mostly done.

It's pretty wild though. Hopefully it doesn't suck because getting the thing to work properly has been a huge hassle.

Anyway, now back to what I was talking about two paragraphs ago, the "final" quest. See, the thing is, the city portion is open ended, so you don't necessarily have to do that one last, and when it's done you can keep going with sidequests. What I'm concerned about now is whether that's a sufficient "ending" to the module. There's two quest chains that are required to proceed to the third, and currently non-existant, chapter. So you could do those two first (well, probably not because you'll need a level or two and some gear to have a shot I think), and then do sidequests until it's done, which I don't think is a very satisifying ending.

So I was thinking about adding on the beginning of Chapter 3 as the ending of Chapter 2 instead, so at least it doesn't end on a diretionless sidequest frenzy. What do you all think?

Thing about that is, I got my wife's leave date, the 2nd of August. Which is great for the family here, but not so great for you all. I was originally projected to be the 7th. So I basically lost a week of time to finish this.

So bearing in mind that if I add an extra chunk, it probably wouldn't be out until September. I could probably get that done before she comes, but my list of "extras" wouldn't make the cut, which I want to do at least some of them.

I guess we'll see how much time I have left later this week and take it from there.

But what do you all think? Weird non-ending now, or a month delay for another 15-20 minutes for a better ending?

Vacation != Me

2008-07-14T01:31:00.003-05:00

A little comparison operator humor in the title. Could be my lamest joke to date. Determing that may be my next poll.

In any case I'm back, fully fingered, mostly because I didn't actually light any fireworks this year, with the rest of that because being I'm not an idiot. See, last few years the cops have been hammering down on illegal fireworks, and in Wisconsin the legal ones basically are either snakes, sparklers, marigolds (kind of like sparklers, used to light better fireworks mostly), and 3 inch tall fountains.

So there's really no point in even bothering with that, I'm not going to lower myself to lighting sparklers just for the sake of lighting fireworks. I like to think I'm a better man than that. A man who appreciates a good mortar or finding a dud from the 4th on the beach and throwing it into a campfire.

Speaking of Wisconsin, and again bringing up brats, where I'm from there we have a brat fry basically every Sunday year round. Not "we" as in my family, but like going to the parking lot of basically any business establishment anywhere and finding a group of people cooking brats. Which nobody else in the country does, and I find that bizarre. I mean, they're good as hell and an any time of day type meal. Although here in Tennessee, they seem to like to sell either pit bulls or shoes in all of the parking lots. I'll leave that to you to decide which is better (hint: a brat fry).

I also managed to golf for the second time this year, which was a lot of fun. Not that I'm any good at it, ignoring that I did hit this beautiful 250 yard drive that split the fairway. I'm almost at the point where I can hit the ball every time without messing up and rolling it 50 feet because I topped it, but not quite past hitting 3-4 putts every hole.

In any case, I got back a few days ago, and rather than putting up a blog post like all "I'm back" and then talking about nonsense and then people are like "welcome back I guess" or "I like your blog follow this link to some kind of money scam I can't read because the site's in Spanish", I waited a few days so I could say something about my NWN2 campaign. Yeah I know, even I forget sometimes that's what this blog is really about.

Anyway, I've now finished all of the noble house quests, which basically leaves the last section of the main quest and I'm, more or less, done. I have a list of "extras" I want to add, like more companion interjections, some item hunt crap, maybe a pick pocket system and some consequence encounters from how you treat NPCs, but none of that is really critical and I'll do it as long as time permits. Because my wife is coming back for 18 days from Iraq in August, and this WILL be on the Vault before then (thank you again to everyone who's tested throughout, it's really because of that I can pop it out a week or two after the content is done). How much extra is directly related to how much time I have left after finishing the main quest.

Which should be quite a bit, even with an alternate "evil" ending I'm adding. There's one, possibly two areas to build depending on how far I want to take the main quest sequence, but most of it is spawning things and a few cutscenes, I expect to be "done" by the end of this week if things go well.

So that's pretty much that.

Really Late EDIT!!!!

I almost forgot about this.

So anway, I usually have a TV series I like to kick back and watch from time to time. Having seen Oz, Rome, Deadwood, The Shield, and waiting on The Wire, I'm in between shows now. I remember when I was a bit younger, they used to play anime on the Sci Fi channel Saturday mornings, so I've seen like a handful of them. I always thought they were kind of cool, but I don't even know what's good and what's not besides Ninja Scroll.

So I went on a little digging expedition to see what's what, and here's what I came up with. If you all have seen these joints, let me know what's good:

Boogiepop Phantom: The name is awful in pretty much every way imagineable, but these Japanese, evidenced by their RPGs, wouldn't know something cool if I kicked them in their collective asses (still mad I haven't gotten a letter from them like all: Hey Dirty, you're cool!"). It's supposed to be some Twilight Zone type horror stuff, though.

Elfen Lied: Another awfully named horror type joint. Not sure who exactly Elfen is, but he (or she, it's a bit androgenous) is apparently full of it. Um, not sure what to say here. There's a half naked broad on the box?

Gantz: See what I'm saying? Boogiepop, Elfen, Gantz, it's like they pulled their titles out of a Shining Force game. This is supposed to be like ultra nasty horror/action, which works for me. One of the things I discovered about anime is that they are big on using all of their blood red colored ink.

Gungrave: Well, this one comes in a blood red cube instead of a box, which again attests that they Japanese really like their cartoons bloody, or just have an affinity towards red. This one is about a guy that comes back from the dead to kill, which is awesome. However, they kind of dropped the ball by naming the hero "Brandon" instead of "John H. Gungrave" or something like that.

Hellsing: Well, this has nothing to do with Hugh Jackman, Andrew Jackson, Action Jackson, nor "Downtown" Willie Brown, though those last three may come as no surprise. Pretty similar though, guy fights vampires and whatnot. Looks a bit dull, but who knows?

Noir: This looks a little on the artsy side to me, but there's supposed to be a lot of killing popping off. Whatever, I don't know.

Serial Experiments Lain: Again awfully titled. Also about a 13 year old girl. However, it's supposed to be more horror themed and weird, which could be fun. What can I say, the Japanese even like their animated horror stars young. And there's also probably a lot of blood and other weird crap.

So, any input? I know somebody who reads this likes anime, don't be shy now.

Vacation

2008-06-28T20:30:00.002-05:00

I'm going to visit the family over the 4th, so I'll be out for the next week and a half.

Alright, that's all.

4 To Go

2008-06-26T12:14:00.002-05:00

The other day at my daughter's gymnastics class, which I don't participate in leaving me a good chunk of time to sit around and do nothing in a building that's not my house, I picked up this magazine they have. One of the things I like about my dentist is that he has Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine; I'm not a real big sports fan, but it beats the hell out of Ebony or Redbook or the other BS that's at the gymnastics place. But I did check out this Entrepreneur (or something like that) magazine, which had Mark Ecko on the cover. Apparently the dude is a billionaire.

Then it occured to me that I don't have any of his clothes in my wardrobe, which, you'll note from earlier I have about an hour to kill with little to do, got me thinking why I don't, you'd, or perhaps I'd, think I'd like those kind of clothes being a big hip hop fan and all. But I don't really get in to those stupid urban/rapper clothing lines that much. And I figured out why: Most of these rappers look like they raided their grandma's old clothes box.

Seriously, look at these guys. I guess the last thing I want to do is take fashion advice from guys who wear diamond earrings the size of a marble, shiny tennis bracelets, and fur coats (dude, my mom wants a fur coat).

I do want to know how they keep their hats on, but can never keep on their shirts, or some kind of half-shirts like they couldn't decide what goes where even if it looks a little suggestive in a bad way.

Also, here's a hilariously misleading condom ad.

But on to the update:

Those are two areas I did this week to further the noble house quests. As the title suggests, only 4 more quests to go, then the two final stages of the main quest and that about does it. Getting very close now, and not much to talk about, hence my tirade above and below.

Now, more Baldur's Gate:

Last time, I had just left the prologue on my quest to find out why people are trying to kill me and succeeding in killing Gorion. Turns out this involves a lot of walking and stumbling in to things. Since the only thing I know about so far is a pile of loot to the north I can steal from Gorion's corpse, that's the first stop:

Then I stumbled into more things, like these guys:

Meet Xzar and Monteron, two mildly annoying guys. One is near worthless in battle, the other when scripted tries to hide in shadows constantly instead of moving to his waypoint (also, the pathing in this game is terrible, again I'll chalk that up to age because the logarithms used today may not have even existed or been too costly to use). Anyway, didn't know this when I said it's cool to come along, plus a full party is better than nothing.

Anyway, I told them I had to go north to the Friendly Arms Inn to meet some friends instead of going south to Nakresh like they want to. Hopefully, I thought to myself, I will find some sidequests and and a CGI(?) cutscene. And I wasn't disappointed.

After arriving in town and being nearly murdered again, I found some more friends, Jaheira and Khalid:

I'm assuming because there is no more space for companions, that I have a full party. That means sidequest time. The first one I found was from what appears to be a completely nude woman who lost her ring.

Obviously I accepted, as it seems simple enough and I haven't seen a game yet that punishes you for taking quests, often puzzling why a "no" option even exists because you can just ignore them anyway (luckily, many BG quests you just get from talking to a guy...but you can ignore them.) I did that, killed the hobgoblin who had the ring, but his corpse was sort of behind a tree so I didn't notice it and continued north thinking it was up there, where I found a whole new batch of sidequests, including some bandits who you literally scalp, which is kind of nasty.

I don't know why an innkeeper would want to buy a dead guy's filthy bandit hair, but I don't ask those questions.

A little further north I found a farmer who's son is missing, which I'm supposed to find. After a very brief time looking, I ran into one of these things.

Notice my party is a little smaller? Yeah, that's because these things can literally explode your guys into a spray of body parts. They don't just regular kill them. It lead to this screen:

That's my hand melting away.

So after a reload, I did manage to win but lost most of my party again. I just wanted to see if I could do it.

But, after careful consideration, I decided I'm in the wrong area because these things are a little strong for a level 1 party; even Xzar with his 4 hit points and no offensive damaging spells was having trouble. I think that's why he bothered me to go south to Narakesh. He was punished for it, because I'm evil:

I made him wear a belt that made him a woman. Then Jaheira started bugging me too about going there, and so did my journal:

Most of the quests end in "by the way, maybe we should go south to Narakesh?" So I caved in, lacking another gender bending belt.

And here I am at level 2:

Baldur's Gate

2008-06-21T03:31:00.003-05:00

First of all, I've got your Subtlety of Thay needs covered here. So don't even trip on that. I guess I should lightly touch on the poll options: You all suck. Not much support for neither the Wild West or Kung Fu. That's cool though.

See for my next project, during my break between Ch 2 and possibly continuing, which I'll probably pick it back up one day but I need to switch gears for a bit, I was puzzling out what exactly I wanted to do. I had an idea similar to Seekers where there would be a central "hub" level, and you could go open portals or something to unrelated, random plots in an effort to get out of the "hub", but since that's pretty much been done by Seekers, and nobody really seems to appreciate the brilliance in such an idea, I'm going to go ahead and take a pass.

My other idea was to put something in the Chult area, because jungles and such haven't really been done outside of Tomoachan, but the new expansion pack seems to have that covered really well. However, I thought they didn't really do justice to Thay in MotB (yeah, the Red Wizards are good natured...kind of forgot to put the evil ones in there...), so maybe they won't make jungles cool?

Nah, it'll probably be pretty dope, and there will probably be a lot of cool jungle themed stuff too.

But, that leaves me with my last idea, which I'm not going to go into other than it's going to have a mild Wild West theme to it. Could have been Wild West/Kung Fu! But you all messed that up. For shame.

Nah, I'm not mad. Kung Fu wouldn't have been that great because you can't really go Shadowboxing vs. Crane style when everyone's a monk with 3 animations. Plus there's no David Carradine head model. But there's definately going to be some Wild West overtones happening, and it's definately going to be a lot smaller a project than this one.

In any case, I was talking about how I got GameTap and downloaded Baldur's Gate. Well, I tried it with a character and realized I really had no idea how the AD&D ruleset worked and didn't like my poorly statted multi-class Fighter/Mage because I saw everyone gain levels while my character was still level 1, a few thousand XP away from level 2, and with 6 hit points, so I started over. But this time, I documented it.

So, let's go!

In any case, from my previous run through I just know that resting is a MFer without healing spells, and to avoid dealing with it I'll just play a cleric. I know they need Wisdom, but I basically hit reroll until I ended up with pretty high numbers across the board since I have no idea what the numbers actually do.

It kind of makes me wonder with all the hating on 4E, did the same thing happen when they went from AD&D to 3E? Because this is kind of insane, and the lack of explanations in the game didn't help matters.

So anyway, with that in mind I chose the first portrait I saw, and since he doesn't really look like that nice of a guy and more like that giant from Fearless, so he's definately evil, nearly as big, but probably not nearly as strong. After all the other things I filled in that I didn't know what they were, I got to the name.

Allow me to introduce you to "Crazy Legs" O'Hooly, only named so because O'Flannigan and O'Hoolie were too long, but dropping the "" around Crazy Legs would have just been silly.

So, off we went to the Inn. After freaking out (I'm evil, remember?) at the Inn Keeper about his lame joke, he didn't want to talk to me anymore. Until seconds later when I clicked him again and checked out the inventory. Couldn't afford any good armor and have enough left over for a weapon, so I left to go get some more money. That means random tasks for strangers, folks! Because I can't pick locks and depsite my gigantic size have trouble cracking open drawers and chests. Need a rogue. Or is it thief?

I did a few like finding a book in cow feed, delivering a sword pretending like I didn't steal it and intend to sell it, until I found this gem: The combat simulator 3000. It's cool, because basically this guys summons opposition, except they can't hurt you. So what did I do? Summoned as many guys as I could!

Then I tried to unequip everyone's stuff and give it to my character, but when they dump you out of that area they take all your stuff. Touche Bioware, touche.

Anyway, I also found this quest:

You all see that I got the Rat highlighted? A rat in the cellar quest? Are you kidding me?

I think I'm going to give them a pass though. Could very well be that this game is old enough to be the origin of the rat in the cellar level 1 quest cliche. I didn't let it bother me and killed the rats.

So finally I had enough money to buy some stuff and headed over to the Inn. Got tore up from the floor up (sorry I can't think of anything that works with geared up. Geared up to the weird up? I don't know.) and split, ready to find Gorion. Told him yeah, I'm ready to go. Then he died.

Then I met Imoen, who seems a bit perky (and really, her portrait doesn't look like a young kid like the game says she is, or is that just me? And does she call you gay when you select her?) for an evil giant to be kicking it with, but I'm not walking around alone and somebody needs to break into cabinets for me.

And that's the end of today's Baldur's Gate. Next time, walking around the woods, seeing graphics glitches, and possibly several ambushes as I attempt to rest.

The Last House is Done

2008-06-15T23:57:00.002-05:00

And it couldn't have come at a better time. Nothing particularly special about the time that it did other than I made what seems like dozens of dozens of bedrooms. Let me tell you, where there's only like 4 beds that looks nice, a handful of rugs, and a few cabinets, making bedrooms that look distinct from one another can prove difficult. And tiresome, for that matter.

But it's over, and I feel good. Want to see some screens of the last one? No? Well you're going to have to if you want to read the rest of this post, because I'm embedding them below.

And that's that. Next, I really need to sit down and figure out exactly how I want this to play out. I don't want it to feel thrown together, but rather a (limited, I'm not that smart) intricate plot that when you piece it together you're like "oh!", from 6 different points of view. I'll probably take a few minutes tomorrow to do that in between my nap and my post nap rest. Taking a nap can be tiring, I'm almost 26.

But yeah, that's where I'm at. I hope, by the end of the month, to be done with the noble houses, take my 4th of July break for a week or so, and wrap this thing up by mid-July. I was pretty close with the June ball park figure all those months ago. I'm a little peeved that I didn't make it, but that's life. I just don't think I can put the quality I want down on these last parts in two weeks. I can get quite a bit more done in another two weeks; it doesn't seem like much time, but for real, I spend at least 40 hours a week working on this. Another 80 hours is a lot of time.

But anyway, that's all I got. No off topic stuff this week, other than today I got GameTap and will finally play Baldur's Gate for the first time. I have no expectations of it, other than people talk about it like it's the next coming of Christ. That's an achievable standard I think. Dude was only a carpenter, right? Big deal, I built a shelf in 6th grade wood shop.

So if Baldur's Gate doesn't build me a shelf, I'm going to be pissed.

Little bit of whatever

2008-06-10T11:20:00.004-05:00

Well, the first thing we should do here is get the NWN2 news out of the way. I finished another noble house in it's entirety; I actually decided to do the NPCs and conversations before taking the screenshots, so check them out:

You know, I think my mouse is taking a crap. It's randomly double clicking when I want to single click, which aside from being mildly annoying, makes me click things I don't want to, sometimes detrimentally. Well, detrimentally as far as things on your personal computer go, it's not like I'm going to launch a nuke or something. Although having that kind of access would probably mean having a really high tech mouse instead of the one I have now, which is pretty normal, although there are two extra buttons on the side! But those go either back or forward in IE, which means sometimes I grab the mouse after writing out a long post on a forum or something and accidentally press the back button, which is possibly more annoying than random double clicking. Come to think of it, I kind of hate this mouse!

Regardless of all that, there's only one noble house left to build, then it's quest time! And finishing the mod time! And fixing bugs. That last one doesn't deserve an exclamation point!

So, yeah, that's progress.

Now I know rap isn't very popular in the cRPG circle (what do you all listen to? Queen or some stuff I'm guessing?), go listen to this first track on this mixtape, you'll like it:

Click it

Finally, I took some time this weekend to play a classic: Dominions 3. I'm probably going to be writing a guide over at their forums over the next week to one of the nations in it. I wrote a few like a year or two ago when I was waiting for NWN2 to come out, and I picked it up this weekend and thought I should write another one.

Anyway, I highly recommend the game.

What else is going on? In an ultimate display of hilarity (no offense guys! I didn't do this to you, remember that!), Obsidian annouces a new expansion around the same time Mysteries of Westgate gets delayed for the...well I lost count, it's been almost a year since it was annoucned as "done". Now begins the race to which will be released first. Honestly, my money would be on Storm of Zehir, despite it's really stupid "this is obviously fantasy" name. Apparently, though, you can bet on professional curling, arm wrestling, and tug of war but not Neverwinter Nights. So my actual money isn't actually on anything.

Anyway, I'm just saying it's getting to the point where it's more of a joke than something I'm actively anticipating. I mean, what do you want me to say though? Sorry guys, I'd say I feel bad, but didn't Atari screw you over with Darkness Over Daggerford?

Oh well, life goes on. I kind of feel bad contributing to the negativity surrounding the whole Mysteries of Westgate fiasco. Being a video game fan, a rap fan, and a Family Guy fan (which all of the sudden they went from brilliant to sucks? What?), I can't even say how often you go to find some info about something you like and all you hear are haters floating around with diss posts on the net about it.

