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It's always darkest before it goes totally black
February 28, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 It's always darkest before it goes totally black. Or something like that, anyway.
I ran into some really weird issues with High Seas. When doing ship-to-ship combat, everything just stopped. I isolated the issue to the code that determines ship speed. There's a piece that cycles through the crew, looking for a certain type that improves your sailing speed. Unfortunately it simply stops in there with no explanation why.
Ironically, it was working before. I think I broke it by fixing the issue with the ship cargo items not being a valid item type. Now that they are, the above function started looking at them and horribly breaking along the way.
I also finally peeked at the bug reports from the testers. It was fairly bleak, with some nasty bugs stopping all progress at one point. It looks like I'm going to have to spend some serious debug time myself to sort out what's going on. In this case, a required conversation isn't firing and I'm not sure why.
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I've been doing some more work on High Seas, ...
February 27, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I've been doing some more work on High Seas, procrastinating on getting back to debugging. In a way it's good, as I'm starting to think more about what having a "campaign" really means from a technical perspective. I think I have to go back and cleanup some common scripts so that they work properly in the future modules.
Today I worked on icons and the appearance of the various crew members for boarding actions. I'm about halfway through, trying to make sure everyone is interesting looking. Later on I want to make the boarding action area into something real looking. Right now it's just a big grassy plain. It's fun work, though, after spending so much time working on interior areas.
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The new NWN2 graphics engine really makes for...
February 26, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 The new NWN2 graphics engine really makes for some pretty shots. I ended up leaving a test open for five minutes until the day changed and the moon rose. I can't wait to start putting in "extras" to the world map like light houses, ships wrecked on rocks, and other fun touches.
I made good progress scripting-wise yesterday, spending way too much time cycling through the same set of tests. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why even the toughest ships kept surrendering to me in battle. It turns out that they never had any crew. The reason they didn't have any crew is that none of the high seas specific items were being properly created. And the reason for that, as I finally figured out, was that in the prototype they were a unique type of stackable item. I quickly changed that and things magically started working again.
I also got the flags working, which I felt was pretty key to identifying ships. It involved creating a separate polymorph for each flag/ship combo. It was a bit of work.
I still have a few really core things to sort out. I'm thinking that I'll start boarding actions with a very simple "two ships of the same type" area. That means you might end up attacking a fishing boat and doing boarding on a somewhat larger vessel. Still, it's far simpler than trying to make a different area for each combination of vessels. I'll start there and see how it turns out.
I also need to check up on PJJ's progress. Odds are he has a ton of new bugs for me to sort through. Can't wait!
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Work continues, though I skipped posting for ...
February 25, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Work continues, though I skipped posting for a couple days. Mostly I've been working on High Seas while testing continues. All the icons I made for NWN have been moved over, though I haven't yet linked them up to all the item blueprints. I've also been trying to get the various High Seas systems working properly. Only minutes ago, I managed to get the action moving from the world map to the ship-to-ship combat map. Now I need to test out boarding.
I did have some frustration yesterday, trying to get the ship models working properly. Unfortunately there's some weird technical issues that mean that ships will be able to run through each other. I ended up shrinking down the ships so it wasn't so weird looking, but I do find it quite annoying.
I'm also working on visual effects, such as getting the clouds and whirlpools looking good. The world map needs more attention too. Busy, busy.
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Well, it's taken longer than I wanted, but I ...
February 22, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Well, it's taken longer than I wanted, but I finally got through PJJ's latest list of issues. This morning was all about the piano, one of the things you can interact with on the creepy third level of the keep. The list of issues was pretty long, from not being able to sit, to the music not playing, and some admittedly weird camera angles.
I ended up removing all mention of sitting in the dialog, as sitting in NWN2, while possible, is tricky to do scripting-wise. It turns out placeables don't make sounds, so the player now has a conversation with themselves. Finally, I added a few cameras to get the angle working better than it was.
I'm going to see if I can whip up a new build to get to the QA folks today. I also need to catch up on my e-mail and see if new tidbits came in. Maybe I'll get back to working on High Seas, making icons or something.
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Two steps forward, one step back
February 21, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Two steps forward, one step back.
I think PJJ saved the toughest issues for the end. There was a horribly broken script for the 3rd level that I think I finally got pretty much fixed. I was up around 4 am this morning, and worked for a couple hours straight until it was time to go into work. Basically I need to be very careful with moving NPCs around when starting conversations. If they're not in the area when the ActionStartConversation event fires, it won't wait for the JumpToObject script to finish getting them there.
