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I'm hoping the waves of illness that have swe...
November 30, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
I'm hoping the waves of illness that have swept through our family are finally over. I found some time today to start digging into the bug reports. There's a few bad ones, and another batch of smaller ones. The lists I'm getting keep getting smaller, which is a good sign. Hopefully this weekend I can whip up a new build and get it to the testers.
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I was deathly ill last night, which translate...
November 28, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I was deathly ill last night, which translated into me being up at some weird hours. On the plus side, I was able to do a full test run of Chronomancer and I can say that it can be finished, at least with respect to the "good" ending. I did notice some unvoiced Konrad dialog lines, which I quickly recorded this morning. I also noticed some semi-bug issues where you can quickly click through dialog lines and the actions stop matching up with the words (e.g. you'll be in one place while talking about another). Still, I think it's an acceptable trade-off and it makes debugging much easier.
As for today, I'm feeling much better and am going to see if I can find the time to dig into PJJ's latest bug reports. So far it sounds like we're getting into the area of polish rather than fixing horribly broken bugs, which is a good sign of progress.
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Periodically life gets insanely busy and I ca...
November 27, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
Periodically life gets insanely busy and I can't get to the game. Sadly the last couple days have been that way, coupled with my annoying, lingering cold. Hopefully in a day or two I can dig myself out and get back to the final QA work.
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My bug fixing continues
November 25, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 My bug fixing continues. I actually went back to take care of something that's been lingering for a long while. There's a single room in the first module where you can play a little ball game. Sunjammer worked on the coding, but the transfer from NWN1 to NWN2 never quite worked out particularly well.
I finally took the time to get it properly working, with nice clean lines and the edges of the playing field in the right place. For the soccer fans out there, you can now whack the ball around, though admittedly there's not a very big challenge.
 Of course, I also spent some time fixing some other things. It turns out that the feats got screwed up along the way somewhere. When I leveled up, they showed up completely blank. I fiddled with the 2da file and things should be much improved. While I was there, I made it so all the sling-based feats now referenced flintlocks. Since flintlocks are really slings, all the combat feats relating to them actually benefit flintlock use. For the gunslingers out there, it should now be more obvious which feats to take.
Finally, I was debugging the Lord Tyson quest and realized he didn't have any voiced lines. I put on my most evil voice, which was actually helped by my lingering cough, and got them chopped up and attached to dialog. Now I'm in the process of getting the format right and making the lipsynch files.
Still on target for a new release tomorrow. With luck, most of the big issues should be resolved. High Seas probably needs a bit more polish. I'm tempted to have an option where a first mate pops up and gives advice. Otherwise some of the problems can be a bit tricky to figure out. For example, if you're headed up wind, it would be nice to tell the player they're doing that. If their hull is damaged, that would be a good time to mention the benefits of having a carpenter on board. We'll see how it goes.
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The bug fixing continues
November 24, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 The bug fixing continues. I added help screens to a couple High Seas GUIs. I've also made it so you can't defeat a particular enemy by clicking on him quickly as he runs away to have his minions to attack (which starts up his final dialog). There's lots of smaller fixes, such as some completely messed up dialog I managed to record. Progress continues, and feels quite good.
There's still things I'd like to do, but I'm feeling increasingly good about the state of the game. Today and tomorrow I want to go through and polish some more things up, and get a new build to the testers on Monday.
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Today has been fortunately pretty relaxed, wh...
November 22, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Today has been fortunately pretty relaxed, which means I've had some time to seriously dig into the bug reports. The Chronomancer quest was indeed screwed up again. Part of the problem had to do with a funky piece of code that chose which dialog companions should speak, depending on which act their in. It turns out that was overriding other conversation requests, so I gutted the whole system and switched to something entirely different. The good news is that seems to have fixed the looping Chronomancer conversations, and probably others as well.
I've also added in some help text for the High Seas system and will likely add more (some in the journal and some on individual GUIs). There's a bunch of other bugs to investigate and fix, and some balance issues with High Seas.
Still, all this work gives me something to do while everyone else watches football and eats.
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Periodically, a hate computers
November 20, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Periodically, a hate computers.
It turns out my e-mail hasn't actually been getting sent since last Friday, which includes my message to the testers with the latest build. So it and all my other e-mails just left my computer, several days late.
