Another Update

The holidays are done and it is time to get back to going through Risen Hero. I am hoping to be able to spend a fair amount of time working on this over the next two months. The kitchen/dining room remodel are just about wrapped up so that will open up some more time. Over the past month I have done a complete play through and the first three modules are pretty much bug free and working. Had to go back and do a few modifications to the sneaking system. The player is rewarded for consecutive hides and there is a multiplier added for each hide in a row. I ran into a problem when I used a ranger with his hide skill maxed out. For the last save he got over 500 xp for hiding from some wimpy kobolds. With a cap in place the system is working as intended.

I am working on re-organizing myself for the final few areas that need to be put together and wrapped up. These areas have taken far longer then anywhere else in the game so far. Some of that is due to less time spent in the toolset but the time I have been working on Risen Hero hasn't been very productive. I've been jumping back and forth between different areas, conversations, and scripts. I have started going through the fourth and final module starting at the beginning and working through everything. I need to find what is complete and what still needs work and what is just gone or missing. Hopefully everything will come together fairly quickly so BETA testing can begin.

New and improved monsters

The rescaled and tinted balor has been replaced with an actual minotaur and the war dogs have been changed from hell hounds to oversize dobermans.

Going Back to the Beginning.

Having mainly just conversations left to wrap Risen Hero up I had decided to do a play through, mostly just to go through the old companion conversations and maintain the same personalities. I was rather surprised that most of my problems to fix where random descriptions for placeables and creatures of no real importance and a candle that had a flame almost burning off to the side, only like 6 inches from the wick.

Early on in the game the player finds themselves in a kobold's den. You may fight your way through the tunnels and gain all sorts of experience and treasure or one could find a way to confront the chieftain alone and avoid the multiple fights along the obvious route. While doing this play through I realized that a stealth character is really difficult to play. Even the OC sneaking really didn't help against encounters. So I decided that I needed to develope this third route (stealth) through the kobold cave.

I approached this as a trigger based system that would turn on the encounters for hide failures and reward the player for actually hiding so the experience levels should work out fairly close. I need to thank both _knightmare_ and and Lugaid of the Red Stripes for their advice on the making the trigger reset after a certain amount of time.

The idea of the system is the player or companion that enters the trigger must be in stealth mode. The script them cycles through the companions, if they are in stealth mode and within 5 meters of the player they get a chance to help the player. If they succeed either a spot or listen check the DC of the encounter hide is decreased by 1. They character that enters the trigger must make a hide save to avoid the encounter and receive the xp reward.

This script will likely reappear in different areas of the game. The XP rewarded is based on the player's level and number of successful saves in a particular area stored on an ipoint placeable assigned by a local string. I have also included a bonus for the sent feat released with SOZ, it will make it so the player doesn't need to do a spot or listen check.

The script in action

This is the first set of armor the player will find. The second set isn't much better but it is medium armor.

Congrats to the Alphas Out There

It is motivating see others getting ready to move their projects forward and it gives me hope that sometime soon I will hopefully have this out for the community. Since seeing E.C.Patterson and jclef's alpha post I have found myself working a bit more in the toolset, still spending a lot of my free time working on the kitchen and dinning room remodel. The cabinets are on order then it really should just be trimming out the rooms and the flooring.

With the current area I have started to use the coloring tool more. In my past areas I have used it but generally just adding grey shades to define the terrain. I have been experimenting with using much more colors on top of the terrain textures and I am quite happy with the depth it adds. Making mud look wet, trails from run off and just general muck. I am closing in on the end and I am still discovering new ways to do things. Playing this campaign it will be noticeable as I gained more confidence and abilities in area design and scripting. I have gone back a little to touch up here and there so it would be overly blatant as well as improving or just trashing and making all new scripts.

And the area progresses:

A gate to nowhere good.

A bit of wholesome carnage

Part of the fortification.

Wet mud with the stagnant water in front of the wall

More of the same from the opposite angle.

Back to Some Area Design

I have taken a break from conversations and started working on one of the last two area. A mountain fortification filled with an growing army. The bulk of the soldiers are goblinoids and orcs lead by a Grey Dwarf with the help of minotaurs and ogres to help keep the goblins and such in line.

A bunch of the conversations I still need to complete will be your companions advice on how to infiltrate this base so I figured having the area mostly completed would help with those conversations. There will be three ways through the fort and to reach the commander of the army.

The first and perhaps most difficult will be the stealth approach and will include more problem solving stuff to create diversions and remain unseen. Maybe having you necromancer companion raise some of the dead from the the burning piles outside the fort will be one such an option to hop the first wall unseen but then who knows.

The second will be for those of you who just can't get enough of beating things over the head. While you will not be able to assault the fort you will be able to challenge the champions and fight one on one battles up through the various groups of the army. So if you beat the worg riding goblin champion you get to fight the orc champion until you are fighting in the audience of the army's leader and he brings out some half-breed beast of a creature for you to fight.

The final approach will be talking: diplomacy, bluff, intimidation and probably a few other things as well and being able to asking your companions to jump in and help out. A half-fiend bard would probably excel in a situation like that.

For the fort I have been using Barry the Hatchet Watchtowers . A couple of small to medium sized forests were definitely clear cut in the creation but sacrifices must be made. The walk up to the fort I wanted to show the barbaric nature of it's inhabitants and their lack of value for human life. On the NWN forums Chaos Wielder pointed me in the right direction by using visual effect models and I was able to create rotting corpses standing in elevated cages and skeletons on pikes as well as a dead horse. Using the hanging copses and funeral fires included in the MotB and SOZ blueprints I was able to create a rather ghastly entrance.