I also did some more polishing. There's a place where you could find a combination to a safe. Previously, it would just let you open it, but now you have to do a little bit of work and enter it into an input box. I ran into some weird problems where what you entered didn't match the text properly. It turned out there was some mysterious invisible character tacked on to the end of the string.
I'm feeling closer to the next build, though I'd like to do some more testing tonight and polish off a few more issues. I have a hard time judging how far until we can release. It's going to take at least three more weeks, I think, and maybe more if testing goes poorly. Still, we're close, after two years working on this project, that's just the blink of an eye.
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I started in on debugging the module again ye...
February 20, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I started in on debugging the module again yesterday. PJJ is doing a fabulous job, finding all sorts of issues, big and small. Some are typos, others are broken scripts, and there's quite a few suggestions to simply improve the play experience. I've appreciated the fact that he's tested the prototype as well. Over the weekend he caught a bug where some missing dialog wasn't firing properly, something he remembered from playing the prototype over a year ago.
As for today, I'll continue the debugging process. I'd also like to run through Remembrance: War again. At PJJ's suggestion, it's now No Rest, which means that you've got to be very careful with your troops. Before you could rest up between fights and it wasn't much of a challenge. I worry a bit that players will lose their entire troop, making the rest of the battles extremely difficult. We'll see how it goes.
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My computer is back together and NWN2 is full...
February 19, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 My computer is back together and NWN2 is fully installed and patched. Taking advantage of my functional computing, I put in some quality time with the High Seas system. It's the core of the second module, tying together all the various islands. Without it, you couldn't sail from one place to another.
At this point, it's somewhat working. I'm able to go from land to sea where the player polymorphs into a boat. I can then sail about, interact with the other ships on the ocean, and return to shore. Ship to ship combat doesn't seem to be working properly, though I'm hopeful I can fix that soon. There's some issues with the ship models - currently they don't block other ships at all and so you can sail right through them. The cargo and weapon icons aren't in place. I only have a single island working. The world map needs more work. Flags aren't working. Storm and whirlpool visual effects aren't in place. Each crew type needs to have a unique appearance.
Still, the visuals of NWN2 are stunning and the scripting parts of the system seem to be working well. Ships are given random ship names. Most importantly, I can get from place to place. Hopefully I can dig into the above issues today.
I begged, borrowed, and stole a few more voice clips. There's still going to be a few unvoiced lines, but the majority of conversations should have dialog. I've got to get those cut up and converted today, which takes a bit of time.
Somewhere along the way, I need to get back to the latest QA reports as well. Though it's fun to sail ships about, my hope is that I can wrap up the first module relatively soon and get it posted for all to enjoy.
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I've been having a fairly catastrophic comput...
February 17, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I've been having a fairly catastrophic computer failure at home, and get to do the fun task of reinstalling things. Fortunately I have backups galore and a second computer that will run NWN2 just fine. At the moment I'm chopping up sound clips that I made my mom record last night. To be honest, she didn't do a great job and there were tons of distractions. Still, I hope everyone is nice about it because, hey, it's my mom. I admittedly had fun making her say "When I was your age, I felt a certain hunger that only a man could quench." Tee hee.
I also spent some time with the world map for the second module. The ability to scale things in NWN is priceless. For NWN1, I had to make all sorts of custom placeables to pull it off.
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It's funny how testing always seems to get ba...
February 15, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 It's funny how testing always seems to get back to the Remembrance: War section. Even in the prototype it was touchy, with lots of scripting problems and balancing issues. Some of the bugs reported were pretty weird. For example, when saving and reloading in the area, the NPC you're controlling jumps back to the PC character, who is tucked away in a tiny space for the duration of the area. I ended up having a module heartbeat that tracks the NPC's position and jumps them back after a reload.
There were lots of other things, including new additions such as more voice acting, journal entries, and descriptions. I just finished uploading a new build to the testers, giving them their first look at the lip synch animations. Hopefully they'll like it.
As for today, I might have some time to work on HighSeas a bit more. I'm still debating over the various ways to handle boarding. I'm also torn whether or not to let players sail any ship in the module, or give them only one and work on building a sense of ownership as they slowly upgrade it. It's tricky, from both a design and technical perspective.
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I had some weird drive errors with my main co...
February 14, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
I had some weird drive errors with my main computer, but seem to be up and running again. Yesterday I worked on getting some of Daniel's new lines into the game. Chris has done a great job with the character and is hysterically funny. I can't wait to have people hear it in the game.
