Sunday, March 8, 2009

WHAT?! Why is this broken now?

Play testing. . .

With the completion of 3 out of 4 modules I had begun play testing. Had to start from the beginning again to check everything with SOZ. I Added and changed some things and wanted to make sure everything was still working right.

Most everything seemed to be going how it should until it came to leveling up my companions. I sat their confused when I discovered that I could not use their custom packages and they were all set as either a bard or a monk. After two days of changing, resetting and double checking I came across an post in the archives on Keadrin's site. Apparently the game only reads up to line 255 and mine started at 300, which I assumed would work since Keadrin's start his packages at line 407. So a quick 2da change, update several blueprints and scripts and I was back on track.

I continued on till the screen turned black the died when entering a new area. Originally it was a area transition to a speak trigger but had already been upgraded to an on client enter. I spent way too time picking apart the script then the conversation, assuming that it had to be the problem. I was stuck on the conversation because there were two ways into the area the first triggered the conversation and crashed the second had no conversation and worked fine. It was finally this morning I discovered that the conversation had nothing to do with the crash it was a bad custom visual effect. At a certain distance to the effect the game crashed it just happened that the first entrance was close enough to crash while the second was not.

Using Lance's patch HAK I was able to export the corrected area as a erf then with NWN2Packer I took the area information from the erf and stuck it into the patch HAK and the area worked perfectly with no crashes! When the time comes to release this I will definitely be including the patch hak.