More good progress on the last day of the year

December 31, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

More good progress on the last day of the year.

Yesterday I put all the voice work I have in the game. I also managed to get the SoZ 2da files integrated with the Dark Water ones. Theoretically that means that new SoZ characters can cast their spells and use their feats as expected.

As for today, I'm working through the most recent bug list. Fortunately it's not too bad and I'm nearly done.

Happy New Year to all.

I'm slowly getting back into the routine afte...

December 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm slowly getting back into the routine after the holiday madness. I've been chopping up my sister's dialog (you can take a listen here), adding in some missing scripts and visual effects where I forget them.

I'm still very much behind, with some more dialog from Vicki and bug reports from PJJ sitting in my In Box. My goal for the day is to keep at it, hopefully getting all my voice actor's work in the game and starting in on the bug lists.

It's Christmas day, but that hasn't stopped m...

December 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's Christmas day, but that hasn't stopped me from working away on the campaign. Yesterday I dragged my sister in front of the microphone to reprise her roles from the last module, though I still need to chop up the dialog and attach it. I also worked through the bugs and wrote a couple new ending dialogs. Heather and Daniel were awfully silent and needed to have some closure before the grand finale.

Now I'm slowly uploading the latest build for PJJ. Tomorrow I'm off to Portland, where I might be able to work on things, or perhaps I'll actually take a short break for awhile.

Though Christmas is soon approaching and the ...

December 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Though Christmas is soon approaching and the weather has disrupted our travel plans, I still managed to work away on the list of bugs.

I think I'm nearly done, minus a mysterious one involving the hook system. I do have one more dialog to write, and then I'll work on a new build for testing. It's nice having just one person test the first couple times, as otherwise I get overwhelmed by bug reports. It's also nice to limit the shame of all my typos to just one person. Working on my modules has improved my spelling considerably, but only with words like "dessicated" and "vengeance".

More good progress

December 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

More good progress. I'm about 75% of the way through the bug list, adding more content here and there as I go.

Every once in awhile I run into funny bugs

December 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Every once in awhile I run into funny bugs. In this case, I think it's self-created, as I was running the game and then fired up the toolset to edit the area. All the geometry vanished, leaving the NPCs standing in an empty void. I'm sure there's some deep symbolism somewhere.

I continue to work through PJJ's bugs, as well as trying to deal with some long-standing rare bugs. The bug that affects some people where the module is forever stuck on the area loading screen is particularly annoying. I took some wild guesses as to the possible problem and added some debug code that might shed some light on the issue.

Good progress today

December 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Good progress today. I went through many of PJJ's bugs, though there are a few I need to investigate. I had a few scripting issues, a couple typos, some missing journal entries, and the occasional weird inexplicable problem. The latest patch caused a trigger issue right off the bat, causing a key conversation not to fire.

PJJ pointed out that a lot of the Port Brighton conversations in DW3 are the same as DW2, so I have some writing ahead of me.

QA work isn't particularly glamorous, but it simply must be done.

PJJ has dutifully sent along a long list of b...

December 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

PJJ has dutifully sent along a long list of bugs and suggested improvements. I've taken a peek at the list, but haven't quite screwed up my courage to start in on them.

My Christmas wishes were answered. I heard from Rob and it sounds like Heather will be completely voiced, despite their current location being somewhere in Botswana. I'm ever grateful for all the work they and the other voice actors have done, and I'm so happy to see all the main NPCs voiced throughout the campaign.

My sister is rolling into town, so I'm going to strap her to my computer chair and make her reprise the role of Silver and a couple other NPCs. All the voice acting is coming together nicely. Now to do a big debug push and finish things up.

Late Friday afternoon I packaged up the lates...

December 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Late Friday afternoon I packaged up the latest build, clocking in at over 500 MB, and sent it off to PJJ. It has the clone fix and all the extra treasure maps. This weekend I've been taking it easy, though perhaps I'll try my hand at testing one of these days.

I've been working away at fixing bugs and add...

December 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working away at fixing bugs and adding the last few features. The twins issue has been corrected via the use of a self-destruct script. Today I'm creating some new treasure maps for purchase at Port Brighton. Currently there's only the one, which seems pretty sparse.

I had a really weird crashing bug which resulted in the entire toolset crashing whenever I compiled a certain script that used to work just fine. I ended up doing a weird workaround, though I still have no explaination. Ever since the patch, I've seen quite a few more crashes.

I'm gleeful to hear that Derek is reprising Drake, who's the main villain in the campaign. I'm not quite sure what I'd do without him. Now the only remaining key voice actor is Eshinee. Last I heard, she and her husband were in Africa, so there might be some insurmountable technical issues.

I want to get the treasure maps in the game, do a full build, post the file, and hand everything over to PJJ to do a rough first pass. If all goes well, I'll start thinking about a bigger test, though I'd like to get as much voiced dialog in the game before I get too carried away.

I'm running into a problem where Daniel's rom...

December 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm running into a problem where Daniel's romance script is generating twins. While he may think that's a swell idea, I decided to try and prevent any inadvertent cloning. I have most of the horrible bugs fixed, but still want to fix a last few things before I make a new build.

There are always lots of last minute features I'd like to get into the game, but we'll see how much time I really find. More treasure maps are high on my list, but we'll see how that turns out.

I've been very busy lately, but still managin...

December 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been very busy lately, but still managing a bit of Dark Waters work. I managed to write and voice a bunch of Spider dialog that was needed. Today I'm getting a bunch of Daniel romance dialog in the game and hopefully scripted.

I'm getting close to the end of the "really want" side quests. I'm sure some of the initial QA will come up with more initial suggestions, but hopefully the bulk of the development work is coming to a close. Of course, my experience with QA is that it can easily take months to get everything working and polished. That magical release date is still a ways off.

I returned to the High Seas this morning, wor...

December 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I returned to the High Seas this morning, working on getting the ghost ship side quest sorted out. I've run into all sorts of amusing bugs, from ships that look like big stone blocks, to having the ship sail about partially submerged.

I think I have most everything working pretty well at this point, including some quick voiced dialog for the particular villain in this quest. He ended up reminding me of some diabolical middle management type.

I've been working away at loose ends today

December 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working away at loose ends today. There was a side quest involving a ghost ship that had a big section that had only been finished in my imagination. Unfortunately wishful thinking doesn't make for a real quest, so I was busy working on scripting, walkthroughs, and so on. Tonight I can hopefully test it out.

This morning I tried to record a serpentine monster voice. I was ready to chop it up and I realized it was completely unintelligible. Because I have no shame, you can have a listen. I can't decide if it's an evil inflatable doll, slowly deflating, or a crazed super-intelligent squirrel.

I also sent out a wide variety of pleas to voice actors. With luck, they'll be able to reprise their roles from past modules. I'm getting very close putting everything together. Of course, sigificant QA hasn't really happened yet, so that'll probably be a long couple months where I quietly sob into my computer keyboard. I love that part of game development.

I tested and finished up Heather's romance quest

December 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I tested and finished up Heather's romance quest. I think it mostly works and it was very fun seeing the Yuan-Ti in the game.

Today I worked on another necessary dialog, this time for Spider. I'm trying hard not to make the player walk around a lot to get quests, but there will still be some that want to stop by for a visit and chat about how things are going.

I really need to finish up Daniel's romance. There should just be a handful of dialog lines I need to write, along with some scripting and item creation. I just need to hunker down and get it done.

Still working away at Heather's romance quest

December 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Still working away at Heather's romance quest. I'm nearly finished, though of course it'll all need to be tested. There are some fun and unique combats, which should keep things exciting. Maybe tonight I can see them in action.

Even more exciting was the news that Chris Serani is gearing up to record Daniel's voice. I've been so impressed by the enthusiasm and professionalism of all the voice actors. It's really made a huge difference in the success of Dark Waters.

I worked more on ninja-related activities las...

December 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked more on ninja-related activities last night. There are still a few bugs, but I figure it's an easter egg after all.

I did some voice recording yesterday and it was horrible enough that I re-recorded it this morning. Today I chopped it up and hooked it into the dialog, so that's one less thing on my list.

I also got inspired by Jonny Ree's Yuan-Ti's, that I had to work them into a side quest. This is for Heather's romance, which means some people might miss it, but I figure it was a nice little reward for people who like to play matchmaker.

I didn't find too much time over the long Tha...

December 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I didn't find too much time over the long Thanksgiving weekend to work on the game, but snuck in a little here and there. Last night I worked on a very minor easter egg for patient people. I think it needs a tiny more polish, but since it's already just for fun, it doesn't need much more. I also worked on some voice recording this morning. I'm getting close to the point where I've done everything I can personally do, and need to start getting everyone else organized.

I still have some writing I'd like to work on. The critical path should be complete, but there are always some side quests that need some work. I also want to review all my current bug reports and make sure I've taken care of the main ones. It feels nice to be in the final stretch.

Another day, another horribly broken module p...

November 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Another day, another horribly broken module patched up and made working again. In this case, it was the Fairy Tale module, which is a text adventure that's entirely optional. The most critical was a script problem. GetNearestObject doesn't seem to work very well with placeables any more (I discovered this awhile back when working on PirateCards). In any case, I can use another method and it seemed to work okay.