I'm taking today off work to hang out with my family. I might be able to sneak in some testing time. I want to make sure I haven't introduced any weird bugs with my latest round of fixes. If all goes well, I'll make a new build and pass it along to the QA folks.
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As predicted, I had a very long list of bugs ...
February 13, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 As predicted, I had a very long list of bugs to fix yesterday. Some where fairly serious show-stoppers. Some were cosmetic. The most time consuming was adding a description for every enemy in the game, though I think it's a nice touch. It felt good to take a few more baby steps towards release.
I tried really hard last night to get my ships properly marked according to faction. My first attempt was to get a big logo on the main sail using tint maps. It sadly failed miserably. For now, I'm going with flags instead, which is what I did with the prototype. It works fairly well, though the flags can sometimes been pretty small. I still might be able to get full-sail logos as well, or perhaps give the player some options to pick some. We'll see how it goes.
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It took hours to get right, but the Carrack i...
February 12, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 It took hours to get right, but the Carrack is ported over to NWN2. While the bulk of NWN content looks pretty shabby in NWN2, there are clearly exceptions. Since it was designed as a tileset, the polycount is extremely high (close to 6000) and the addition of normal maps greatly improves the look. There's still one or two things to clean up, a mysterious untextured object showing up as the dreaded question mark cube. It shouldn't be hard to find.
I'm amazed how long the carrack took to convert, though. The big issue is that the NWN2 game engine can only handle models with 32 meshes. The NWN model had over a hundred. It was very tedious joining all the meshes together, but I like the end result.
As for today, I'll probably be getting the weekend's batch of bug reports and working through it. If I get a little free time, I'd like to work on the second module a bit more. It's fun.
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I had forgotten how fun it is to mess around ...
February 11, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I had forgotten how fun it is to mess around with custom content. I managed to get the ship in the game. It turns out the vanishing mesh problem only happened in the toolset. In the game itself, it looks very nice. I even did a test where the player transforms into a ship and sailed around my temporary sea a bit.
Already I'm making plans for getting High seas itself ready to go. On Friday I converted it to NWN2, though the scripting and areas need massive working. I can't wait to get started on the world map. I have plans to use the tint system to create a variety of sails with different patterns.
The boarding issues are more tricky. My hope is to do away with the generic "two ship" tileset and go with boarding scenarios that reflect the ships involved. The trick is that if I let the player crew a variety of ships, I have to allow for a huge range of ship pairings. The walkmesh issues are daunting. One option is to only let the player crew one type of ship. The other is to only allow movement on one ship. Finally, I could try to have an invisible flat plane everyone can walk on and spawn in ships and blockers to control movement. I may have to do some tests and see what looks best.
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One of the things the next module needs is sh...
February 10, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 One of the things the next module needs is ships, the more the better. There's a ton of great ships out there for the original NWN, many of which should look good enough for NWN2 with a bit of tweaking. I decided to convert one of the simpler ships in the TNO tileset and see if it was possible at all.
The first thing I needed to do was to combine a number of meshes to get down to a reasonable number. The NWN2 game engine can theoretically handle up to 32, so I worked hard to get that number down as far as I could. The render looked pretty good, so I decided to export and get it in the game. For the longest time, I thought something went horribly wrong. It turns out that it was invisible when viewed from up close, but looked fine further away.
There's some other issues, missing meshes and weird transparency issues. I'm going to keep fiddling and see if I can sort them out. With luck, I can whip up a nice little array of friends and foes for Dark Waters.
I also spent some time testing the lip synching last night. In my opinion, it looks pretty good. It's admittedly a little off, as the lips don't move with the correct words, but I think it's better than staying still. Danie's animations are a little weird, though. I'm pretty sure I know how to fix it, modifying his fxe files to put in the correct race type. It's somewhat tedious, but I'll improve as best I can.
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Success!
I finally figured out why the lip...
February 09, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Success!
I finally figured out why the lip synch animations weren't working. Inside each fxe file is the name of the wav file that it's for. It turns out that if any of the letters are upper-case, it doesn't work. After I switched to lower case, things started working again. My task for today is to regenerate the hundreds of fxe files, making sure they're appropriately lower case.
I tested my theory with a quick conversation with Death. It was quite amusing to see his jaw move about as he chatted away with me.
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Testing continues
February 08, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Testing continues. This morning I tried to figure out why the lip synching wasn't working and ended up with some really weird results. The Pirate Cards lip synch wouldn't work when I moved it over to my test module. Something fishy is going on and I need to investigate more.