I guess I just turned into one of them! Crap.

...so it's going to have to be me? Really? Well, alright!

2008-06-03T00:36:00.003-05:00

You know, I was really hoping somebody would address this so I wouldn't have to besides a silent nod, which nobody would actually see, but I assure you would actually take place. I could probably find a .gif of somebody nodding, probably even Captain Picard (he seems to be in a lot of .gifs) but I'd first look for Rambo (but I'm not sure if he silently nodded in any movies, haven't seen the new one though, plenty of silent grimaces (and what was the point of the McDonald's guy Grimace? Did he have any powers?)), and we could work something out.

But first, let's take a look at some screens:

I'm getting in a bad habit of putting these up before they are populated. Anyway, this another of the noble houses, leaving only 2 left once I've populated this one, so I should be working on the next one later this week. Of course, populating them includes putting in NPCs to do things and their "player has no quests here" conversations should somebody curious walk into one of those areas with no purpose, so it's not as simple as slapping down some NPCs and an enter script to do the random ones. But it won't be so bad, either, because those conversations tend to be short.

Anyway, I'm taking a leisurely pace here. It is my projected release month, but I'm pretty close and the ongoing testing helps. Maybe I'll make it, maybe I won't, but it'll be very close, surprisingly because it was, at the time, just a guess. I really like June, my birthday is this month and so is my wifes. It would be awesome to be done by the 4th though, so I could be done, go blow my fingers off with some drunken fireworks fun, and be healed enough to see my wife in August for the first time since September last year without having to think about how I'm not getting anything done.

In any case, the title and first paragraph need to be addressed. So, this is what I'm talking about:

Click here

I've been thinking about this like, how can I say this without sounding like a hater? How can I say this without seeming like a jerk for my involvement with the beholder and drider?

Well, the simple answer is I can't. But the fact is, and hopefully we all know this, is that these models should not be getting ratings this high, period. And hopefully both the people who voted, and the people involved with making them agree, because that would squash this potential beef. But if it has to be a beef, then that's what it is.

Seriously, these models are from an old game, and I say this without reservation, that is quite graphically challenged (is that the PC term these days for ugly?) The models were built with that in mind, not to detract from them because frankly they do look much better than the models that came with NWN. But honestly, this is the jump I'm talking about: NWN2 vs NWN. Again, not to detract because those heads linked look leagues better than both of the official content released with each respective game. No, the difference is NWN2 looks a lot better than NWN. Think about it, if I took that head pack and ported it over to NWN2 because of the elf head shortage...well I mean, what would you say? Would you put one of those on your PC?

And I can't really stress that this isn't a diss to anybody, but honestly my impression of the project is that it's a model placeholder project until better ones come out, people have something to work with. A good idea! But if you're not treating these for what they are, then it kind of does a disservice to those who are working on, what I'd consider, top quality models. There is a stark difference between the two you have to admit. Plus, do they even work properly?

What is it? Don't want to hurt somebody's feelings? Think they need the encouragement of high votes to continue? I really don't understand it. A respectable vote reflective on the content should be sufficient, and dare I say anyone who doesn't like it needs to buck up.

And I don't think I'm being unreasonable. Let me know if I am.

OK, now you can call me a hater.

Mass Effect, not much else

2008-05-29T22:48:00.003-05:00

The "keep me signed in" checkbox actually worked this time, which kind of threw me for a loop because I like to keep my annoyances consistant. If I can't sit down, hit the "sign in" button, and be annoyed when I have to input my information...well, what can you rely on these days?

So you'd better believe that www.blogger.com is going to be getting a nasty email!

Seriously though, having never worked in customer service in any capacity...I take that back, I did briefly work the front desk at Blockbuster video. Shortly after telling a late fee complainer, and you probably know the type, comes in there knowing they have a late fee and get all mad when you tell them they have a late fee and demanding you take it off, that the late fee stands and I don't care if they never come back because they don't pay their bill anyway I was relegated to changing the DVD books to the printed out Blockbuster blue and white ones for eight hours a day.

Oh, in case you were wondering and remember when blockbuster used to have blue and white cases, yes someone does them all by hand and each Tuesday they get the new releases in so they swap them in by the hundreds every week.

Anyway, besides never working in customer service aside from that time, it makes me curious what kind of insane complaints an internet based company recieves via email. I mean, I could take a guess, I've mailed a few dripping-with-sarcasm-thinly-veiled-threats-accusations-of-incompetance-sprinkling-of-F-words myself, but not everyone has such a way with words like one such as me do.

That said, one of the companies I wouldn't email this time around is Bioware. See, I sent my computer in to get some new parts, and it's working much better now thanks to a suggestion from my friend flem who you may, or may not, know from the comments section (in which case you don't, you should probably leave a comment. I get excited about spam down there, an actual person would be awesome! But you heartless google spiders don't care about me, do you?!) about a new power supply, the guy is on his stuff. Anyway, the two days being without my computer gave me some time for some personal reflection, and because that's boring and gay, I put in Mass Effect and finished it. I hadn't touched it since probably January, and surprisingly the controls came back pretty quickly and I was on it. And I was really close to being done with the game.

Anyway, I stick by my assertation that the game is awesome, probably among the best RPGs released in a while. I know the game has taken some heat from some cats who are perpetual haters of anything that was made after the millenium, but those are haters and that's what they do.

But regardless of them, Mass Effect has a lot going for it. Primarily, carrying a gauge that never runs out of ammo makes the FPS part a lot of fun. Call me primitave, but there's nothing better in an FPS than shooting someone in the face with a shotgun. I don't care what the game is, if it has a shotgun that's what I'm carrying. But for some reason, in most FPS games they're either really hard to find or the ammo for them is, which is ridiculous considering how abundant rockets are in them. But in Mass Effect, you never have to use anyting else.

The other thing that's great is the dialogue responses. I saw the early screens where you'd get to say "yeah!", "nah!", or "what?" on that little wheel...but peep this: that's not actually what the dude says. You'd choose "yeah!" and he'd be all "Hells yeah!" and blast somebody in the face with a shotgun. Or not, sometimes he said more, but you get the point. There are times that you may choose the wrong thing because of the shorted responses, but they're pretty few and far between. Also, the much lauded The Witcher pulled the same stunt and didn't catch any flak, so don't believe the non-hype.

Plus, there's a lot of choices you have to make. I don't know if the consequences actually matter in a way that's more than "wow, I sold that guy up the river" and I doubt that'll bite you in the end (but there are some involving your friends, life or death and suchlike), but just on an imaginative scale. That'doesn't really bother me because the last few at the end are pretty huge.

Anyway, it has a few weak spots like the Mako which really sucks to drive and try and shoot things with and the side quests, while interesting, basically take place in boring worlds and all of the building interiors are more or less the same, so it gets repetitive. But there's a good 20 hours of main quest awesomeness, which while probably not worth the $60 box price I paid for it, still worth playing.

But that's all I've got to say on that.

Anyway, I've begun to think about what I'm going to do next after I get Subtlety of Thay Ch 2 done. There's a few themes on the polls there, and since I'm in the forming the basics in my mind stage, thought I'd get some input. So vote! For the Wild West! A Wild West/Horror theme would be awesome!

Anyway, I'll be back soon. Going to pick up where I left off a few days ago now that my computer is up and running.

Some screenshots, Magibon, and...I don't even know, I'm still really confused.

2008-05-24T21:13:00.002-05:00

Well, let's get the screenshots out of the way. I've created a beholder's lair, that will also be filled with driders and a new, secret creature never before seen in a D&D game, so take a look:

Click here
Click here
Click here
Clikc here
Click here

Ha! Just messing with you. Those are just some screens of a regular house. You can see a couple of altars, to both Azuth and Velsharoon respectively. This is one of the noble houses, a house of mages. See, the Simbul doesn't take males or non-humans as apprentices, so I figured they'd need somewhere to go. Besides Thay.

Anyway, fun stuff.

Here's something else that's really weird. Normally I'm not one to surf YouTube all day, having being unenlightened enough not to understand the appeal of being "in" on the latest viral crazes out there whereupon I should note that I've never claimed to be more than an American who likes explosions and swear words, or perhaps even punching people who then explode while swearing. In any case I read about this broad on a different blog, so I'm covered there about being aware of this despite it's lack of exploding swear words. Her name is Magibon, and apparently the Japanese like to watch her videos by the millions. If you're not Japanese, you're understandably as confused as I am. Again, this goes right back to my question about what's the appeal, but I digress.

Go ahead and watch the video. I did. Look, this thing already has a few million hits, so your refusal (rightfully so) to watch it on the principal that it's probably pretty stupid is understandable, but it's way too late to do anything about it. Hop on in with us unwashed masses and be as confused as we are.

Nice and confused? Good. In addition to making me feel better (befuddlement loves company, or is that misery? Eh, either way) it should make you curious enough to learn more. That's how she gets you! But don't worry, you don't have to look any further than this site:

www.magibon.com

Alright, so you're probably even more confused now. That's good, I was too. It puts you in the proper state of mind to accept the reality of this situation:

I just killed you. My bad.

And I'm really sorry about that, but it had to be done. For your own protection! At least I didn't Rick Roll you. In my day that was goatse or tubgirl. This was when movies were scary and all that. Times have changed when this fluff hair fruit is considered to be more horrifying than a woman drinking her own enema. And trust me, once you see goatse it'll be burned into your mind, you won't be able to close your eyes without seeing it. Don't even try to find it if you haven't ever seen it. I've done enough to you by killing you, so try and enjoy your last week.

Anyway, it's really simple. Remember that M. Night Shamylianaire movie where you watch that video and then you get a phone call and a girl climbs out of your TV and you die for some reason, even though it's just a slow moving little girl who you could probably just like kick in the ribs while she slowly crawls at you in stop motion? Yeah, I know that movie wasn't very good, but neither was the one I just linked to you. See where I'm going with this?

And I'm really sorry about that. But just to be straight with you, you'll be getting a phone call pretty soon. Except nothing will happen when you pick it up, because this Magibon is just staring at the phone and blinking being all incapable of speech and whatnot. But you're just going to have to assume, like I did, that you'll die in seven days when you get that call, because of complicated logic, and possibly logistics, that I don't want to waste any more of your little remaining time on. Then basically you'll be doing something around a computer and your browser will go to YouTube, and she'll crawl out of the monitor and somehow you'll die. Brain frying confusion? That's all speculation at this point. But the one thing that is certain is your'e as good as dead, and it's my fault.

Or at least, that's the theory I'm running with.

I had a bad last few days!

2008-05-19T14:55:00.004-05:00

So I was thinking, you ever see old pictures? Portraits are probably even worse. Anyway, when you look at them like everyone in it is really pissed off. But you see pictures today, and people are usually happy and smiling, unless they're pissed off I suppose. I think there's two reasons for this. The first is the world has kind of gone soft. The US and Europe I think have kind of turned into the height of the Roman Empire, when they sat around covered in gold eating grapes being all fat, and then they got smashed by the barbarians. I know there's probably a lot of reasons for Rome's fall, but part of it is they turned into some wimps.

But, the other reason is because of the quality of dental care. Seriously. Having rotted out teeth that hurt all the time has to put you in a bad mood. And drinking whiskey all day doesn't help. For real, you tell a guy from 1800's, knowing he's been taking shots of whiskey since he woke up and knowing his teeth hurt really bad because they hadn't invented dental floss and they brush their teeth with a stick with grass tied to it, to sit in front of a camera for an hour because that's how long it takes to take a picture, that guy's not going to be too happy with you. The rest, as they say, is history.

How many wars could have been avoided with proper dental hygeine? I leave that for you to speculate in the comments section.

I know because I just came from the dentists office, again. It was supposed to be my last appointment for the year, but the company that makes the crowns messed up and sent the wrong color. As a smoker, who frankly doesn't take good care of his teeth (I'm using the grassy-stick no floss method in case you were wondering), what am I going to do with a bright white tooth? That doesn't mesh well with my smoke stained yellow ones I've got. Worst part is they didn't notice until after they removed the temp and gave me a shot. Now I have to go back again.

I'm telling you, the dentist is like the cops. Whenever you talk to them, it's never good news. Usually costs you a grip matter of fact. I can't even remember the last time I had an incident with the police, though. It's been years, probably when I got a ticket for lighting illegal fireworks around the fourth of July, which goes back to my point about being wimps. What kind of society doesn't like lighting off things that explode in your back yard while drinking beer? Screw baseball, that is the American pass time.

But whatever, that's not even it. My daughter had a ballet/tap dancing recital on Saturday, and that was a huge nightmare in the way that nothing went right. First, my camera had a dead battery (even though it spent all night on the charger. I think the "on" switch was in the "on" position when I put the battery in and it died before I got there), then someone stole her leotard (accidentally or not? Makes you wonder who has a grudge...) backstage and I spent much of the second act finding one. I ended up going up to the store that was selling the extra uniforms and taking one from them. After that, I was getting her dressed and the teacher thought it would be a good idea to place me in charge of the room of 5 and below kids. I'm talking about at least 50 kids in this little room that, for who knows what reason, was seemingly designed with the sole intent of echoing sound, highlighted by the little girls in their tap shoes insisting on kicking the sheet metal cover of the heater over, and over, and over...

So that was nice way to spend Saturday night. Especially after telling my wife the camera battery wasn't charged, which you can imagine she was thrilled about!

But you're here to read about Subtlety of Thay. Still working on it. Got some bug reports, trying to fix those and expand the content. I should have a new version up on the download site in a few days. Or not, I've been really unreliable lately about guesstimating things.

Oh, and you all have to read this:

Read it!

Mysteries of Westgate...what?

2008-05-12T16:06:00.002-05:00

I know, I know. I almost forgot about it myself. After the delays a few months back, and the delays after those, I kind of turned off my radar on that. But, the good news is they had a press release, or conference, or something, and the outcome of that is out:

Mysteries of Westgate Podcast-o-rama

Word on the street is a lot of community members were flown out there to attend, including Michelle aka Liso from NWN Podcast, and she picked up some good word on the ongoing trial that is the release of Mysteries of Westgate. I'm going to listen to it shortly myself, and you know how those Neverwinter Nights Podcast people do so it should be full of good information, so you might want to turn that radar back on until June-ish.

I've got to be honest though, much as I like some of these Ossian guys and would like to see them successful, the fact that they're locking the content is a huge turn-off to me. But on the other hand I almost felt bad for them with the flak they were taking on the forums about these delays, however when you're getting paid, well that's the cost to be the boss. The crown weighs heavy and all that.

Should be interesting to see how this all works out for everyone. But anyway, the point is listen to the podcast!

So what else is cracking? Not much, unfortunately. My daughter was sick all weekend, and if you know kids are then you know when they're sick you feel like the guy that had Quato is his gut from Total Recall. That must have been annoying.

But I'm back to work as of now, and have some catching up to do. Go listen.

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

2008-05-07T02:12:00.003-05:00

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:

Only 4% of you think I'm a jerk

2008-05-01T23:16:00.002-05:00

Which is good news, as far as I'm concerned. When I take my daughter to pre-school, I need to swipe her in using a card. There's a lady that works the computer there, takes payments, I guess clicks something when we swipe...I don't know, it looks like an easy job. Anyway, I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm a jerk. I just get that vibe. So I kind of act like a jerk to her, because I'm getting a "this guy's a jerk" vibe. So I don't really blame her, to be honest.

Anyway, good to see so many people replay these things. I do rarely myself. I wish there was more mods out there though, because I can't mess with the original NWN anymore, the UI is too awful in comparison (and you can't even mod it!) and the henchmen system...it's just a headache to try and play that. Maybe super story driven ones I might mess with because of the above the combat compared to NWN2 is too sucky, but I think I'm about done with that game. I did go through a massive "uninstall old games" thing the other day, but I left it on there. You never know.

What else? I watched Cloverfield the other day. My disclaimer here is simple: It was a bootleg. One of the perks, of the very, very few, of being (or in my case, having a wife) overseas is that those guys bootleg like a mug, you can get whatever for like $2. Alright, so that said, this bootleg wasn't a very good one...like seeing people stand up in the theater, hearing laughter, arabic subtitles, and worst of all terrible video quality. I mean, it's debatable...with the way that movie is, all from a camcorder point of view, perhaps a crappy bootleg made it a lot more "authentic" in that if you got stuck trying to escape from a giant monster in Manhatten and recorded the whole thing with a crappy camcorder what I saw is probably a lot more realistic of what the picture on the camcorder would look like than what you saw with a legit copy of the movie. The bad thing, though, is that with a movie like that, sharp picture quality is a plus because all I saw was blurry crap moving all over the place. I still have no idea what the monster looks like aside from it's big, dark, and blurry. Hopefully 10,000 BC will be better (oh, did I forget to mention they bootleg stuff before it's even in the theaters? Yeah, they've got that down to a science in the Middle East! I think 10,000 BC is in the theaters though, I'm just saying when I was over there I had Terminator 3 a few weeks early...)

Far as NWN2 goes, the big project I've been working on, Driders, is going to be both a playable race and a PRC for Drow. Gives you enough to work with where if you're playing a SP mod you can just pick up a full strength drider and have a super character from the beginning, but if you run a PW you can have a special "drider" "quest" (RP wise you probably don't want to become a drider, min/max wise they're better than any race if you can make it out of the +4 LA, you're going to have HP in the teens for a long time), give the transformation feat which changes your appearance, and take 10 levels of "Drider" and slowly earn your powers and stat adjustments with no LA. But that's all done and working as far as I can tell, probably have to tweak a few things later, so that's a big project out of the way.

Far as Subtelty of Thay is concerned, this kind of set me back a bit. However, I've done a lot of the scripting for the quests I was talking about last time, and have just a little bit to go in that regard and write a few non-quest conversations, then I'll build the quests. After that, on to other things.

Alright then.

Driders will be playable

2008-04-27T14:40:00.002-05:00

Alright, first off, my bad. This was my idea, reason being a drider doesn't require much scripting. It would have taken me ten minutes to do the driders for the latest modeling (or is it modelling?), and with all the work that Jonny was putting in over at Bouncy Rock...it didn't seem right that I didn't put some work in too.

So why am I apologizing? Well, it set my project back a few days.

But anyway, it's mostly done now. I need to tweak it a bit...but how? Want a hand in this? Go to the forums and let me know. I have to admit, as far as things like this go, I'm vaguely familiar with the rules. Or whether or not people even want to follow them to the letter. I'm thinking about how to do the most "usable" drider as a race for players. Let me know.

But yeah, that's about all I got for now. I'll post some screens up when the models are done of the thing in action.

Heat, and some screens.

2008-04-22T17:20:00.002-05:00

Well, the heat is officially here in Tennessee. For the last month or so it's been between the 50's and 80's (that's Farenheit, I calculated it out to something between 2 and 6 degrees for you Celsius users) so I was hesitating to break out the summer clothes and open the windows and all that because there's nothing fun about being caught with shorts and a wife beater when it's 50 (-8 C) outside, but I think this weekend is going to be the time to do that.