So here they are the screen shots. The area design is still in it's early stages. Only three textures have been placed with little blending. Also in some of the screen shots the elevated cages are all funky. For some reason when I set the portcullis (what I used for the walls) to static they revert back to their default scale and when I then uncheck the static box they return to me assigned scale.

Elevated corpse cage, uses a zombie VF, no ambient idle animation and no walkmesh issues

Corpse Cage, impaled skeleton and hanging tree all in one screen shot.

The hanging tree. Hag spawns make nice discolored and bloated bodies

The main entrance with corpses and fire pits placed

Final gate to the inner walls and the fort's main hall

Main entrance, no corpses placed, slightly out of order but oh well.

Raven picking any last bit of flesh from the skull

A barricade by the main entrance and a dead horse

Another view of the cage. Zombie's head sticks out of cage so it's shoulders will be resting against the bars.

Just about wrapped up another area. Finished placing the last of the lights and sounds then the walk-mesh cutters. The monastery for the most part has been completed. Still have a dozen or so placeables that need to have descriptions written up. All the conversations excluding the companions are in their initially phase and need a bunch of grammar work and whatnot. There is just a bit of scripting left but nothing too complicated. This single area has taken longer then any other area that I have created, so either I'm slowing down or this area just has more to it then others. If for no other reason I would prefer to choose the second because it makes me feel better but this is also the first area that is actually habitable and has a decent group of NPC living in it. As I wrap up this area I have started working on the final large area, the bad guy fort. It will be a mountain valley fortification based on descriptions of 9th century Saxon Burghs from Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Series (I'm patiently waiting till October when the next book in the series is to be released.) The fort will have three tall walls made of made of earth and reinforced with logs. A hall will be placed at the center and the player will need to find some way to get to it without having the entire army descending upon them.

I have also been spending some time working on the dwarven clerc that joins the party. I mentioned his twin axes in a previous post and over the past few days I have been scripting them. As they are blessed by his god so only the dwarf may wield them and he most be using both of them to gain the bonuses. They initially will appear to be normal axes but will grant him two weapon feats, battle axe proficiency feats as well on bonus divine damage and enchantment bonuses. There are seven levels, most of which will never be reached but I figured to go for it and do it up right just in case. Every 5 levels the bonuses improve from lvl1-lvl5 it is a +1 weapon and does 1 bonus point of divine damage and grants the two weapon fighting feat. All of this is currently untested so there is always the posiblity it will do nothing....

The hostility issue from the previous post has been fixed, at some point while updating stuff to patch 1.23 I stuck a repute.FAC with only the standard factions into my HAK. Now that it is removed everything is working again, much to my relief. I have included some screen shots. The top four are from the monastery then the bottom 4 are from a hidden crypt under the monastery.

Dinning/sitting area

Main Entrance

These two are from the quarters of the sorcerer Marick Tannesen, who normally resides in the city of Neverwinter. While he won't join you he offers guidance and will sell you items from his extensive collection.

The dead rest uneasy and will quickly swallow up any intruders.

Red gloomy fog. We all know nothing good can call a place like this home, but here's hoping there is some decent loot.

QK placeable gargoyles and Hellcow's cobwebs

They're All Attacking Me

It has been about two weeks now since I played Rogue and battled an emu so I feel safe saying that the kick has come to an end. Here's hoping I don't stumble upon another vintage game.

On the remodel front I have discovered that I am actually a decent electrician. The wiring is now complete and everything is working like its suppose to. Now I just have to wait for an extra hot and muggy day then I can start insulating the walls.

I have updated to 1.23, was looking forward to some of the script additions especially set base ability. With the update I have had some frustrating behavior from my NPC with custom factions. All module factions behave as if they are hostile regardless of their settings. This is a major problem for me and I assume many others. It is almost as if the game is no longer checking the module factions but from what I could find their is no place for campaign factions nor could I find the a faction 2da to add my customs to. I have a post on the bioware boards as does loudent2 but no no solutions or explanations have been offered so far. I haven't had a lot of time to really go and look into it either.

The past week I have had a bit of dialog explosion when I'm not worried about neutral NPC attacking me in a fit of rage. Finished a number of conversations for some NPC that the PC will interact with, just need to do a little more scripting and check that all the conditions are right.

On area design I have gone and hidden Ree's Homage to Grinning Fool in the game. The player will need to have some decent spot skill to discover it and receive a little reward. So that is it now, no new screen shots unless people want to see crazed NPCs attacking....

ROGUE

Very little to report on Risen Hero. My nighttime toolset time has been dwindling down. Just too tired after working on the remodel all day to do anything really productive at night. I ended up having to remove all three exterior walls on the dining room,one at a time of course. Now the framing is mostly done and the new windows are in. The past few days I spent wiring the kitchen and dining room and waiting for the plumber, insulation and sheet rock are next.

When I am working on Risen Hero I have been making blueprint. Easier then conversations and area design and they are something that you can usually complete in one sitting. Created all the NPC for the final battle and I been making a bunch of items. One of which is the Lyre of Orpheus

On another note I have found yet another way to waste my time. I have downloaded a classic game that as a kid I played way too much. ROGUE. What other game can you battle Emus as well as dragons. Other then running out of rations and starving to death or being killed by griffins and the Letter U (Ur-Vile), it is it is a great game. Random dungeons, dangerous monsters A-Z (excluding E, how dangerous can a emu be?), a yellow face for an avatar and it even makes a beep when you step on a trap. Well that is it for now, back to building and exploring the Dungeon of Doom.