|
|
Well, I have the skeleton of a beach tileset ...
April 30, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 Well, I have the skeleton of a beach tileset functioning. I have the wet and try sand terrains in place. There's a lot of issues, however, from texture problems to lighting weirdness. I haven't even started with the water yet. It's not bad for a couple days' work, but there's much that can be improved on.
In terms of the Sigil tileset, I conceded defeat with my one tile, turning off shadows on the offending mesh. Even creating a dummy shadow caster ended up making weird banding shadows across the other geometry. Blah. As for today, I'll probably do more shadow checking as well as creating some edge tiles. Work goes on.
|
permalink| comment
|
I wish I had some pretty pictures to show eve...
April 29, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I wish I had some pretty pictures to show everyone, but they're sadly lacking at the moment. I spent a huge amount of time on a single Sigil tile yesterday, trying to track down a weird shadow issue. I think I've mostly figured it out, but it's taking far too long.
I also did a little work on my beach tileset, getting all the textures down to go from dry sand to wet sand. I created the tiles themselves and the SET file, but I'm doing something wrong as it's not painting in the toolset correctly. I'm probably getting overly detailed, but if it turns out the way I'd like, it should be one of the more realistic beach tilesets. I also stumbled across a way to do waves better than I was planning. We'll see how it goes.
|
permalink| comment
|
I don't have a lot to report yet
April 28, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I don't have a lot to report yet. I did some housekeeping with the Sigil tileset, uploading some .max files to the versioning system we use. I worked more on the fancy beach textures. Hopefully today I can make some quick terrain to see how it really turns out.
|
permalink| comment
|
I had every intention of being a good modeler...
April 27, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 I had every intention of being a good modeler and working on the Sigil tileset while I was at the beach this long weekend. Unfortunately the call of the sand and surf was too strong and I ended up taking a ton of pictures tentatively to be used in a beach tileset. I'm not sure if I'll have the time to be able to do more than a very simple one, but it was fun making the textures and doing a test tile to see if my ideas pan out.
I've figured out how to get the wet sand look the way I want, but the water is a different matter. I may do some more experiments trying to simulate the waves as best I can.
Though this is a bit of a side project, I'm still working on finishing up Demon and the Sigil tileset. Hopefully it won't be too much longer.
|
permalink| comment
|
I have the two custom doors I was working on ...
April 22, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I have the two custom doors I was working on the other day in the game. I think I've got some more desparkling on the buildings to go, though the biggest issues are dealt with. I also want to strategize with the other CODI modelers about shadow issues. Could be tricky.
|
permalink| comment
|
Tile development continues
April 21, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
Tile development continues. It's hard to pull anything particularly exciting out of it. "I moved a bunch of vertexes around" is pretty much the truth of the matter. I cleaned and desparkled a few more tilesets. I created a couple custom doors for some tiles. Progress plods along.
|
permalink| comment
|
It was a bit of a madhouse yesterday as every...
April 20, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 It was a bit of a madhouse yesterday as everyone discovered that there was a problem with the Dreamcatcher4 hak pack I'd uploaded last week. There was an issue with the appearances.2da file that caused an important creature to become invisible and crash the game. All bad. Fortunately it was easy to fix, so everyone can replace the hak pack and continue on their merry way.
I've been living and breathing modeling tools for the last couple weeks. The Sigil tileset is slowly getting finished up. I have the "c02_*" tiles at the moment, the straight line of building tiles. There are thirteen of them and I have desparkled, filled gaps, created some new geometry, tweaked vertexes, and cleaned up a few texture errors. It's not particularly glamorous work, but the end result looks quite nice.
Most of the other tiles have been picked up by CODI modelers, so the tileset should go quickly. Batinthehat is retexturing the mortuary, the last of the big projects. There's a tower that Ghost made that we want to put in. After that, there's some more cleanup, a few minimap icons to make, verifying shadows are working properly, and then we can call it done.
|
permalink| comment
|
It was another quiet day yesterday, mostly sp...
