Friday, April 16, 2010

Stuff NWN2 could use....

Wouldn't it be nice to have all those floors pictured on the right? You'd enable a ton of new interior styles/themes. They are in a NWN1 hak. The hak's original author hasn't signed in to the Vault for 3 years so it's probably abandoned.
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Hakpaks.Detail&id=40282&id=6101
That's not the only NWN1 content that could use converting. There's a far chunk of other placeable content, but floor content is flat, so it hopefully shouldn't take a lot of remodelling, just apply these textures to some of the floors already present. Skydome's would be another conversion that would seem to be relatively simple.

A hot lava ground texture and a volcano plume placeable card. You've seen the photos from Iceland. The NWN2 lava placeable is fine, but can only flow horizontally, a ground texture could flow vertically. A smoothed cooled lava ground texture would be good too. A volcano plume placeable card is necessary for when you're not actually on the volcano, it's off in the distance. Placeable cards in general is an area that could use filling in, some cities or other structures in the distance, mountains.

Proper, defined clouds as placeables. Area fogs and smoke don't cut it. I want some poofy clouds to put around floating cities, or underfoot while the players are on high bridges. Cumulus and stratus please. Cumulonimbus would be great as a card placeable.

Actually loud waterfall sounds. I can barely hear "large waterfall" even after I've turned the sound placeable up to max in the toolset. Large waterfalls are loud, they have a roaring sound, they should drown out most everything if you're near the base.

Ability to change some tilesets floor/wall/ceiling textures. RWS Deep Halls comes to mind (Sorry you guys). One or two of the Obsidian tilesets has the same lack of ability to have the textures changed (Shadow Fortress) . I bet Deep Halls would look spectacular with the clean/smooth Sunken Ruins textures on it (good for Drow interiors I'd imagine) instead of the chunky roughhewn look they have now.

8 comments:

  1. Hi, this comment might be a tad out of place but I didn't really find a better place.

    I just downloaded the latest version at http://pathofevil.wikia.com/wiki/Path_of_Evil_Neverwinter_Nights_2_campaign_Wiki and thought I'd playtest a bit 'cause I felt like playing an evil Ranger.

    However Kvas gave me a rather suspicious looking "Crown Piece" at the beginning which had a placeholder description "testing object" and excessive stats (sneak immune, 2 saving throws, 2 damage reduction). So I wonder, is this version ready to be playtested or is it still some development pre-alpha?

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  2. Hi Kamal,
    Much of what you mention would be good. Regarding the waterfall sounds, I find I can get a good loud waterfall by playing with the min and max distances. Perhaps you have tried this, but if you set the max distance to 20 and the min distance to 20 the waterfall sound will be just as loud 20m away as it is 0m away from the source . This is opposed to the default settings of 0m minimum distance which causes the volume to taper off to 0% at 20m.

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  3. Sumguy: thanks, that would be a bug. One that I thought I'd long since eliminated so I'll have to look at the upload I made. The Crown piece he gives you isn't supposed to be that powerful, it should also be called "iron symbol" and have a real description.

    But yes, it's ready for playtesting. Doesn't mean it's perfect and you won't find any bugs... I've personally been through the entire campaign with an overpowered test character and now I'm going through with a regular party. The town of Ekkathys is kind of alpha (but the plot things there are tested and work), the rest should be beta quality. The wiki is there to make it easy to report any bugs you come across or suggestions you'd like to see.

    I'd estimate only 10% of bugs in my current playthough have been quest breaking. And another 5-10% force you to complete a quest in some alternate way. The rest are mostly typos, inconsistencies, suggested improvements etc. It's certainly a ways from release, but that has more to do with it's size meaning it takes a lot of polish work. I released the first module of it too early, too the result of lots of bugs. A mistake I don't want to repeat.

    @elfinmad: I'll have to try that.

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  4. Thanks for the reply.

    Is there a way to switch the crown piece for the symbol via the console; assuming it doesn't break quests? I guess it would be hard to judge balance when you have one of the most powerful items I've ever seen ;)

    Should I edit the wiki bug page http://pathofevil.wikia.com/wiki/Bugs_to_Reports_%28broken_stuff%29 directly when I find bugs or put them somewhere for review first? Like when I find things that may or may not be bugs, for example there are 2 chests under the bed in the player's house. They are very close together and one contains an iron symbol in the form of a hammer. Sounds like an oversight. Then again it might be intentional.

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  5. sumguy: it won't break any quests, and I expect you'll find things hard enough with it. Go ahead and edit the wiki, that's what it's there for.

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  6. @sumguy: I just launched the game to see the crown piece testing item. I was correctly given the "iron symbol". In that case I must have uploaded an old version of the first module somehow, I am uploading a correct version of the first module now.

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  7. I just edited the wiki with with the bugs I found so far. Let's hope the version wasn't too old to make them redundant. Then again if they are already fixed all the better ;)

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  8. Sorry I haven't had a chance to look at the bugs yet sumguy. I do see there are a lot you've reported. Thanks! The depression is doing it's number again right now so I'm on a hiatus.

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