There were also a variety of smaller things, from lousy camera angles during a cutscene to a few missing lines. I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome, so it's time to move on to something else tomorrow.

I'm in the process of uploading a new version...

November 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm in the process of uploading a new version of Dark Waters 1 to the Vault. We had a very quick test where I fixed the intro scene, uploaded it to a test area, and someone successfully played through DW1 and DW2. There are likely some odd issues, but people will at least be able to play until Obsidian releases a patch.

That's been consuming most of my time, though I managed to record some dialog this morning and send out some voice actor requests. I might find a little time today to chop up dialog and attach it to the conversation.

The next few days will be filled with family and time off work. I may periodically sneak down to the basement and work on the game in order to escape the madness. I'll also try not to bring my flintlock pistol to the dinner table.

It seems that the latest patch has broken mos...

November 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It seems that the latest patch has broken most OnEnter scripts. I suspect we'll see a hot fix fairly soon, as most modules will have problems until it's fixed. On the plus side, the patch supposedly fixes a few longstanding bugs, including one that makes the tattoo parlor store look a little weird.

Hopefully today I can get back to fixing my own bugs instead of the game's.

NWN2 has another patch out

November 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

NWN2 has another patch out. As usual, it seems to be causing problems, with Dark Waters not working at all. Unfortunately the auto-updater isn't working either (I think I accidentally edited a core zip file). Sadly it means I'll have to do a reinstall and re-patch of everything.

So that's what I'm doing today . . .

I headed back to the Isle of Insanity

November 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I headed back to the Isle of Insanity. PJJ reported some problems with it and sure enough, it was completely broken. Fortunately it was simple to get it mostly working again (I must have disabled something for testing). The extra polish took awhile and I went through multiple times to get it working properly again. In general, it doesn't seem too hard to win as long as you're putting some effort into it. On occasion, things go badly and it can get pretty frantic towards the end.

I hope to do more bug fixing and polish in the weeks ahead and get things to the point where I can do a wider beta test. I also need to rally the voice actors. I haven't contacted many of them, asking them to reprise their roles from the previous acts. Hopefully most of them can.

The first time I watched the credits scroll b...

November 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The first time I watched the credits scroll by, it was pretty neat. Pictures from the game, development, and weird bugs appeared on the left on right. It was pretty nifty.

After the fifth time, though, it was starting to get a little much. I dutifully noted the bugs and fixed one after the other until it was well polished.

I finished up the walkthrough, though it's still just a first draft. As I add extra goodies, I'll need to add those in as well.

I worked really hard the other day

November 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked really hard the other day. I wrote and recorded the last dialog for the final conversation. Everyone I could find that contributed to Dark Waters should get listed in the credits that scroll up at the end of the game. I even worked on the walkthrough, getting over half of it done.

I tested out the final section and found some bugs, so I'll be working on that today. I may also have a tiny surprise at the end, just for fun.

I worked away at getting Robert's scripting i...

November 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked away at getting Robert's scripting in place. I rather like his ambient actions, walking around and saying certain things. I try to avoid NPCs simply standing there, waiting to be greeted by the player.

I think I have the last of dialog written for the epilogue. I agonized over the last line, but I think I settled for something that goes with the tone I want to set.

There's still much to do, but I'm feeling increasingly good about the state of the critical path. Maybe tomorrow I can work on some of the lengthy bug reports I've been carefully ignoring.

I fixed a funny bug from PJJ's last set of bu...

November 18, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I fixed a funny bug from PJJ's last set of bug notes. He reported that there were Missing Texture's everywhere, though of course it looked fine to me. The toolset requires my terrain textures to be in the override folder, though normal players wouldn't have that.

Sure enough, all the hair on the Isle of Flesh became quite colorful. It was easy enough to fix, just dropping a few textures into the hak pack.

I also worked on the scripting for Robert's grand final scene. Hopefully I can get a little testing done tonight. It has a surprising number of branches, far more than I normally do. It'll make the voice over a bit more of a challenge.

Finally, I chopped up and go the voice clips in the epilogue. I still have some extra lines I need to write and record for that one, but it's getting increasingly close to finished.

I spent a little time to clean up this site

November 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I spent a little time to clean up this site. People were having questions as to whether or not I was releasing acts four and five. The reality is that I decided awhile back to combine it all into a single, 14-module Act. It's very hard to do these big non-linear releases, but it felt necessary to give the player that sense of openness and exploration.

In any case, I cleaned up this site and now there are only three acts to the left. I also embedded the preview videos for 1, 2, and Lute Hero (which shows up in 3).

Finally, I decided my missing dialog I mentioned yesterday was completely in my head. I found my notes and started typing them up, realizing that I had never actually done that part before. In any case, it's typed up and in the game. Now I just need to add some scripting and that part should be ready to go.

I worked away at the confrontation cutscene, ...

November 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked away at the confrontation cutscene, finally getting things to the point where I was happy with it. As it is, I think you can get from the beginning of the last module to the credits screen without any critical bugs.

I ran into a funny bug during testing. One of the NPCs was killed while playing a custom animation. This resulted in him literally being dead on his feet. Pretty amusing.

I was disheartened to find one of the rather lengthy side dialogs had vanished. I dug through the places where I would have put it and didn't find anything. I may have a paper copy in my notebook. If so, it should be relatively easy to type up.

I still have an issue with custom textures and if they can work in a hak pack (I thought they used to work). If not, I'll have to modify the installer to drop them in the override directory, which is annoying.

Hopefully I can get a new build to testers shortly.

I finally got the Fallout 3 monkey off my bac...

November 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finally got the Fallout 3 monkey off my back this morning. It really sucked the life out of me for awhile. It was hard not to make some comparisons with Dark Waters as I wrapped things up. One good news is that there should be a lot more ending variations, more like Fallout 1 and 2 that talks about the various places and people you impacted along your quest.

I'm back to testing one of the final confrontations. Unfortunately the scripting isn't working quite right, but the elaborate shootout part at least works. Hopefully I can clean it up tonight. I really want to start in on the QA work next week, hopefully getting things ready for PJJ to test. I still have a ton of content to add, but maybe I can get the critical path ready to go.

Slowly making progress

November 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Slowly making progress. I did some tinkering with the problematic scripts that were giving me grief. Hopefully I can test it out tonight and see if that fixes anything.

I also worked on some Isle of Flesh bugs. I'll see if I can get more writing in tonight. We'll see.

Last night I tested out some of the scripting...

November 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Last night I tested out some of the scripting I put together. It failed pretty horribly, but I'm making progress. I did take this funny screenshot where it looks like Spider is being hit by lightning. I guess he offended someone.

This morning I spent 15 minutes recording Death's voice and ended up with a sore throat. Maybe today I'll find the time to chop it up and get it in the game.

I'm back in full force today, which feels qui...

November 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back in full force today, which feels quite good. I continue to work away at the ending, trying to get the final scripting done for the critical path. I added more to the epilogue, in this case the four different things that can happen to Lucy depending on your actions in the game. I can tell already that the epilogue dialog has the potential to grow even more. Lots of different things happen to the various NPCs and places the player has touched.

PJJ continues to pass along QA reports, which I'm somewhat letting pile up. Once I finish with the critical path work, I want to turn my sights to that, along with working on some of the "nice to have" details.

A combination of Fallout 3 and having the kid...

November 10, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

A combination of Fallout 3 and having the kids to myself this weekend led to me not touching Dark Waters for two whole days. It was an odd thing, and at the end, the guilt was gnawing away. Late last week I did manage to write some non-critical path dialog and Friday I worked on a secret project. Still, it's time to get back to the campaign and roll up my sleeves.

Another quick report

November 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Another quick report. I finished getting the last of Guy Incognito's voice work into the game. There are 542 sound clips in the third act so far. It's amazing how much work that represents.

I also worked more on the epilogue, working in the various endings to Daniel's romance (with Lilly/Raven). More of that tomorrow, I suspect.

My wife was really sick yesterday, so I spent...

November 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My wife was really sick yesterday, so I spent the day watching the kids and not working on Dark Waters much. Fallout 3 did arrive, so I spent a comical election day roaming the radioactive wasteland of Washington D.C. fighting mutant ants. I'm sure it's symbolic somehow.

I'm currently under the watchful eyes of my bobble-head PIPBoy3000, making sure I'm not as neglectful today. Based on PJJ's QA work, I've toned down the combat difficulty of the Alphabet Assault quest (which was evidently impossible with a level 20 character). I'm also working on getting more of Guy Incognito's voice work into the game. As is clearly the way of his people, he left another funny clip for me. I think I'll work that one in at the end of the credits.

I was wandering around in the caverns this mo...

November 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was wandering around in the caverns this morning, taking advantage of the time change. My daughter wanted to test again last night, so all these bugs were made extremely obvious as I led her around Port Brighton. Sure enough, I've some more dialog to write, though not as much as I'd feared.

My beloved PIPBoy3000 bobble-head should arrive today, along with that Fallout 3 game thingie. I'm going to try hard not to let it interfere with Dark Waters, but it may be tough going.

Guy Incognito continues to leave funny little...

November 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Guy Incognito continues to leave funny little adlibs at the end of his voice recordings. After spending a half an hour chopping up long mp3 files, it makes for a little treat at the end.

