Progress Update

I haven't posted much in a few months on what progress has been happening with Crimmor.

Wyrin's foraging placeables have been added. I didn't say the full wyrin system because I rewrote his script into a general forage script that checks skills party-wide to allow party cooperation in harvesting. (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2Scripts.Detail&id=395). Crimmor is getting a modified version of my posted version of the generic forage script. The posted script preserves Wyrin's forage system, but for Crimmor I wanted to alter things.

Wyrin's stuff requires the pc have some survival skills to have a realistic chance, since survival is a skill always checked in his system and the survival DC goes up to about 20 or so. Crimmor is an urban environment, so finding the plant among all the things in the forest (survival) isn't needed. I removed survival checking, as I figured someone skilled in alchemy (the other skill wyrin checks) would be able to recognize the alchemical plants they can work with, even if they didn't have general plant knowledge from the survival skill. So survival checks are out except for the two plants, reeds and the retch plant, where the description of the forage process in the placeable description implies it's pretty much entirely survival skill. Those two still use survival. The craft alchemy check is made much harder (mostly over DC 20) now though to compensate, and make the foraging a reward for those that pursue the craft alchemy skill. Additionally, you must also have base skill points in survival or craft alchemy, it didn't make sense that the untrained person could harvest extracts, or even know that they could.

Several small fetch quests were added to fill out the world and give a purpose to some areas that were entirely for flavor previously. Hopefully people will find these better rationalized than NPC "I need some firewood", Player thinking to themselves: "There's an axe and a woodpile right next to you, you're able bodied and there are no monsters around." I don't like it when there's no rationale for why the npc isn't taking care of the task themselves. In Crimmor these often function as exploration quests, as the npc doesn't generally know where what they are looking for can be found. For example one npc is looking to find a particular kind of wood to have a lute made, as he's a hobbyist lute player in his spare time. He hasn't found anywhere that sells that kind of wood yet.

The scripting of some of the generic commoner things has started, to cover things like people in taverns sitting and drinking, bards playing. I found some useful scripts out there I can use.

A prefab area had all it's trees replaced. Crimmor doesn't have a perpetual windstorm like the Sword Coast, Chult, and Rashemen apparently do. A community member gave me access to redone tree spt files, that eliminates the trunk/branch swaying (the leaves still sway).

A number of placeholder conversations have been filled in. Tip for other builders, putting {placeholder} into a conversation allows you to search for "placeholder" in the toolset and find all these placeholders, but since it's inside the {}, it won't show up in ingame testing. This allows you to write out your conversations quickly if you're stuck on finding the right conversation lines for your characters, so you can add in scripts etc and test things even if you're having a bit of writers block.

Density and the Open World

No, this post isn't just about Skyrim. :-) Path of Evil was an open world on the scale of Faerun, and Crimmor is an open world on the scale of the city.

Open world games have something to keep in mind that more linear games do not, the density of points of interest in the world. Think of the overland maps in SoZ, and imagine if there were only 3-4 places you could go on them. That would create two problems. First, it would be boring, and second, you'd spend lots of time just walking from between place. Now imagine the opposite, several hundred of places you could go jammed into the overland maps. That creates two problems as well. First, there's a logic problem, "You mean there's a dungeon/cave/ruin every 2 meters between here and the next place I need to go?", and second, the player may very well explore all those places on their way to the destination, with the "saving the world waits for me!" problem.

There's a happy median to be found somewhere in there. Open world games need to provide plenty of points of interest on the main land map, but not pack them together so tightly that they run into the problems from that.

In Path of Evil, the points of interest outside the cities weren't always as interesting as they could have been. Most of the quests centered around cities, or areas you could travel to from a city without needing to move to the world map. There were a few quests you could wander into on the world map, but for the most part the world map locations were just random dungeons of no particular interest to the player other than for what loot could be gotten. I think ultimately the campaign suffered some for that. I'm not sure what readers might think of the density of locations on the campaign world map, but I think the density of interesting locations was too low.

