Thursday, November 6, 2008

Back to Risen Hero

The Community Halloween Campaign is out and getting a lot of good feedback. That was an incredible accomplishment by all involved. I am definitely glad I was able to be a part of it. It was also my first mod release on the vault and a very encouraging experience. I do have to admit that so far I have only made it through about a third of the houses but I'm making some slow progress on the rest.

I am back to work on Risen Hero and the last month has been very productive after the summer slump.

The campaign is now fully compatible with Kaedrin's PrC Pack v1.33. I will have to update with future releases as they come out and yes I am already behind with release v1.34 but it will get done. Fortunately none of my custom content was in conflict so it was fairly easy to combine the 2das. The added classes and feats are a lot of fun. The final release will include this material as well as Tony_K's AI.

The conversations (The most dread part of modding) and most of the larger cutscenes for mod three are completed. Only 2 move larger cutscenes need to be put togther then several small converstions scattered throughout need to be completed.

A new companion will has also been added. Originally he was just going to be a henchman to help out in a battle heavy area, however, as I developed his character he was just too much fun to have only in one area. He is a half-orc barbarian/thug (taking advantage of Kaerdrin's new base class). My plan is that he will be far from a cliche tank. He will be a powerful fighter but will be an expert taunter. He is be that obnoxious guy who as the talent to enrage just about everyone he meets. He is able to throw insults and say it with just the right inflection and sarcasm to set anybody over the edge. While in the party he will have no problem interjecting in a conversation dashing any chance you may have had of talking your way out of the fight. The taunt skill is hard coded so he will receive special ability feats that will have taunt like abilities to use in combat. These will be given to him either when he is in the party at a specific time or encounter or some will be influence based and given during conversations with him. These taunts will increase in ability and have additional effects other than the standard taunt penalties.

I have gotten some great feedback about this on the bioware forums.
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/myviewtopic.html?topic=654922&forum=111

Following the tutorial put together by Shagret's A Texture Tutorial, By (Semi)Popular Demand. I have created some visual effects for some of my custom monsters so they aren't just scale and tint jobs.
So far I have created one glow map for a flesh golem. I was trying to give it more of a freshly pieced together corpse with blood and oozing through the stitchings and connections. In addition to the glow map I took the mummy dust and made it a nice dark red and slowed it down to have a nice blood dripping effect.







By having the dripping attached to the hands it gives a nice splatter effect during the attack.

Here is the description from d20srd.org.


Once I started playing with the visual effect editor and gaining more confidence with it I went on to create this next aberration. It has tentacles attached to both it's hands and the spirit eater to it's back. The black cloud on it's body is mainly there to help hide/smooth the added effects but with during attacks and damage some of the tentacles will appear to be floating in mid-air. This creature comes from the converted monsters on enworld.com





This is how my level 5 fighter fared against it.



The third module is about half way complete with the bulk of the remaining work being conversation and starting to script custom taunt abilities (once I decide on what execptly they will all be). It is nice now that I can definately say I am on the down slope and the end is getting closer.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I really like that Flesh Golem you made. It has a creepy look to it--props for adding blood dripis onto the hands. I'm glad someone has used my tutorial.

That aberration certainly would look cool in the right circumstances. I hope more people use the VFX editor creatively for bizarre monsters like that. It's quite robust but underused.

Nice to see you're back on track, too.

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed the VFX editor, but had some troubles gettign things to consistently show up in game (due to the size of some of the mdb files I think), so it was more of a time drain han I first thought.

Like the look of the tentacle beasty tho

Wyrin

Shaughn said...

The VFX editor has been a bear to learn, and honestly I am doing very little with it. Most of the time I am copying the default SEF files and either adding or removing an element.

Most of my attempts at using VFX editor create a SEF that looks great in the toolset but causes the game to crash. I must have had about 10 different versions of the tentacle effect before I found one that wouldn't crash the game.

The tentacle guy will be found is a small cave. With the narrow environment and darker lighting it improves the look of the creature and hides a bit more of the clipping and unattached pieces. The open space was used for testing.