April 19, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
It was another quiet day yesterday, mostly spent watching kids. I scribbled down some notes and dialog for my next project, but hardly touched Demon or the Sigil tileset at all. I did note some more cleanup needed for the tiles, so I'm sure to do that today.
|
permalink| comment
|
Not a whole lot to report
April 18, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
Not a whole lot to report. I fiddled with the final cutscene a bit more, using Gestalt's camera system to good effect. I also did more decorating, putting in some placeables so certain areas didn't look quite so bare.
|
permalink| comment
|
I've been making good progress these days
April 17, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I've been making good progress these days. The tiles I assigned to myself are shaping up quite nicely. I've been desparkling, tweaking walkmesh, and adding geometry as needed. Soon the Sigil exterior tileset will be in a formal beta state. I'm also excited to see bat slaving away at retexturing the Mortuary, which is a huge 8x8 monstrosity. It's stunning to wander around in and it will certainly make an appearance in Demon.
I continue to tweak the cutscenes for Demon. This morning I put in a nice little "camera follow" script that works fairly well. Timing is everything in cutscenes, making it especially tricky when things happen at variable times.
|
permalink| comment
|
I've been doing a mix of things as of late
April 16, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 I've been doing a mix of things as of late. I got the camera movement into the Mechanus puzzle levels the way I want. It now goes out of the cutscene properly when certain events occur (e.g. the monodrone dies or stops moving). I'm pretty happy with the result, especially considering it's taken so long to get there.
I continue to assist the CODI folks with the Sigil tileset. I'm starting in on the buildings, trying to get them ship-shape. Mostly I'm cleaning up sparkles and gaps, and tweaking the walkmesh as needed. So far, I'm feeling good about progress. To get a really good view of Sigil and all the buildings, you can take a look at the movie they released. It even has the newest building at the end, never shown before.
I'm also trying to poke my head into the various IRC sessions happening around NWCon II. I'm pretty busy, but you might see a PIPBoy3000 floating about.
|
permalink| comment
|
Like a moth to a flame, I find myself yet aga...
April 15, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 Like a moth to a flame, I find myself yet again fiddling with the Mechanus puzzle levels. I rediscovered Gestalt's camera system, getting deeper into the latest version and all the new features. For Mechanus, the player's camera now follows the travelling monodrone around the track, which makes it much easier to understand what's going on.
I also started adding in the new cutscene functionality a few other places. There's a great shot when entering Omelas for the first time. The camera spirals upward to view the city all around the player in an initial moment of awe. I'd like to do more of the same today. There's some other cutscenes I'm doing using the standard Bioware controls and I think I'd like to replace them with Gestalt's as they work much more cleanly.
|
permalink| comment
|
I think I've finished with my first grand des...
April 14, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I think I've finished with my first grand desparkle pass on the road, ground, and ground feature tiles. There's still the rare glimpse of a sparkle, but it's much improved.
Bat's been working on a new group for the tileset that looks quite good. You should see it in a movie for the upcoming NWCon II event. I'm thinking of using it for the Gate Diver's exterior.
I'll be checking the assignments file for who's working on which Sigil tiles and grabbing another batch to clean up.
|
permalink| comment
|
The other day, someone e-mailed me asking to ...
April 13, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
The other day, someone e-mailed me asking to give a general status update, so here goes.
I'm in the final stages of finishing up a new module titled Demon, sequel to the Dreamcatcher and Shadowlords campaigns. The majority of development on Demon is finished and I've run through the entire game to confirm it's possible to actually win (it took me several days of sporadic playing).
At this point, I'm helping the City of Doors Initiative, affectionately called CODI. Their goal is to bring Planescape to NWN, and they're creating quite a few pieces of content that I'm using in Demon. The biggest pieces are an interior tileset, which is essentially finished, and the city of Sigil's exterior tileset.
