Beta Progress Update

Most of the reported bugs with Crimmor are fixed. I'm still tracking some performance related things down and trying to figure out good ways to implement some tester suggestions.

I haven't been able to give things my full attention (I'm not secretly playing Neverwinter Online or anything, though I did go through a week of Civ5), just lacking motivation recently. Not to worry, it will pick back up at some point and I'll get things done and released. I go through periods when I've not been the most dedicated modder, they always go away :-)

Neverwinter Online Beta

I have a beta key (they can be gotten for free). I played much of the weekend.

Neverwinter Online (NWO) is an Action RPG MMO. NWO is Diablo or Torchlight, but with a third person camera. NWO is not a translation of DnD rules of any edition into MMO format, it uses a traditional action rpg style ruleset, with DnD names assigned to things.

If you do not like action rpgs, you will not like NWO. You can safely ignore any and all dialog and story. If you like RPGs, I would in fact encourage you to actively do so, as your head may explode otherwise.

The game is slated for release "early 2013", and official video streams from Perfect World (PW is the owner of Cryptic, the dev making NWO) mention April. The game as it stands in this second beta has numerous serious bugs and other basic multiplayer and party issues. I do not believe all the issues and bugs can be addressed before the end of April (the latest possible date that fits their current release announcements).


Neverwinter Online will be free to play. Cryptic plans on making money via microtransactions, selling game currency, armor dyes, unique mounts etc. During beta, it did not appear that anyone would need to buy anything before coming to a conclusion on whether they like they game or not.

Beta

Crimmor is ready for beta. I've messaged people that tested the proof of concept long ago, and a few builders. Since dropbox doesn't have unlimited bandwidth on accounts I don't want to post links for everyone and get the dropbox account temporarily locked, preventing people from downloading, if you are interested send me a message via Bioware Social, my profile is here:  http://social.bioware.com/2429179/ .

Bringing .max files into Gmax, without Max

You need 3DExplorer from http://dutch-boy.com/3De/ (version 1.8 or above), which will open .max files and allow you to save them as .3ds and .obj. Once they are in .3ds you need gmax scripts that can import the object into gmax. Fortunately someone made scripts for that. You need the 3ds importer v1.1 from http://pages.videotron.com/browser/ I found that page via the Natural Selection modding website, at http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/95819

Summoning the Sound Ninja - a PlaySound fix

The PlaySound function puts a sound playing request into the queue of the target creature, which means it doesn't actually play the sound until the other actions in the queue happen. "But I want to play the sound now, not when and even if the queue finishes" you say?

http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/PlaySound mentioned using a scripthidden "sound ninja" to stand in and play a sound, but didn't have an implementation, and the suggested implementation looked like it hard coded the sound into the onSpawn script of the sound ninja, so you'd have to make a different ninja with a different script for each sound. So here you go, a generic sound ninja summoning version of PlaySound, this ninja does not require any scripts at all.

/*
    credit to kevL at http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/164/index/15800566#15801095
   
 ga_play_sound replacement, summons the "sound ninja" creature to play sounds since
 playsound goes at end of action queue, so an npc may not play immediately
 for more see http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/PlaySound

 Note that the sound ninja does not need to have any scripts on it at all, but "Disable AI
 while hidden" must not be checked.

 Also note the string sSound is not the tag of a sound object, but the name of the actual
 wav sound file to play

*/
#include "ginc_param_const"


void kL_PlayNinja(string sSound, object oSoundNinja, float fDelay)
    {
    DelayCommand(fDelay, AssignCommand(oSoundNinja, PlaySound(sSound)));
    fDelay += 10.f;
    DelayCommand(fDelay, DestroyObject(oSoundNinja));
    }   

void main(string sSound, string sTarget, float fDelay)
    {
    object oTarget = GetTarget(sTarget, TARGET_OWNER);//
    location lTarget = GetLocation(oTarget);
    object oSoundNinja = CreateObject(OBJECT_TYPE_CREATURE, "sh_sound_ninja", lTarget);
    if (GetIsObjectValid(oSoundNinja))
        {
        DelayCommand(0.1f, kL_PlayNinja(sSound, oSoundNinja, fDelay));
        }
    }

