In praise of the tester!

Over half of the fixed bugs since I first put it out there for testing, and virtually every bug for the past month, have been reported by some guy who calls himself Sumguy. Thank you Sumguy! With all those reports, things are really coming together in many areas. I haven't had much time to test myself.

Campaign Bugtesting Wiki

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.

When do you toss out an area?

So at what point are you willing to toss out an area and start over? This screnshot is from the rebuilt town of the player stronghold. I tossed out the old town exterior over the weekend and rebuilt everything. The old town just wasn't that good, which is odd because it's one of my most recently built areas.

The town was plain, it had a lot of buildings that were just there taking up space, and I'd made it 32x32 to incorporate some things, so performance was poor. Bad builder, bad. Here's an overhead screenshot. It did extend a bit farther at the bottom outside the walls, those two herizontal paths at the bottom were the borders of walkable space.

I started by making the decision to split the town into two areas. The old town had a stream that seperated the rest of the town from the upper class/stronghold area. I kept the stream, but made it the boundary between the two areas. In the "main town", I kept the church you see at the center, in the center of the new "main town" for two reasons. First the town church is at the geographic center of many historical towns, and second was a plot reason.

I kept the general geographic layout, with the stream running diagonally. But I eliminated the houses between the church and stream. There were plenty of houses that were doing nothing already, they were just there. Then I divided the area around the church into three "districts", merchants to the SE, general housing to the SW, and some buildings the player can unlock to the NW.

It's a tighter, more SoZ style: all buildings have some game purpose and can be entered. It's a contrast from a more realistic style where not every building has something of interest to the player. The main town is now 12x12, and not all of that is used because of the diagonal stream, so it's closer to 12x10. To do this the cliffside gladiator pit had to go, but I didn't have gladiator combat. I still have a spot where I could make a transition to a new gladiator pit area and keep it inside city walls (or just put the pit outside the walls). With the smaller area, I was also freed up to put in more detail with placeables and the like while keeping acceptable performance.

I also built the basics of the other area in even though the player can't reach them. Terracoppa is your friend :-) This allows the adjacent areas to be consistent. Of course once I'd copied the area into the new area I made sure that all the objects from the other area got turned into environmental objects to improve performance.

In the upperclass/stronghold area (East and North of the stream), the upperclass area got compacted so there are no more general buildings that are just there.  The stronghold got it's whole area though, since the stronghold is a prize for the player and I wanted to keep the ability of the player to walk around and admire the grounds and the view. I did make the stronghold entrance closer to the upperclass area, but still gave it some seperation with the "forest grounds" you see. The area wound up 16x20 or so.

Fun with VFX:

Old stuff I never blogged: These screenshots came out of a request on the official forums to see about having custom weapon fx. The idea was to see if it would be possible to put rings on a weapon to make some martial arts weapons that have rings. Actual weapons with rings is basically impossible. Ring vfx would be pretty close to it as well, since you'd need very tight sync between the weapon location and the vfx location.

In our first shot, I applied the force field effect to the weapon. Totally useless, it doesn't make a actual force field that blocks monsters for instance. But this is kind of interesting. If you unequip the weapon (second shot), the effect remains in the place it was when you unequipped it. Turns out all area vfx do this. The force field effect scores a 0/10 for practicality, it's huge, jumps around lots when weilded so it's visually distracting, and doesn't actually make a "blocking effect" like you'd expect from a force field. When re-equipped, the "placed" vfx disappears and the vfx goes back to the weapon location.

Here we have a leaf effect on the weapon. Look closely and you can see the leaves dropping from it, making a trail as the player runs. Good for a druidic weapon I bet. 9/10. Not distracting, gives an indication of weapon use, high on role playing goodness. Druids and other nature lovers might not like the implication of falling leaves though. Maybe leaves in place "growing out of the weapon" would be better.

Close up of the leaves effect.

The mind flayer come effect on a weapon. This follows the weapon around. It looks pretty strange in motion as the effect itself is animated. Not very practical as an effect on a player weapon, it jumps all around when the player is in motion and is distracting. Maybe for an undroppable boss weapon combined with some mind effects OnHit. 3/10

Priests of Auril rejoice! The snow mace! When equipped, it snows. Kind of hard to see in the shot. This is the standard snow vfx, placed on a weapon. An area fx, the snow stays in place when the item is unequipped. 5/10. Better than the force field since it's not very distracting, also it has fairly obvious role playing signifcance. You could probably script this weapon to have some kind of mild aoe cold effect when weilded. People who want cold damage will likely go for the default cold vfx though. And the snow vfx remaining in place would be bad for performance.

This one didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. It's an invisible or shadow vfx (I can't remember which) effect on the mace. I was hoping to make a semi-transparent "shadow weapon". I tried several similar vfx. But no go. 7/10. It looks good, just not what I was trying to achieve. Not visually distracting (when not moving, the vfx is essentially invisible).

I didn't explore using odd vfx on weapons further. It was simply done as an experiment.

Time for more guinea^H^H^H I mean testers

As promised, for those interested in testing, a new version fixing all known bugs (except for the intro movie not playing). Thanks to wyrin and _Knightmare_, the bugs that somehow slipped into the overland map are now squashed.

module files
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/Path%20of%20Evil%20modules.7z

files other than the modules (if you previously downloaded this, you don't really need to do it again, there are some fixes to typos in the tlk file)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/Path%20of%20Evil%20other.7z

The handy dandy bug reporting wiki
http://pathofevil.wikia.com/wiki/Bugs_to_Reports_%28broken_stuff%29

Feeling stabby again

Well, if just posting about a frustration is going to get me answers as quickly as my last post:

Another one of those problems that just appeared out of seemingly nowhere. This is seperate from the barkstring conversation issue I posted.


