Title: Where Have I Been ? or.... Almost Broken Monitor

Well obviously school has started back up and I have limited time for much other than tying the knots that finish this thing. There isn't much if any room at all for any new areas or other time consuming creations.

Fortunately even with this constraint, I was able to find a perfect fitting prefab to make a small side-area that ties together and adds intrigue to the larger area it branches from.





It's a pretty cool little distraction to the combat heavy, IWD style combat crawl that is chapter 3. Who doesn't enjoy an audience with wise elder trees. It worked in Family Guy.

I am doing my best to cut things smaller and tighter without cheating the player out of play time. The reason it is so critical for me to do this fast is that I don't multi-task well: when projects become active at school, I have a hard time focusing on hobbies. When I'm concentrating on modding, the same is true and so I hope to have it done and enjoy my freedom. Even once I am done the playable game right to the end, there is some work to be done with voice actors so I cannot possibly streamline things too much.

I bought a HD enclosure for an unused HD and have been using it to do a back up every few days. I cannot stress enough how valuable this has been as I lost the largest area of chapter 3 to corruption and was this close to doing serious damage to something when I remembered my new backup system. (Likely the only thing I would have damaged would have been my interest in the campaign ever finishing :) )

I'll do my best to shake my natural tendencies and keep at this for a quick but complete end to the campaign.

"Reflections" of a builder

So in finally getting reflections to work, I got an idea. Probably someone else has thought of it but I dont care because I came up with this on my own. I saw nice polished/reflective marble floors when playing the Witcher, and I thought too bad nwn2 cant do that. Then I thought hey maybe it can.

With a water height level of .05, pure white coloring, absolute stillness and reflection power of about 1.1, and a .4 bias I have nice elegant looking polished floors:





If you are going to do this, be sure to elevate rugs to a height of .1 or they will reflect too and that aint not good!

To answer other questions, my problem with the reflections was that it was counter intuitive. I assume when the "bias" setting says: refractions / reflection in that order, you slide right (towards the word "reflection") to reflect more, and vice versa. Since I never tried much lower than .8 and had very little reflection I would then crank it to 1.0 and basically never got reflections.

As for the polish settings, I started out a lot higher and it got a little weird and kind of had a buggy multiple tiling blur. The settings I have are probably the most you want for polished floors. The odd weirdness occurs like black tiles at certain angles but for the most part is passes quickly and is worth the effect.

I had forgotten I left two quests in the lurch in chapter 1. So there's some fun doing extra work. But then again, I had an idea for an interesting encounter with a certain high end creature, and there's no reason he cant be in one of the quests rather than on his own at the end of chapter 3.



Black looked particularly slick in game, when everything is moving.

Eye strain

If anyone is familiar with using the computer too long (Im sure you are, but its something I like to avoid) I can definitely say its not worth it for the extra few hours of modding in 1 day. It's been three days since I beat dragon age (all in 1 long day) and my left eye hurts so bad I can hardly sit down at a monitor for 10 minutes. Hope this stops soon or theres no way this project will finish.

I've got to thinking, and I don't see why combining ideas from two outdoor areas into one can't be done. I will get to use both ideas I wanted, and not have undue extra work. By my estimate the 9 days I have left will accomodate ONE large are from scrap not counting scripting and encounters. Since I have the area largely done, but none of the extra, it's time to finish this thing. Every time I think I am adding one little thing I want another and another so it stops here.


I got the reflective water to finally work (counter intuitive toolset settings nice isn't it?). I also yanked up the vertical on the mountains the way I really wanted it, so you can compare this to the pic in the previous post and see how much greater it is!





I am having a lot of trouble with the lake edges. I've cleaned it up quite a bit already but I am finding it impossible to find settings that will make a nice uniform rounded edge. I think I need to use a little large brushes than I had been, but there's still several around. I never could keep sharp edges from popping up in my exteriors which is why I have avoided them. I wonder what the magic trick is though.

And just for fun is a sneak preview image of the final area (yes I've decided its final, first it was then it wasnt, now reality has set in lol )

The Assembly line begins

Well I am doing everything I can to get this out during my semester break (which is till the 11th I think).

I keep falling into my old habbits of screwing around with something stupid but time consuming (and ultimately maybe unecessary) like trying to control my companions in a cut scene. They keep running all over in the most irritating fashion possible when I've gone through numerous hoops to prevent it. CutSceneImmobilize and forcing a jump to a precise way point is not enough most times. Then it works, but 1 in 3 tries someone is still puttering around. I look forward to leaving this toolset behind for DA: O. There is a lot of things done better in that toolset such as how your party is perfectly lined up and facing the right way at every cut scene. I will miss the fun things NWN2 has like multiple particle effects and the 3 ed D&D rules. Then again I hear 4th edition will totally botch those, so maybe that point is not valid.

So specifically to my project, I can NEVER get my water to reflect. I crank the reflection power to full 10, and the bias, and I get green watercolour paint as my result:



Perhaps any of my readers will be able to help. Before we go further though, yes I know how reflection settings work and it does work in game for the OC or other mods, mine just never reflects. I have noticed it gets better if its during sunset or sunrise but I use default settings, so if anyone has a quick way to set my scene up to mimic sunrise sunmoon settings do tell!

I'm also looking for suggestions on how to make the stone/dirt hills blend into the grass nicely. I just cant envision it, should it be a rough drop of about 6 feet, or a smooth hill that gradually grows more grass? What kind of textures?