And you know what that means? I'm going to have to go through all my daugther's clothes from last year, filter out what doesn't fit anymore, and probably have to buy new clothes. Which, me being a dude and all, is not something I'm looking forward to. This is particularly difficult because I'm running low on the "reserves". For those of you who have kids, you'll know what I'm talking about, but for the benefit of those who are still able to go kick it on the weekends (even seeing a movie in the theater is a bit of an excerise with children...), basically what happens is when you have a kid, you get garbage bags full of old clothes from all of your relatives, probably last you until they're about 2. My daughter is really small for her age, so she can still fit in 2 year old clothes, but it's getting to that point where the reserves are gone and I'm going to have to buy like all new stuff. And I hate shopping for pretty much everything, even things I like I'm always in kind of a hurry to get out of the store.

The good news is I get to do yard work again, and see what plants I planted last year made it through the winter. Among the casualties are the palm tree, unfortunately. That thing is dead, like rotten wood dead, along with the rose bush. However, my strawberries actually spread and I'm counting around 30 strawberries will be ready in a few weeks, which is awesome. I'm not much of a gardener, but waking up and grabbing a fresh strawberry with my morning cigarette all summer sounds like I'll be living the high life. I'll just have to buy a robe and I'll feel like Hugh Heffner, except surrounded by strawberries instead of naked women.

Anyway, far as the mod is concerned, I have a ton (well, 9) of screens from the newest area (actually two areas, an upper level and it's upper level, and seperate basement), which you can find here. Here's a sample:

New graphics card looks hot, don't it?

Alright, so that's basically half of the two thieves guild, which is a fancy way of saying one of them. The other half (one) comes in two areas, but they're very small, and after that it's writing/scripting the quests involved. I anticipate to be done with those quests by the end of the week, and then I'll be on to the noble houses and the final parts of Chapter 2. So June is looking pretty good for the release.

I decided to change the ending a bit, though. Originally I was going to have like the biggest dungeon EVAR after the city, however I think that'll make up the bulk of Chapter 3 instead, for a few reasons. The biggest being my friend palafoxx is working on some custom content that probably won't be ready for a bit and I really want to use it, so to wait until it's done is the best course of action at this time. What I've got here is big enough to keep people busy for a bit, especially since most quests have different outcomes so you can play it a few times. Finally I want to focus more on a more frequent release schedule and smaller pieces instead of trying to do so much at one time. On that note, I've got some other things going on that are looking more interesting to me at this time (it's actually more like a great opportunity just fell into my lap!), and I've been looking forward to shifting gears a little for a while. More on that later when it's written in stone.

I know, I just spent a lot of words not saying a whole lot. But if you all know me by now, you know I don't give up or leave things half done, so a little faith and some patience and you'll see what's really good.

Peace.

Two Things!

2008-04-16T14:03:00.001-05:00

First, there's the update which you should read.

Then, there's this which I'm not sure if it's OK to laugh at but did anyway.

Good news and bad news? Or all good news? You decide.

Pretty Standard Update

2008-04-14T18:27:00.002-05:00

You know, I forget how many drivers you have to update when installing a new computer part. You never know what's going to go bad, even with something that seemingly has no effect on the other. For instance, after I installed the new graphics card, I had no sound and my wireless internet was dropping off constantly. I just reinstalled the same driver for the sound on my motherboard (thing is 5.1 surround sound out the box! Who'da thunk it?) and it turns out that when I had my computer put together like half a year ago they installed the wrong driver for my internet anyway.

But that didn't stop me from providing an update for you all. Two new areas, probably jam a few sidequests in it. There will be a clear reason to visit the area, but I'll probably throw a few "go here and do something" things in there as well as I "I don't like you, so die" option.

Now you're probably thinking what could you possibly be doing down there? Well I'm not going to tell you, other than these two are involved, if you play your cards right (or wrong as it were) you'll find out what happens when you apply both the vampire and half golem template to a second level fighter (it's not pretty!), and it's not what you think!

There a whole slew of screens here you can check out. Many of them are from the opening cutscene for the area where you walk in and get escorted back to the throne room to meet the resident, to simulate looking around at your surroundings. Some of it is kind of nasty stuff:

And it's still not what you think!

But anyway, it was kind of ridiculous. It literally took me four hours to get this thirty second cutscene working right, where the player follows an NPC through a hallway. I tried to do it the stupid way first because I thought it would be more efficient, and tried for several hours to make the stupid way work. Then I took fifteen minutes to do it the "right" way and another few minutes to tweak the delays on the camera.

But anyway, that's pretty much what's going on. More to do, more to do.

My Interview on NWN Podcast

2008-04-11T13:44:00.002-05:00

You can listen to it here if you're into that kind of thing. Now apparently because you head is full of bones and organs and such, your voice sounds differently to other people than yourself. I can't listen to it because of that. Like if I saw myself on the street I'd be all like "what's going on" and then when I walked away from myself I'd be all "man, I can't stand that guy." A lot of people do that anyway I'm sure, but I'm not used to hearing that from myself.

I'm kidding of course, I'm pretty awesome.

Anyway, I ordered the new graphics card as per flem's advice yesterday. I just got regular shipping and it's already in my city according to the tracking, which is insane because it's as fast to pay nothing than to pay like $20 for next day shipping, and I probably would have gotten it later if I had paid $3 for the three day shipping. That's not quite as insane as how many emails newegg sends you when you buy one of their products. I literally got seven emails sending me my receipt and tracking number in different graphic formats.

But yeah, good day today. I think I will eat Chinese food tonight to celebrate.

Sidequest in a Day

2008-04-10T10:38:00.002-05:00

That's how they all should go. Anyway, two days ago I uploaded the newest build for my epic (in length) beta which added one lengthy and one not so lengthy quest, eight areas ranging from small to medium in size, and a slew of bug fixes.

Anyway, after I did that I began to work on the next quest, which I finished completely yesterday from start to finish. Here's a screen of the area it uses:

They should all go that fast! So I'll be on the next one soon. In the meantime I'm going to dedicate a little time to testing The Red Prison, which should be on the vault shortly I think.

Well anyway, I downloaded a plugin for the first time since 1.03, thought I'd give them another shot. It's annoying when they break, however Powerbar was pretty useful at the time and it seems the author has kept updating it. The script search and rotating an area 90 degrees is pretty useful.

It also does a word count of everything you've written, including item descriptions! So here's a few numbers of what I've done to date:

Campaign Words: 78316
Chapter 1 Words: 73846
Chapter 2 Words: 198751
Chapter 1 Areas: 32
Chapter 2 Areas: 51

Total Words: 350913
Total Areas: 83

Holy crap eh?

The Beholder Is Out

2008-04-06T16:40:00.002-05:00

Check it out

More on that later.

First thing's first, far as Subtlety of Thay is concerned. Originally I meant to have a new build up for testing by this weekend...not looking good at this point for that because I took a few days to work on the beholder (which was totally worth the time). However, by tomorrow night is looking much better. I'll have to bust my butt today and some of tomorrow (I also have to mow my football field sized yard though!) but it's definately an attainable goal.

And when you're working on a large project, little steps like that are important.

But anyway, on to the beholder. This is the part you can tune out because it's not terribly interesting.

Anyway, the AI on the beholder is really a cool system. Basically it has 12 spells, the 10 eye rays, it's antimagic eye, and an AI spell that tells it which rays to shoot and at what. So basically what happens is at the end of each combat round it runs an AI script that tells it which action is the best to take. For instance, if it's hit points are low it may decide it's best to retreat a distance back (I changed this so it will shoot it's rays THEN retreat, hopefully inflicting movement hampering statuses) or, if you're using the waypoint, to it's levitation waypoint (from HotU, I don't really know what this is all about but I left the function to do it in there), or which target to physically attack or to use it's rays. I changed a few things so it almost always uses it's ray attacks, but it will physically attack characters that have the anti-magic status because the rays won't work.

It gets interesting once it decides to use it's rays, though. It casts this AI spell on a creature. Because a beholder can only bear three rays against any single target, it also chooses two additional targets if there are any within range. Once it does that it prioritizes which target is the primary one, which the secondary, and which the tertiary based on a number of factors, with the first being the most threatening, etc. The AI could really be tweaked here to choose the absolute best target in a variety of circumstances, I added a few checks because it didn't really have much there from NWN1. In any case, then it chooses how best to attack these targets by seeing how many targets there are and then somewhat randomly which rays to use against which targets; there are several routines, but it won't dynamically choose which rays against which targets, they are predetermined. Such as the primary target gets the strongest rays like disintegrate and death, and the secondary and third targets get the charm and petrify to disable them. The trick to that was to assign how it picks targets. It has most of it's fortitude saving throw rays on it's primary attacks, and chooses classes with low fort saves first, for instance.

Anyway, once it's done that it runs it's antimagic eye script, which again goes through some checks as to whether or not it's a good idea to open the eye. I changed things there again because I thought it was set up to be at a disadvantage against a single target because it can't use it's own rays on a target that has anti-magic status, so it won't use it against a single target except if a few circumstances, but it will now use them to eliminate buff spells first and then close the anti-magic eye and use it's rays, and use it against higher level casters than it was set to originally.

Anyway, I thought it was a pretty unique AI set up. And since neither my wife, my daughter, nor my mother care, I thought I'd share it here!

Well anyway, back to work.

Taxes, Sea Monkies, and Remember the Titans

2008-04-03T12:25:00.003-05:00

Well for this post I have good news, bad news, an update, and something incredibly stupid and probably offensive.

So let's start with the stupid!

I don't know if you all have realized it by this point, perhaps some of you long time readers, but I'm a huge idiot. Therefore it should come as no surprise that I love this program because it lets me impersonate Stephen Hawking to friends and relatives over the phone. I also like to pretend to be the guy that got crippled in Remember the Titans, even though he didn't have a vocoder or whatever that thing is. I don't know why but that's been a running joke in my household for years ever since I found that program that will make your computer talk what you type and I say "Remember the Titans, always Remember the Titans!"

Well anyway, now for the update:

Click the link

Not much new there since I wrote that yesterday. I got all of the ambient NPCs, the key NPCs, a small shrine to Sharess in one of the houses (I've got a lot of shrines to various Gods around the city, if you worship that one you get a better blessing, if you have a similar alignment you get a blessing both of which are long duration buffs, if not nothing)(and where Sharess goes...), and all of the basic conversations done. I should be done with the quests relating to these areas over the next few days and a new build up for testing afterwards.

Kind of makes me question the decision about putting half finished stuff up for testing, though. I'll add two quests, both non-combat because I listen to the polls!, and it'll probably take an hour or two to finish them (shorter if you know where you're going, but part of the quest is to figure that out...since you're not fighting anything) and then it'll be another few weeks/month for the next batch. Should I have waited until it was all finished? I don't know, it's a massive project to test that much material and when game breakers happen it slows down everything, so it's nice in my opinion to test in pieces. But then people get sick of waiting or playing the same things over and over too...I don't know. That's life.

Well anyway, the bad news: I got in a huge fight with my wife over sea monkies. Basically she bought some for our daughter, I said they were stupid and just little pieces of crap that float in the water and not actually anything...the box came without a lid and the cat drank all the water in the little tank that came along...and well you know how women can be, somehow I'm the bad guy. But anyway, it raised an interesting question: Are sea monkies little pieces of crap?

The answer was, unfortunately, no. They are actually tiny brine shrimp, the same stuff whales eat. So my bad baby, I'll know you'll read this later. I told you I'd apologize if it turned out that they weren't little pieces of crap but actually alive and a public apology is better than a private one any day of the week!

Finally, the good news: I filed my tax return. You know, I used to think taxes are really, really stupid. You know what I'm saying, why don't they just take out what I owe and not make me go through these hoops and create all this extra work? Well it turns out that sometimes they give you a lot more money than what you paid in. With the government rapidly gaining debt as it is, I can't see how this is a good idea either, but I'm not going to turn down a bunch of free money so this year I became of fan of taxes.

In any case, because I got this gigantic ass return, I'm going to buy a new graphics card. So does anyone that reads this use a 8800 GTX? Any problems with NWN2? The last thing I want is to get a better card and have it be worse for the game I'm spending most of my time working with.

OK, that's all I've got.

You know when you hit that "remember me" check box it doesn't ever remember you?

2008-03-27T11:59:00.004-05:00

Seriously, like every time I want to leave a comment or post a new post I need to sign in. The thing just doesn't remember you.

Alright, well anyway here's the latest screen shots:

These are from the Great Library I was talking about last time. I've since added scholar NPCs to sit around and a librabrian doing things in the area. But I've spent the greater part of this week typing out books to appear in the library. Basically they're NWN1 style conversations where you walk up to a bookshelf and click it, and choose to read a random book out of the shelf and you get a 3-7 line excerpt on the topic. Here's an example of what the type of stuff is in the books, probably my personal favorite, the entry on necromancy:

Necromancy is often misjudged! I swear to you, your honor! The prosecution demands me reveal the inner workings of my field for the layman, only to twist the words into more than they are.

I will admit, as I did when these charges were first brough before me, that I did indeed raise some zombies and a few skeletons for my own purposes.

But! But, it's been long determined, by this very court mind you, that the soul leaves the body the instant of death!

Therefore, how can I be defiling the bodies of the Jones family if those bodies I used gathered from the graveyard were no longer considered the Jones family?

I put it before this court that bodies in the graveyard are not property of any one person, but abandoned by their owners and property of the public for our own personal use!

Furthermore, these charges must be dropped as public property is, indeed, public, and...

So far I've got 11 of these "books" on various topics, with between 6-20 entries each with about 1000 to 4500 words each. So that's a lot of writing, and it doesn't feel like I got a whole lot done in the last few days for some reason. I'm going to do 4 more books for an even 15 and call it a day on all that, then move forward with the rest of the quest I built the library for.

I'm still undecided on the pick pocket system. Early in the poll it didn't seem to be important, then a bunch of google spiders came and voted up the importance...so I'll either end up doing something or feeling really bad about not doing it.

Somebody's going to get disappointed is all I know.

The Dentist is No Jest!

2008-03-21T17:41:00.002-05:00

Man, I've been playing the Witcher lately, and these old ladies say "Old age is no jest" once in a while, and for some reason I think it's just hilarious.

But today I think a lot of things are hilarious, because I'm on Tylenol III with codiene. Yeah man, I had to go to the dentist today to get crowns, that's no jest! Those things hurt, and you're mad sore when it's done. I mean, I'm no stranger to the dentist chair. Honestly, I could probably be driving a Navigator or something for what I've paid to have my mouth fixed over the last few years, but a crown is up there with the worst dental procedure an average person has to go through, and I've been through most of them. Worst part is they're like $800 per crown, and I need to get seven of them.

But today I had to have three of them done, and I'm glad it's over. Well not quite, they need to take these temps out and put in permanent ones, but I think all of the drilling is over!

So I thought I'd drop this post before I start getting all light headed and need to take a nap. So obviously I won't be modding much this weekend, unless I'm feeling better tomorrow or something. Just want to wallow in my own self pity, thank you very much.

In any case, last few days I finished up a cut scene that came out more awesome than I thought it would and started working on the Great Library, which will either be a quick area or a monster of an area depending on what I do with it. I made the bookshelves out of the new MotB estate tileset ones, those are nice but a pain to line them up. I just need to do the little reading areas and tables with stacks of books and some candles and whatever, so there's not much left to do. Well, plus the NPCs and whatever, but that's not a big deal. But I said that about the Inn too and look what happened! But I doubt I'll be putting in dancing NPCs in the libarary. Well give me a few more of these Tylenols and we'll see though.

Once this area is done I can finish up the sidequest chain I'm working on and throw up the new build for those that still have it in them to test further. It will add two additional quest chains and five new areas. The city is getting nearer and nearer to completion, then it's on to the somewhat linear and therefore faster final mod and not far after, release.

OK, but back to the library, my original plan is to add random book dialogues to the bookshelves in there. I did a similar thing in the Museum in Chapter 1 if you've played it, so I can reuse some of that. But let me ask you guys, do you think I should take a week or so out to type up a ton of these for the library? It's a cool way to add a ton of lore about FR in there, but it's also a phenomenal amount of writing. If you'll recall from earlier I put one in the temple to the Triad, and that was about 7000 words. A dozen or so of those is a pretty big project. Would you be interested in reading that? Let me know what you think.

Oh, by the way, I was interviewed by the NWN Podcast crew two days ago. Be on the lookout for that, link's on your left.

This turned into a project!

2008-03-15T12:52:00.003-05:00

Back in 2003 I was in Afghanistan. I'd like to say I was doing heroic things or whatever, but the truth is I was a generator mechanic who got sent to a communications section. They had a few generators, but technically they were owned by the civilian contractors so I wasn't responsible for, more appropriately allowed to do, any work on them. So I was doing the physical labor of the communications, which really boiled down to running internet cable, while everyone else did the thinking man's work.

But I liked that job. I've always been good at doing work.

Anyway, one of the key points I picked up is this old saying, "The lazy man is the smart man, because he only wants to do thngs once." Matter of fact, we had this bulletin board where the boss of the shop used to put up these inspirational messages. I'm a bit dubious on the effects of those messages; I always thought inspiration is kind of for women because your feeling or whatever shouldn't be stopping you from doing your job. That said, I liked that message (didn't inspire me, though, I swear!) because I'm the type of guy that likes to do things right the first time.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with anything at this point. Well, the first step in your understanding is to look at these screens:

That's the Inn I was working on, and it turned into quite a project where I had to go back and redo things many times until it was right. Of course, that didn't require any fancy pants words on paper to motivate me to do it. Anyway, I modified my random spawning system to check if there is a creature at the spawn point, and choose a new spawn point if so to randomly fill the area with a variety of NPCs. Some sit in chairs, others stand, some dance on the dance floor, some are waitresses. It's more crowded at night than during the day. They all have several animation cycles they go through randomly depending on what they're doing. The band sings songs where I took lyrics from recognizable songs and changed them into parodies.

So it's a cool area if you ask me, which you didn't but I need something to talk about, right?

On a completely different note, the Module of the Year contest is going on now. Personally, I'm abstaining as my mod is on the list and I don't really hinge what I consider a success or failure by winning awards. However, as this award represents what you all, the players, think about the modules made for NWN2, this is the award I respect.

Alright, I don't have anything else to talk about right now.

-edit-

Almost forgot:

Since I'm spending a lot more time than originally intended on the city itself, how important is a theft system for pick pockets? There is currently nothing, and would be a bit of a project, probably like a week's worth of work, to do something reasonable in that regard. But as a player you'll be in that city for hours doing various quests and what have you, so how important is a realistic pick pocket system? Keep in mind it'll add quite a bit of overhead! Is it worth it?

Click There

2008-03-12T15:13:00.000-05:00

Click here

I'll do a more substantial update soon.

Still Chilling

2008-03-06T17:42:00.001-06:00

I did a little work on a new area, fixed a few bugs, but I've got some things I need to do this week so not much is going to get done, hence the boring and short post here.

