WTF? Uninstall deletes modules you've downloaded?

Uninstalled and reinstalled to fix the toolset crash. And now the toolset will launch with the 1.22 patch. But uninstalling deleted all the modules I'd downloaded or built! WTF?! That's at least 100 hours of work down the drain unless I can recover it via an undelete utility. Seriously, WTF Obsidian? How about asking if I wanted to delete modules?

1.22 update broke my toolset (but it was my fault)

Of course, my toolset was quite buggy to begin with. I was already getting toolset errors whenever I started my toolset. I had a ton of prefab placeables which were almost assuredly causing the toolset errors. Removing the prefab placables didn't help, so I'm currently stuck uninstalling and reinstalling NWN2.

Also, someone gave me a 9.25 on the Vault. I don't think I'd rate myself that high. There is much that I could do better and the scripting/quests are quite pretty straightforward. So I think that person is being kind to me.

Calimshan

I was busy over the weekend creating the Calimshite town of al-Qasr al-Kadim. using the Solvheil: Tahamman prefab (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2PrefabAreas.Detail&id=360), though it barely looks the same anymore as I redid it into a much more arabic looking town and turned half of it into a tent city with oasis. It's populated by Storytellers desert npcs. It's almost all mapped now and the npc's have been put into place. Plotting of quests is also complete, so what remains is actually implementing the quests.

Located somewhere in the deserts of Calimshan, al-Qasr al-Kadim is an entire city of sidequests, mostly centered on plotting, doubledealing and scheming (there is one hack/slash quest). Twelve sidequests have been plotted so far, including two gender specific quests. Two joinable companions are to be found here as well. Since it's pretty much a standalone area, I may release it as it's own module for levels 6-7 with the companions.

Valentines Day gift

Very little work got done since my last update. Valentines Day brought me food poisoning....

Dungeons built by ogre magii.

I'm putting the finishing touches on the ogre magii built dungeon. Hidden deep in a mountain range, this dungeon houses an ogre magii relic. The relic itself isn't useful to players, but can be recovered as part of an optional quest. Finishing this quest will allow the player to finish another quest, also optional.

The ogre magii dungeon is two levels, plus there are two outdoor areas to travel through to reach the dungeon. The player will find some treasures scattered on the floor of the dungeon, indicating some of the events that have transpired there. This area is mostly hack and slash (only two real npc conversations), but if certain party member(s) are in the group, you may find out more about them.

RWS Dark Ruins

I spent some time this weekend seeing what I could do with the newest RWS tileset, Dark Ruins
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=415

Great stuff as usual, though the initial release didn't include a few standard tile types (eg room with two doors opposite and two variations of hall end with one door). The other thing with this tileset is that you have to be careful with cave pits and bridges. Bridge end pieces need another tile next to them. The "lookout areas" into pits don't always mesh well with adjacent tiles, leading to spots with wall on one side/clear from the other syndrome if you're not careful. This restricts the layout you can make pit areas.

The final oddity in the tileset was a metatile that does not connect to any other walkable areas, though it does have doors in it, so you could access the area by using a door elsewhere.

The other thing is RWS has put in a circular door for this tileset, but the texture is the Aztec calendar stone. I'd like to see a little more generic alternative, the door makes the tileset strongly meso-american (or maztican for Faerun).

But since it was just released, can't really fault RWS, especially since the tileset is so good looking. The tileset also happened to be a good fit for an area I wanted to work on, a dungeon built by ogre mages. The tileset has a strong "not built by humans" look imo.

New tilesets from RWS are always great, the quality I see from them is always excellent.

Path of Evil goes 1.0

It's sat on the Vault for long enough without any bug reports, so I moved it to 1.0 status last night. Hopefully people like it. Only a whole bunch of my time went into it :-)

Unbalanced campaign

By that I mean I'm not going to scale encounters to the party. Scaling encounters are seen in a lot of games, most recently for me when I played Oblivion. In practice this is a sop to new game players, the developers wouldn't want them to get too frustrated. But if you're playing NWN2 this long after it's release, you're almost assuredly familiar with the game and with the D&D world.

I am not a fan of scaling, in any realistic (well, as realistic as a fantasy game can be) world you can walk into something you are overmatched for, or something you can walk over. Baldurs Gate 1 definitely gave this feel. Wander off the path from the Friendly Arm Inn to Nashkel and you could wind up staring at a basilisk in the face at level 2. Or you could enter the xvart village at level 6-7 and run them over. You never knew. It kept you on your toes and showed you how powerful you'd become when you plastered the xvarts.

I have great memories of my party barely rescuing Dynaheir only to discover a bunch of gnolls now blocking my escape and preventing me from resting. It was a great and hard fought victory using every tactic and pretty much ever potion, scroll, etc I had to get out of there.

Once you reach a certain point in the POE campaign, almost all the gameworld will open up at once. And while it will be suggested you go certain places, you will be able to go where you want in the gameworld. This means you could wander into a higher level area at lower level and get pasted. Maybe you should have thought about that before insulting that beholder at level 2*

*there are no hidden beholders to insult in the Nest. :-)