Working on it... barely

Well my last final exam was this morning. I thought I would procrastinate longer for sure, but here I was working on it already today. Chapter 3 is removed from all the areas I've been working on for 2 years so it has an element of freshness to it. Here are some shots of the mountainous isle, the last area of the campaign. Above is the shore. I kind of stole it off the vault and modified it without too much butchering of the higher quality art. As always, click the images to see a full size version. Sorry but I was lazy and these are just toolset shots, lacking the fine settings. It's conceptual though.

This next area is scary... I'm attempting to build a whole exterior myself and I gotta say its not my forte. This is an early shot, with much left to do but I would welcome any advice to make it look more like the linked pics, of Lake Louise, near Calgary.



I'm hoping for the treed in like crazy effect:

SAMPLE IMAGES

However I see how this might be unrealistic since trees that heavy will slow things down and there are no individual tree cut out 2d placeables, whose low overhead would make this possible. So in lieu of that I'd just like advice on making this look more convincing.

I'm in touch with voice actors and Im racing to finish so they have something to read and we can cut this diseased limb off by new years. :) But man it's really hard forcing myself to do it right now but maybe having nothing to do for 2 weeks will improve my motivation.

LATE EDIT: I did happen to find relatively cardboard cutout trees by accident in the RWS cliff pack so yay for that. Still looking for general tips now to "reality"-ize the area or at least improve it.

Passage of Time

So as my birthday looms in the next few days, I am reminded of just how long I've let this project drag out.

At this point, I have tried playing DA: Origins and it's fun. But I think I can safely say I prefer finishing my campaign before finishing more.

I'm kind of in a lull now, you know the kind where... the toolset is kind of like an ex girlfriend you aren't seeing right now. But you often get back together, and although she seems distant at this exact moment, once you get back around her, everything seems familiar and like you haven't left. That's where I'm at in a nutshell. Well, at the point where I'm NOT seeing her currently.

This is for the best since it's the final two weeks of school and then I'll have two weeks to hopefully wrap this up.

I wonder what people think of changing (expanding) a work already mostly complete. I have 3/4s of chapter 3 to do and it's finished. But I'm feeling the need to make the campaign something broader; until now I just focused on making the quests as fun, physically rewarding, unique, and doable in any order as possible, with a huge helping of custom content. Now I feel like I would like the companions to have some depth, and an increasingly philisophical verbage to their banter.

I just wonder, how bad does shoe horning actually come off to the player? For me I've never noticed it when someone said they did in their campaign. But if I don't know how the project looked previous I don't know what polish might have been ruined. Assuming I don't do it stupidly though (like having silent companions for 2 chapters and all of the sudden a 16 hour running cut scene) is it likely it will be an overall enhancement?

Once again I long to go back in time and PLAN the campaign exhaustively, and even do all or reasonably close to all dialogue first. Then I would know when the story is complete, as I find I only stray because it seems things are missing. One can rip out an impressive amount of work if it's pre-planned so that you don't stop and think. Right now I just feel the need to outlet some thought-provoking concepts; illustrate a point of view on life after death in the realms (and life before, and again after, for some), a remark on mortality and aging. Too heavy maybe, but I think I can delivery it in a way where one can choose to stop and ponder or just reply with generic "you're crazy/you need some rest" remarks like a good little monkey and continue with the conflict.

Early troubles

Turns out my campaign was quite horribly corrupted. Im working around it, trying to finish it completely, despite a persistent journal bug. At first I was just going to cut it short, but as it showed signs of cooperating, I've actually gone ahead and added not only the content originally planned in the final 2 side quests, but some bonus cut sceneage to make it a lot more story-based. Not just throw-ins to give some personality to the NPCs but some thought out stuff, complete with epic symbolism and foreshadowing.

I have to say cut scenes were not an early interest of mine, but it's almost as addicting as custom particles. Gives me a good reason to make some as well to show all the spectacular dream-scapes and powers being used. Regular conversations I prefer to do in NWN1 exclusively, but when doing something cinematic or from a dream or vision, that's when I let cut scenes out of the box.

So I was on a good role, but school work has picked up and at the same time I am finding toolset work more tedious again. I will just plow to the finish with the release version coming no later than december. Whatever is there at that time will be the finished game.

Here's an example of such a scene, where I did my first real ventures into bloom use. Really makes the magical white balls blurry and dreamlike.





Click twice to see the full size images, rather than the 1/4 size one it links to. THANKS :)

I never even gave personalities to the companions until now. In the end my hope is the story, (though light on words when compared to works like Azzen's new "Live Forever" campaign), should be compelling and thought-provoking enough that the campaign would have seemed empty without it. I'm only one third done and it already feels that way to me.

TESTING TIME.... Alpha alpha alphaaaa

That's right it is time for Alpha testing, in the month of september as promised, I kept my dead line! This has to be a first for modders and commercial software makers, right?

Anyway I have no idea where I am going to put these honking files, please comment if you know a spot.

Thanks.

-EE

Well I have declared alpha testing this month, and basically set out to have one play through front to top to make sure everything worked from A to Z. Of course it didn't, but the good news is I have not only fixed bugs but while at it, made a lot of the non-working quests (which would have been left out of alpha for now) workable, so it will be a more complete alpha test in the end.

As always, I've found reasons and excuses to create more custom VFX. Here's a screen shot update of a quest that will now function in any release, alpha and beyond.

Well these guys don't belong here!

And you don't belong here!