I'll be back later, maybe this weekend I can get back to cracking.

It's Leap Year

2008-02-28T19:58:00.003-06:00

News to me. Apparently it's the end of the month. Seems somehow appropriate that I stumbled across this Gwar video of the song Meat Sandwich in which the lead singer dunks on Jesus. Crazy and hilarious. Apparently the concept of the video is Gwar is grilling out with some punks and Jesus doesn't like that, so he challenges them to a game of one-on-one?

All I know is that's so devoid of logic that it's awesome.

I've got to tell you, I can't really say that I listen to any music besides rap with any regularity (also if you like rap you should check out the new Wu Tang, 8 Diagrams, which is the best any of them have done since the 90's), but I have a soft spot for Gwar. What a bunch of nuts, although this is coming from a guy who thinks guys in their 40's rapping about karate is cool, so take that with a grain of salt. I also watched this band called Lordi who, apparently, won some kind of European battle of the bands on the international scale; I don't know that much about it, but the song was cool and it's like Gwar except less awesome and more 80's hair band in Gwar clothes.

Also makes me want to put in custom music, but copy right issues and the "hmmm, this probably isn't appropriate" vibe kind of break that off.

As far as modding goes, we're in the testing phase at this point, and I've taken the week "off" (not really, I'll get to that). Well, tried to. I ran into a few snags, including the very first and a really important script breaking that was working months ago even during public testing making me look like an idiot, and my hak messing up because of the 2da (let this be a lesson, your 2da file acts crazy with entries greater than 4 digits).

But anyways, as far as being "off" goes, to me that qualifies as playtesting and taking screen shots for the eventual custom loading screens. Let me tell you, exploring every nook and cranny has taken me all week. What is it Thursday? I started on Sunday night and I'm still not done! I will probably finish up tonight though, chill for the weekend, and get back to building on Monday.

And I hate testing. Eventually I get to the point where when I get criticism of any part of my campaign, I'm instictively agreeing, like "yeah, I hate it too!" Sometimes I do, I play the thing so damn much and it's usually me playing when it's not working right so there's compounded frustration. I mean, think about it; I'll end up playing it buggy and broken probably a dozen times from start to finish testing various aspects, and each quest gets tested individually dozens of times as I try to break it as I'm building, adjusting static cameras and balance, moving characters around, whatever, and testing again and again; it gets tedious.

Which is kind of ironic, playing the game being the worst part of making a game...

Did I mention how thankful I am of anyone who tests and gives feedback?

It's Uploading Now

2008-02-24T00:24:00.001-06:00

click here

The clock is ticking, my friends

2008-02-22T23:49:00.002-06:00

I've got until Sunday night to meet my self imposed deadline. It's definately a possibility at this point. There are several things slowing me down. The first is I had the flu all week, so that kind of slows you down. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but taking any kind of medicine makes me drowsy and lacking of focus. Plus, it's the flu.

Ergo, I put off my calculus homework. That has to be done this weekend as a priority. Can I do calculus and finish two cutscenes and a whole area? It's a challenge, but it's not beyond hope.

Or else it'll just take a day longer, so big deal. It's not like it's an actual deadline.

Anyway, did I tell you I switched from Showtime to HBO? Smart move, I think. I've complained about Showtime in the past because frankly it's awful. Only problem is the HBO package comes with Cinemax, which is also a terrible, terrible premium channel unless you're into softcore porn. Which, I'm not. I don't think anyone is, actually, except teenagers who lack identification to purchase regular porn and whose parents happen to have Cinemax but it's blocked with a password that's either the last four digits of your phone number or your street address.

You know if you have kids, don't put a stupid password on anything, but especially the premium channels on your cable. It's seriously not that hard to remember four random numbers...and even if you can't, you're only missing Cinemax which is awful. Might want to think about it with, say, a PIN number or something. How about the last four of your social security number? Shoot, you probably don't even know that, so you're kids won't.

Still more, today I caught the last hour of both The Hills Have Eyes and Snakes on a Plane. Frankly, I don't really feel compelled to dial in again to check out the first half hour/hour of either. They're both not very good movies.

First of all, The Hills Have Eyes. There's some lessons to be learned from this movie, one of them to potentially save your life should you ever find yourself up against a villian. But first, the bad:

OK, being exposed to radiation doesn't make you immune to pain and bullets. It doesn't make you super strong, or predatorily cunning, or fast and deadly. It doesn't make you a cannibal. It gives you tumors and cancer. It destroys your thyroid. You get bloody vomiting and diaharrea from GI damage. It makes you sterile. Your kids have birth defects, small brains, abnormal growth, cancer, and retardation. Seriously, they're deformed mutants living in the middle of the desert, not the X-Men kind, but the kind with huge health problems.

I had similar complaints about Wrong Turn, but in that case they were inbred mutants with huge health problems. Also, the same goes above for being inbred, it's really not a good way to go about getting super cannibal powers, but being sterile, deformed, and mentally disabled.

So the whole premise is just stupid.

"Hey man, why are you trying to kill us all?"

"We're mutated cannibals, ooooOOOOOoooo!"

"Dude, you have lymphoma and a hunch."

"Your nuclear bombs did this to us! oooOOOOOooo!"

"Why are you making ghost sounds? Also you guys should have moved when they told you they were nuclear testing."

"But the incredible hulk...."

"No, dude. Thyroid cancer and brittle bones."

"Crap..."

Alright, so it's just a movie, I know that. And I guess this is why they figured that at the end they'd pull a classic "the hero is an idiot move", since not a lot here makes sense why should any of the character's actions, right? You know what I'm talking about, when he plugs the bad guy a few times and the bad guy falls down motionless, they he walks up to the bad guy carefully with the gun trained on him, kicks him, is relieved that his gentle kicks indicate death (I guess those with limited knowledge of radiation poisoning also have limited concept of the pulse), and drops his gun next to the dead bad guy to turn around in success, only to be completely surprised when the bad guy is, get this, not really dead!

And here I am screaming at this idiot "just pop him in the face! Finish the job! He's not dead!", but they never listen. What is it, like, "maybe he's just disabled but needs medical attention, just hurting him is enough"? Nah, man, it's a mutant cannibal. I mean, what the hell?

I mean, even before that he catches the brain outside of skull wheelchair guy, and he's got a big axe in his hand, but walks out without offing that guy...alright even before that he catches a bald fat lady combing a wig not paying attention when he as a baseball bat... Anyway, this is why you can respect the guy from Man on Fire because, in what is nearly unanimously considered by me the greatest scene ever put to film, when he wants information, he cuts your fingers off one at a time until you tell him what he wants to know. Then he cuts your fingers off anyway, and then kills you. That's why that is a classic, the guy is realistic about handling his revenge.

But look, you don't walk away from the deformed wheelchair guy. You finish him off and go about your business.

But we've all seen that enough to know that if we're ever fighting mutant cannibals, or even non-mutant non-cannibal bad guys, don't do that! Don't inch up to them slowly, give them a love pat, and drop your guard so they can stab you or wait until you're not paying attention or something. Shoot them in the face a few times while they're down...because really if your whole diabolical plot hinges on your victim nearly killing you and being an idiot at the last second...well, you're the idiot.

But I suppose techinically these are retarded cannibals. And when I say retarded, I don't mean like as an insult, but literally retarded from radiation poisoning.

Now, Snakes on a Plane, that's another story. Obviously there's a lot of stupid in there, like when the boa constrictor bursts out of the phosphourescent light, like the maintainence guy accidentally installed a boa constrictor instead of a tube light bulb. Again, things to learn:

One is viral marketing on the internet can't make a successful movie. This had all of the factors, a stupid premise, snakes, Samuel L. Jackson screaming the F word, but still did abysmal in ticket sales. Maybe it made it up in DVD sales, I don't know. But one thing is things on the internet are supposed to be free, so advertising a movie to people used to stealing stuff probably is a poor marketing strategy.

But the important lesson here is if you're fighting either snakes on planes or mutant cannibals in Arizona or whatever, you're going to want some guns. Shotguns are cool, bring those.

Peace!

Just two more areas

2008-02-17T23:25:00.002-06:00

I'm pretty sure, without using Maths to be sure, that I have a module of the day update on Wednesday, so I thought I'd throw a small update up here really quick.

I'm finishing up the sidequest in the newest temple area I posted screens up of last time, which takes place entirely in areas that I've already done, so no new screens. So nothing too exciting to report, except...

I need to build two more areas and fill them up with the remainder of a sidequest, and I will be putting up the entire temple section of town for testing, so I'm at the point where I'm feeling confident by this coming weekend it'll be ready, barring some kind of disaster.

If you want to help with that, join the Forgotten Realms Weave and make a post in the forums, and (as soon as it's worked out, which Rogue Dao was, much to my appreciation (that can't be a sentence), pretty quick about responding about, thanks flem and Rogue Dao!) I'll send you the FTP info so you can download it. However, in doing so, we're entering an informal contract that you'll get back to me with some feedback!

I'll also try to get in touch with those who helped test in the past but I haven't heard from in a while if possible. I've got all of your handles written down in a readme somewhere on my PC, but not your contact info. But I'll do my best.

Alright then.

Another Blog Post

2008-02-13T18:54:00.002-06:00

It's one of those days where I don't have a fancy title for this post. I mean, I was even having trouble coming up with something to say for my module of the day update, so I just rambled a bit and threw up some numbers that may or may not have been pulled from my nether region (they weren't, but how often do you have a chance to use "nether region"?)

So yeah, I finally got the temple war sequence working correctly! That turned into a huge project, too many conditionals and, therefore, too much room for mistakes, which happened. Frequently. But I got it working, hopefully permanently. To celebrate, I immediately moved on to the next area and pushed that fiasco as far from my mind as possible; it was draining me.

So, here's some pics:

OK, another temple. Probably sick of seeing those; me too. But the good news is there's only one more to do after this one. More good news is these should be less involved than the last two in terms of how much time it'll take to set the sidequests up and get them working. I plan on keeping them both fairly simple by comparison. Even more good news is the other temple quests are working properly. Did I mention that?

So really, there's a pretty good chance it will be needlessly complicated and incredibly time consuming, given my track record! It's already starting with some of the scripting I'm doing...

What else is happening?

There was a NWN Podcast roundtable interview (you can find the link to the show to your left, possibly about even with this paragraph, possibly not! It's hard to tell as I write this.) on Sunday. Sounded pretty cool, a lot of people I've come in contact with over the last year or so were on it talking about their projects. Felt a little put out myself, too many times not being picked for kickball I suppose. I couldn't tune in because my daughter was sick. If you have kids, you know how they are when they're sick, they literally freak the F out when you stop touching them...or maybe that's just mine. And the week was this huge disaster between the storms and flu. And now really it's my turn to be sick, I can feel it coming on. That's another thing you know if you have kids, if your kid is sick you'll be sick.

So I won't be able to actually listen to it for a few weeks, which is fine I guess. But that's definately one of the podcasts I'm looking forward to hearing. It's always cool to catch a new spin on things and hear some input in general game design.

I guess that's about all I got.

Tornados and such

2008-02-06T14:09:00.000-06:00

Well I'll have to keep this short because I'm a little busy at the moment. There were 24 tornados last night in Tennessee...which is where I live. It devestated a few cities near by. Luckily, I got off pretty light, and all I lost was the shed in my back yard and a chunk of my fence. Others weren't so lucky.

If anyone is interested in helping those people, you can donate to the Red Cross.

I've got insurance so you won't be buying me a new shed if that's what you're thinking!

There's basically two things that are killin' me here!

2008-02-01T21:28:00.000-06:00

I don't mean killing me literally; as a smoker, I pretty much know how I'm going to die. And I have to tell you, it's quite convenient. I feel confident enough that I could walk out in the middle of a Wild West style gun fight and live through it because I'm that confident it's going to be lung cancer. So I pity you non-smokers in a way. Do you have that kind of self assurance? I thought not.

I'm also heavily anticipating the invention of some kind of artificial lung, not unlike a pace maker, that will let me live well past a century. If science has taught us one thing, it's that it'll solve all of our problems with no reprocussions.

But that point aside, my calculus classes and my scope creep are what are killing me. My life is a series of routines. I like things to happen when I expect them to. I could tell you my schedule for the next month if you wanted to hear it, but then the mystery of what kind of exciting life this dirtywick must lead would be gone. Since it's half gone, though, I'll break the rest down for you: It's not particularly exciting.

Thus, my calculus class takes up my Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons and evenings. I take my classes online, and the way they work is you get an assignment for the week due Sunday and can pace yourself, so a routine there is important (especially in this particular class where nothing is really "due" until the final week, upon which I will sit back and laught at the idiots who threw away a few grand because they can't manage their time!). But I probably spend at least 20 hours a week doing homework and learning the material. Compared to my usual any class where the assignments are to write a paper or two a week, which I can crap out an A paper in about an hour, that's a ridiculous amount of time to me. You see, my primary skill is finding the fastest way to get the best results. I don't allow myself to get anything less than an A, but I also don't allow myself to spend any more time than necessary to get said A. I give 110% as fast as I can so I can do things I want to, but the amount of money spent on college would make getting anything less than perfect grades a waste of my precious money, you see.

In any case, that's a good chunk of my free time spent doing matrices and logarithms, which is a phenomenal waste of time. Really, when was the last time you said "oh man! I wish I knew the quadratic formula! Then I could balance my check book!" Game, set, and match, son.

The other cause of my demise is scope creep. What that does is causes you to add so much to your project that every time you start up, you don't feel like you actually got anything done, which is mad discouraging. I mean, I did get stuff done, but not as much as I'd have liked, mostly because I'm doing a ton of complex scripts and "what if" scenarios that bog down the whole process.

So, I might have underestimated the work load a bit when I thought I was 50% done. As of now, I have no idea how percent done I am, but it's markedly lower than 50, I believe.

But F it, let's check out some screens of what I did do!

Below you can check out what's become of the catacombs. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to step into the middle of a religious war fought below some churches of opposed faith in a catacombs? No? Really? Damn. Well, I went ahead and did that anyway:

What remains to be done there is to finish the final battle up in which you confront the leader of the side you're fighting against (again, options! Will you turn traitor on who hired you? Try to work out a truce? Stick with your word?) which is what I'm working on now. A little cutscene, a few scripts, should be done by the time I hit the bricks tonight. Well, matress.

Then I need to reproduce the scenario from the other perspective, in case you want to take the other side in the conflict. That's what I've been talking about when things go faster, the areas and blueprints and spawn scripts are all done, just need to modify a few things and do a bunch of dialogue and some changes in when and where things happen.

But, let's not go without taking a look at these screens:

You know, I was thinking "what the hell am I going to do with asteriods!" when I installed MotB. Guess whose temple that is.

Well anyway, I having seen the ads for Cloverfield a few months ago I decided to look it up on IMDB, mostly trying to figure out whether it was a good movie or not because I'm not likely to see it until I can get my hands on a bootleg of it or it's on HBO. Or I got to Blockbuster, which isn't likely. Anyway, I headed over to the IMDB boards to see what the monster was, because really like you couldn't figure out it was a giant monster and honestly that's not much of a spoiler (mostly because I was reading about Cthulhu in preparation of my Far Realms area I want to do. Having never read a H.P. Lovecraft book in my life I, admittedly inexplicably having no knowledge of what Cthulhu is anyway, thought "dude, that's probably what Cloverfield is!" It's not.) and will probably forget the spoiler by the time I get around to watching it...

Apparently, this movie is a lot like the Blair Witch Project. You'll either like it or pass out vomiting from migraine induced seizures. Or something. Well, point is nobody can agree whether it's a good movie or not. I'm going to go ahead and say yes because, come on, giant monster? I'll also say it could probably kill Superman to nip that debate right in the bud.

But anyway the message boards had something about whether or not this movie belonged in the top 250 movies of all time. So I took a look at that list.

Alright, since I've never been afraid of saying something stupid in my life, I won't start now: Most of the people who decide what good movies are just say what they've heard are good movies in an attempt not to sound stupid to people who "know" good movies.

I mean, how else do you explain that list?

Alright, The Godfather at the top, I'll accept that. I mean, it's a pretty good movie, no doubt. Best ever? Well, I'd disagree, but I'm more of an John Everyman that likes things that are awesome over beatiful cinemetography and beautiful other words I can't spell or know the meaning of. I like explosions and stuff and junk.

Knowing that, explain:

Pulp Fiction at #5

This movie wasn't that good. Taratino, I mixed about that guy, but Pulp Fiction wasn't all it was cracked up to be. There's a Sammy L. bible quote scene which is pretty awesome, but John Travolta doing the vogue with Uma Thurmon and then dying on the toilet? Yeah, it's a Royale with Cheese, I get it. I've heard people quote that too many times, and I'm all "yeah, foreigners say different things that us. I get it. Besides, you heard that on Pulp Fiction, you're not actually cultured by hearing somebody who was cultured make an observation about an American fast food company...you know what, forget it."

Point is, not #5.

Speaking of Tarantino, Grindhouse even being on that list is an atrocity, slightly more than Kill Bill Vol 2. A woman with a gun for a leg? That's stupid. I could see an arm, but a leg? That's stupid.

Psycho at #22

Uh, this movie wasn't that good, sorry. I know it was like terrifying or whatever in the wholesome 60's when people didn't get killed in motel rooms, but I lived near Milwaukee when Dahmer was arrested. Come on, this movie is not that entertaining. For it's time, sure. But this isn't the greatest movies of all time for their time, it's of all time.

Raiders of the Lost Ark at #18

First of all, I'm bringing this up because it should be higher, but it bears mentioning that the Temple of Doom isn't even on the list(!), and The Last Crusade is in at a paltry 120. This is the greatest trilogy of all time, and Indiana Jones could kick any of these other action fruits at higher rankings asses. So let's put things in perspective here.

V for Vendetta at #146

Real talk, I know the guy that played V in the movie. Not the voice, but the guy in the suit. His name is David Leich, and he was my neighbor's son by my ma's. That said, this wasn't that good of a movie. It was OK, but I think the only reason this is on the list is because of the anti-Bush feelings in the US. Watch it plummet in 2009.

2001: A Space Odessey at #80

Movie is balls. First of all, it's 2008 and we're not floating around in technicolored crappy special effects. Secondly, this movie just sucks.

Apocalypse Now at #36

Can anyone honestly say they enjoyed the sweaty Marlon Brando donkey killing mess that was the second half of this movie? Didn't think so.

Alien at #52

I liked this move, but the vastly superior Aliens is ranked #69, which is a little backwards. What's better than a single poorly made rubber alien killing people in the early 80's? Many, many slightly less poor rubber aliens killing more people armed to the teeth with cool guns in the mid 80's. And what's better than them both? The Thing at #175. It's inexplicable.

Terminator 2 at #74

Uh, Terminator 2 is awesome? It's awsome almost 20 years after it was made.

Amadeus at #85

Wow, this movie sucked. I don't know how the circumstances came about that I watched it...perhaps it was the cool box art, perhaps I had nothing better to do. But wow. Just...wow.

