Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Lost in the Mountains

Well summer is here, and I have been trying to take advantage of the weather to get stuff done outside and enjoy myself. I continue to work on the toolset but not nearly as often.

I have been moving my campaign into a more mountainous region. This is proving to be quite a project working with the camera controls. With the large incline of the terrain at the bottom of the screen will be clipping to blue as I am trying to place objects and such. A little bit of rotation and I find myself inside the mountain side looking through the ground at tree bases. But the over areas are shipping up.

The main idea to this mountain area is the PC and their party are lost trying to find their way I kind of stole the idea from that swamp in IWD II. I have one large main area that makes up the bulk of the mountains. I have taken it and divided it into 9 separate sub areas. Each of the sub areas has two area transitions, one is right and will move the party to the next subarea and the other one is wrong leading to badness. If the player goes the wrong way they have a chance of a random encounter and then will be placed randomly in one the subareas that they have already visited.

To help the player and not make this a total act of frustration trying to navigate the mountain side each sub area will have a conversation. Companions will give hints and PC skills will be used to find the right way. But just to make things fun some of these hints will conflict, this will be the exception though. I have no intention of have the player have to guess which way to go at every turn, that would be tedious and just generally obnoxious.

A river fortress that the player will need to find a way through. Still working on the conversations but I hope to have numerous ways of getting through for multiple skills, classes and alignments. Fighting your way through will hopefully be a last resort.
The banners were made using Cloaks of Faerun (pk2) by Wild Bill



The subareas in the mountain are defined but a slightly different texture on the walkable path. Then boulders, trees and dense grass set up the boarders. The subareas are placed so that they don't line up; so there isn't a linear progression through the area and the area map will not be the cheat sheet to navigate through the mountain.

Beware which path you choose certain death could be waiting for you and your party, or maybe just a bunch of filthy goblins and such.


I couldn't help myself with this one. One wrong turn in the mountains will lead to a wandering monster screen. 6 deactivated encounters are here and one will randomly be activated each time a player finds themselves very lost.

One of the encounters will be hill giants, but don't get your hopes up too much though. I don't have the same talent as other community members and my custom monsters are just tinting and scale jobs. I don't currently have a screen shot but I have used a half-orc made them really tall and gave then very broad shoulders (for throwing boulders).

Giants will be throwing boulders in Risen Hero. Each giant should have three boulders to toss at adventurers. I found the script used in NWN1 and tweaked it quiet a bit. The giants will use a range touch attack and the PC will be given a reflex save to dodge and reduce damage should the giant hit them. The main script is working but I am still working on the User Defined script which will fire the main script.

Bioware forum post

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/myviewtopic.html?topic=638602&forum=114

Bouncy Rock Forum Post

http://forum.bouncyrock.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=127&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=10

I did try to create a custom ranged weapon for giants but due to hard coding you are unable to link new ranged weapons to ammunition and the throwing boulders will show out of ammunition when they were used in battle.

So that is where Risen Hero is at now.

3 comments:

Frank Perez said...

You have an interesting rock-throwing script posted at the forums. I'll try it out when I have the time, especially as I'll be needing hill giants in my module as well. I tried using the rock-throwing script that I found in the toolset, but when I tried it, the projectile looked like a cube with question marks around it.

Shaughn said...

The script right now has minimum visual effects. With the taunt animation both the frost giant and my half-orc turned hill giant raise their hands over their head. Then there is the dirt explosion at the traget. There is no animation for the boulder flying through the air.
The user defined script I am still trying to work out and make up.

Elf des coquillages said...

For projectile visual effects, you can have a look - if you haven't already - at this nice proof of concept: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=297

The lost-in-the-mountain concept seems nicely done, by the way. ^_^