In any case, I continue to cough away, though I keep hoping I'm on the mend. I spent some time this morning collecting more debug notes, though I've only just realized that they're for the previous build. Still, people are testing out parts that I haven't tinkered with yet.
I did find some time this morning to start looking into an issue with the High Seas trading system. It turns out I can buy a single item and it magically turns into two items. I can then sell them both back for a tidy profit.
Though amusing, I should probably fix that.
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From time to time, a single debug mention lea...
November 19, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 From time to time, a single debug mention leads to hours of testing and tweaking. Today it was a comment about the Tattoo Treasure Map quest not working right. Sure enough, there were all sorts of problems, from the quest name not having spaces, to the treasure map giving wrong directions, not to mention that NPCs weren't moving around and talking to people appropriately.
I enlisted my sick son to run through the section over and over, with me writing a little code in between. Through sheer willpower and repetition, I think we've mostly beaten the quest into shape. The only downside was that the game hung when loading Port Brighton after digging up the treasure, so I couldn't test the end.
The random crashes trouble me and are really hard to diagnose. It only shows up every once in awhile, and I've yet to record the issue in the log file. Slowly getting there.
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As usual, it turns out I'm an idiot
November 17, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 As usual, it turns out I'm an idiot. My previous workarounds to the CopyObject bugs that the 1.10 patch introduced didn't actually get into the last build. I redid them, among other things, and passed it off to the testers.
I also gave Chronomancer a bit more love, adding placeable decor, putting in some cameras for better shots during dialog, and so on. The Chronomancer periodically drives me crazy, as it's entirely dialog based and has serious cutscene scripting that requires lots of tweaking and adjustment. Hopefully this new version will work out relatively well.
I also recorded some more lines for Spider. At the testers' prompting, I added some dialog for completing each quest, which means more voice acting. I have a cold today, but hopefully it won't sound too weird.
I still have more bugs to investigate, though the list continues to get shorter. Busy, busy.
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One of the advantages of being sick is that I...
November 16, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 One of the advantages of being sick is that I strangely have a lot of free time to work on the module, in between the coughing and sneezing. I fixed some of the more dumb bugs, such as setting the variable "SpokeToSpider" instead of "SpokenToSpider" (notice the missing "n"). Others are more cryptic and harder for me to reproduce.
For example, I was able to buy and sell cargo and the like, though I'm getting reports that it's not working properly. I also didn't run into problems talking with companions, even though I got that bug report too. Ah, challenges.
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Sick as a dog today
November 15, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
Sick as a dog today. The testers are feeding me a steady stream of bug reports. It turns out that Lord Brighton's new dialog is causing crashes, probably due to the lipsynch code. I'm also getting weird issues with half-Drow, which is hard to test as it's a MotB issue.
We'll see if I can work on things tonight, or perhaps just take a hot bath and curl up in bed.
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Success!
My workaround for the CopyObject ...
November 14, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Success!
My workaround for the CopyObject seems to be working. I didn't have time to play through the entire Chronomancer quest, but the problem parts seemed to work okay. The various clones that appear were well behaved and moved around like they should.
I also added the Lord Brighton dialog that Raphael has finished so far. It always takes a bit of fiddling to get formats set right, files named, and lip synch files generated, but the outcome should add a lot of life to the character.
Gears of War arrived on my doorstep yesterday. How is this related to Neverwinter Nights 2? Well, they integrate the same lipsynch technology into their editor. So far, I haven't figured out how to generate the magical FXE files that NWN2 uses, though I found mention of it in the documentation. If I'm lucky, there may be a way to make real lipsynch animations, though I'm not going to hold my breath.
In any case, I just e-mailed out the latest build to testers. With luck we're slowly getting closer to that magical public release date.
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To quote Han Solo, "It's not my fault!" I br...
November 13, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 To quote Han Solo, "It's not my fault!" I braved the attack of the clones to try and figure out what the problem was with the Chronomancer quest. It turns out that the 1.10 patch broke the CopyObject script. While it copies the object, it doesn't return the object variable, so all subsequent calls using that variable fail horribly.
There's sort of a workaround, which is to look for the object once it's been created. I'll need some time to dig through my code looking for all the CopyObject functions. Some things may stay broken until the 1.11 patch, unfortunately. For example, I'm getting reports that you can't buy cargo, crew, and the like, which I suspect is related. It may be harder to deal with stackable copied objects, but perhaps there are ways to deal with that as well.
