Another Blog Post

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

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!

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:

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.