That's what I've been doing today, getting yet more dialog in the game. Yesterday I spent a little time continuing work on the end sequence. In a weird way I'm happy I picked the slow and cheap shipping option for Fallout 3, as it's giving me the time I need for a final push to get things ready for QA.

I decided to break out the ghost ship for Hal...

October 31, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I decided to break out the ghost ship for Halloween. It seemed appropriate to the season, and that particular module needed a bunch of work. I've mostly been focused on finishing the module before getting back to serious QA work, but this one was bugging me so I took some time last night and this morning to get everything working properly.

Yesterday I worked on writing for the ending some more. My plan is to basically tally up all your actions and show the various effects of what you did. Mostly your impact is positive, but there are a few cases where you could have caused quite a bit of havoc, and I'm trying to reflect that as well.

I still have to get the new voice recording into the game, hopefully something I can do today. There's also supposedly a Halloween-themed module being released today which has a tiny area I created in there. I'll post a link when I know what it is.

Update: It looks like the Halloween module was posted. It requires the MotB expansion. For those of you who just want to play my tiny module, or don't have MotB, here's a link to just my module. It's extremely small, so don't expect more than 5 minutes of entertainment.

I've been doing all sorts of odd things today

October 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been doing all sorts of odd things today. I did a first pass on the critical endgame dialog, and am reasonably happy with the results. Guy Incognito also sent along some more voice recording, which hopefully I can work on tomorrow.

My daughter announced this evening that she wanted to play "the drippy eye game". After awhile, I figured out she meant Neverwinter Nights. She did some testing of the Isle of Flesh for me, discovering a bug along the way. If only I could recruit my wife, I could get my whole family working on my next project.

I've been slowly working away today, coordina...

October 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been slowly working away today, coordinating voice actors and writing new dialog. Along the way I created a new full build, clocking in at slightly over 500 MB. I'm amazed at how much stuff is in the campaign, from music to voice files, to all the areas. Whew.

I'm still trying hard to get the end feature complete so that I can get to testing in earnest. Hopefully it won't be too much longer.

Yesterday was one of the more productive days...

October 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Yesterday was one of the more productive days that I've had in a good long while.

It started with debugging the ending some more. It's still not finished, but I managed to get things moving somewhat more smoothly.

I started in on the load screens, which involved going into every module and fiddling with the area parameters to get a nice looking graphic. Those all got turned into tga files, I updated a 2da, and then I proceeded to edit every area in the game in order to get the right load screen set.

Not feeling quite done yet, I fixed a bug that made it impossible to leave the Isle of Insanity, cleaned up the walkmesh, and added a couple hidden treasures. Back in Port Brighton, Monroe got a new treasure map to sell, something that I'd like to add a lot more of.

As for today, I might even manage to start in on bug lists, or perhaps add in a few more treasure maps for sale. They're relatively easy to add and there's a bunch of islands with out-of-the-way areas. I might also start in on the walkthrough for the game, which is another of those things that's handy to finish before seriously getting into the QA phase.

Work continues

October 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Work continues. This morning I got up before 5 am and started in on the final scripting. I still need to tweak one of the more significant battles in the game, but at least it's too easy rather than too hard. Before, I couldn't progress to test out further areas. Now I breeze through, though I'll need to increase the challenge later on.

I have to keep reminding myself that the hard part of debugging is about to continue, but it does increasingly feel like the end of this epic campaign is near.

I've been working on getting the Guy's sound ...

October 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working on getting the Guy's sound clips chopped up and put into the game. He's done a great job, including keeping a straight face while voicing one of the most hysterical lines in the entire game. He had a bit of fun improvising the Hanged Man's lines, as you can listen to here.

I think yesterday's posting about Guy's work ...

October 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think yesterday's posting about Guy's work got folks a little excited. I've had another voice actor offering his services, and Chris letting me know he's going to be gearing up to get ready. The woman who voices Heather is still in Africa, but she and her husband will hopefully be around starting in November. I'm not quite ready to get all geared up for voice acting, but I don't think it'll take too long.

I spent some time debugging yesterday, but mostly I spent a bunch of time working on a super secret project. It was frustrating and satisfying and very different from the usual sort of thing I do.

I got a tremendous amount of work done yesterday

October 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got a tremendous amount of work done yesterday. For starters, I had a new voice actor volunteer his time, so I went through some of the unvoiced NPCs and he very quickly got the recordings to me. I chopped them up and got them in the game by the end of the day. Here's a quick sample of Guy Incognito's voice, which seemed appropriate to the season.

I also worked on scripting for the final area. I spent nearly an hour trying to figure out why my two NPCs weren't fighting. I eventually came to the conclusion that the tileset was at fault. I'm guessing that you can't properly target creatures when they're below the 0 z-axis. In any case, I had them run up a flight of stairs and they immediately began fighting.

This morning I worked on connecting the various pieces of the ending together. There's still lots to do, but it feels like things are coming together nicely. Soon the plan is to move into bug fixing and polish mode, as well as working to get as many NPCs voiced as possible.

I've been making dark sacrifices to the marke...

October 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been making dark sacrifices to the marketing and PR gods, but to no avail. Soon I can speak of that forbidden time, in a land beyond sanity and hope.

In the meantime, I've been a diligent modder, writing lots and lots of dialog. Endings are often a wordy affair, with farewells and threats and exclaimations of dispair. It's been fun getting the characters and plots wrapped up, a culmination of the years of events that came before them.

As for today, hopefully I can manage more of the same. Slowly getting there.

Update: I can finally talk about it! The world builder newsletter went out with news of the event.

About a month ago, Jay from Bioware dropped me an e-mail, inviting me to see the new Dragon Age toolset and hang out with the Bioware folks and other community members. I rushed to get my passport together and traveled to Edmonton for a couple days.

While I still can't talk about the toolset, I can say that I had a great time hanging out with everyone. It was wonderful meeting some of the folks on the forums I've talked with over the years, along with the Bioware crew.

The tour of the Bioware offices were great fun, though sadly there was no western themed lobby with stuffed prarie dogs (so much for my prophetic dreams). One high point was our group being pinned down by automatic Nerf gun fire.

I'm still pondering Dragon Age plans, but rest assured that I will finish Dark Waters regardless of what I do. Things are getting close to done and it'll be very satisfying to see things come to a conclusion after so many years.

I'm back

October 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back. Theoretically I'll be able to actually talk about what I did on Monday sometime.

On the plane ride back I managed a bit more writing, and more again today. With luck I can start getting the new dialog in the game shortly.

I made it safe and sound to Edmonton yesterday

October 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made it safe and sound to Edmonton yesterday. The Canadian immigration folks grilled me for awhile. Due to a freak happenstance I was born in Canada, so they were really pushing that I apply for Canadian citizenship. It might be fun to have a country to flee to after the American economy collapses.

I managed a fair bit of writing yesterday. I still have a lot to write, but the pieces are slowly coming together.

As for my events today, I'm sworn to secrecy. I had a dream last night that we were being shown the Bioware offices. The lobby was Western themed, with stuffed gophers perched on log fences. They took us behind an elaborate metal door and gave a presentation involving toys, maps, and greeting cards. We'll see if my vision was prophetic.

I'm off to the airport shortly, hauling along...

October 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm off to the airport shortly, hauling along a laptop and notepad in hopes of getting in some writing. Yesterday I managed even more testing, pulling my hair out over getting two NPCs to fight each other. For some odd reason, they just want to be nice to each other, despite all my scripting tricks. I may just switch one NPC to the Hostile faction and be done with it.

Today is my last day before heading up to Canada

October 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Today is my last day before heading up to Canada. I'm very much looking forward to hanging out with fellow module builders and the Bioware folks. As usual, I'm going to try to work on writing during the long trek. I still have quite a bit to go.

I typed up some of my scribbled dialog and worked it into the game yesterday. Next I added the necessary scripting and tested it out. So far I'm generally happy with the pace of the final module, with appropriately witty dialog, and a mix of puzzles and combat. More polish is always needed, but I feel like I'm slowly getting there.

Once I get the bulk of the final act in place, the plan is to package up the entire campaign and work on polishing everything until my testers declare it good. The testing phase is always the most grueling, but I've learned over the years that it's far better to test for the necessary months rather than release early and frustrate a lot of people.

If you look closely at the picture, you'll se...

October 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

If you look closely at the picture, you'll see that the entire party is floating above the water by a few feet. One part of the Vault involves the floor collapsing, but I neglected to make the area unwalkable afterwards.

Yesterday I fixed quite a few bugs, from the silly to the serious. While my sister was visiting, I had her sit down in front of the microphone for a few quick lines. I still have a ton of writing to do. Maybe when I head off to Canada in a couple days, the long flights will be condusive to scribbling prose.

I made some good progress yesterday, fixing b...

October 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made some good progress yesterday, fixing bugs, writing dialog, and adding scripting. You can't quite make it all the way through, but you can get further than before. It felt good to finally have a chance to hunker down and get things done.

My sister is in town for the day, so I may see if I can get her to voice some dialog. Fun, fun.

Nothing too exciting

October 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Nothing too exciting. I keep working away at the Vault. I got a secret door working the way I wanted. The entire place is getting a lot more density of stuff, making it look less stark and more a place where the riches of the world are stored.