Donnie Darko even being on this list

Terrible. Just terrible movie.

Alright, well I'm going too far with this, but let me just say that perhaps the biggest travesty of this whole debacle is the movies listed here are all on the list, despite being mostly awful with the few underrated exceptions, yet neither The Warriors nor Big Trouble in Little China made the list. I'll let you ponder that.

Wait, I had to edit this in:

How in the hell do you explain Scarface being on that list? I mean, I know it's every rapper/mustachioed popped collared 80's business man's wet dream to snort a mountain of cocaine and shoot grenade launchers at illegal immigrants, but are there really that many of them out there? Really?

In case you missed it:

2008-01-26T13:36:00.000-06:00

A few days ago I made this post in the NWN 2 official forums, which is pretty much something I'd put in my blog but a little more technical because there's a lot of builders there.

Only reason I'm bringing it up is to save myself some typing. The area I was talking about in that post that was giving me the fps problems...as I began to fill it in with npcs and such, it was really pushed to the breaking point. So I spent the better part of a day splitting that single area into six, something I had wanted to avoid because it's a pretty big hassle. But it's done now.

Aside from that, I finished up a few sidequests and will continue finishing up some more. The next two will require another area to be built, but I can squeeze two quest chains into them. I'm starting to get to the point where I can put multiple quest chains into the areas I have with only dialogue modifications, so that's nice. But that will also change soon as I get away from the temples.

In other news, the cheating Patriots have cemeted their path to the Super Bowl...not that there was any doubt that they would or there's any doubt that they'll trash the Giants in the big game even if they didn't cheat. But I think it's a sad season for the NFL when a team of known cheaters goes completely unpenalized to a perfect season. I mean, the coach got fined, but big deal! Most of the victories but to that point were illegitimate. It's a little disrespectful to Dan Marino's legacy, as he's led the only team in NFL history to have an undefeated season decades ago just because they were good, and the first team to match that feat had to cheat to do it. And the sad thing is I don't thik the Patriots would have had to cheat, they were probably good enought to do it straight up.

I know, I know..."everybody's doing it!" Well, y'all got caught.

So, I find this season in the NFL completely meaningless.

You can also draw some strange parallels between the Patriots and the United States. The Patriots stunk for years, probably until they redesigned their stupid olg logo into something a little more cool. Then 9/11 happened and the Patriots took it personally and as their way of showing the US that America rules they dominated the NFL and won the Superbowl...against a bunch of other American teams, but still they were the most patriotic of teams. Then in the following years, everybody kind of got sick of them winning all the time. Tom Brady left his long time girlfriend...who is pregnant...for a brazillian super model. Basically Tom Brady turned out to be a pretty big douche bag. Then they picked up Randy Moss, who is king douche bag. Then they cheated their way to the Super Bowl. So by now everyone does, or if you're a Pats fan you really should, hate what the Patriots have become. I do, screw them!

This is around the time when everyone was like "USA! USA! USA!" on their way to work or whatever, the US messed up really big a few times, and now everyone's kind of hating America. And you can call me a Pats fan in that regard because American is awesome, but I'm just saying it's a strange coincidence.

The Tom Cruise Scientology video was insane. You should check that out. It's like he's a pretty big douche bag in that video, and you could find some more douche bags in other Scientologist videos, like these guys who apparently don't realize jamming your face really close to a camera and mouth breathing is pretty douchey, but the point is this week has been check out these douche bag Scientologists week.

Not that I'm saying anything bad about the Church of Scientology, not a fan myself but I know how Scientology do and don't really want to get into it, just that those particular guys are douche bags.

What else? The Elections? Who cares? If you thought Randy Moss was a douche bag...

Well, you get a lot of screenshots.

2008-01-21T02:41:00.000-06:00

I guess that's the nice thing about working primarily on area building for the last few weeks. I have a lot of screen shots to show for it.

Originally, I was going to wait until I completely finished the area I've been working on the last few days, but I'm about due for an update, so here it is:

That's the temple to Umberlee, the second of the five major temples in Velprintalar.

Oh, you thought that was it?

Well, part of the quest chain that originally started way back when I was working on the "homebase" area also requires a trip into the catacombs, a series of tunnels interconnecting the five temples and their basements. So, I had to get cracking on that massive 24x24 interior, and here's some of the results:

So, F it, I'll say, pretty awesome, right?

As for what remains, I'll be working on the tunnels. I'm using the RWS sewer tileset to do those:

What I did there was lay it out like a grid, with shortcut doors. I'm going to be blocking tunnels with debris so it's more mazelike, and getting from point A to point B can be a little tricky, and the catacombs aren't without their dangers:

Whew! Lots of stuff going on in all those screens.

What else is good? I've been emailing back and forth with a friend; actually it was someone who e-mailed me some great feedback from chapter 1 and we've been talking about design philosophies and all kinds of stuff, it's been very informative and it's kind of nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off of and explain why I did certain things the way I did and compare the differences between PnP and cRPG. Good thinkin' stuff or whatever.

Anyway, my point here is that I got this list of item concepts, I don't really know where they came from originally, but there's a lot of really cool ideas in there. Now, a while ago I wrote this script (later to see that one already existed in the toolset; you'd be surprised what you don't know in terms of what scripts already exist, mostly because they're naming conventions are wacky as hell) to give an item when you use a placeable and to get rid of the placeable. I've been using it for some more interesting stuff, but mostly for like scrolls or potions or in conjunction with the item placeables to give out weapons and armor.

But I've also been using it for what the MMO community (used to play WoW for a while, was pretty good at it collecting epic loot, wife got mad, finally realized MMOs are pretty stupid in general anyway, happily ever after) call vendor trash to change things up from gold piles and gems into aged wine and ornate candle sticks.

Anyway again, I got this list of cool items and figured, let's take it a step further from vendor trash to vendor trash that, if you figure out which vendor wants it the most, will give you a great deal! So I've been putting in various places around the city all kinds of items from this list and NPCs who would take an interest in the item and pay nicely for it. Sort of a fun little easter egg hunt thing you can do.

Well, let's close this off with some reader feedback: The "problem" I'm having here is I'm going to be putting realism on the back burner for the most part in the city in a very specific way: there's going to be a lot to do for the industrious player. For instance, every temple is going to have at least one sidequest. The two I have done have more than one already and that's likely to continue. All of the temples are on the same hill. So, what are the odds that all of the major temples in the city all have some kind of major problem(s) all at the same time? Slim to none in real life. There's going to be dozens of sidequests in and around the city within walking distance. I already know what's going to happen, it's going to seem like every named NPC in the city has some kind of major problem that needs to be resolved and will be asking a total stranger to help. But, that's the way things have got to be! Or I'm wasting a whole lot of time detailing dozens of buildings if there's nothing to do but look around and hear some random NPC pointless dialog, right? I mean, we are playing these things to hear a cool story, solve some quests, gain some XP and collect some cool loot, right?

I don't know, what do you guys think?

Lack of Updates Lately?

2008-01-14T23:29:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I know. I'm usually more on it than this. I just haven't updated here is all. If you're interested, check out this:

Bi-Weekly Update

I've been doing that for a while, and I had just done one a few days ago that was rather lengthy which left me little to discuss here that wasn't redundant.

Additionally, I wrote this little tutorial on how to merge 2das and change model numbers, which you can find here, if you're interested in that kind of thing.

In any case, it's about that time. So, let's talk about what I've been working on. I think some screenshots will suffice to show the last area I did, so let's go with that route.

Find more here.

So I made a temple to the Triad, Tyr, Torm, and Illmater. I think it came out pretty cool. I actually did a lot of writing for this section, as there's a large bookcase in the upper level featuring ~4000 words of text on the Planes and Deities in Faerun. Not particularly exciting to take screens of, but it'll give you a good picture of what's happening. I also am in the middle of a sidequest involving that temple and the Shadow Thieves where you can pull off a triple cross! That's a double cross followed by a double cross, or keeping your word to one of the two. Or not, that's just one of the solutions to this particular sidequest. The other solution is going to require two areas to be built.

Again I have to reiterate, more for my benefit, that things are going slowly now, and I know it, but since I'll be using the area for multiple quests each, well as much as I can, things should speed up as I progress as I'll have less areas to build. I'm currently building 2-4 per quest chain, which means filling it in with NPCs with full dialogue as well, and will be for a while, but not long after it'll be 0 and just writing a lot of dialogue and scripts with the many conditionals (like, what if he's dead, but he's not dead? Need to acknowledge that because it won't make sense if he's saying this...) into existing dialogue files. I'm not really looking forward to that time to be honest, makes building areas seem easy. But the end results so far for the quests I have are awesome, you really have a ton of options to fit your character. Unfortunately, I can't really show that through screens nor do I want to give away the possibilities, it's half the fun of playing Subtlety of Thay.

Well, let's end this with a screen:

Back for the first time again

2008-01-05T19:49:00.000-06:00

So, how was everybody's Christmas/Hanukkah/Chinese New Year/holidays? My best guess was my Kwanzaa was good. But being as how I really don't know what Kwanzaa is or how to celebrate it, I'm taking the optimistic route.

Yeah, my wife ordered from Iraq and Xbox 360 and a handful of games, so I spent a lot of my holiday break drinking beer at night and 'boxing off a hangover. I don't know if anyone else says that in reference to playing an Xbox, 'boxin' off, because I'm kind of new at being an Xbox owner, but they should. I will start a trend of it if necessary. Anyway, I was mad impressed with the Xbox as a whole, it's pretty awesome, and as a result I came to a few realizations:

1. If you say you don't care about graphics, you're either lying to me or to yourself. After all, when's the last time you played a choose your own adventure book? Case closed.

2. Guitar Hero is pretty cool on easy.

3. Having locked content in games is stupid. I ain't paying by the month and I suck at playing the guitar, so I only get 10 songs? Guitar Hero sucks.

4. Mass Effect is awesome.

So I spent a lot of time playing Mass Effect, like 13 hours into it, and it's pretty awesome. I read a lot of haters talking down on this game, but don't listen to them. There are a few legitimate complaints about it, like the controls for the Mako are pretty ass backwards and the planetary exploration is bad and the inventory would be cumbersome on a PC but isn't too bad on a console, and the text is really, really small on anything but a huge TV. If you can get past that you'll actually have to aim to hit things and dodge things like an FPS, it's a lot of fun; at least, as of now it is.

First, there's the dialogue wheel you've no doubt seen in some screen shots where there's some two or three word responses...but that's not what the character actually says, it's just the general idea of what the character says. I think it works really well.

Plus, a lot of things happen where you have to make choices about what to do. I'm not sure at this point to what extent these choices matter because I haven't gotten around to reloading and testing the differences, assuming they would be apparent immediately anyway, but it's fun. Pretty minor spoiler to follow: After a while, this reporter will ask you a few questions and, barring the nonsensical "I'll kill you!" option (why in the world would you threaten to kill a reporter? Classic Bioware "evil"!) you get a few ways of answering the questions, then later you get a transmission telling you how you made everyone look bad (if you're me) or whatever. I don't know if it's like this huge part of the game, but it happens pretty frequently. Also they masked the load screens mostly with other activities, like being decontaminated before you enter your ship or riding in an elevator, and in these scenes sometimes your characters will talk about things or, more importantly, you can hear about what you did on your latest mission over a loudspeaker. I thought that was pretty cool way of integrating the choices you made to make the world more immersive.

Also, there's a ton of sidequests, and some of them are picked up during the load screen elevators when you listen to the news and such. I think that's a pretty efficient use of loading, and riding the the elevator listening to one liners is more interesting than a stupid tip and a little bar filling up!

The companions also seem to have a lot to say and the writing and voice acting are top notch ('course, what did you expect? They hired Keith MF-ing David!) and the combat is fun. I recommend this game.

Well anyway, I just got back to the house today, so I've got a few things to get in order like unpacking and laundry and such, but I'm more or less back in the saddle, folks.

Actually, I'm really probably going to stop now!

2007-12-14T23:58:00.000-06:00

Being as how I'm happy with where I'm at, I'll be leaving for other parts of the US utnil after the New Year in less than a week, and I've uploaded a backup copy of my campaign to the storage site, I'm probably done until I get back.

But I'm thinking, man, where did the time go?

Just today I ordered a bunch of new books to read as sources for my campaign, mostly novels. Thanks goes out to those for the advice I got at Candlekeep which, though I've only been posting there a day or two but have been reading on and off for quite a while, is a great community of people. They just seem nice, which is really weird for the internet in general, and the fact that the novelists and creators of Forgotten Realms take the time out to actually talk to the fans on an almost daily basis, it's just bizarre in a good way.

But anyway, I picked up the new books and I'll pack up some of my old ones and probably spend a lot of my downtime over the holidays drafting documents and flowcharts for sidequests and the plot; I've got to stay busy.

That made me think of where the time went. Last year I was sick over the holidays and spent a lot of time at my Ma's house, where she doesn't have cable, and my Grandma's house (on my wife's side, she's an old sweetheart and honestly feels like family to me) where she has cable, but it's pretty boring anyway. So last year I spent a lot of time drafting things and such, and though much of it didn't get much use outside of the general concepts, this time should be different because this year I pretty much know the toolset and it's capabilities inside and out and last year I was just getting my feet wet.

I'd say last year I had about half of the first mod done. That included the beginning cave, the road exterior, glarondar itself, and all of the interiors there done. I released that campaign in, what, May? So I got a mod and a half done by May having very little experience with the toolset. Imagine what I'll have done by May this year! Might even be playing the whole thing if I stay on my hustle, which I almost assuredly will.

What else? A couple of interesting topics came up on the NWN2 official boards in the last few days, one of which being my Module of the Day update, which I've been doing every two weeks since that started. So if you read here and not there, you're probably not missing much, but there I focus more on how things work so you might learn something if you check them out.

Not to be stepping on cat's toes, but I was disappointed by this topic for a few reasons. Basically dude wanted to quit his current project and do a different one, which is fine I guess. Do what you want to do, it's your time. I would never do that because to me that's some quitter shit and I don't play that. I'm a nose to the grindstone, get shit done and don't stop until it's done right kind of guy; you give me a 10 page paper to write in a class and I'm writing 15, in MLA format, with sources, end of the story. I've always taken a lot of pride in my work though, and to give up on something to me is to admit defeat. So it was a little disappointing to see so many members of the community all like "yeah, go ahead and quit and pick up another project," know what I mean?

But I said my piece there and I'm not mad at anybody, just a little disappointed.

And you know what? You ever hear of that seven deadly sins? Greed, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Wrath, and...Pride? Why is pride bad? I think pride is one of the things that's helped out through life, ya dig? The other six obviously bring more problems than benefits, but pride is a good motivator. It's having standards, working hard to achive those standards, and looking back on things you did like "yeah, I did that!"

So if you want to talk about what motivates me as a builder, it's basically pride and respect. My goal is to put out the best mod on the Vault. I want the respect of everybody that plays it, and in order to do that it's got to be something I'm proud of doing. I'm in school for game design now, so even if it doesn't lead to other opportunities to make games, still it'd be great if people were playing it and, after it's all said and done, said "you know what, that's the best mod I've played." Tough thing about that is I'm competing with (it's not literally a contest, but figuratively for the goal I set for myself, there's no animosity or anything, I like to think I'm cool with everybody!) teams of professionals and teams of non-professionals, years of experience and pure talent. Like when Chapter 2 is out if people are saying "this is right up there with Purgatorio", that's what I'm looking for. The better everyone else is doing, the harder I'll work. If you want to do something on your own at the same level as professionals, it's going to take a tremendous amount of hard work. That's my edge, my drive. And basically it's all out of pride to do the best I can.

So pride is good? I guess it's somehow mathmatically quantified directly with how well Chapter 2 is recieved. Or something. I don't know, I kind of even lost myself. I'm even kind of debating whether or not I should post this up at the cost of sounding kind of arrogant (maybe that's the bad part about pride? Being kind of annoying?), but it's my blog and my spot to be honest, so it is what it is.

Yeah, so, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, I'm out.

What's homebase?

2007-12-10T19:57:00.000-06:00

Normally in these situations, it would be the swingset or slide, however in the case of my campaign it'll be the run down, ransacked house of your noble ally. Without giving away too many spoilers (though she is present in nearly every screenshot for today), after the banquet you'll be put into a Crossroad Keep-esque rebuilding of a noble house. The scope is smaller as it's just one building, but a little better I think because I didn't include any cornball plot locked doors with the rooms already constructed so you can actually see the changes made to the house itself. Here's an example:

In seconds, with a few days worth of painstakingly placing, recording the tags, and scripting a few hundred placeables to be deleted and othes to spawn, a filthy craphole turns into a modest manor.

There are some more of more rooms in the screens gallery conveniently, and more importantly to me freely, located at photobucket.

I also got the companion swapping working, so you don't need to bring your clunkly plate wearing ally on stealth missions. I fear I may have screwed the pooch about a year ago when I first implemented companions for using the Sunken Flagon GUI method for swapping companions. I didn't really like that way anyway because you had to sit through two loading screens to do level ups and sort through inventories, so it's not all it's cracked up to be. Besides, I recently disabled auto levelling for companions when they're not in the party, so you don't need to worry about that either way! Actually, I'll see how that effects balance later so that might be switched back, but I think the tradeoff of keeping everyone powerful vs. using them when they're best suited and that the player will, over time, become the most powerful and therefore the hero is an interest dynamic.

In any case, that's what's been happening. Next up is a few cutscenes and some other fun previous actions and effects from them stuff dealing with that specific area and I'll be on to actually making the first quest I've done in probably about a month!

So, check back often and leave comments because I like to type things and it's better if I'm addressing them at a person instead of dead internet air.

Good News and Bad News

2007-12-06T20:11:00.000-06:00

May as well start with the bad news. Another celebrity died this week, Pimp "Sweet Jones" C of UGK was found dead in a hotel in Hollywood. I wasn't terribly surprised, kind of like Ol' Dirty Bastard died. I mean, the guy ran up into a mall in the middle of summer...in Texas no less...in a fur coat with a machine gun. Obviously, Pimp C enjoyed PCP quite a bit and, as far as I know, that stuff isn't very healthy. Having never partaken of PCP myself, I can't say that with 100% certainty, but that is the drug that has people hopping out of windows and, if Friday, the biography of Ice Cube, is accurate to any degree, had Chris Tucker running from a lowrider making chicken noises. But still, it sucks if you're a fan of good Southern rap.

And according to Tiberius209 somebody else died that was apparently of importance. How she measures up to Pimp C in terms of rapping abilities is currently unknown.

What's worse, at least as far as I'm concerned, is I found out I got conned. A few months back when I was sick, on my wife's suggestion, I bought some Zicam. Well, it turns out it comes in wet Q-tip stick up your nose form, and I wasn't about to stick a F-ing Q-tip up my nose so I never actually used it, but it cost me $12. Well, the other day I was reading about homeopathy...which I have been aware of it being a complete sham for some time...when I saw that Zicam was a homeopathic remedy. Of course, I prompty checked the box and there it was, in small print, homeopathy in the bottom right corner of the box (as well as a few other places). So obviously I felt pretty stupid. It's kind of like...well basically anywhere where somebody asks you if you want a free gift and you're all like "sure!" and then you get roped into a six hour timeshare meeting. You know, like you should have seen it coming but it's too late and now you're stuck, and when you finally do get out your gift is just a piece of crap.