These days I'm working on the Sigil tileset along with a number of other modelers at CODI. I'm "desparkling" tilesets, removing the tiny gaps between tiles to avoid the background fog from seeping through and showing up as tiny sparkles. Yesterday I worked on roads and they are much improved, but not quite perfect. The geometry of the ground is fairly complex and I find myself moving vertexes about and seeing if it cleans up the issues.
I'm very much looking forward to the other modelers jumping onboard. I was chatting with Papermonk, the project coodinator at CODI, and it sounds like a whole bunch of very talented modelers will be helping with the tileset shortly.
|
permalink| comment
|
I have sworn vengeance against sparkles
April 12, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 I have sworn vengeance against sparkles. There's a very common issue with tiles that seems to show up in virtually every custom tileset. Tiny gaps between the tiles can occur during the production process, causing "sparkles" when you look into the fog that surrounds the tileset in the game.
There are several desparkle utilities that have been released to battle this phenomena, yet it seems that this doesn't fully take care of the issue. After much fiddling about, my best results seem to come when I go in to the ground texture entry in the mdl file and move everything at 5.0 and -5.0 to 5.004 and -5.004. It's tedious work, but produces a lovely sparkle-free set of tiles.
Oh, and here's the improved mini-map icons. Much less grid effect.
|
permalink| comment
|
Well, I wasn't happy with the way the minimap...
April 10, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
Well, I wasn't happy with the way the minimap icons turned out yesterday, so I completely redid them with the lights positioned far higher than before. It resulted in something that looked much less grid-like and has better lighting.
I also finished up a batch of tiles, fixing animation, transparency, sparkles, and walkmesh issues. Whew. It's uploaded to the CVS and I'm ready for the next batch. Still plenty more to go.
|
permalink| comment
|
I started in on minimap icons this morning
April 09, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 I started in on minimap icons this morning. Not everything is textured completely, so I'm jumping the gun a bit, but it's a start.
I also spent a fair bit of time on walkmeshes for a handful of the tiles. They're not quite ready to go yet, as there's some other issues to deal with (shadows and animation loops). Still, I'm starting to feel like I'm contributing to the effort of getting it out of beta status.
The issues with the Vault were resolved yesterday and everyone should be able to download the Dreamcatcher hak packs once again. It turns out that there was indeed a problem with the Vault's upload scripts. It was chopping off the last bit of the file which made life tense for a couple days. It's amazing how many people are still playing Dreamcatcher after these many months.
|
permalink| comment
|
It was a hectic day yesterday
April 08, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 It was a hectic day yesterday. I'm running into all sorts of problems with the new Dreamcatcher hak packs. When I upload them, the last few bytes of the file get chopped off. I've tried several different times on different networks, finally deciding the issue was on the Vault's end of things. I sent off an e-mail to Maximus, who will hopefully be able to sort things out.
I stayed up late last night, finishing up edge tiles and load screens. Minimap icons were next, but I ran into some problems along the way. If I have time today, I'll hopefully get a chance to work on tiles themselves. It's about time to lay down some walkmeshes and tweak vertexes.
|
permalink| comment
|
I think I have my work cut out for me, even t...
April 07, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 I think I have my work cut out for me, even though I made a bunch of progress yesterday. Since the new focus is on finishing up the Sigil exterior tileset, I've been trying to find ways to help with this. I decided to pick edge tiles and load screens to begin, so that's what I did yesterday. I've got a few more load screens to whip out, but it's not too much of a challenge. There's a lot of tile work to do as well, but I'm always nervous working with other people's stuff. I'll probably jump in soon enough.
I actually worked on the module itself a bit, adding in some more commands for the henchmen. You can now toggle stealth and searching on and off. I also added a stealth toggle for the various troops in the Struggle areas.
|
permalink| comment
|
Yesterday was suprisingly busy
April 06, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 Yesterday was suprisingly busy. It does indeed look like the focus of CODI's testing is shifting to the Sigil exterior tileset. Though I admit to some trepidation, I think I'm okay with that. It's critical to getting Demon out the door and it does give me a little extra polish time. I worked on getting the transition meshes on the Sigil doors turning a nice shade of blue when you move your mouse over it. It's the little things that people notice.