I did a little writing, but there's still a bunch of dialog I need to work on. Busy, busy.

Unfortunately I didn't manage a single word o...

October 10, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Unfortunately I didn't manage a single word of writing when off on my business trip. It was admittedly frustrating, the result of way too much team building and not much time to myself. Hopefully I can remedy that shortly.

I'm back to the Vault, trying hard to finalize things. Yesterday I got my daughter to record some more Lucy dialog. Today I want to get some of the Drake dialog and scripting together. At this point, I basically know what needs to be done to finish the game. Now I just need to hunker down and do it.

At least the bugs I'm experiencing these days...

October 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

At least the bugs I'm experiencing these days are rather flashy. In this case, I find myself trapped in an area with lightning flashing all about. In another case, I had flaming villagers running about. Good times.

I'm off on a trip later today, though I think I'll have Internet access. My plan is to write as much as possible, finishing up the various endings. If I'm able, I'd like to start in on the companion dialog. At the moment, the romance aspect of this final act is a little light.

I actually got a chance to do some debugging ...

October 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I actually got a chance to do some debugging yesterday. PJJ had gone through an extremely rough version of the final Act, finding all sorts of bugs. I think most of them were rooted in an accidental time travel problem. There are two versions of the Port Brighton module. The new one from the third act accidentally led to the high seas module from the second act. This caused all sorts of new content to vanish and things to look weird. Fortunately it was easy to fix.

I continue to work away at the final module. Players can now trigger the currently unfinished denouement. I have some of the post climax story written, but I need to add yet more to cover everything the player impacted over the course of the campaign.

I added a small easter egg to the game yesterday

October 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I added a small easter egg to the game yesterday. At the very end, the player can choose to end the game, or instead look around for awhile. I added a number of amusing magical objects that had been stored in the Vault. People can go around and examine things if they'd like.

I also added yet more scripting, the "glue" that ties everything together. At this point the final module feels like a puzzle that's slowly coming together. I'll add a piece here, then jump to another section and add it somewhere else. Hopefully when it's completed I'll have something that makes sense and is fun to play. Wish me luck.

I have the gargoyle properly spawning now

October 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I have the gargoyle properly spawning now. I even added some fun little visual effects during the transformation. Yesterday I created two new item sets, small but fun. I should have all the creatures in place, along with the new set items being dropped.

I still have some more things to put in place for this area, but it's getting closer by the minute.

I sat down and typed up all my dialog I'd scr...

September 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I sat down and typed up all my dialog I'd scribbled down the other day, working it into the final module. The conversations are short, but poingnant, so I'm fairly satisfied with the quick pace.

I have run into a few issues with turning people into monsters. The most amusing ended up wrapping the gargoyle model around my PC in weird ways, which looked very amusing. It should be pretty easy to fix if I switch to another approach.

PJJ is already getting some initial QA feedback to me. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

I have all these scraps of paper from yesterd...

September 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I have all these scraps of paper from yesterday, covered in dialog and item descriptions. I think they take care of most of the framework for the final battle. I'm so much happier with the way it's turning out, seeming much more epic while still touching on the campaign's main themes.

As for today, I have lots of little details to take care of, from scripting to item creation, to typing up all my scribbles. Slowly getting there.

I had fun coming up with assorted pictures to...

September 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I had fun coming up with assorted pictures to display during the credits. Some are pretty, some are amusing bugs, and some show off aspects of the game for the player to wistfully think about at the end of the game.

I also came to a realization last night that I've been avoiding the final battle. What I'd been thinking about was too routine, a very typical boss battle where you wear down your foe until he dies. I was so uninspired that I kept fiddling around with other things, my subconscious working away at the problem.

I finally figured out what I need to do. There are still details to work out, but I'm much more excited and hope the end will be far more memorable.

After a fair bit of fiddling and swearing, I ...

September 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

After a fair bit of fiddling and swearing, I finally got the credits to scroll smoothly across the page. It still needs some tweaking, but I think I'm on the right track.

My next plan is to create areas on either side of the screen where I can show pictures and words. The plan is to tell the aftermath of the adventure, documenting the player's decisions throughout the adventure and the consequences they had. Ever since the ending of the first Fallout game, I've been partial to that approach.

In any case, I spent some time last night writing down various endings. Most involve telling what happened at the different islands and the people there. Hopefully it gives the player a sense of how they changed the world.

I typed up some of my written dialog, though ...

September 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I typed up some of my written dialog, though I still need to flesh it out more.

More exciting is that I recently finished coding the main part of a "credits" screen. Of course, that likely means that it's horribly bug-ridden, but hopefully I can put it together soon.

In all of the interviews I give, I try to emphasize that Dark Waters is a team effort. Putting together a nice credits section is the least I can do.

I've been making pretty good progress over th...

September 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been making pretty good progress over the last few days. The biggest was getting the installer all put together properly. It should now install and uninstall all the proper files. I also fixed my silly mistake that made it impossible to start a new campaign and jump to the final act.

I continue to line things up for the final module. I managed some more writing, giving Drake some more great lines. For some reason, scoundrels get all the fun. I'm also getting some of the big confrontations ready, putting folks like Lord Brighton and Spider side by side.

Hopefully today I can continue those trends, and perhaps work on a "movie credit" scripting thing that's been bouncing around my brain for awhile. Fun, fun.

I stayed up relatively late last night, insta...

September 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I stayed up relatively late last night, installing and uninstalling the full campaign. The installer is close to 500 MB and it requires 1.5 GB of drive space to install. I still have to add lots of voice actor files, so it'll probably grow even more. I'm certainly going to have a "Lite" version without the music, voice acting, and load screens, which will probably be around half the size. It's amazing how big modules are these days.

I also got my passport today, which was the last of the obstacles for my Canada trip. I'm getting excited.

Of all the weird things to get excited about,...

September 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Of all the weird things to get excited about, I got excited about the new installer for Dark Waters. I'm trying to get a new, full installer to PJJ for testing. Of course, it's not working properly. To top it off, he brought up some of the failings of the current installer, which typically gets the job done, but nothing else.

I spent some time today reading the documentation for NSIS, whipping up a splash screen, and generally getting things polished up. Hopefully this weekend I can test out the installer and figure out the other problems PJJ is running into.

I'm sick at home today, but I managed a bit o...

September 18, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm sick at home today, but I managed a bit of time on the final module. I wanted to give players a chance to see and purchase any of the special set items they might have missed along the way. Basically I check the player for a long list of items and create them in the store if they don't have them. It makes for a good way to have a final spending spree before the end.

I've typed up what dialog I have, discovering a dozen lines for Drake that I wrote months ago along the way. They were pretty amusing, so I'm definitely keeping them. The first of the big confrontation dialogs still need to be finished, and I'm bound to require some scripting as well. Still, it feels like I'm in the final push before the end.

Writing, writing, writing

September 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Writing, writing, writing. I've put some of this off for quite some time, so it feels good to finally get around to it. This morning I finished up the dialog that players get if they jump into DW3 from a new campaign. Basically it lets players report what they did, who they killed, and other things that make a difference in the final module.

Now I'm working on dialog for Vault Island. I have an initial merchant-type character finished, offering equipment and setting the stage for further events. Next up is the first of the exciting end battles, which I'm trying to turn into a duel roughly similar to the one in DW2. Should be fun.

I've been working very hard, though I don't h...

September 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working very hard, though I don't have any flashy pictures or amusing sound files today. I think I tracked down the last of the issues with the Mac version of Dark Waters. There was a music file not quite in the right format (it became somewhat obvious in a hex editor). I passed along a new version for my brave Mac testers to look at.

I cleaned up some of Death's dialog, giving an added bonus if you end up doing a certain subquest for him. I attached all my dialog sound files, though it looks like I'll need to record a few more.

Finally, I took a peek at PJJ's QA report. It was, as expected, pretty horrible. The good news is that I think I know the root cause and it shouldn't be too hard to fix. Mostly I need to create a "full install" for the entire campaign. I suspect it'll be around the 600 MB mark. I think my Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, and Demon installer was about 100 MB. Whew.

I just wanted to give a quick shout out to th...

September 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the good folks at the Australian gaming magazine Hyper. I've had my name pop up in five or six magazines, but this is the first time anyone has actually sent me the magazine. I went out and bought a couple of the ones in the US, but Australia is a bit far for me to go just for a magazine.

I just finished chopping up sound files, resu...

September 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I just finished chopping up sound files, resulting in 60 little clips that I've converted and are ready to go. It's Death, who is always amusing, and I saved some choice ones for your listening pleasure.

Otherwise I've been getting my passport ready to go and doing some writing when I get the chance. My life is slowing down a little, so hopefully it won't be quite as crazy as it's been as of late.

I've been pretty busy these last few days

September 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been pretty busy these last few days. I managed to write a bit of dialog and get things ready for the final module, along with a bit of scripting to display the appropriate flag at the base camp. I have a QA report on the text adventure module waiting for my attention. The voice actor who did Daniel contacted me, and I sent along a bunch of work for him.

The most exciting thing I can't really talk about. While I technically haven't signed an NDA yet, I can say I spent today rushing around to update my passport as a well-known game developer offered to fly me to their secret lair and show off their upcoming game. We'll see how that turns out.