Naturally, this perceived weakness is something I'm trying to improve in Crimmor. It's making a lot of work in order to fill out the gameworld with enough to do. Currently things are going relatively slow. I've been playing some other games (sacrilege!) and not been super motivated (this is normal in the middle of winter for me). I havnt posted to the Bioware Social thread for Crimmor because there hasn't been anything worth showing, just some minor sidequests in existing areas, and some frustrating work on my commoner ai project that seemed to go nowhere. I'm considering redoing much of the work on that and getting a cleaner start based on what I know now.

Everyone else is talking about Skyrim, so I will too.

I've been taking some time away from the toolset to play Skyrim. Let me get this out of the way; it's great and the money was well spent. They fixed essentially everything that was wrong with Oblivion. I've played for some 40 hours and totally ignored the main plot in favor of pursuing the backstory I came up with for my character. Also, I'd buy Morrowind again if they remade Morrowind with this engine.

Now, on to the nitpicking. (If you just want to read something very cool, skip down to the last two paragraphs.)

Logic:

Being told that there's a big conflict between some rebels and the Empire I took a logical (for an adventurer) tack and head for the border. That's where the conflict should be sharp right? Nope. I followed a path and found a border to the empire, and there was a gate marking the end of the gameworld. The gate was unmarked on the main map, meaning it was unimportant. It was also unmanned, I thought there was conflict? Right next to the unimportant, unmanned gate to the empire, and five feet from the road, valuable ore (gold iirc). Was that ore just ignored when they built the gate?

Later I found a map showing where the forces were, and found a number of camps from both sides. The empire's invading force was not near the border with the empire, instead they are all as far away from the border as they can be. The rebels? Close to the border. Shouldn't that be reversed?

I found two dungeons where I could turn off a few of the torches. Presumably this would improve my sneaking. Unfortunately, these were the only dungeons I could do so in the 40-50 I've been in. Either let me turn them off, or don't. 


Lighting:


500 feet underground and it's light as day. Everything natural apparently glows in the world of Skyrim, water, fog etc. The natural world underground is actually brighter than the dungeons.  Yes, I know, gameplay reasons... If you look up, many of those "light beams from the sky" are coming from hard rock. Not all of them though, some come from actual holes in the ceiling, so I know the maps can have holes in the ceiling.


I've entered a number of places where no living creature has been for centuries, and there are torches and candles everywhere lighting the place up? Apparently torches and candles last for hundreds of years in Skyrim, or maybe zombies like them? Also, dust in the air, hundreds of years and it didn't settle.

The sunlight in the various grottoes on the world map does not match the high mountains surrounding them, instead the areas are lit as if there were no mountains, or much lower ones. Daylight reaching the ground in some of these should be an hour long, at best. Some grottoes do not have a day/night cycle, despite even large openings to the surface.

Gameplay:


The "cleared" notification for dungeons is a great idea. The game tracks it as a stat. There's a Steam achievement for clearing enough places. So why aren't some places clearable? I'm positive I've emptied out a number of places (Skrim's levels are almost entirely linear), yet not received "cleared" or a notification that a place isn't clearable for some reason. It would also be nice if I got an information message of cleared instead of having to look at my map, though maybe I've just missed that.

Dragons are awesome, except when they stink. The tutorial dragon wrecks an entire town. So when I found my first dragon I thought, "This is going to be epic!" Nope. Three hits and it was dead. It didn't even get a chance to use it's breath on me. Perhaps the game should take note of it being the first time you fight a dragon, and make sure it's difficult.

The random "superboss" mob member. In one area I fought a boss, a master level wizard opponent using ice magic, and learned one of the dragon shouts for my trouble. The level of difficulty was such that I could take 5-6 hits before dying. 15 minutes later I was in another area fighting mobs, and one generic mob member, who also happened to be an ice wizard like the boss I'd just recently fought, kills me in two hits. Repeatedly.


This is a Steam one, and maybe the Xbox/PS3 as well since it's an achievement thing. The "Master Criminal" achievement is when you've got a high bounty everywhere. That's not a "Master Criminal", that's a bad criminal, the good crooks get away with it. Wanted Outlaw maybe, Scourge of Skyrim perhaps?

