In case you missed it:

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.

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?

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

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!

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?

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

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.