Yet another busy day, with little time to do ...

September 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Yet another busy day, with little time to do much with the campaign. I sent along the latest build to PJJ, my stalwart tester. It was fun looking at all the files I'm including: 10 modules for the main quest and three for side quests. Compressed it's 160 MB in size, and I haven't added all the sound and music yet. It's a pretty massive undertaking and hopefully the effort won't kill me. I think the key is to focus on one thing at a time. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and all that. I'm not sure the original speaker had module development in mind.

I made some good progress over the weekend

September 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made some good progress over the weekend. My son wanted to see how the mine track module was coming along. I confidently declared it finished, so he wanted to try it out. Sure enough, he quickly proved me wrong and after five or six tries we finally got everything working properly. The biggest issue was that your party wouldn't emerge from the mine cart with you, making fights considerably more difficult.

I also finished the psionic combat battle in the Vault, along with a fun little surprise for players who take the non-violent route.

I'm working on the Vault this morning

September 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm working on the Vault this morning. There are a variety of tests of skill for your psionic powers, one of which is an optional psionic combat battle similar to that of Woodhaven.

Of course, my first attempt didn't quite work out. My PC started attacking the psionic projections and I had no actual forms I could turn it into (I especially liked the "Hint: You must obtain more forms or you'll lose" comment at the bottom of the screen). Hopefully I can get those things cleaned up and move one step further to an actual ending to the game.

This screenshot is a little dark, but it has ...

September 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

This screenshot is a little dark, but it has the back of a vent, a gong, and a giant werewolf in the background. That's pretty much how it goes when I'm testing things out. In this case, I was trying to understand why I couldn't dock on the Vault island. I never did figure it out, but I copied an existing placeable blueprint and modified that until it worked.

At this point, a player can theoretically go from the start of the game all the way to the final island. Now it's mostly a matter of finalizing the grant finale. I'm really happy with the ambiance of Vault island, but still waffling on the final confrontations. Fairly soon I'm just going to have to roll up my sleeves and get it done.

Progress continues slowly

September 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Progress continues slowly. I now have things set up so that the Vault island appears, though the sea is black and you can't land on it. Furthermore, when I was testing this morning, that scoundrel Drake boarded me and did something rather rude. In any case, hopefully I can fix those problems soon.

I have a bunch of sound files I recorded for Death yesterday morning. I'd love to get some time today to chop them up, though I'm not sure when.

I'm also tracking down an annoying issue with the Mac version of the module. There are some sound files that are causing crashes and it's difficult for me to troubleshoot. Fortunately I have some very helpful folks who are offering their time.

I've been off on a short beach vacation for t...

September 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been off on a short beach vacation for the last few days. In between playing on the beach and watching kids, I managed to write a tremendous amount of dialog for Death. If you happen to die in most dangerous areas in the module, you should get some amusing commentary to reward the occasional failure. I need to put a little more work into it, looking up the tags of various areas and adding them to the dialog scripts, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Today I spent some time working on the world map representation of the Vault. When you get all the map pieces and venture out in your ship, it should magically appear and let you wrap up the campaign. That's the theory, anyway. I still have some work to do before it actually happens.

I went back to the mines, adding in an extra ...

August 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I went back to the mines, adding in an extra goodie for evil characters. It's always fun to hold out temptation to good characters and see if people give in, if only to see what happens.

I also put some effort into Death, which had a few issues, such as sticking around after raising you from the dead. I also worked on my goal to give him something interesting and relevant to say when raising people on different maps. So far I only have two, but my goal is to go through and give him funny things to say in most places in the game.

Finally, I fixed a couple minor issues with the mines. My dwarven fighters weren't spawning in to provide fun background combat. The beasties should now look like they're doing something other than standing around waiting for some action.

I think I'm finally done with the mines

August 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think I'm finally done with the mines. I spent yesterday and this morning debugging, tracking down all sorts of weird issues. The mine cart path is defined by a series of sequential waypoints (over a hundred). It turns out I skipped a couple, which caused it to get confused and come to a stop. I chuckled a bit when I accidentally killed off the mine cart. I also had creatures attacking the camera, which I solved with the good ol' EffectSanctuary trick.

Yesterday I managed to spend some time with the Valsharoon side quest. He's one of those minor villians that pops up over the course of the adventure and you can go after him on the high seas if you'd like. So far I've made his undead crew, but now I need a ship and some fun treasures to go along with it.

It feels like I've been working in the mines ...

August 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It feels like I've been working in the mines for years now. The good news is that things continue to work better every day. The lighting is greatly improved. I added foes and treasures, conversations and journal entries. The sound effects are coming along nicely, from mine car noises to the whoosh of splashing into water.

I spent a bunch of time testing this morning and did run across assorted issues. The hardest to fix was getting my camera object smoothly following the mine cart. A simple ActionMoveToObject failed miserably, presumably because the narrow walkable area made it impossible for the camera to get there. I ended up picking a location behind the cart and telling it to go there, which generally worked okay.

I also tested a couple of the fights, which ended up being extremely challenging. I toned it down, but have yet to test the big, massive fight. I also worry about a couple track-jumps, which I haven't tested lately.

Busy, busy.

I fixed the multiple slope cart issue, but ha...

August 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I fixed the multiple slope cart issue, but have since discovered others. The current frustrating item is that the cart won't jump over the lava properly. It gives up and decides not to risk life and limb. I think the issue is walkmesh related, but we'll see.

The track is laid and the landscaping is done. Of course, I still need to add in some actual adventure beyond the amusement park ride appeal.

Well, I've been making progress with the mine...

August 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, I've been making progress with the mine area, though the usual amusing bugs are popping up. In this case, the multiple "tilted" versions of the cart are getting all stuck together. While it looks pretty odd, I'm working to clean that up now. There are also issues with the camera and getting in and out of the cart, but I'm slowly getting there.

I still need to do a ton of landscaping, but the track is all laid at this point. Hopefully it won't be much longer.

I finished up my Halloween module and sent it...

August 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finished up my Halloween module and sent it off to the Bouncy Rock folks. It's short, funny, and puzzle-oriented. Last night I finished debugging and added voices to the two main characters (myself as an NPC and Grunto, my faithful lab assistant). I'm especially fond of Grunto, who lives to clean up after his master's messes. There are a few in-jokes scattered around, and an odd little treat at the end.

The plan for today is to sink a bunch of time into the Iron Mountain area. Hopefully I can finish up laying tracks today, which is fairly time consuming.

The folks at Bouncy Rock are putting together...

August 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The folks at Bouncy Rock are putting together a Halloween themed mod, and asked that I make something for them. If you look closely at the picture, you can get a sense for the theme of my entry.

I'm going to try to keep it short so that I can get back to Dark Waters. I did manage more work on the mines yesterday. I'd like to keep that short too, so that I can get things to the point where I can wrap up the majority of the work and start moving into the testing phase. Testing usually takes months, so I'm trying to plan accordingly.

I continue to slave away in the mines, making...

August 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I continue to slave away in the mines, making a huge amount of progress yesterday. At this point the cart nicely moves about on the tracks. I want to speed it up a bit and make the turns more smoothly. It also looks weird going up and down slopes, but I think I have a fix for that too, using visual effects of different models applied to an invisible human. Sneaky.

I did a bunch of debugging and tweaking yeste...

August 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I did a bunch of debugging and tweaking yesterday with the Serpent Isle area, though I still need to hunker down and do another testing pass.

Last night I worked more on the mine carts, doing a quick demo to prove to myself that it generally works. I didn't quite plan on sticking the PC visibly out of the mine car, along with the rest of my party in tow. It makes for an amusing sight, but I don't think it's quite what I'm shooting for.

It's been a few days, interrupted by a mosqui...

August 18, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's been a few days, interrupted by a mosquito-filled camping trip, but I'm back into the saddle again. I have a list of bugs and tweaks to work on for the Serpent Isle quest. Hopefully it won't be too hard to finalize.

I've been helping my son work on his "pirates versus ninjas" area. On the long drive to go camping, we worked up a backstory and some motivation. Mostly he's been doing area creation, and only occasionally getting frustrated. I may assist with some of the final terrain texturing, but generally it looks pretty good.

I'd love to work on my mine cart roller-coaster concept, but I'm not sure how much time I'll get today.

Finally, it looks like Bioware has confirmed a toolset for Dragon Age. I don't have any Dragon Age plans at the moment, but it's nice to know there might be options down the road.

Update: I had forgotten, but AME posted a new interview with me from awhile back.

I spent a lot of time testing and coding last...

August 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I spent a lot of time testing and coding last night, and again this morning, though I mostly just made a new list of issues. It's coming together really well now. My favorite part is telling Heather and Daniel to go off and do assorted useful things while you fight the undead. Heather sets up traps (which the villagers annoyingly set off at the moment) and Daniel helps round up the villagers and get them to the safety of the animal pen.

I still have a few more bug passes to go before things look good. There's also certain sections that are untested that I need to get to. Still, it's coming together nicely.

While I finalize that area, I switched over to Iron Mountain. I'm going with a roller-coaster theme, with mine carts rolling around the map. So far I just have a few sloped mine track placeables I've created and some proof-of-concept areas. We'll see how it turns out.