I also combined my sigil.hak and Demon1.hak files into a single big hak. Hopefully that'll minimize confusion and errors during testing, as well as getting things closer to a final state. Bat's been updating the Sigil tiles like a maniac, so I moved over his latest work into the hak pack as well.
I also did some webmonkey work behind the scenes, setting up an IRC proxy so that I can talk to the CODI folks more frequently. It was technically difficult setting everything up - installing cygwin, apache, and cgiirc. Bonus nerd points for me.
Finally, I've been sitting on some hak pack updates to the Dreamcatcher series for too long. They allow Shifters to work properly and I just need to find some time today to update things. Hopefully I'll manage.
Update: Well, the Dreamcatcher hak packs are finally updated. All you Shifters out there - feel free to grab them. Nice to get that one off my to do list.
|
permalink| comment
|
Well, testing isn't going as well as I had hoped
April 05, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 Well, testing isn't going as well as I had hoped. There were some problems on my part, last minute changes that caused things to break. Then there was another issue, more mysterious as I wasn't able to duplicate it on my testing machines.
There's also a request to delay QA on Demon until after the Sigil tileset is signed off as final. It was a bit of a surprise to me and my worry is that it will delay release of the module. I suppose I can always do testing myself while the tileset is worked on, or assist in tileset development myself.
Hopefully we'll straighten things out.
|
permalink| comment
|
Quiet day so far
April 03, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
Quiet day so far. I'm gearing up to coordinate testing and help with the Sigil tileset. Getting the files off my hard drive was a relief. Now I'm just chatting with the CODI folks, trying to work out details.
Slowly making progress.
|
permalink| comment
|
Well, I think today's the day
April 02, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 Well, I think today's the day. The last of the big bugs involved issues with the Spirit Gem not working properly, so I tweaked some things and then tried dying and killing off my henchman a bunch of times. I think it's working properly now.
I also fixed a bunch of other minor issues, such as moving the shield node for the PC Tainted model down a bit. I also polished up the readme file and turned it into a Word and PDF document. A couple areas got some new placeables for ambiance's sake. Somewhere in there I also managed to make up a lengthy document for the testers, letting them know particular things to pay attention to.
There's a final fiddling I'd like to do with the music, replacing an older battle theme with one of Magnus' newer ones. That's about all I can think of before I FTP up all the hak packs, music, movies, and the module itself to the CODI site. It's actually quite a relief. If I'm hit by a bus, at least someone will be able to post the thing to the Vault.
I also took some time yesterday to fix the last of the .2da issues with Shifters in Dreamcatcher. I'll post them if I get some time today, otherwise it may be this weekend. After all the exitement for today is over, I need to find a way to help finish the Sigil exterior tileset.
Update: I just finished uploading all the files up to CODI's FTP server for testing. It turns out that all the files are a whopping 60 MB in size. For those of you on modems, you can skip the intro movie and music to bring it back down to a bit over 30 MB. Whew.
|
permalink| comment
|
The bug fixing continues
April 01, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
 The bug fixing continues. I'm doing a bunch of cleanup, trying to make sure the doors all connect, the dialog is a bit less rough, and player's inventory is moved about appropriately when they first enter the game. I feel like I'm making pretty good progress, though I'm having an urge to "pretty up" a few areas with more placeables. I'll probably do that today as well as try to take care of the remaining issues on my list.
It's a strange feeling getting the game towards some degree of completion. I've been working on this module for over ten months now, as long as my daughter has been alive. Hopefully I'll be able to post it on the Vault well before she turns one.
|
permalink| comment
|
Older Posts
|
Links
Dragon Age
Dragon Age Central
Interviews, etc.
Why We Fight
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.
|