So, yeah, be warned, homeopathic remedies are fake and it looks like real medicine. If you took that stuff every time you got a cold, which for most people is probably a few times a year, you're blowing like $50-$100 on sugar pills and wet Q-tips, and it could be a lot worse if you have AIDS in Africa, because then you'll probably die paying a bunch of money for sugar pills.

But on the good news side, there some new screens up of the final exterior, which is now finished. Probably tomorrow I'll be uploading the newest version for the testers that haven't burnt out on it yet (plus it serves as a back up for me in case my computer takes a crap or something). And that's my goals for the year, so anything I get done between now and when I go on vacation for Christmas is bonus as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, and I'm taking a college course that, very lightly, touches on 3dsmax and how to use it. I suck awfully, terribly, badly at making 3d models. But, for fun, here's what I made for my final project with 3dsmax after about 3 weeks of learning the program:

Awful, right?

I'll probably end up playing Harp and Chrystahmaemljalmdalnadfnda a few times in the interim. I picked it up last night for like an hour, and ridiculously hard to spell title aside it's phenomenal. I highly recommend this mod as it's probably the best you'll see for a long time. Until mine is done!

No, but it sucks to have to swallow your ego, but this mod is that good and there are a number of areas where my current work isn't on the same level, mostly visuals and cutscenes are where this mod really shines, and the writing is nearly on a professional author level (better than many, many commercial games even and certainly better than my own), and probably will outclass nearly everything in the future in those regards. I think there are a few weak areas so far, but they don't detract from the mod itself very much, if you notice at all. It's not perfect, but it's really close.

I don't know, I was blown away initially, just a really good mod. Go play it and vote for me because as an author I don't feel it's right to vote but I'm seriously tempted to.

Alright, then.

Probably about that time and also Christmas

2007-12-04T11:42:00.000-06:00

So I have some progress to speak of today, and I'm getting nearer to the point where I can start working on something other than areas. First of all I have provided some screens for the docks area, found by clicking here or even here if you missed it the first time. If so, it's a simple matter of going back and clicking one of those two links or trying this one here, all of which lead to the same place.

So that's a small portion of the docks. There's two portions to that area, an upper area on a hill where the temples sit, and the lower section where the docks are. The random spawning is again in effect, and they're clearly seperated by citizens up top and dock workers on the bottom. There's not much happening there aside from that, but the base work for that area is done.

I've also begun working on the final exterior for the city. Since I'm using the same textures as the last two, it's actually gone by pretty quickly since matching the technique is pretty easy. All I have the left in that area now is the buildings, trees, and placeables and setting up the spawn system which actually isn't anything I haven't done twice before in the last week or so.

So that's it there. I'll probably finish up the work on this area within the week and call it a year as Christmas is approaching and, honestly, I haven't done anything. Nah, I'll probably do some more work when I get bored within probably hours of finishing up this area, but I don't have any set goals in mind at this time.

You know, Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. My favorite is obviously the Fourth of July. I don't even really drink alcohol but literally a few times a year. It's not like I've got a problem with drinking or anything, I'm just getting a little too old and a little too married for that scene, plus as a parent you've got to be thinking that driving when you've been drinking with a kid in the car isn't a very good idea, even if it's only just one drink, you know? And what if something happens and we have to run to the hospital in the middle of the night? See what I'm saying?

But anyway, the 4th is great because beer and fireworks is a really good mix of things that are fun. Plus the 5th of July is great because you can go down to the beach in the morning and find duds from the big ones where it failed to ignite and the sizzlers, which are the little balls of the chemicals used to make the colors that fly all over the place when fireworks explode. So if you're lucky from July on you can be blowing things up all summer.

But Christmas is next. I do things a little differently than most people for Christmas. You all probably call people and ask them what they want; I know my family does. Maybe even do a gift exchange or round robin or something. Me, I don't play all that. I go to the store and buy things that I think are cool and that's what you get. For instance, two years back I bought my dad a shrunken head. That thing was creepy, it even stunk, but good luck topping that as the most memorable Christmas gift of all time, ya dig?

The only rule for buying gifts, as far as I'm concerned, is don't buy other people clothes. Nobody wants that stupid K-Mart sweater you bought, Grandma.

I also stay away from the round robin BS for kids especially. I don't know, that's kind of lame to do a gift exchange on kids. For one, they get like no presents then at the family get together. The other thing is you exchange names, then everyone calls and asks what the kids want. Yo, I could have just bought the damn thing myself if that's how it's going to be, know what I mean? What's the point? Like you all can't go ahead and buy all of the kids something small on your own? Damn if they don't "like" it either, that's a spoiled ass kid who gets mad their not even blood relative uncle from out of state didn't get them a Spider Man kung fu grip toy and got them a puzzle book or whatever. Then there's usually a price cap on the stuff so no one gets "outdone" by anyone else like it's a contest.

I don't know, it's just not fun to me.

But I don't have to deal with that with the Fourth. I just put down some beers and blow some stuff up, and everyone is happy that I spent $500 on some dope fireworks, then we head off to the big show. Plus, I don't have to shovel snow.

The thing is this year, since my wife is gone, I'm on my own with Christmas. My family lives in Wisconsin, hers in Chicago, and we live in Tennessee. So I need to do all of the shopping, make the drive with my daughter, my dog, and my cat, and get to all of the Christmas stuff by myself. That's going to be rough. And to top it all off, the pressure is on when you're visiting from out of state. It's crazy to me why this happens, but it does every time I visit family. It's like I'll stay by my Ma's house, where everyone that lives in the area will call and ask you to visit them. They don't want to come out to see you, but they expect you to go and visit them at their house...like I haven't just driven 500 miles to come there for a few days but now I have to spend those days driving around town to visit you. Did your car break down? What's the problem here, you know where I am?

Of course, I'm not going to say that to my Grandma and I always end up driving out there. I'm just saying. Move out of state and come back for the holidays, you'll see what I'm talking about.

But it'll be fun I think regardless. I'm used to all of that and make the best out of it anyway.

It's a cold day, a cold, sad day.

2007-12-01T02:22:00.000-06:00

Evel Kneivel is dead.

I suppose it's a miracle that the guy was even alive twenty years ago and every day since then has been a blessing, but damned if he wasn't one of the modern heroes of our era. So he'll be missed.

It kind of makes you think, though. Precisely how many days did it take after the first car was invented that somebody went, "you know, if I built a ramp..." For real, it was a marvel of modern technology at the time, but the freaking things went like 7 miles an hour (that's like 50,000 kilometers per cubic metric litre or something to you European cats) so I'd imagine the general public was more like, "yeah, that's great" as they passed by it at walking speed. So who was the first guy that decided putting 15 foot tall tires on it and running over other cars would be a good idea? Or this? It's that kind of reckless ingenuity that has kept the US leading the world in awesome, but we lost out today.

Of course it's not all bad. In other car related news I found this Camborghini on the internet, and if you're familiar with Cam'ron at all you'll probably find this hilarious. I did so much so that I'm seriously considering ordering the T-shirt if I didn't think I'd have to explain it to everyone who sees it and wonders why I have a half retarded looking drawing of a car on my chest, but odds are I will buy it and have to get some new pants (I'm sort of OCD like that, I won't mix and match pants and shirts and I have to buy them in pairs). So the day isn't a total loss, but it's pretty close both emotionally and ultimately financially as I'll end up buying some clothes.

On the NWN2 front, I've made some progress. I'm working on the second and what will actually be the largest exterior area of the city, so call me a liar for saying it wasn't going to be. There's a lot of docks and open water in it, though, so it's not the largest walkable area. Anyway, I'll save the screens on that for next post when it'll be done. I need to do the grass, trees, and details on it, but it's mostly finished.

RIP Evel Knievel & my wallet

What's Really Good?

2007-11-26T01:21:00.000-06:00

I was going to go for four in a row, but since I've gotten to the point where I'm adding NPCs to Velprintalar and the general layout of the city is done I thought it'd be a good time to post some screens out this piece. So what's really good?

Basically what's happening is this area is huge, so what you're seeing there is all from the same area in a lot of different corners of it. What you're not seeing is the vast majority of it. The entire exterior of the city will be comprised of three areas, though this is easily the largest of the three.

I devised a simple system of spawning random NPCs (out of a possible 16) at random waypoints throughout the city. I believe there's between 20 and 25 spawned when you enter the area, and all deleted when you exit it (I'm assuming this helps with performance. Whether or not a few NPCs walking around in areas you're not in makes a big impact is up for debate, really, but I figure every little bit helps), and it still feels really empty so I'll need to add some that just stand around with no point. I'm a little loathe to do that, however what's supposed to be the largest city in the country should be a little bit bustling. Maybe I'll just increase the number of random walkers instead and still add fewer that stand around. I haven't decided yet.

But yeah, I think it looks pretty cool. The design is interesting, a lot of hills and height variations, if not unconventional. According to the sourcebook, Velprintalar has a distinct elven flavor to it, which basically translates into I have to throw in a few of those illefarn statues where there's like a dozen variations but they all kind of look the same and a lot of plants. There's really not much to work with in the toolset that's elven, and dwarven is even worse, but I did my best. I have dozens of buildings to add random things in, which I won't utilize every doorway but it's nice to have options. There's not a whole lot of minute details, however there's a lot of color because I made it for the fall season and a ton of plant life (there's like 30 different kinds of trees in there. I stuck to the five seed rule on it, though, so theoretically performance should not be impacted. It hasn't so far, it's actaully getting much better FPS than I would have expected, but we'll see when it's all said and done and all of the NPCs are there...) so that should keep the eyes entertained.

I'm happy with it. Over the next week or so I'll be working on the other two parts of the city, and then it's on to actually building the quests, and I'll add interiors as needed until I'm done. Finishing the city will be another huge milestone, then it's the ending areas to wrap up the Chapter. I may make a summer release if things keep along this smoothly.

I'd also like to take a moment again here to thank everyone who has been doing the ongoing testing. They've been really diligent with offering suggestions and pointing out things I missed, and playing the same thing multiple times can be tedious but it's really important to know things are working as you move along and taking the time out to help...I don't know, I appreciate it is all. So thanks.

But, let's talk about the History Channel. There's a few channels on TV that are the "boring" channels, and really the only one worth watching most of the time is Discovery (and maybe the Science Channel), but even they have their fair share of crap like American Chopper or American Hotrod or American Air Compressor (tricking out a compressed air tank with flames = awesome and patriotic!), and I also think How it's Made kind of blows but there's some educational value there if you can stay awake through the boring narrative about how to make a bicycle seat cover. But Mythbusters, Future Weapons, MF-ing Survivorman, and Dirty Jobs are all dope, plus I really like the random specials they have like Planet Earth or the six part series on the ocean. The one on the Abyss, the deep part of the ocean where the sunlight doesn't reach, is an absolute must see. It's better than most movies, there's things down there that range from bizarre to frightening, and it can all kill you. That's why I won't set foot in an ocean, I don't care what I'm missing. I'm not trying to get jellyfished or stringrayed or eaten by a shark, you know what I mean? I'ma stay right here in the midwest, thank you very much.

But the other two, The Learning Channel and The History Channel, are mostly garbage programming. The Learning Channel I have less beef with. It's just it kind of turned into a subsidary of Oxygen and Home and Garden TV, all they play is house remodelling shows and how really, really fat people lose a full person's weight and are still fat and then die from being fat shows. I don't mean to sound non-PC, so if you're a little chunky don't be offended, I'm talking about like 800 pounds+ that can't get out of bed, literally no BS here, without a forklift. I don't understand that, who is feeding these people? It's not them that disgust me; I really can't blame them at that point. If you're bed ridden and somebody keeps bringing you fried chicken, what else are you going to do all day but eat it?

Point is there's not much that's watchable on that channel.

But the History Channel really trips me out. There's a lot more there that's watchable if you're into World War II. Personally, I'm not a big fan of history in general outside of the Roman Empire which I find fascinating, but the rest not so much. I'm also not sure that it should get as much play as it does past middle school. I understand the value of learning from history, but unless you're in a position to really capitalize on it like a world leader or some such, I don't see the value of it in every day life besides winning a game of Trivial Pursuit...which I'm not even sure anyone even plays anymore. I don't even think the Civil War was over when that game was written because the entire medical pie piece is about blood letting with leeches.

It ain't even that though, it's that they air so little that has anything to do with history. For real, like half of the shows are about the Bible, Nostradomus, and the Paranormal, and the other half is World War II documentaries. I just don't get where the first half fits in to all that. I don't buy in to all that, psychics and future predictions and whatnot, mostly because it's entirely fake but partly because even if it was real it'd be explained scientifically in time anyway so it wouldn't be exceptional anyway. For instance, today there was a marathon of this show called Monster Quest, where they get a bunch of otherwise intelligent people to try and prove things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are real, where they end up not really doing anything and interviewing assorted "experts" (they're heavy on the kryptozoologist, which is sort of like a zoologist but no formal training is required and it's not actually a field of science...), "witnesses" (which are just people who think bigfoot is real), and actual experts (who disagree with pretty much everyting), and overlay it with creepy music, half assed CGI (because, obviously, they don't have any actual footage of fake things), and ominious narrative for an hour, then a big "alright, we didn't really do anything, but maybe it's real...or is it?" at the end and call it a day.

It's awfully stupid. Not quite as stupid as those ghost hunter shows where they bumble around in the dark with night vision cameras and scare themselves, but very, very close. But shows like that are like half of the History Channel's programming. Or, should I bring up "UFOs in the Bible" as further evidence of what they'll play? They also aired Loose Change once, which I won't link to out of fear of sullying my blog's good name (heh), but you've probably heard of it anyway.

Basically, it's a real disappointment that the History Channel has to sink to that level, you know? I'm assuming that in order to sustain a big enough audience to keep the channel running they have to air Sylvia Browne-esque (I will link to this, I even bought the T shirt! Don't think anyone is going to get the reference, though) shams to the "true believers" at the expense of distributing actual knowledge and truth, which begs the question is there too many people like me? History just does nothing for them? Because it's a shame that their prime time programming is based around a bunch of lies and the real stuff is stuck during soap opera hours.

Alright, till next time, stay with it.

Three posts in a row, no screens

2007-11-22T22:36:00.025-06:00

That's a little unusual for me, but I'm like half done with what will be a very large and looks to be impressive city area, and I don't want to spoil it.

Yeah, I'm done with the Palace section of the mod. This will probably require some revisions and additons later as the side quests start to come out, however a huge portion of it is done. Came out to 5 areas and over 25,000 words of dialogue, so there's a lot of cutscenes and optional info to advance the story. Perhaps the most fun part about the banquet is that your decisions in Chapter 1 and up until that point, including what you did in the Palace and during will all impact what faction is willing to take you in out of a possible 6 (as well as your reward). Of course, that will remain optional, however it will play a major role in what you'll be doing around town if you decide to stick around and do the open ended sidequest deal. I'm thinking about throwing in an "evil" ending in there as well, that will turn out badly but it's there. Been helping out Red Wizards and generally being a bad guy? Well, Aglarond won't be a big fan, but perhaps one of the more "revolutionary" anti-goverment factions will...

There's a few odd sidequests as well, combat optional in all of them. I don't know, I think it's a cool area. It also needs to be tested thoroughly, so if you're interested in doing that head over to the Citadel and give me a shout out, or here.

So yeah, I started to work on the city itself. It's been a few days in the works but it's coming together. Most of the buildings are in place, the terrain is done, and so are the textures, but I need to do some mad detailing work on it. When it's done, I'll have some screens.

Dude, anyone been following Barry Bonds? I don't really care for, or about for that matter, baseball at all, but man, that guy is getting screwed. He's looking at like 30 years for using steriods! For real, I knew this dude that used to use steriods, except he didn't work out or anything, he just thought he'd get ripped by taking them. I guess it doesn't work like that, I wouldn't know. I took steriods once, but it was in this anti-fungal creme for my foot and I didn't get any bigger or crazier. Just got rid of the athlete's foot, and then it came back...so based on all of my first hand steriods experience I'm not really too keen on the stuff myself, far as I know it doesn't even work, but 30 years in prison is a bit harsh.

It looks like they're just trying to get him to roll on the steriod users in the MLB and turn him snitch. I don't think they're going to go for it, and honestly I don't think they can get a conviction anyway. Try to find a jury that doesn't already know Barry's been juicing for the last decade and you'll have to look in like the Phillipenes or somewhere where they don't even have bed sheets, let alone cable. Even then you know they're walking around in Bonds and Vick jerseys.

Matter of fact though, if they're going to sweat somebody over steriods, why not make it Carrot Top? You seen that guy lately, dude could bench press a mini van. And what's the greater offense? Barry Bonds breaking the home run record, or Carrot Top on stage? Last time I saw Carrot Top was at the Flava Flav roast, and I spent more time figuring out why he was even there than laughing at his clock props, he didn't even roast the guy he just played with some toys for about 15 minutes. And I don't even know when the last time I saw Barry Bonds, because aside from Berliad and my grandpa Stan (who, I kid you not, for my birthday when I was a kid got me a full team roster of the Cubs on Wonderbread trading cards wrapped in celaphane. We didn't even live in Chicago. Of course, year before that he bought me this sweet Pennzoil remote controlled Indy car that I ran into a curb and broke the wheel off within twenty minutes of opening it and my mom was all "don't tell him you did that or he'll hit you on the knuckles with a fork", which he would have so it was good advice.), I'm not even aware that anyone watches baseball, so your guess is as good as mine (about when the last time Barry Bonds was seen, probably forgot what I was talking about). So who cares if he breaks the record? Not me, I attribute it more to a work ethic than anything, steriods can give you an edge, but if I started shooting them in my ass would I be able to even hit a baseball? I'd probably end up freaking out at my keyboard and busting it on my monitor when a script didn't work right and get acne is all that would happen.

But you've got to respect Bonds, it's all green to him. All that guy wants is his paper, and I think that's whey he gets shitted on so badly. He's not the humble "aww, shucks America" guy next door, he's straight business and isn't ashamed to say it.

So that's what I think, they just don't want to see the record broken by a guy that doesn't "love the sport". But the minute you started paying more than I make in a lifetime to a guy that can hit a ball with a stick really well, that's what happens.

Reap what you sow.

Explain: Jean Claude Van Damme

2007-11-16T21:04:00.001-06:00

First off, the poll is about half way through now. The results aren't too encouraging as to whether or not I'll be using any Mysteries of Westgate content (which depends entirely on how that content is available anyway), because it looks like not too many people will be buying it.

Not as many impulse buyers as I would have thought either. I certainly am, but it's pretty lame to vote on your own poll so I don't count.