I finally got some time to test this morning

August 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finally got some time to test this morning. Sure enough, things failed horribly, but I think I'm getting closer. The first issue was that I simply forgot to attach my scripts to the right places in the dialog. That was easy to fix, and I was off testing again.

The second problem is that the zombies can walk through tiny gaps in the wall. I think I get to make big sections unwalkable to prevent it, which shouldn't be too hard.

The final issue is that some of my key NPCs run off and fight zombies instead of doing their assigned tasks. I added a bunch of debug code and hopefully can figure out what's going on during my next testing run.

I sunk a tremendous amount of time into codin...

August 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I sunk a tremendous amount of time into coding yesterday, getting most of the work theoretically done. Unfortunately when I went to test this morning, it comically failed spectacularly and I wasn't able to test much.

A trigger started the first conversation just fine, and I was clicking through dialog options. Soon enough, I noticed something moving in the tall grass and sure enough, a zombie emerged. After that, it was like something out of a bad horror movie and I started laughing and yelling out "Look behind you!".

My companions lept into action, fighting off the zombies I had forgotten to delete from previous testing. The conversation kept going on, everyone oblivious to the battle around us. When the dialog branch appeared when Daniel was supposed to speak, he couldn't and the rest of the dialog became broken. Fortunately this one was easy to fix with a quickie zombie deletion.

I still have more code to write, though it's getting pretty close to finished. I'd like to create another weapon with a custom OnHit ability, as those are fun to do and I need a suitable treasure.

Well, we moved the hospital yesterday, and ev...

August 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, we moved the hospital yesterday, and everything went amazingly well. I'm mostly caught up with sleep and the concept of free time is starting to appear as well.

I decided to refocus on my current side quest, in hopes of finishing that up. I did a quick test and was able to talk and battle my way to the goodies at the end. There's still a bunch of cleanup I need to do, and the exterior area needs a ton of scripting. Still, things are coming along nicely. I was even able to get an achievement, which was a good sign.

I've been making small, but steady progress w...

August 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been making small, but steady progress with the latest quest. There's lots of little details that need to be added, such as having the Blade of Ending give a special attack when fighting these huge creatures, or updating the achievements when you actually manage to kill them.

I'm working way too much this weekend and next week, so we'll see how much time I can really manage.

My work is getting crazy busy lately

August 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My work is getting crazy busy lately. We're in the process of moving to a new hospital, and I'm smack-dab in the middle of the move insanity. I'm still able to sneak a little development time here and there, but it's getting increasingly more difficult.

I worked on my undead legions and put together the initial parts of the scripting. There's still a ton to do before it's ready for testing, but it's nice to start making progress.

I'm back from my trip and indeed managed a bi...

August 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back from my trip and indeed managed a bit of writing along the way. I realized I needed another area, but it should be pretty small. I'm nearly done with the deep caverns area, other than a little decoration perhaps.

Mostly I have tons of scripting ahead of me. Some of it is fairly complicated, but it should help make the fights somewhat unique and interesting. Eventually I'll need to make sure the big battles aren't impossibly difficult as well.

Fun, fun.

I finished most of my dialogs for this rather...

August 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finished most of my dialogs for this rather lengthy side-quest. I've decided I'm basically incapable of creating a simple "kill the monsters and get the reward" quest. That's probably good from a player pespective, but it means that making even a minor side quest can get rather complicated.

The last dialog involves Daniel's romance storyline, which hopefully won't be too wordy. After that, I have a ton of scripting to do to make the actual quest come together. That's usually the fun part for me, especially watching it all come together for the first time.

I'll be out of town for a couple days, but the good news (for you) is that I'll be stuck in a car for much of it, with little to do but write dialog.

Mostly I've been writing dialog for the last ...

July 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Mostly I've been writing dialog for the last couple days, so sadly no pretty pictures.

I've decided that the true masters of dialog are able to convey what they need in as few words as possible, much like the Japanese sumi-e style of painting a landscape with a few brush strokes. I find myself compelled to ramble and fill in the details. Perhaps some day I can boil it down into a series of two-word sentences and a few grunts.

The zombie fun continues

July 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The zombie fun continues. The village is essentially finished, and I made ten or so villagers for ambiance. I have a fair bit of dialog writing and scripting to do, but hopefully that should go quickly.

Of course the big excitement is with what's below the village. That'll take a fair bit more planning, though I have a pretty firm idea as to how it'll work. In theory, it'll be one of the bigger fights in the game.

Once I have the proper inspiration, I find my...

July 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Once I have the proper inspiration, I find myself compelled to turn it into reality. I wasn't happy with the rural buildings as part of my primitive island paradise, so I took apart the lighthouse roof and the fort walls to create some huts. They're fairly large, but look reasonably good. In the background you can see one of the guard towers you can climb, along with the Veil that marks the end of the normal world.

When I get a little time today, I'll probably finish up the village and work a little on scripting. I'm not fond of the way this place looks during the day, so I'll likely change it to night for the proper creepy zombie ambiance.

I woke up this morning and knew exactly what ...

July 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I woke up this morning and knew exactly what I wanted to do with Daniel's romance, his remembrances, and a fun zombie-themed side quest for Serpent Isle. Right now I'm working on the island itself, putting up an extremely long wall around most of the island. I also did a guard tower test to make sure the player could get up to it and back down again. The pesky zombies have an annoying habit of walking through solid walls, though I think I know how to fix that particular issue.

The current plan is to put quite a few zombies in the area at once, though I'm going to simplify their AI as much as possible. Most of the combats in Dark Water are against small groups of monsters. It's fun to set up fights that have a dozen or more creatures coming after you at once.

I finished up the Fairy Tale side quest, thou...

July 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finished up the Fairy Tale side quest, though I've yet to test it all. My favorite part was giving out the rewards, which are somewhat non-traditional. My favorite is the Blade of Ending, which is destined to bring about the ending of the world. Until then, it's a reasonably powerful magic weapon that can be used in most situations.

The best part is that it goes around complaining when attacking "lesser" opponents. It has a fair number of snooty remarks it makes about foes being beneath him, and why can't the player get on with bringing about the apocalypse? Of course, when it does face a truly challenging opponent, it gets special powers and is a great weapon for these occasional boss battles.

I'm falling behind with my correspondence, and hopefully can get to that today. It's looking like there might be issues with the version of DW1 posted on the Vault, and the Mac version may need a bit more cleanup. Busy, busy.

I opted for a Tarot-themed ending for the fai...

July 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I opted for a Tarot-themed ending for the fairy tale module. Instead of going with the witches and fairies sort of reward, breaking out the cryptic and mysterious seemed a more apt finale. I didn't have a proper Hanged Man placeable, so I rotated one of the corpses around a bit and stuck him to a tree.

Of course, now I've got three unique magic items I need to work on, but hopefully it won't take too much time. Next I need to script the transition between the book to the story and back again. Then I can declare this side quest finished and move on to something else.

Oh, and I fixed the lamp issue. No longer is the flame sticking out in a weird place.

I got a little bored yesterday and whipped up...

July 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got a little bored yesterday and whipped up a lamp for the player to get while in this little fairy tale side quest. There's an odd problem, namely a candle flame that mysterious appears above it. I haven't quite figured out how it got there, except perhaps it came over when I copied the candle item.

I made the last area in the side quest, which I think will mostly be place to get loot with maybe a minor puzzle or two. Last night I tested out the game from the start to where I finished yesterday. After a few significant bug fixes, it seems to be playable. Mostly I think that people who have never played a text adventure game may have some difficulty adjusting. These days, the thought of typing every command into a box seems foreign and strange.

I've been working away at the Fairy Tale side...

July 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working away at the Fairy Tale side quest. It's coming together relatively well, and hopefully has the appropriate number of text adventure references for us old folks. As with all these side areas, I'm trying hard to keep it optional and fun for everyone.

Hopefully I can wrap it up fairly soon, as I have tons of other areas I need to work on.

I've been doing more stuff with voice, gettin...

July 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been doing more stuff with voice, getting the Fae Queen's dialog in the game and working properly. I think it all turned out okay. I opted for an echo effect that compliments things nicely.

As for today, it's my birthday. I may do a little work, but I suspect I'll be reveling in chocolate cake and doing fun things.

I managed to get all the tattoos in the game ...

July 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I managed to get all the tattoos in the game yesterday, complete with icons, tattoo patterns, and special effects. The tattoos are much more powerful this time around, hopefully not overly so. They have a constant effect, in addition to a very powerful, short-duration effect that uses up the tattoo. I suspect some people might just leave the tattoos alone and never use them, but they have the potential for helping immensely in a fight.

I keep waffling back and forth about the ending. Players want to defeat the villain, save the world, and get the girl. Sometimes, though, it's better to give them what they need. Watching the Vault Dweller walk off into the desert was a more powerful and poignant ending than simply returning to his cheering friends. I'll probably cheat and provide multiple endings, some following the traditional path and others more nuanced.

I'm being fickle, switching back to the Mered...

July 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm being fickle, switching back to the Meredith quest in Port Brighton. I got some great voice clips from my sister the other day and I had lots of fun making them sound vaguely ghostly in Audacity. Since before it was a simple "creature attacks the party" encounter, I had to make a lot of changes in order to support the new dialog. The quest is much stronger, though, and I even managed to slip in a line as suggested by PJJ.