Armor/Weapons:

Dwemer armor is quite valuable, so naturally dwemer scrap (used to make the armor) is fairly valuable too, right? Nope. It's seems to be least valuable type of "ore" for smithing, and it's value to weight ratio is worse that virtually any useful item, even the lowly iron dagger.

Light armor versus heavy armor. The light armors elven, glass, and dragonscale all have a hard plate armor look. This visually groups them with the "heavy" armors. It also would mean in practice that the usage would be more akin to "heavy armor" usage, the hard plates deflecting blows. Except light and heavy armor are different skill trees. I've purposely avoided "upgrading" to these armors just from the look. I'm not playing a melee fighter, I don't want to look like one.

Falmer are blind, so their helmets have no eyeholes. When the player wears a falmer helmet, they can apparently still see despite wearing a helmet with no eyeholes. I know npc's can be blind, see the infamous bucket stealing trick.

Some non-realistic looking weapons. I was granted a unique ghostly sword for completing a quest. That was pretty cool, everything else in skyrim goes for a realistic if sometimes stylized look. So I liked the sword even though I'm not playing a swordsman. Shortly thereafter, I found a dungeon full of lootable ghost weapons. So much for the uniqueness of my quest reward, and the ghost weapons are out of the "look" of the rest of the game.

Other:

Oddly inconsistent texture work. The texture work is mostly great, but in a few places it's not nearly the same quality/resolution. Fast travel to the mage college and look at the snowy bridge for an example.

All the jarls have the same "bored slouch" pose, even the ones that take an active interest in things.

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Best moment ingame: Fairly early on, I wandered into an archery trainer, who has the player complete several ingame archery tests for training. She gave me a bow for completing them. It was about the same as the bow I already had, but I started to use it anyway since I quite enjoyed the ingame tutorial. I kept using the bow even as I got better one, until I got one that was much better. I still kept the bow out of fondness for the training/trainer, and carried it around since I didn't have a home or anywhere to store it. It even meant having to leave loot in dungeons sometimes.


Much later ingame, I wound up against a boss enemy, who used it's dragonshouts to disarm me of the bow I was using. So I pulled out another bow from my inventory that I'd picked up in order to sell. That too got disarmed. Now what? I looked through my inventory and there it was, the bow from the archery trainer I'd met in the middle of nowhere, and carried around solely because of my fondness for the training. That bow, "obsolete" and carried around solely because of my character's fond memories, saved my character's life. That's a gaming moment that will last.

The Dark Host pseudo prc

By making an in-game bargain with an lower plane power, you can gain access to the Dark Host pseudo prc. In return for a significant stat boost (but random as to whether physical or mental stats are boosted) and forced alignment change towards evil, the player loses some control over the pc due to the influence of the being they host. The idea is similar in concept to the story of one community member's adventure (I won't say who since it would kind of spoil if for players of that person's adventure), at least I can say I had the idea independently.

This is an entirely optional bargain, it is not necessary to complete anything in the game, it is not given anywhere the player must go, and the player is warned in-game of the unpredictable nature of the bargain. Lance Botelle has a poll up now on predestination versus free will. Is your pc's answer to the lines below predestined, or free will?

PC: So I become just an empty shell for something. Somehow, that does not sound appealing.
Lower plane power: You do not become an empty shell. You... share, though of course you are strong enough to remain in control.
PC: Of course. Somehow I doubt you are entirely telling the truth.
Lower plane power: How much is truth and how much is lies is for you to decide...

Here are some examples of the loss of control: one quest has the player try to convince some local ruffians to take care of something so the player doesn't. A normal player can use appraise, bluff, or taunt. The Dark Host forces the player to use intimidate, as the being they host overrides the pc and speaks through the character. Another quest sees the Dark Host forcing the player into a fight they'd most likely avoid otherwise. It's not all bad consequences, a murder investigation the player is asked to undertake is instantly solved because the Dark Host "sees" the evil of the murderer, allowing the pc to instantly identify them.