Anyway, I finished the large banquet cutscene, weighed in at over 6000 words...and you have to read most of them! So it's pretty long, not Trial in Neverwinter long, but none-the-less pretty long. There's also another lengthy cutscene to follow, not as long, but lengthy, that needs to be finished, and all of the post banquet dialogue needs to be done for everyone in the Palace. But I've made a lot of headway and am nearly ready to move on to the next area.

So that's the news there.

Anyway though, I know I've brought this up several times on my old blog, but for those of you catching up I have the Showtime/Encore movie channel package, which sucks. They get the scraps of HBO/Cinemax/Starz (and if you're doing worse than a network that uses a 'z' in place of an 's', you've got problems), so they basically get the worst movies possible. For instance, they've pretty much been marathoning The Hillz, of which Paris Hilton is the main character. I think. I haven't actually seen this movie, but since there's a 'z' where there should be an 's' there's really no point in even speculation on the possibility that this movie isn't God F-ing awful.

Anyway, point is Showtime and Encore both suck as movie channels. It's saving grace is that they're not really that picky about what they'll play, so a lot of older "classic" movies. I'm using "classic" pretty liberally here, as you probably won't catch any Citizen Kane or anything, but HBO doesn't play those kind of classics either because...alright, as a work of art, yeah, cool, but as an actual entertaining movie that you'd want to sit down and watch, you could do better. Honestly, I thought Stanely Kubrick's 2001: Space Odessey was a pile of crap when I saw it, and said so aloud in my film class, and was publicly scolded. Whatever, have you ever actually watched that movie? It's sucks, I don't care.

Again, anyway, you'll see a lot of classics. I'm talking like the Ghoulies, Puppet Master, Hellraiser, Critters, The Thing, Conan the Destroyer, Gymkata, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Ong Bak (which has an awesome soundtrack btw), well, you get the point. Movies you probably forgot about that were awesome at the time and you still dig. Nah, but you have to wade through monumental piles of crap to find them and their original programming sucks aside from Penn and Teller (incidentally, they also play crappy casinos out in Vegas, what's wrong with them two?), but if you're patient and have an iron will, you will succeed where most have failed.

So that's what I did when I caught Universal Soldier, starring Jean Claude Van Damme, who was huge in the 90's but now probably most famous for beating his wife and going to jail, and Dolph Lundgren most famous for a scene in which Brandon Lee, floudering where his legendary father had infinite success: the Action genre, took a role in which one of his speaking parts was complimenting Dolph's penis and then got killed in The Crow which also wasn't that great of a movie but people love kind of like Scarface. Also he played Ivan Drago and beat the chit out of Stallone for like an hour.

Fun Fact: That entire paragraph consisted of only two sentences, one of which was a blatant run on!

Anyway, JCVD was huge in the 90's, and Universal Soldier is often cited as his best movie, aside from perhaps Bloodsport. After seeing it the other day, I'm wondering how did that dude get so big? It's not that good of a movie! The barely coherent plotline is full of more holes than the giant Germanic barbarian slave in Gladiator in the opening sequence (or, if this is a better reference, the ear necklace Dolph wears throughout the movie), the acting worse than the acting of the giant Germanic barbarian slave in Gladiator, and there's no kung fu or JCVD doing the splits (though he stands around nekkid a few times...ladies! Nah, but every since he beat his wife, I don't even think the gulls like him that much), which is pretty much the entire point of casting the guy.

Nah, that movie is not good. I wouldn't say it sucks, but it's not good. Doesn't matter though, because you could easily call that his best work and still have to explain The Quest (which is just Bloodsport except it sucks), Time Cop (which just sucks), Streetfighter(!), Double Team (which is just that Jackie Chan movie but it sucks. Well, more.), Lionheart (which is just Bloodsport but it sucks), Kickboxer (which is just bloodsport but it not as good, but not sucks) Cyborg (incidentally I also caught Cyborg 2 later that same day which stars a young Angelina Jolie (which I also caught Hackers a few days before, which really deserves it's own post about the portrayal of computers in movies, but also stars a young Angelina in a see through shirt and Goth looking), but doesn't star Rosario Dawson who is, IMO strictly as a married man, way hotter), etc., etc., etc. you've got to wonder, how did this guy get famous? This guy messed up worse than Segal somehow, and yet he never should have had that option because he only made crappy movies whereas Segal was the joint during the same time but much less recognized. Far as I know though, JCVD didn't even get fat so there's really no excuse.

Anyway, all this has given me the inspiration to go to Blockbuster this weekend and rent the entire Hellraiser series and watch them all. Because if I'm going to watch crappy movies, it may as well have Pinhead instead of JCVD's naked ass.

The end.

You know, sometimes being a parent is hard!

2007-11-10T16:19:00.000-06:00

First of all, let me introduce you to my two new new screens. Screens, reader. Reader, screens.

Now that you're acquainted, let me give you a little background. Aglarond needs mounts for it's aerial calvalry for the seemingly inevitable war with Thay, but they can only breed them so fast. So they've turned to less traditional mounts, wyverns. Of course, they're having a tough time cowing them into being ridable. Maybe you could help? Or perhaps screw it up badly and kill all of the young wyverns? It's really up to you.

Yeah, that's the newest sidequest, a little ranger/druid time to shine, but not steal the show. There's like 4 ways to solve it, each with different outcomes, but they're all pretty similar. I don't know, it filled up a room.

Now, I only have one more room to go before I begin the actual banquet sequence, and the in palace post banquet activities before I submit that as an addition to the ongoing beta test. I figure when that's finished, probably about two weeks, I'll be around the 50% mark, which is pretty significant.

Anyway, back to the title of this post. You can tune out now if you don't care about my personal life.

So I went and picked up my daughter from preschool the other day. This is a pretty multiracial area, so she was sitting there at this table playing with some kind of purple goo; sort of like silly putty I guess, but I don't think they make that stuff anymore. But anyway there's a lot of kids there of different ethnic backgrounds. Matter of fact, my wife is half Mexican, and I'm pretty much a white guy (more on that later) so she's...I don't even know.

But anyways, one of the parents comes in to pick up his daughter, a black guy. So my daughter goes "Daddy, that's a black man!"

Ruh Roh!

So I had no idea what I'm supposed to say. You know how some people are sensitive about that stuff, plus I'm sure the last thing the preschool teachers want is for kids running around pointing out each others race. I ended up going with something like "yeah, that's a black guy." I don't know, what are you supposed to say?

The whole race relations thing is kind of awkward to me, because I'm not particularly sensitive about that. When I was a kid, it wasn't all that serious. We knew better than to use racial slurs, and my parents never did either, but we didn't really tip toe around stuff either. Obese was fat, little people were midgets, african americans were black, and crackers were crackers. Pretty simple stuff, and I keep it that way, that's just my philosophy. But I'm not sure if I should be emparting my philosophy onto her or teach her to be really, really PC, you know? Who knows what tomorrow will bring, hopefully it'll just be people chilling the F out.

Like I said, I don't really get all of the racial relations stuff. There's certain words certain people can't be saying, reparations, who stole what a few hundred years ago from who and how we owe their ancestors, and I'll tell you why. I've personally never owned a slave, stolen somebody's land, or massacred a civilization. I was genuinely curious about this so I made a few calls to family members, but it only reaffirmed what I knew before that time: Most of my ancestors came to the US before the civil war and lived in the North and fought for that side, and my great grandpa Felix was a Mohican Indian (which explains my love of gambling and small pox - hey, they're my people!) so not even my traceable ancestry had anything to do with it, at best they were standers by, at worst victims themselves. I guess I owe myself reparations? And my daughter can be traced back to refugees fleeing Nazi Germany from Poland and to an unidentified guy from Mexico, so...like if you want to bring that stuff up she's been persecuted from almost every angle and is owed land in both New York and Texas that was stolen from her. I mean, when you know all of that, who really has the right to point fingers? It's way too confusing to even matter.

Also, if you're curious as to how I found all of this out, my method was to call my sister who plotted out the family history. If you don't have a sister who did that, I'd suggest getting one, thought it may be too late.

So, obviously, I don't really get the point in bringing all this ancient history up and being all worried about it, because you could probably literally point to anyone and say "your people did something to my people a really long time ago!", but where does that get us? And half of the people doing the pointing probably don't even know the truth about themselves, let alone who they're pointing at.

Which is why I'm pretty sure just saying "yeah, he's a black guy" was the right answer.

Whatever though.

Been on my Hustle

2007-11-06T22:40:00.000-06:00

I guess that would be the best way to put it. I have to tell you in all honesty that it can be tough when working on a project this ambitious it's hard to keep on your hustle with it. Sometimes, you just don't feel like sitting down for a few hours to chip away at a boulder, so to speak. But every time you don't, that's those extra hours on the back end which adds up. I think that's my motivator, though. Like if you don't sit down and get things done, it's not going to get done, period.

I'm also not the type to sit around and think about things. Thankfully, my thoughts frequently come on the fly while I'm working. So really, the harder I work at this the better it comes out in the end. Seems kind of obvious when you see it written out, right? But I know that some cats have spreadsheets and extensive design docs and months of planning, which is good for them. Me, I keep a rough outline and wing the details, and work with inspiration when it strikes.

Case and point: For the last couple of weeks I've been working on The Simbuls Palace. As of earlier today, I have two floors completely done pre-banquet. They were supposed to be small with a few fun diversions. Well, I got a few ideas when I was working on it and it's probably turned into a good hour (or more, depending on how much time you're willing to experiment with one quest if you don't get it immediately from the clues! Or I suppose technically much less if you skip it all.) 2 extensive sidequests (one has two solutions, the other five) and one smaller one (technically two. I scripted in preparation of another quest that takes place in the castle, but I need to lay a lot of the groundwork for it in other areas first so that doesn't count...plus it wasn't that hard to do) that can lead to a quest chain (if I decide to even include it at all, no guarantee, but it's nice to have options and, let's face it, I probably will) depending on how you choose to handle it, all with non combat solutions, and 16,000+ words of dialogue. And I've still got two floors left.

And that's all just on the fly. That's why I like to run with things when I get the idea, that's a pretty significant addition to the module and only diverted a few days time, mostly due to me testing the scripting for them. All three had some scripting, but the two extensive ones had quite a bit, mostly visual effects for cutscenes. Because really, what's the point in closing a portal to the elemental plane of fire if there's no boom?

But I think the most challenging part of this particular segment is the writing. I've got no illusions that I'm some type of master wordsmith, I can barely talk coherently, but I'm good enough to get by. Which is the problem here. Basically what I've got going on is there's a banquet of nobles who are there to congratulate you on saving Glarondar from the attack that took place in the first chapter, among other things. However, they've all got their own agendas and they want to use you to their own ends, some good, some bad, some in the middle, but they're too polite to say it out loud. It's some classic politic stuff, you have to read in between the lines to see what's really going on. Thing is, I don't know that my writing ability is up to the task there.

I gave it a shot, though. I wrote a little dialogue where a somewhat important female NPC gets "forward" with you (aka she's hitting on you), but it's all in the subtext. Is she hitting on you, or isn't she? That kind of thing. You get to play along, or not, if you say the right things (and if you don't a dialogue skill might bail you out if you make the DC, or you can completely blow it on purpose). Then it's explained she was testing you, but that's the kind of subtext and subtlety you need to use if you're to be successful in impressing the nobles at the banquet. What you say and what you mean are two different things. Like a really weird tutorial.

I think that one came out OK, but this banquet is going to be challenging. It's going to be one of those things that people will either love or hate, I think.

Well, that's about all I got. No crap this time.

Peace!

Up yours, Obsidian

2007-11-02T21:47:00.000-05:00

Not really, I like them cats. Most of them, anyway. There's been a dev post or two that have rubbed me the wrong way, especially if you bring up Atari. They don't like you bad mouthing Atari, that's for sure. I don't know why, I mean, can they really be happy with them as a publisher?

That's what I'm saying. Blizzard has it right, you know? They do it all from the ground up, so if something's not ready they don't hesistate to push back release. One one hand, I suppose that, in a way, has got to be ticking off players. Look at how long we (well, you, I could give a F) have been waiting for Starcraft II? What, like a decade thereabouts? But I guarantee you when Starcraft drops, it's going to be hot (well, for you. Again, remember the afforementioned F). On the other hand, though, they don't have anyone to share the blame when the bugs start crawling out. I mean, like when people hated the ending of NWN 2 OC (which I still haven't seen because much of the middle is pretty tedious) Obsidian is just, if you read between the lines, holding their hands out and saying "Atari." Or how no skin from neck to the wrists and how they changed the Warlock outfit, again, they're pointing a finger.

Speaking of censorship, I just ordered by copy of The Witcher, which looks pretty hot (and like MotB, has been post release betaed by Europe already so I don't have to deal with the BS). Unfortunately, I found out later that there is a censored US version headed my way instead of the real game, which is a kick in the teeth. Now look, you might have noticed that I kept Subtlety of Thay pretty PG. I don't necessarily think that a bunch of nudity is appropriate for every game out there, and mine was one of them. I working on tackling some mature subject manner, like racism and politics, but none of that requires a bare breast hanging out. I don't know, one thing is I'm getting awfully tired of using the same clothes over, and over, and over, and over...

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm against that either, which is why I was disappointed by my ordering the wrong copy. I wanted to play that joint like it's meant to be played. I'm an adult, so whatever.

Funny thing is a lot of cats are blaming America (or AmeriKKKa if you prefer. Also, stop reading my blog if you spell it that way, please.) for that. And to a certain extent, they're right, because there's no other weird cersored copies floating about. Basically the gyst is people think that Americans love violence but fear sex. Patently untrue, we love our guns and ammo as much as our hookers and strippers. But seriously, y'all cats have to understand that it's not us, ol' average American guy just trying to get by, but old Republicans and Christians we've never even met, and Walmart, that are making us all look like bloodthirsty prudes. I swear on my life, I don't know anyone who even knows what the Witcher is, let alone if it does or does not have nudey collectors cards in the game. It's the Jack Thompson, Hillary Clinton, Al Sharptons, uh, Sam Walmart(?)s of the US that are behind all that. But I didn't vote for none of them, and prolly come next year only one of the listed will have public support of any kind. I don't really know the specifics behind it all, but for some reason those people are allowed to make decisions about video game imports.

So, yeah, just so we're clear: It's the F out of our hands what gets censored and what doesn't. I'm kind of sick of it too, but I don't even know who you're supposed to vote for and where to stop that from happening, and I have a feeling no one else does either. Besides, the government is all messed up anyway (oh, you all foreigners aren't any better off, real talk), so for the forseeable future that's life.

So, you've forgotten why I said "up yours, Obsidian" by now I'm sure. I'm in Act III of MotB. This may just be an ego stroke, but my area design is better than theirs across the board, and that's real. Of course, I think they have a better writing staff and I was impressed with many other aspects of the game, but I beat them out there no question. In two places it realy dawned on me: The first is where you fight the Ice Hag, that area is terrible, easily the worst in the game. The second is the Thayan Academy, which was really bare and non-sensical. I also thought the puzzle quests there were uninspired as well. That area was just really disappointing overall, which is unfortunate because it's the only time you get to explore Thay in MotB and I think a lot of people are going to walk away from that one with the wrong impression of Thay.

Say what you want, that's real talk. Want proof? Alright, go check out the Thayan academy that uses the estate tileset, and mine own for a couple of screens.

Alright then, I'm back to it. I've got insignificant NPC dialogue to write and sidequests to script!

And this freaking thing won't keep me logged in!

2007-10-27T23:14:00.000-05:00

I don't understand that. Why go to the trouble of having a "remember me" button of the freaking thing doesn't work? The only times I come to this site are for reasons that require me to be logged in. Seems like a lot of hassle for no good reason if you ask me.

Which you probably didn't. I mean, what are the odds that you'd think the same thing and say "I wonder if dirtywick feels the same way and happened to have made a post about that topic. Let's see!" Probably pretty slim.

Yeah, I'm in a bad mood. Thing is, I'm taking these college courses online, and the due date for the final was yesterday. Three days earlier than any other semester. For some arbitrary reason, they changed the due dates for finals leaving me high and dry, and they didn't even have the courtesy to send out a simple mass e-mail saying "hey, we moved the due dates for finals to a different day than what we have been using the last few years!" Not the end of the world, though. They're usually pretty cool about stuff like that and make ups. Even if they're not, it'll get sorted out. Normally I'm probably the most laid back guy you'd know, but when somebody goes off and does something stupid like that that will turn my $1200 A into a wasted $1200 D, best believe I'm going to break my foot off in somebody's ass.

But enough about that. You're probably wondering what's going on with my mod. Well, I just so happen to have a few screens with what's what on them.

Basically, I've been working on The Simbul's Palace. Seeing as how she's one of the most prolific and probably among the top 5 most powerful spellcasters in all of Faerun, I figured she need a laboratory to, I don't know, do wizard stuff in. And what happens when there's an unattended laboratory and an apprentice too big for her britches? Heavily scripted and multiple ending sidequest mischief!

Speaking of laboratory, I was typing that word out when I had one of those "You know, that doesn't look right..." moments. You know what I'm talking about, when you write out a word that you know is spelled right, but it just doesn't feel like it's right. So I looked up "labratory" online instead to cross check my crossed t's and dotted...lower case j's (props if you caught the reference, because it's party time, excellent! Woo woo woo woo!) Apparently, I would have been the 275,001st person to make that mistake, but I caught it. Most notably is the second link down on the page, a company that sells "labratory" equipment. That's got to hurt sales seeing as how your site only shows up if you spell the word wrong.

But yeah, basically the next few weeks will be occupied with building The Simbul's Palace. It's 5 areas deep, most of them double digits by double digits, so it's massive. Figure in all the NPCs that need dialogue and the huge banquet cutscene that will be influenced by the previous actions throughout the first three mods, your conduct inside the palace, and your conduct during the banquet, and all of the various sidequests/exploration opportunities in the palace, and you've got a lot of work to do. Well, I have a lot of work to do.

But it's going to be fun, this is one of the things I've been looking forward to doing.

Alright, then.

Did you catch Southpark tonight?

2007-10-24T23:00:00.000-05:00

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.

Things are going well.

2007-10-21T20:18:00.000-05:00

Ran into a few snags with the beta testing thus far, but that's to be expected. But overall it seems to be going a lot better than the first time around with Chapter 1. That's good news, mostly because I don't like this phase of the building process because it usually involves pinning down bugs and exhaustively testing the fixes.

But I've got to say, thanks to everyone who has volunteered to help. Multiple pairs of eyes makes things so much easier, and I can't even stress how much I appreciate the help.

But yeah, this week has been busy. Well, not so much busy but not having time to work on building. My cousin came out to visit for a few days, and I spent most of that time playing the Wii. I don't know about that console, hopefully it will get better. For one thing, the developers that work on that platform seem too obsessed with the ability to flail your arms seizurically and the character on the screen does stuff, so they tend to go that route when, perhaps, pushing a button would be better.