I also need to go back and add a bunch more tattoo patterns, again making sure I have adequate piratey items in the game. In DW2, some of the tattoos seemed a little weak and I'm hoping to spruce it up with some more impressive ones. The plan is to give some with constant effects, in addition to a big effect which results in the destruction of the tattoo. If the player wants protection from fire, they can get a Burning Man tatto and it will always be active. If they use tattoo, they'll get a flaming damage shield that's hopefully entertaining to play with.

I drifted over to another side quest, one tha...

July 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I drifted over to another side quest, one that I'm doing out of love. Unfortunately I keep managing to destroy the module and lose progress periodically, so I find myself redoing things. I suppose the good news is that I've gotten fairly good at it at this point, so this third version is more polished than the older ones.

The Fairy Tale module is essentially a text adventure. It'll likely be very short, entirely optional, and more of an homage to the genre. I have fond memories of a kid typing "go north" and "get lamp". I've written a few simple text parses over the years. I'm trying to keep this one extremely simple and not take weeks to get working right.

Yesterday I fiddled with the GUI so it looks more book-like. I also had all sorts of problems parsing out text strings, though hopefully that's fixed now.

It's been fun working on this system, which reminds me of the good ol' days when graphics meant ASCII characters on the screen and sound effects were various beeps coming from your computer speaker.

Progress continues

July 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Progress continues.

Yesterday I had my son and sister record some more lines. My sister was the sultry Silver from DW2, and I wanted to give her some more adventure hooks for DW3. I also added some dialog to a side quest NPC. Before they just attacked, but as PJJ pointed out, some additional dialog would be poignant and amusing.

I've also been working on other miscellaneous things. The Vault is getting lit and polished. Lighting always looks so much better when you add a bunch of placeable lights. I realized I once again lost the XML file that was part of my text adventure side quest. This will be the third time I've created it, so hopefully it'll go fast.

One of the things that's required in a pirate...

July 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

One of the things that's required in a pirate-themed game like Dark Waters is making sure I have the appropriate number of pirate elements. I sometimes imagine a little Pirate-O-Meter attached to the campaign, with me tossing in piratey fuel to raise the gage into the red. I've got eye patches, hook hands, flintlock pistols, sailing ships, and now the traditional ghost pirate. Sure, he's a gnome, but I think that counts.

In any case, I finished Isle Diablo for good, testing out the final area to make sure everything worked smoothly. It's very much a side quest island, a result of getting a treasure map while on your adventures.

As for today, I've got to get back to the rest of the adventure. I have voice clips to process, dialog to write, and some bugs with the Mac version of the campaign that I need to sort out.

It was back to the hot and ashen Isle Diablo ...

July 10, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It was back to the hot and ashen Isle Diablo yesterday. I verified that I could dig for the treasure and it would drop me into the cavern as planned. I also have the automata working, along with implementing their special weakness. The chest puzzle works as well.

I just finished writing and scripting the dialog for the final "boss battle". Of course, a little diplomacy or lying will get you out of the fight. Fun, fun.

I think I've got the fountain/lever puzzle wo...

July 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think I've got the fountain/lever puzzle working the way I wanted. I'm always amazed at how long it takes to debug scripts, as it seems so simple when I think of it. My little side quest island is turning into a bit of a distraction, but hopefully the remaining puzzles will be easy to crank out.

As is usual when returning from vacation, my life is intensely busy. My apologies if I don't respond to an e-mail as quickly as I'd like.

I'm back

July 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back. I didn't get quite as much writing time as I would have liked, but I did manage to crank out a number of pages in a key dialog. I'm pretty happy how it turned out, with various past choices and player skills influencing the outcome. Branching always takes more work than I think, but it really supports player choice and replayability.

This morning I focused on bug fixing in my new volcanic island. Players should burst into flames as appropriate when hanging out near volcanic vents. I also tested the main fight of the island, which is quite difficult. I try to sprinkle in a few optional, challenging combats and this looks like one of them.

My volcanic island continues to shape up nicely

July 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My volcanic island continues to shape up nicely. Volcanic vents spew hot gas and fire on a periodic basis, providing hazards to the unwary traveler. I also added some interesting foes, which I may fiddle with a bit more before I'm done.

Paul passed along some voice clip files for me to work on. He recorded the sketch artist voice, and I encouraged him to go with a thick French accent. I'm fond of the variety of accents in the game, as it gives it an international flair.

I'd like to finish off my island today and get to the voice clips. I'm also going to be going on vacation for a few days for my anniversary. Often they turn into great writing opportunities when I'm stuck in a car or waiting for people to wake up.

I finished up all the achivement scripts, GUI...

July 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finished up all the achivement scripts, GUI elements, and graphics yesterday. I'll probably do a bit more work as I get more things to track, but it felt good to mostly get that out of the way.

When my son was at fencing and my daughter was playing with another girl, I was stuck in an empty room with only a pen and paper. Fortunately I turned it into an opportunity, scribbling down the basics of a gnomish treasure side-quest. The puzzles ended up embodying the virtues of gnomish values, strangely enough. It amused me that the player had to think like a gnome in order to get through.

Once I finished scribbling out my quest, I realized I needed a place to put it. I've long felt that I wanted a variety of islands that were interesting, but not directly connected to the main quest. The tricky part is to spend enough time on these islands so that they're worth visiting, but not enough that it bogs down the development process.

In any case, I ended up making a volcanic island yesterday. My favorite part is the ash that falls around it. I'll likely have some combat and maybe a small puzzle, plus the treasure, if you know where to dig.

I was really sick last night, but fortunately...

July 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was really sick last night, but fortunately recovered completely and have gotten back into the swing of development. Today I've gotten the last of the psionic polish in place and I ended up working on achivements. Normally it's one of the last things I do, but since I was already working on the GUI that shows them, I figured I might as well put together the graphics, tracking the statistics, and so on.

I've been working away at the psionics, now m...

June 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working away at the psionics, now moving on to the GUI that's used to view and increase the skills. The problems with tlk files and 2da files have all been resolved, so I think it's mostly just making things look pretty.

Assuming I can find some time today, I also want to sink some time into writing more dialog. That's constantly in need of work.

On a complete lark, I was playing around with getting my Guitar Hero Wii guitar so that I could play Lute Hero. I plugged in a Bluetooth adapter, downloaded GlovePIE, installed BlueSoleil, and followed the rough instructions here. My first wiimote didn't work, but the second did. I ended up modifying the Frets on Fire PIE script so that it pressed the 1-4 keys. It's not perfect, but it was good enough for a demonstration.

I was originally going to post a dry "how to" video, but after some prompting from my son, I ended up making an extremely silly one instead. Just to prove that I'm not above making a complete fool of myself for the enjoyment of others, you can watch it here.

I ran into a very frustrating problem the oth...

June 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I ran into a very frustrating problem the other day. Evidently the main tlk file got corrupted somewhere along the way. Instead of causing immediate problems, suddenly the descriptions of certain things stopped showing up properly. I ended up having to revert to a slightly older version that I'm hoping isn't missing anything. I'm also hoping I didn't accidentally roll it out into the latest patch, as I'm not sure when the problem started.

I also ran into some interesting design problems with Teleportation. It turns out I can get to places I'm not supposed to be able to get to, so I'm going to have to carefully block things off. On the other hand, I still want to give players the ability to sneak into "forbidden" areas and make them feel they're getting away with something.

Finally, I managed to get the Teleportation power into the game like the other psionic skills. Before, players used a book, which didn't quite seem right.

As a game developer, I think I'm required to ...

June 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

As a game developer, I think I'm required to make crate puzzles. Fortunately this one is fairly painless and the plan is to have lots of hints pointing the player into the right direction. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to save the world and being stopped by a bunch of crates in the wrong place.

I have lots of bugs and issues that are popping up in this extremely rough and early version of the finale. Still, it's fun seeing it finally take shape.

I think I've got the tileset work essentially...

June 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think I've got the tileset work essentially finished, though it was surprisingly hard to wrangle into shape. I still need to make a "beautification" pass and make it all pretty, but the main structure is there. I've even started in on the scripting, which will probably be fairly tricky. I just barely started in on the dialog, which will take another big chunk of time.

Endings to big efforts are always challenging. I'd like to offer up multiple versions so that the player feels like their actions made a difference in the outcome of the game. Some people are looking for the traditional "save the world" ending, while others look for other rewards, be it romance, promise of continued adventure, treasure, revenge, or some bittersweet self-knowlege like the endings of Fallout and Planescape: Torment. While I'm not egotistical enough to think I can satisfy everyone, my goal is to let the player make big choices that impact the ending significantly.

I really hope this tileset effort is worth it...

June 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I really hope this tileset effort is worth it, as it's quite slow going. I'm having fun making secret doors and such, but it's taking a bit longer than expected.

I don't have a lot to report today

June 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I don't have a lot to report today. I continue work on the Vault area, wrestling with that difficult yet rewarding tileset. It's slow going, but hopefully the result will be well worth it.

I was deathly ill this morning, only really b...