New area transition triggers for module transition in my campaign have broken (ie: they used to work, now they don't). They either:
a) don't work at all. They player enters them and nothing happens, or the transition autosave happens but they don't transition.
b) work, but send the player to the module start point, not the designated waypoint.

I've tried several versions of area transitions. I've used the standard new area transition trigger, as well as generic triggers with the ga_olmap_load script and the ga_load_mod script.

The destination waypoints exist and I have confirmed their tag names as well as the module names being referenced.

Has anyone else run across this? Wyrin commented to my previous post that he's started to see some of this behavior. This issue is preventing me from releasing an updated test version of Path of Evil.

Feeling All Stabby

Like this guy from Futurama ---------------------->

You see, I had a perfectly working overland map. I could go anywhere in the game world. I'd tested it multiple times. The only problem was that the OM module had too many areas in it, making transitions to the OM slow as NWN2 loaded them all. So I split the OM module into two, one for eastern Faerun and one for western, and updated all the map triggers. Rebaked all the areas.

Simple right?


No. Now things are completely borked. See that placeable conversation? That's not a barkstring, and there are no conditionals on the responses. And the area to transition to is in that same module. I had one placeable conversation that did pop up correctly, but disappeared after a tiny fraction of a second. I couldn't even tell it had occurred except that it showed up in the log (as a barkstring). Then sometimes they work.

Except when they don't. I can close and reload and the behavior will change. Generally, I can't transition to new modules from my OM. On the occasions when I can, I can't go transition back.

Except when I can. I tested transitioning from a module back to the OM module, and either it doesn't work (nothing happens), or the transition works, but deposits me at the start point for the module instead of the destination waypoint.

I'm using Obsidian scripts and naming conventions.

So I'm going to ask for help from a kind soul out there to help me figure this out. I've reduced one of my OM modules to a few area and packaged it for someone out there to look at. Critters removed for tester safety, loadscreen hak removed etc, areas moved right together to test, but scripts kept. You can get it here.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/poe_overland_west_backup.7z

Someone tell me what's wrong? Or do things just work for you?

On the other hand, the custom loadscreens and tips are still working just fine (that area is a prefab by sgk73).

Get your Evil here (Path of Evil external testing)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/path%20of%20evil.7z

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/Path_of_Evil_other.7z

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/poe_intro.7z
(updated version of the first module, March 13, fixes 50 bugs specific to Neverwinter, adds "flavor" text and other improvements that were only in later modules.)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3879894/March_14.7z
(fixes a gamebreaking bug with the first area after leaving Neverwinter, leaving players stuck and unable to progress...)


Bugreporting wiki:
http://pathofevil.wikia.com/wiki/Bugs_to_Reports_%28broken_stuff%29

I've made a thread for feedback here: http://www.hiddentales.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=207 and tried to anticipate questions people might have. You can always PM me on the official forums and I'll send you my email address if you prefer to give feedback that way.

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PoE is "complete" and needs fresh brains for food.... I mean feedback... (Complete except for a few minor things, the stronghold town and the endgame, those two areas are still alpha/beta quality.)

I wouldn't worry about things to do ingame though, there's plenty of stealin', intimidatin', muahaha-in' and paladin smackin' to go round.

Testers reward: choose either a gravestone with an epithet of your choice (a Bioware tradition), or be a purchaseable slave for the stronghold (with barkstring/convo of your choice).

If anyone does decide to help playtest, my current testers are playing a mage and a priest. Since the initial ten quests (a few hours of game time) of the campaign are completely different depending on your class, I would request you try a melee type or rogue for the part set in Neverwinter, but anything you want is fine, the more testers the better. I've been through the paths enough that my eyes glaze over, the two testers have already pointed out several logical errors that I missed because as the builder I "just know".





Since I figure this blog is probably read more by builders than players I'll lay things out from a builder perspective:

How one handles plot for a villainous pc is the experimental part of the campaign. Your typical heroes are told where to go and what to do, generally in very specific terms. "I seen the necromancer threatening the town and some zombies coming out of the cemetary!" Bam, there's a quest. As a player, you know you need to head to the cemetary, and the necromancer is going to try to kill you. Motivations are built in, players are expected to be good and to help those in need. "Evil" is typically restricted to demanding money to do the task. At best the evil player is given an alternate route that accomplishes the same task (working for the Thieves in the OC). Any larger quest, such as defeating the OC villain, is broken down into a neat series of subquests that are all direct and specific.

Path of Evil sets up a large quest goal for the player (without spoilers, this is nothing groundbreaking, just an item accumulation quest). However, it tries to leave as much as possible up to the player in how they want to accomplish the quest. They are not told directly where to go to find the items or what to do. One companion will make a suggestion on where to go to find out more information. Even if they go there the information they wind up getting is vague. The player might figure out that what they are looking for is in a city. And the item is there.... somewhere. The towns of Path of Evil have main quest lines, but these can be unrelated to what the player is looking for. The item might turn up in what you thought was a sidequest. It might even be unexpectedly easy to reach.

Basically, the pc is on the path to being the villain of traditional modules. Except we're seeing the villain before he/she has achieved power. The villain is still questing to achieve power, not yet wielding it to try to smite the forces of good. The questing villain has to operate quietly, they can't go about asking for help; good won't help, and evil would use the knowledge against our villanous player.

So Path of Evil winds up very much a sandbox. The player will find that plot, as normal modules handle it, is almost non-existant. Not that there aren't quests to do (there are plenty, around 150), dungeons to explore, etc. But direction is something the player will have to find and decide for themselves.

Handling evil players also means having to plan for them doing things that would be unexpected in most modules. Evil players can be in character while trying to doublecross a questgiver, ransoming an item for more money than was agreed upon, lying,  etc. This means I'm looking for lots of feedback on alternate ways to complete quests.