I got some more bug reports, most of which were easy to fix. A few are game engine bugs, which hopefully will be fixed by patches. Most of those are cosmetic, and not too critical. The only worrisome bug is a timing issue - I think slower CPU computers have a weird experience during certain cutscenes. Hopefully I can put some "just in case" code around it to make people's experiences similar.
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I went through the list of bugs and fixed som...
February 07, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I went through the list of bugs and fixed some more. The funny mating dance from yesterday is strangely difficult to fix, or at least I can't figure out why it's happening. I did improve a bit of the cutscene involving the sword. It looks okay if you don't mind their legs moving about like rubbery noodles.
I got some brand new voice work by one of the new, prolific voice actors. He's Mister Clark in the first module, but he has a ton of voices for the second. People are really liking the voice acting, so I'm excited to start in on the second module and put all the voice acting to good use.
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Nothing too exciting lately
February 06, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
Nothing too exciting lately. I got a new build to the testers and worked through a new round of bug reports. My favorite bug of the day is the following:
When Daniel went to get the sword from the statue and came back, my PC and he were facing each other, holding candles and wildly moving their arms and legs. It was like some exotic mating ritual, hilarious to look at.
While I'm all for exotic mating rituals, I better take a closer look tonight and see if I can sort out what's going on.
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I worked on lots of little things yesterday
February 05, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I worked on lots of little things yesterday. PJJ, a military historian, pointed out that the icon for the flintlock pistols was actually for a percussion cap pistol. I made some more this morning and added some variation for the blunderbuss and possible future magic ones.
I cleaned up some scripting to make it more robust. I also added a neat little visual effect at the beginning of the Remembrance areas. Patch 1.04 lets you put the hak pack in the My Documents area, so I switched around the installer for that. All-in-all, things seem to be coming along nicely. I don't think the latter parts of the module have been tested very well yet, so I'm eager to hear what the testers say about that.
As for today, I want to finish up the walkthrough and catch up with the latest bug reports.
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Debugging continues
February 04, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Debugging continues. I found a couple of the issues that the testers reported. I had slipped in a couple changes right before the last build that I thought was improving some things and it actually made things worse. I think I've improved things to the point where it doesn't look so bizarre.
There's a couple places where you see through another player's eyes. Unfortunately it was somewhat abrupt and it wasn't obvious what was going on. I added a bit of dialog that hopefully improves that some more.
Finally, there's a hidden easter egg, but it had no clue to even tell of its existence. I put in a little note that gives a hint that there's something to look for later on.
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I made a new build last night, with the full ...
February 02, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 I made a new build last night, with the full build size sneaking up to 119 MB in size. Part of that is fxe files for the lip synch animation, so I'll take those out if I can't get them working. The plan is to get that to testers today so they can do their thing over the weekend.
It feels good to keep making progress and getting things polished up. I wrote a lot of the walkthrough and fleshed out the readme file some more. I've been fixing the odd bug where I find it, mostly things like camera angles, typos, and the occasional scripting glitch. I have had some serious reports about really weird behavior, but haven't been able to replicate them. In one case, I added some "emergency exit" placeables that let you escape an area if a problem comes up. Hopefully people won't have to use them.
Finally, the mirror puzzle got tested extensively last night. I think absolutely everything works, from having Daniel help to the secret easter egg hidden away.
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Well, I'm back to the mirror puzzle, which ha...
February 01, 2007 by Adam in NWN2
 Well, I'm back to the mirror puzzle, which has haunted me for a long while. It's solveable, but there are problems with Daniel "helping" the player. Currently when he solves it, it actually ends up moving all the mirrors into oblivion, thus making it impossible to move forward.
I've nearly hit the end of the first round of testing, though there's still some issues I need to follow-up on. A couple are biggies that I'd like to track down in more detail. The QA cycle is pretty slow, unfortunately, as it takes a couple minutes to fire up the game, load the module, and jump to the area I'm testing.
I also need to upgrade to the new patch and take a look at the new goodies that come with it. I think some files have moved location, such as hak packs actually working in the My Documents folder, which is best.
Update: Oh, I forgot. I did an interview with an Italian gaming site (scroll halfway down the page). Registering in Italian was interesting, to say the least.
It looks like Stephan Gagne did one too. It's interesting comparing notes with another big developer. I certainly sympathize with his leaving of the hobby development world, the rest assured that Dark Water will be finished come hell or high water.
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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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