January Update : Part 2

Unfortunately I caused myself lots of problems switching from a single module campaign to a six module campaign. I lost my up to date journal, since I had it at the campaign level and the journal importer/exporter utility only handles module level journals. I had to go to a backup journal. Updating mapnotes and door lock status doesn't work when the targets are now in different modules either :-). The modules were also confused about what their campaign folder was, even after I used the campaign editor to set things. I had to take my old campaign folder and move it out of the campaigns folder entirely, even though the modules were supposedly not referring to it. Even the test module was confused about what campaign folder it should use.


So now I'm fixing all the things I broke in my bungled conversion to a six module campaign. While I had played Crimmor to completion in December, I'm currently not able to. Not to worry though, I've fixed lots of other bugs that were present when I was able to play all the way through.

In this image, the pc was tasked with forging some orders for a caravan company. This was made complicated by the fact the merchant representative of the company is standing behind the counter, and there is a locked door behind/next to him where the offices and the order book is.

Solutions available:

1.Pickpocket the door key from the merchant, then use that key when the merchant isn't looking in order to get inside the office (PRR ownership scripts mean the merchant "owns" the door and pays attention to attempts to pick it/knock it down).
2. Intimidate or bluff the merchant into giving you the key. Now that you "legitimately" have access to the door, the merchant doesn't pay any attention to you using the door.
3. Use the special Hidden Theurgy ability if available to cast a suitable spell on the merchant, so he will willingly give you the key.
4. Kill him and take the key. How gauche. Plus the merchant will fight back, and stands a decent chance of killing the thief.

The PC is a thief/wizard and has Hidden Theurgy. He knows a relevant spell for use on the merchant, in this case Charm Person, and passed the skill checks (Concentration, Sleight of Hand, and Spellcraft) that allowed him to cast it on the merchant during conversation without the merchant knowing.

Charmed, the merchant thus willingly gave him the key, and the thief is in the offices.

Now the player has to actually forge the orders in the books. He can try his penmanship via skill and stat check, cast a True Strike he has memorized in order to temporarily give himself perfectly matching penmanship, or simply call the merchant he charmed in order to have the merchant change his own orders.

January Update: Commoner AI

January has a large update, so I've broken it into two parts so your eyes don't glaze over reading. :-)  The first part is about the commoner ai.

I started testing Crimmor with commoners running my commoner ai, and discovered performance with as many commoners as I wanted was terrible. Miserably terrible. Horrific. I was actually causing spontaneous crashes because of high memory usage. For me, this was happening around 1.5 gigs of memory in use. For comparison, Storm of Zehir uses up to around 900 megs on my pc.

I had Crimmor as one big module, something I had wanted so that once the game loads the player can move around the city with minimal loading. So I split Crimmor into 6 modules, each of moderate (15-20 area) size, one module for each ward of the city and one module for the few areas outside the city.


At the end of that, my campaign was still crashing from memory usage, so I had to address the commoner ai directly. I decided to have my commoners adopt specific activities instead of dynamically deciding, and only change twice a day, to go home at night and wake up in the morning. So I wrote up activity specific heartbeat scripts for commoners covering the 20 or so activities I felt would be most common from the commoner ai. (released at http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2Scripts.Detail&id=404).

These new generic activity heartbeats actually support combat, so they can be used for enemies, and many only require setting a heartbeat, so they are even easier to set up than the full commoner ai. It's a major addition to my existing commoner ai. You can now easily have your orcs eating dinner when the player walks in, and they will get up and attack :-)

Anyway, these new heartbeats brought Crimmor's memory usage back down to a reasonable level, typically 1 to 1.2 gig, and my crashes have ended. It's still higher than other modules because I have a lot of things going on ai wise, lots of city folk. I may still write custom versions of these scripts to include the Brian Meyer's CSL if that's necessary to make the city as crowded as I want, as his CSL ai can handle hundreds on npcs in combat simultaneously.