Here's a peek at one of my crazy ideas for th...

December 06, 2007 by Adam in NWN2

Here's a peek at one of my crazy ideas for the next module. On the left is a "Letter Fountain" where you can fill up on letters. They show up on a GUI to the right where you can click on them to spell words.

The plan is that every letter causes a certain type of effect. For example, maybe "A" is for armor, which increases your party's AC. Perhaps "B" is for Blindness, which temporarily blinds your foes. Some of the more challenging to use letters, such as Z, would have more powerful effects (e.g. "Z" is for zap, a lighting bolt against your foes). Coupled with this, longer words produce more powerful effects, so you want to spell words using as many letters as possible.

You can gain more letters at fountains like this, or when killing opponents in the dungeon. I'd like tougher foes to drop letters with a certain bonus, say bronze letters that are worth twice normal letters, silver for three times, and gold for five times. It might also be fun to have traps or opponents that steal your letters.

I also have this concept where you can spell certain words for even more effect. For example, spelling "rest" or "sleep" would cause the whole party to rest and heal (the dungeon is otherwise no rest). Spelling "big" causes the player to get enlarged. Should be fun.

There's lots of polish to add, such as showing when you've clicked a letter (and can't reuse it), and actually making the effects happen. I did get to impliment a binary search against my dictionary 2da file. I can usually tell if a word is in the dictionary with only a dozen or so reads to the file, so it's quite fast. I was pretty proud of myself, as I don't usually do that sort of programming any more.

I think we're finally figuring out what's been causing the crashes. The panther in MotB uses the same 2da lines as in Dark Waters. I found a way to get rid of my appearances.2da file from my hak. It turns out I was only using it to reskin a creature, which can be done via a special effect. I'm going to get a new build to testers today in hopes that fixes the issue entirely.