Finally, I had a great time in Disneyland with the family, including my life-long dream to eat at the Blue Bayou restaurant in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We all had a great time and I'm refreshed to leap back into the fray of debugging.
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As usual, I've gotten myself in a bit of trouble
November 08, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 As usual, I've gotten myself in a bit of trouble. The Chronomancer quest is amazingly broken, even after my attempted fix from yesterday. What's weird is that I swear it was working a few months ago. For whatever reason, the behavior of my player and Heather clones is really weird and unexpected. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve, so I'm not giving up yet.
I also got achievements working. Some day I'll learn that computers think UIPANE and UIPane are totally different things.
I won't be able to put together a new build for testers for awhile. I'm hopping on a plane with my family to Disneyland. Perhaps I'll get inspiration from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. In any case, I'm bringing along a notebook in case I get some time to scribble down some more dialog for the third module, so my little hobby project won't be completely on hold.
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This isn't an actual achievement that you can...
November 06, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 This isn't an actual achievement that you can find in the game, but I've been working hard on the module once again and wanted to reward myself. If only I got developer achievements, maybe something like "Code Monkey" for writing ten thousand lines of code.
In any case, I managed to get achievements and stats added to the second module, though untested. You can see the DW1 achievements in DW2 on another tab, tracking your progress through the game. There's also all the various stats, from times died to how often you use your psionic powers. Hopefully it's of use to someone.
I'm starting to get the voice clips from Raphael for Lord Brighton, and they're sounding pretty good. That's one of the key voices I haven't had yet and I've been itching to get it in.
I also took a look at the latest QA reports. There's a few horribly broken things, but they're not totally unexpected (having caused me problems before). Yes, there's a lot of miscellaneous things I need to test out and fiddle with. The good news is that each bug list seems a little smaller. I don't think I've seen a typo in weeks.
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Mondays are always hard
November 05, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Mondays are always hard. I have a long list of bugs waiting for me, but sadly haven't had the time to touch them. I might find a little time later today. PJJ was reporting some good news tracking down a performance bug with the High Seas area.
I did manage a bit of time yesterday getting my stats and achievements system working for the first module. Some of the achievements are a little silly, but I suppose it's a way to show people that they're making progress and their effort is noticed.
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Friday was a good day
November 05, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Friday was a good day. I went through and fixed the majority of the reported bugs, packaged up the files, and sent a note to all the testers. I haven't checked, but hopefully by Monday I'll get a fresh batch of bug reports. Since I'm leaving for Disneyland with the kids next week, I might be hard pressed to get another version before I go. We'll see how bad the reports are.
Not being content to just sit and wait, I decided to take up one of PJJ's suggestions to give the player better feedback about things like player loyalty and so on. I really liked what I'd done with the stats and achievements for High Seas, so I'm planning on replicating the same for each Dark Waters module.
I'm currently working on the first one, reporting on things like the number of times died, how many Slithers have been killed, the number of unique focus gems found, and so on. I'm still finding glitches in some of the stats, but in general it seems to be working okay. I'm hoping I can get achievements for the second module working as well. It's a fun addition and gives important feedback to the player.
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I got a huge amount of work done yesterday an...
November 02, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I got a huge amount of work done yesterday and continue fixing bugs and adding polish today. I just finished adding a bunch of dialog so you can report back to Lord Brighton as you make progress on your various quests.
I also figured out the issues with the installer for the first module. I had to rewrite it to pull from my current game directory, but once I got the bugs sorted out it seemed to work okay.
I'm hoping I can zip through many of the bugs I've seen and upload the latest version to testers by the end of the day. Progress feels nice.
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I think I found the root cause of my problem
November 01, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I think I found the root cause of my problem. I generate installers and use that to move thousands files from place to place without too much trouble. Unfortunately it looks like the way I set up the installer on my home PC caused it to not pick up the most recent DW1 module and campaign files. Even though it worked great on my PC, the installer had old junk in it that didn't work.
I'm going to work on fixing some of the other serious bugs that were reported, and then get my installer working properly tonight. Already I've fixed a few of the problems that have been reported, such as replacing Robert's Frankenstein-like head with a more boring one.
PJJ made some neat suggestions about feats and showing companion loyalty. I'm not sure how easy they'd be to implement, but I might give it a try.
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About Me
I've won multiple awards for my Neverwinter Nights modules, which I've been working on since the year 2000.
In the real world, I'm a web developer for a healthcare organization. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
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