That's not really the case in all games. Obviously games like Tiger Woods golf are better when you're swinging the thing, and Zelda and Paper Mario use the remote effectively. Mario Party is a lot of fun too. But take Prince of Persia, I can't even play that game. There's too much flailing and too many buttons to learn. I'm looking like an idiot flopping my arms everywhere while my character is getting beat down by every enemy I run into while I'm running up a wall and falling to my death. Likewise, Red Steel sucks because it's ungodly difficult and relies too heavily on the remote which, for whatever reason, they made ultra sensitive and the camera movement really fast.

I would say that, on average, at least half of the games for the Wii I've played end up with me dying dozens of times in the tutorial section before the real game begins before giving up for better pastures.

The best joints on the Wii you can get is Scarface just to play the beginning, and probably the Wii Sports that comes along with it.

I also found a few minutes to play MotB. Anybody know at what point you're supposed to get the Spirit Eater ability? I'm about to go into the Death God's Vault and I'm feeling like I should be eating some souls by this point. I heard about a bug where you can miss the event where you pick it up.

Don't forget that the quest idea contest is still running and any and all beta applications, which is just you asking and not a real application, will be accepted!

Download the Beta!

2007-10-16T21:13:00.000-05:00

Just holla at me here if you want Beta test this motha!

I'm always pretty excited about a real milestone. This is a bulky third of Chapter 2. I play tested it myself, took a little longer because I hit a few snags (none game breaking, though, just oddities), but overall I'm pretty satisfied with what came out of it. The story is a lot more tight so far, the combat is pretty intense, and the companions and RP elements are a lot more varied and alive.

I was going to write about this last time, as my keen sense of observance usually gives me plenty to talk about (most of it stupid, but that's a given), but the last post was a lot longer than I intended it to be.

The other day I caught this anime called "The Fist of the North Star" on Showtime. Now I'm not a big anime fan by any means, but I like some of it. Ninja Scroll is probably the best of all time, Akira was good, Vampire Hunter D, Robotech, about every third or fourth epidsode of Dragon Ball Z, Afro Samurai, I don't know, there's probably some more I've seen and liked. There's also a lot of garbage too, more often than not.

You know what's interesting about anime? It was and, to a certain degree, still is ahead of it's time. It's catching on in the US, but so far the only cartoons that I know of made for adults are comedies. Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, etc. Afro Samurai was pretty recent (and awesome, should be listed above. Matter of fact I'll edit that in right now...) and was great. I'm not sure why the US needed like a 20 year post-Simpsons adjustment period for it to become "OK" for adults to watch cartoons made for adults. But the simple fact is it did, and now-a-days Showtime is playin' them joints on the daily.

But anyway I was watching "Fist of the North Star", and I had seen that before in high school back in the 90's but completely forgotten about it, and Jiminey MFing Crickets! That show is crazy. The basic premise is this guy knows Fist of the North Star style which is like the greatest kung fu style ever, and he wanders a post apocalyptic world doing good deeds using his martial arts. Pretty much a direct port of David Carradine's Kung Fu, except while they both travel the world offering sagely, Kung Fu advice to solve problems, David Carridine doesn't explode people when he punches them.

And that video is the old school tame version. The stuff they're showing these days doesn't leave a black body/red background to the imagination.

That's not even the crazy part. During the opening credits, the writers of the show were given their due. One of them was responsible for the Fist of the North Star novelization. Really, how much could you possibly write about a guy who walks around exploding people with punches? More of a visual thing, though that's obviously trumped by the fact that this must be a stupid book.

Then again, in high school I did a book report about the novelization of "The Golden Child" starring Eddie Murphy. Maybe the Japanese and Americans aren't that different.

33% of Chapter 2 enters internal beta...

2007-10-15T10:50:00.000-05:00

...later today. I have one thing I have to do still, which is finish a companion dialogue file up. But that shouldn't take more than a few hours, and we're on to internal beta, which is a fancy way of saying I'll play through it beginning to end. There's two paths through this, and one is already internally betaed, but I need to do the other half, which I'll have done by the end of the day. I've already tested the path multiple times by itself, but I just need to run through it as a whole. Then I'll be opening it up to a wider audience.

But remember, this is just a third of the whole chapter 2, so there's a lot of work to be done yet. I like to split it up into manageable chunks, though, makes the testing faster and easier. But I need help! If there's one thing I learned from last time around, it's that I didn't test it adequately. But I'm only one guy and can only do so much, so if you want to help me out either message me here, at the official boards, on the SoT download page, or by e-mail and I'll get you hooked up.

Just to make this short, here's a few bonus screens!

And a number count:

Areas: 17
Words: 50,000+
Monster Blueprints: 30 - 20 with uniquely scripted special abilities
Items: 600+
Scripts: 175
Conversations: 137

Add that together with the first chapter and so far I've got over 50 areas, over 110,000 words of dialogue (which is full novel size), over 40 custom creatures, over 600 custom items! That kind of puts it into perspective for me how much work this really is. I've designed more maps than an FPS, written a full length novel, and coded probably over 100,000 lines of code.

Anyway, now the ranty part that a blog post of mine wouldn't be complete without:

So yesterday, after watching the "Sunday night line-up" (which is literally what I call what I watch every Sunday) consisting of The Simpsons, skipping King of the Hill and catching half of a bad movie on Showtime, Family Guy which is great, and American Dad which I can't help but feel the jokes that weren't funny enough for Family Guy get shoved into, I did a little internet surfing. I was supposed to be working on the campaign, but got distracted by something else (shiny!) I saw on the internet and led into a wikipedia journey through all kinds of topics that eventually landed on Cannibal Corpse, the death metal band.

You long time Google spiders may remember that I listen, nearly exclusively, to rap. You also might remember the Don Imus incident not long ago where he called the women of the Rutgers basketball team "nappy headed hos" and was promptly nominated for the head of the neo nazi KKK coalition. Well, I guess if you're European you might not have heard about it, so basically the guy had a radio show on some major network (honestly, I'd never even heard of the guy before that) and did a sports broadcast and said that, and basically everyone remotely involved with civil rights for African Americans thought he was racist. I didn't really catch it. Nappy is a reference to when your hair looks like you just woke up from a nap (hence, nappy) and is messed up looking, and ho is a shorter term for the word "whore". Basically, he called them ugly sluts.

I'll admit, he probably didn't mean it that way and there was some racial undertones there. This is further accentuated by his actions after the incident when he went on Al Sharpton's radio show to apologize, which Al accepted and still went on to try and destroy the man (moving him to XM radio where he's probably making more money than ever) and blamed rap music for coining the term. Basically, aside from the fact that I can count on my hand the number of times I've heard the term "nappy headed ho" on my hand in rap lyrics, he said (paraphrased from reading in between the lines) "you all can do it, why can't I?", at which point Al Sharpton set his sights on hip hop. But the aftermath of that is a story for another day.

What's my point here is what you're probably wondering. Well, this isn't really my point but we're getting there: Hip hop has been a scapegoat for the countries problems for too long while heavy metal gets a free pass. Let me just start out that I think the whole blaming any kind of media for influencing people is BS. Like when Steve-O from Jackass straps meat to his balls and wades through crocodile pits, you don't sue jackass when your junk gets bit off, he's an idiot and so are you, you know what I mean? Likewise, when you start selling crack (which the real reality is most drug dealers dont' make a whole lot of money anyway, just saying) and beating women because Jeezy "told" you too, you're also an idiot, and when you commit suicide "from" listening to heavy metal, you're still an idiot. Just had to get that out there.

We straight? Good. Now, if you want to blame some kind of media for messing up idiots, take a look at some song titles and album covers from Cannibal Corpse. I mean, if you're the type of person that likes to d-ride musicians over their music, focusing on the guy that talks about a 9 and selling dope on the corner hardly seems worth the time when there's a ton of metal groups out there with disembowled bodies talking about (and I probably wouldn't click on this link) raping corpses and such. Know what I mean? A little bit of crack and a gun hardly seems like it should be worth it to them when it's next to that.

But again, this isn't a criticism of Cannibal Corpse (that's coming up), but a dig at those jokers who are trying to shut these musicians down.

But, I've got to hand it to Cannibal Corpse. In a time when the music industry is taking a crap, these guys can keep the seats filled. I watched a (eh, go ahead and click that one. You won't understand a word the dude is saying unless you're specially tuned to understand growling and if you are probably won't care because you listen to death metal)YouTube video or two of them live (and honestly I was expecting something more along the lines of a Gwar show, but nastier) but it was pretty standard fare for a metal band: long haired dudes moving their hair around and playing instruments.

But here's where it gets fun. Now, I've been on this side of the table before, probably a lot more than you have if you like death metal, but my ultimate point here is being in Cannibal Corpse can't require a whole lot of talent. There, I said it. Obviously, it's a lot more skill than many of us possess, and by the stadiums they play in a lot of people like it (good for them), but I'm talking about relative to similar groups. Like in the way that Jay-Z is simply better in every aspect of rapping than Mike Jones, I'd say there's a lot of metal bands that are a lot better than Cannibal Corpse.

Now, like I just told a black joke, I'm going to say this: Some of my best friends listen to Cannibal Corpse. Personally, it grates on me after a few minutes and I'd rather listen to dozens of other metal bands, none of which I particularly like anyway so I suppose it's a moot point. Usually I just say "What is this, White Snake? Gay." when I hear them playing it.

And I don't even think it's because these dudes aren't talented or skilled, it's just the genre. Death metal pretty much is a dude growling unintelligably about nasty with a drummer hammering away as quickly as possible and repetitive guitar riffs. That's all I hear when I hear this stuff, as opposed to, say, Pantera, where at least they change things up.

I don't know. Probably put too much thought into a 2 minute YouTube clip.

Probably about a week now

2007-10-13T00:18:00.000-05:00

Yeah, so the last of the area design for this mod is finished, and I also took the liberty of designing five new troll blueprints to spice things up. Took a while to test them out, though, as several of them don't die from fire and acid, but other types of damage, as well as a few other scripts for them. After it's all set to go, I have one side project for my bud Anduraga, and I might actually get a chance to play MotB while the testing is happening.

Either I'm really disciplined at holding off, or I'm terrible at time management. Or some combination of the two.

But, here's 6 new screens for you to take a gander at whilst I whittle away at the last of the work that needs to be done, such as the plot events and encounters. Then I need to balance it against the alternate path in terms of XP and loot (I wasn't an idiot this time around a wrote down all that information as opposed to just winging it). But it might be done by this weekend if I stay on my hustle.

Speaking of whittle, has anyone ever done that before? It's been probably a decade since I last heard that word spoken aloud, and technically since I wrote it (twice) that doesn't count. Probably wouldn't know what that is unless you were either a boyscout or have camped before, so here's a rundown: Basically, you grab a piece of wood and a knife, then you carve the wood into something for hours. Usually you end up with a smaller piece of wood if you lack the skill, or just a branch with some bark missing if you lack the patience.

I suppose the last time I heard that word was when I saw the movie "Son in Law" featuring Paulie Shore, which was incidentally probably the last time I ever heard the words Paulie Shore. But anyway, there was a scene where he sees the old, grumpy, and presumably racist homophobe, grandpa whittling a stick, and I believe he uses the word "whittle" when describing to Paulie Shore who minces up to the grandpa asking what he's doing with his ass cheeks hanging out of his pants like he thinks he's Prince.

Yeah but, I don't know, kind of an odd word.

Still moving along, here's some community mods and reasons why you should play them from a builder's perspective:

Night Howls in Nestlehaven

I'm going to be honest here: If you give me a choice between a pure exploration mod and a linear story mod, I'll choose the linear story. But if you're into open exploration, this is the joint you need to play. I didn't finish this because of time constraints and focusing on building over playing, but with this there's so much to do just poking around in the various houses and seeing some oddball stuff that I thought it was really fun. I'll be picking this up again soon because word on the street is the sequel is going to be dope.

Also, throw in cutscenes here, those were also really well done.

Tragedy in Tragidor

I know you all probably already played this, but this is a prime example of how a technically simple mod can convey a great story. The dialogue choices are simple and almost universally superficial in terms of consequence, there's no custom special script systems, etc. But the writing really carries this whole thing onto another level. I don't know, I thought it was immersive and memorable, and off of memory when I cracked it open in the toolset, I think there was very little scripting in there. That's mostly highlighting what you can do with what Obsidian gave you, which is ultimately make a great mod.

Moonshadows

This is basically, to me, a breakdown of how to do sidequests. Hugie really did a good job with that, I think that's the highlight of the mod. Again, didn't finish this one because of the summon/strip buffs/die bug in the later parts (which I've read was since fixed and I'll have to play it again), but the point here most of the mod is doing sidequests in the parts I played. Thing is though, they weren't the typical "go here, kill that, and I'll pay you" format. The setting and narrative, and the details especially, was enough where you probably could have built another mod around each one. That was the most exceptional part of this mod, and you've got to give dude props there.

Tomoachan

Little sidebar here: in the classic SNES game Lufia II there was this dungeon mini-game where you start from level 1 and move through 100 floors to the end, which obviously takes a long time and you're forced to really manage resources and make smart tactical decisions...it was one of my favorite things in RPG history, an actual challenge.

That's what I liked about this, not that it was gruesomely challenging in comparison to the Lufia II dungeon, but that you're on a no resting policy for most of the dungeon and hit with status afflictions, resource management, and tactical decisions to protect your potentially limited and draining resources. This aspect of D&D, and really RPGs in general, is too often ignored. Making the wizard with low strength having to ditch loot because you don't know where the next shop is, make hard decisions about where to use that last potion of restoration, skipping killing the vampires because of the threat of level drain, do I use my spell on this guy or save it in case something worse is around the corner, that kind of stuff is all an aspect of what can happen in a dungeon, but with unlimited resting abound and clearing buffs when you die...whatever. Thankfully, from what I've seen of MotB when a companion is killed and comes back, the status afflictions stick around! Awesome!

Anyway, good job in that regard. That should be the kind of stuff dungeon design uses over wading through hordes of enemies (though that's fine too, just make them a horde of wights with level drain!)

Well, that's about all I got for now. Enough to keep ya thinking anyway.

Don't forget the contest, and if you want in on the beta test come on and holla at me.

Peace!

MotB Edition Up

2007-10-10T18:50:00.001-05:00

Or will be soon, at any rate. Technically, as I write this, it's still uploading.

So go play that joint, if you haven't already. The changes were mostly cosmetic, and the rest was fixes to make some room for the new base classes, as well as slapping some new bugs in the face.

It's also about 100 MB larger because of the model override...who knew that could get so big? So, yeah, ouch to those who don't have a broadband connection. But you know what? Another 100 MB isn't that big of a deal if you're on dial up, either way you're putting on download and coming back in the morning, and either way it'll be done by that time.

Good news is it was a lot easier fitting the expansion into my existing hak than I thought it would be. Took about 15 minutes and I was rolling like nothing happened. I haven't checked out everything yet, I want to play it before I start figuring out what everything is and ruining the surprises in the campaign itself, but what I saw was great! There's a ton of new item models, a handful of monsters, a lot of new faces/races and classes, and the placeables! Picking this joint up was worth the money. Plus I hear the campaign itself is awesome, so that's good.

Anyways, I tested it with a Favored Soul...I wasn't terribly impressed with that class. Maybe it slaps everyone around at high levels, but try that joker at level 3 and it's pretty weak. You can cast a handful of buff spells and basically that's the only way you're going to survive. From what I've seen, at high levels they'll make great "melee clerics" with a ton of divine mights and such to go around, but wearing medium armor and being able to cast a couple of crappy first level buffs a few times a day (and you'll have to forego the healing spells if you want to fight) and not being able to turn the undead hurts. I don't even know how you'd handle playing a full caster either; either you're not going to have a whole lot of spells to cast (and a poor selection at that), or your DCs are going to be low enough where it'll take multiple casts to land a spell. In a group though, they have more than enough buffs to go around, which is really nice (stoneskin all around!), and you can basically have persistant divine favor at early levels.

Maybe I'll spend some more time with it and I'll change my mind, or find a better way to work it. But right now I'd rather stick with a cleric, they're a lot more vesatile and turn undead is nothing to sneeze at.

Also, check the post at the bottom of the page. The contest is still going on! When does it end? I haven't really set a date. If you're one of those guys that has a lot of ideas, but no experience with the toolset, here's your chance to see a quest of yours in a mod! On the other hand, if you're a builder and are going to use that idea yourself, eh, probably shouldn't say anything. Hi Hugie!

Enter, the more entries there are the more fun this is!

Alright, until next time!

2007-10-08T22:53:00.001-05:00

Coming at you from an all new location!

That's right, I moved over to blogger dot com. Why? Well turns out what I thought were Google spiders were actually people reading my blog. That, under certain unnamed conditions, may have left a comment. Whether or not they wanted to sell me x4n4x or v14Gr/\ remains to be seen.

Seeing as how I'm pretty lazy, I was going to put this off until tomorrow. If you'll recall from my last post at the old spot, I was awaiting MotB to continue any further. Well, I got an e-mail confirmation that it shipped, and it's estimated to arrive tomorrow. So rather than cut into the time I'll spend messing with that, I'll be messing with this, uh, right now.

First thing's first though, Happy Columbus Day!

For real, I wish somebody would have told me that it was a holiday today. I might have mentioned at some point that I have a three year old that I'm, for all intents and purposes, completely responsible for. Now I don't know if any of you all Google Spiders searching this for topless Britany Spears pics (I guess that was early turn of the century...Jessica Alba?) have kids, but to get a three year old to do something you want as opposed to running around the house screaming and jumping on the bed is a little tricky. My basic method is to bribe her with promises of ice cream, candy, or things to do that are fun (my daughter is actually a bit of a nerd thanks to me, because I can say "I'll read you the Big Book of Snakes and Other Reptiles!" and she loves that ish). So anyways, I had to get her ready for preschool, which includes brushing her teeth, getting her out of pajamas and into clothes, and tieing up a "dad ponytail", which ends up being a tangled mess of rubberband and knotted hair. Obviously, easier said than done. But I struggle with it three times a week.

Point here is that it's a holiday, so the preschool wasn't open. Apparently, every other parent knew that. So I'm standing around in the parking lot, mostly leaning on my decade old Pontiac Sunfire with the dent in the front, smoking cigarettes and wondering why no one else is there. Just so you're not confused, Tenessee is going through the same October heat wave as the rest of the country, but my AC doesn't work so it didn't make much difference whether I smoked in or out of the car. Only took about 15 minutes for me to look at the door with the big "We're closed on Columbus Day" sign...which they didn't even have the decency to add "sorry of the inconvenience!" at the bottom in small print (I checked).

So, yeah, not a real big Columbus fan.

Anyways, on to the NWN2 mod related content of this post:

Nothing new to add.

But, to kick off this new "I get to read comments, yay!" thing I got going, I'm hosting a contest. Check it: Give me a premise for a city based quest you'd like to see. I'll pick one and put it in the mod. I'm putting a few sidequests in the upcoming city area, but I thought I'd have some fun with it and make this a little more interactive than my last spot.

Now I guess I've got to add links to the sidebar and whatnot, maybe a picture of me staring away from the camera?

Alright, so that's all I got.