Some of you may have followed my thread here:
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/167/index/7156713
Now, never one to chime in with ideas that everybody (but me
) should do, I was definitely planning on implementing.
So that's what I did. I silently took up the 1 month module challenge, and I am 2 weeks in. I adopted the quantam leap style concept for an adventure "episode" of which an entire series could be built. I may give myself one extra week just because of the time spent on the pocket plane which would serve as the lobby for this and any future "leaps" into adventure.
I've decided to give it that kind of "more than one path" capability that was great in BG, and I imagine in a few P&P conversions from what I hear. It's not that complex, basically you can go around town questioning people, or if your theiving and spotting skills are keen enough, you can jump the gun and discover a bad guy in your midst earlier, and force the ensuing town meeting.
Now for this, even with 2 ways to get there and an unlinear method to communicate with the townsfolk to find out the true problem in town, got kind of complicated. So despite the brief "don't think" philosophy of this episode, some planning was in order. There is no way I could do this on the fly in game and keep all the webs stranding together.
Got a little garbled as I ran out of space, but I can figure it out easily.
Biggest challenges I've faced was fighting the urge to redo and over-expand areas, and to add a bunch of custom content one piece at a time. Leads to a lot of conflicts. Future note: check it all out first, and make one full hak, and move forward.
Another thing I really need to stop doing is baking/running areas for no apparent reason. If the area looks good in the toolset I don't need to go through the 3 minute process of getting in game and walking through it.
Here's some shots. I've finally found an excuse to be able to do any terrain I want, and I was itching to do a snow theme.
This is the pocket plane episodes begin in. The safe "home lab" where your gnome boss
sends you on jumps to places on faerun that are "karmacally unbalanced"
Looks interesting.
ReplyDeleteI like the pocket plane. Is that done with extreme elevations and tinting or some other way?
I wouldnt say its as simple as that. Notice how you can see the stars even in the black areas? If I had just flattened the floors, the sides of cliffs block the star view. I can tell you the entire black areas between the grass are at equal height to the grass, and some vfx were mandatory to create the effect.
ReplyDeleteHi EE,
ReplyDeleteYour paper notes look like mine! :) Having more than one way to do something is one of the reasons why my mod is turning out to take so much longer. ;) Are you also planning this for MP compatible?
Your areas do look good as usual ...and the pocket plane looks rather cleverly done with the stars in the "background" - I am guessing its a VFX of some sort?
Lance.
Looks good.
ReplyDelete