Progress update: September

I spent a few days early in the month fixing Path of Evil bugs, so I'm not quite as far along in Crimmor as I could be. That's ok though.

The new main path is pretty well plotted out. The old TSR Lands of Intrigue soucebook, which covers Amn, Tethyr, and Erlkazar gave me plenty of background lore to set up a new main plot that grows out of recent Amnian history as put down in the book, with the characters and their motivations. It's a much better fit of a plot than the old main plot I think. It's not a "traditional" DnD adventure, there are no orcish hordes, drow, or dragons. It's just not the type of adventure most campaigns run.

Laying out the new main plot went fairly rapidly once I got the base idea. I've been filling in the details, I built a new area for the new plot, started expanding three previously finished existing areas for their new relevance to the plot, and took a last area from barebones to mostly done and changed it a bit for the new plot. The new plot didn't require a whole lot of new areas, I already had the city almost completely built so it was just figuring out where I wanted things to be. There are roughly 120 areas in the campaign, ranging from individual shops to city districts, about 110 of those areas are in the city itself. Probably 3/4ths of the areas are original, for the rest I found prefabs that fit, changing them somewhat where needed.

There was a tricky bit I wanted to show in a cutscene, so I built a script system to handle it. That took about a week. Like my commoner ai and other things, I will released it. It works in my test area, but the actual game is much more demanding of the script. I'm going to have to put a copy of the game area into a test module and work out the problems. Another bit of trick scripting to handle the use of a custom magic item in the plot went fairly quick.

My conversations for the new plot are still a lot of placeholders with single conversation options. I haven't worked out all the dialog and things a player might think of saying. Writing dialog for the new plot is also slow, my next post may cover exactly why, though an old post mentioned it.

My goals for October:

Add new main plot things to my test area so I can quickly test it. (edit: most new plot things now in test area)
Finish things for the main plot.
Get consistency of activities through the campaign. For instance the use of my generic foraging/scavenging system is currently concentrated in a few areas. There are many other areas where I could realistically add potentially scavengable items.

November goals:
Add filler npcs. Npc's not related to any quests, but with some conversations for color to fill in the game world. For instance, I already have a beekeeper that will tell you about apiary.
Get the custom sounds working ingame. I converted them to nwn2 format, they didn't work...
Testing, testing, testing.

December goals:
More conversation options for the pc. Once I have things working in testing, I want to add some different ways of saying the same things so players can have more of a personality choice.

Path of Evil, Last (?) Patch

In celebration of reaching a much higher number of downloads than I ever anticipated on the Vault, I spent some time on the (hopefully) last patch, v1.20 is up on the Nexus (Link). It's FTP'ed to the Vault for posting as well. This fixes all known issues (except possibly the cleric companions domains) . Because I had to make campaign level changes, you can not patch to 1.20, you must begin a new game (technically, you could overwrite the 1.10 version and changes would apply to modules you hadn't entered yet).

Fixed:

1. The Stronghold. Time now passes correctly etc. (repeatedly tested)
2. Carcarin's sidequest (repeatedly tested).
3. Neon walls in a specific area. (I had to create a new area and place each tile individually, then terra-coppa the non-tile info).
4. Leadership feat now uses SoZ scripts, so definitely works.
5. Food Supply quest.
   
6. Improvements in the Muzad Trade Dispute quest.
7. Various other small issues.

If you want to see exactly what was fixed, the amusing complete list of bugs back to pre-release is here.

screenshots: 1: Stronghold time advances.
2: Stronghold soldier: you have a choice of humans, gnolls, or skeletons.
3: The no longer neon walled area.