There are currently around 20-25 planned spots for the Dark Host to influence things, eight are implemented so far. Players will generally be given the Dark Host option late in the game, so they probably won't see them all. Exactly how many a player sees will depend on whether they get the physical Dark Host, or the mental one, as the respective beings have different approaches to their evilness. The physical one is more of an intimidating brute personality, while the mental one is more of a conniving knowledge dealer. The Dark Host dialog options are unique, so if a non Dark Host player can use intimidation during conversation, the Dark Host intimidation the player must choose has a different line. The Dark Host dialog lines are umm, appropriate to what happened to the pc. People may not like their lines, but they did make the choice that allowed it. I had complaints about how you could do and say evil things in Path of Evil (yes, I know, I warned people of that in the campaign description, I still had complaints), and Dark Host is worse

I'm torn about giving the player an opportunity to cure themselves of this state. One possibility, the player tries, but the cure automatically fails (predestination!), and the player is stuck with it.

Loadscreens for Crimmor

In Path of Evil, I used GIMP to add a painted effect to area screenshots. For Crimmor, I wanted a more personal feeling. I elected to use unedited screenshots, generally from viewing angles the character would have. I added area name to them since the character is a local to the city and would know the name of the area, assuming there is a unique name.
 

For the text, in GIMP, add a text box. The font I picked is called killigraphy, a freely downloadable font. You can get it from http://www.dafont.com/killigraphy.font among other places. You can see from the font map the letters have a sharp look, reminding me of a rogues' typical weaponry. A number of letters have a particularly "weaponlike" look, particularly f, j, and t. It doesn't have capital letters. I used 72 point, centered. To give the written text a more 3d effect of still liquid ink (fluid, smooth, changeable, like a good rogue), after typing in your text, select Filter -> Decor -> Bevel from the GIMP menu. I used default bevel settings.


For the curious, the Auric Commorancy is a the name of the city's temple to Waukeen. I used a thesaurus to come up with some interesting sounding words, auric means pertaining to gold (Bond fans might remember the villain Auric Goldfinger), and commorancy is a dwelling or residence. So it's just a fancy name for "Gold House", fitting for a temple to Waukeen. Most named buildings have their named taken from the Dragon magazine article on Crimmor, written by Ed Greenwood (creator of the Forgotten Realms setting) himself.

Obsidian's next game is South Park?

CNN is reporting on their website that there is going to be a South Park RPG, and it's being developed by Obsidian. That's... unexpected.

I guess I should have seen the parallel between The Nameless One and Kenny. :)

More games with SLS

Since SLS lets you control lights, I've built up several script systems and a trigger based around lighting that uses SLS functionality. First, I've added the ability to turn lights on/off by doing appropriate damage to the light source. Normally this is fire for on, and ice for off, but "cold lights" would just be a matter of a quick script edit. You can also turn lights on/off via a number of non-damaging spells. Gust of Wind or Darkness etc will turn off a torch for instance. Magical lights are not able to be turned off via gust of wind, but can be dispelled. A variable on the light records the level of the creature that enchanted the light, and the dispel line of spells are very straightforward to implement. And of course some light sources can simply be used to turn them on/off.

So what? Well this is where my trigger comes in. I have a trigger for the lightsphere of a lightsource. The trigger reduces the hide skill of pc's that enter (not npc's as the ai can't deal with that, a sneaky npc doesn't stick to shadows), and restores it on exiting the trigger. But the trigger is also aware of the status of the light, if the light is off, the pc gets no bonus entering the trigger. The scripts that allow turning on and off lights also are aware of the trigger assigned to them, and adjust the hide skill accordingly, so for instance if the player is in the trigger when the light goes on, the hide bonus is immediately removed. This is demonstrated in this trigger awareness video .

Finally, the trigger looks for a local variable named guards_lights on anything that enters, and keeps track of if a guard can use the light source (a variable on the light source). Npc's with the guards_lights variable will move to a light source and turn the light back on if it's off and they can use it. Your average castle guard can light a torch, but not turn on a magical light.

In this youtube video you can see the guarded light function in action. link The pc hits the torch with an ice arrow at the very beginning of the video. You can see the guard enter the trigger (marked by the mushrooms for the demo). As he enters the trigger he notices the light is out, has a speakstring that plays "darn light!", moves to the lightsource, plays a use animation (it should loop until the light turns on but doesn't in this demo video), the light comes back on, and he then continues on his patrol path.