June 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was deathly ill this morning, only really becoming a functional human being sometime after noon. Fortunately that means that I took the day off work, and got some time puttering around with the final area in the game.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Shadow Fortress tileset. It's the only one that has different levels, which lends itself to interesting perspectives and gameplay. Still, I think I'm going to have to create some specific placeables to fill in holes in walls and such, as the tiles don't go together very well. I'm shooting for a "forced coop" experience, where you and a key NPC have to complete tasks together. I suppose it's the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game with a D&D twist.

I've been doing non-stop childcare for the la...

June 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been doing non-stop childcare for the last few days, so sadly I haven't been able to touch the Campaign. Today will likely be a busy catch up day, but I'll see if I can beg, borrow, or steal a few moments.

It looks like Dark Waters won an award for Best Adventure Module and I picked one up for Veteran Author. Many thanks to the folks at the Academy of Modding Excellence, who made a movie for the occasion. I'd like to also thank everyone who helped make Dark Waters what it is, and all you folks who enjoyed playing it.

It looks like the Mac version of Dark Waters is nearly ready to go. I've gotten some great feedback from the testers and can hopefully get something ready soon.

Vicki also sent along some more sound files, which I need to work into the module. I'm getting horribly excited about the final act in the campaign and am itching to write the conclusion. There's a key scene with Robert that popped into my head after I made an area. My favorite dialogs are the ones that must be done, that it's a logical conclusion as to who the character is and they can finally fulfill their purpose in the story.

I've been doing run-throughs of the exterior,...

June 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been doing run-throughs of the exterior, testing things out. I had an amusing little adventure where Death appeared, caught on fire, and things were generally unfortunate from there. It did give me a bit of a chuckle.

I think we have a fix to the Mac crash problem, passing along fixed sound files to the Mac testers. Hopefully I can get a solid version fairly soon and post it to the Vault after that.

Progress has been coming along nicely

June 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Progress has been coming along nicely. This morning I tested the various scripts for the more dramatic parts of the area. They worked nicely, even the part where I caught on fire and ran around, flailing about.

A brave tester has found the issue with the DW1 module not working on the Mac. It turns out that some of the sound files aren't quite in the right format, which is causing crashes. DW2 shouldn't have the same problem (I used a different technique by then). With luck I can do some investigating today and get a new version of the package that hopefully works better.

I delved more into scripting today, working o...

June 18, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I delved more into scripting today, working on cannons and avalanches of all things. I've also moved into creating interiors, trying to continue my icy ambiance. Fortunately I made some snow and ice placeables that work wonders. I find having the area created, the story elements fall more easily into place.

With the Mac version of NWN2 out for awhile now, more people are trying to play Dark Waters. Unfortunately I'm still having problems getting it all to work properly. There are issues with getting files in the right places and I think we may have issues with the format of certain sound files. Hopefully we can sort out the issues soon.

I continue to crank up the look of the snowy ...

June 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I continue to crank up the look of the snowy island, hopefully up to that special "awesome" setting. I added swirling snow flurries and lightning to give the place an appropriately ominous feel. I'll continue to work on it today, as area creation is one of those things that it's easy to spend countless hours on.

As a side project, I'm trying to get Dark Waters working on the Mac. I keep thinking we're getting close, and I have a brave volunteer helping me out due to my lack of Macintoshes about the house. You can play part of the game now, but it's crashing in weird places. My theory is that it's related to sound file formats, and we'll see how the next round of testing goes.

I needed a particularly ominous set of stairs...

June 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I needed a particularly ominous set of stairs, so I dug out Danmar's dungeon set from NWN1 and tediously converted them over to a NWN2 placeable. I like the look, and hope to have an appropriately tense confrontation at the top. Already visions of dialog branches are dancing in my head.

Lute Hero is evidently gaining notoriety. Josh Sawyer from Obsidian is going to GDC in Paris to speak about user generated content. He asked for a high resolution version of the Lute Hero video for the presentation. I tried to make sure all the folks who were involved got credit, from the Oriental construction kit folks to James who's voice shows up at the end.

As for me, I'll be hunkering down with Dark Waters some more, trying to get the critical path somewhat functional. I still have endless dialog to write too, so we'll see what I get to today.

I'm having way too much fun with the snowy an...

June 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm having way too much fun with the snowy and icy island. Today I created a neat ice pond, complete with slipping for players who want to rush across. Yesterday I scribbled down plans for other areas, trying to come up with winter hazards that I can pull off in the game.

I think I also have a plan for Serpent Isle. It's primarily focused on Daniel/Sheridan, though it'll be a completely optional side quest. I suspect it'll have one of the toughest fights in the game too. Fun, fun.

I made about ten different placeables this mo...

June 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made about ten different placeables this morning, mostly retextures to make it look appropriately snowy. It looks pretty good, though there's endless work to do yet. I also adjusted the lightning and added the first parts of a storm-like effect. I think I want to add in lightning, as it looked quite nice in the other area. I have fun adding extra touches and I'm hoping I can work in footsteps for the various characters.

My kids are climbing all over me, so I have to run off. Perhaps I can sneak in more time later today.

I decided to try the "If you build it, they w...

June 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I decided to try the "If you build it, they will come" approach to getting the final module in place. Sometimes the ideas seem to flow more freely when I have a place to put them. Since I generally know the shape and feel of the place, I decided to start working on that this morning.

I ended up using RWS' snow textures, along with my own snowflake particle effects. I just barely started working on the area creation. So far it's mostly just a test of ideas to see if my ideas actually look good in the game. I can tell already I'm going to need to adjust the lighting quite a bit, otherwise there will be a huge amount of whiteout and glare.

My two goals for the day are to get Lord Brighton's new dialog in the game and work on the new area. Fun, fun.

Nothing too exciting to report

June 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Nothing too exciting to report. Mostly I worked on Lord Brighton dialog today.

I see that Lute Hero is the top module at the moment. Perhaps it's all those votes that go to eleven (apologies for the obscure Spinal Tap joke).

I made a ton of progress yesterday, writing a...

June 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made a ton of progress yesterday, writing and scripting and creating areas. The simple side quest is leading to some interesting conclusions, and it seems as if I'll be writing some more dialog for Lord Brighton. It's amazing what a simple question like "Say, what happened to your parrot?" can bring you. Essentially the point of the quest is to shed some light on Lord Brighton's background. He remains a mysterious figure throughout much of the second act. In this final one, hopefully players will get to know him a little better, good and bad.

I'd like to do the same with Spider and Robert. Just having them as quest givers is rather dull.

Long ago, Razvan made a double-barreled flint...

June 10, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Long ago, Razvan made a double-barreled flintlock and I've been itching to get it into the game. I spent a bit too much time this morning fiddling about with textures and models. Somewhere along the way, I deleted a tiny triangle face off the model, so I had to put it back. I've yet to put it in the hands of my PC, but I think it'll work smoothly. I should whip up an icon as well, just to get the last detail in place.

I've decided to work on one of the Port Brighton side-quests next. I have all the dialog written and some of the areas built. It just needs some scripts and other assorted fiddling and it should be done. I want to make sure there's value in the player revisiting areas. Shops should have new gear, NPCs should talk about past events, and so on.

I think I finally have Drake's ship at the ap...

June 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think I finally have Drake's ship at the appropriately ominous size. The big skull and crossbones on the sail always helps, too. Though I haven't tested the most recent set of bug fixes, I think it's roughly ready to go. I could probably fiddle with camera angles some more, but for now it's probably ready for someone else to test.

I have so many things on my "to do next" list, it's hard to know where to start. I'd like to rally the voice actors and try to fill in some of the missing dialog that's in the game. I have a Port Brighton side quest to finish. There are endless tasks, but hopefully it'll be fun getting to them.

Progress continues, though never as smoothly ...

June 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Progress continues, though never as smoothly as I'd like. Drake's ship seems to have sails and floats above the water now, but it's extremely tiny and not particularly fearsome. There are other bugs in the dialog that ensues. It seems simple at first, with really only a couple significant scripts, but I'm busy adding camera angles, effects, and other things that make it complicated. It would be nice if I could get finished with it today.

I have a bunch of e-mails from last week that I've been ignoring. I best apologize publicly and get to them tomorrow.

I always thought of Drake as a fairly fearsom...

June 07, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I always thought of Drake as a fairly fearsome pirate. Somehow having your ship mostly submerged shatters the illusion. It's on my list of things to fix.

Yesterday and this morning I've been working on getting the initial meeting with Drake set up for the module. One of the key challenges for a game designer is to find ways to hurt the player. This sounds odd at first, but they've done studies and it turns out games with easy rewards aren't fun. It's only the challenging games, filled with setbacks and slow rewards, that are somehow memorable. In any case, I'm hoping I dish out the appropriate amount of suffering.

I uploaded a patch to DW1 and DW2 to the Vault's servers. Hopefully they'll be posted by now. I've been sitting on assorted fixes for awhile now, but not quite brave enough to call them done. Fortunately I drank enough coffee yesterday to throw caution to the wind and hopefully it fixes assorted issues that people have been running into.

I still have a ton of work for DW3, but it's starting to feel more like a system and less a collection of stand-alone modules. My next writing project is some of the romance stories and quests. I'm still holding off on writing the final showdown, though the details are slowly falling into place.

Lute hero is out

June 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Lute hero is out. There's also a short interview you can look at. I'm joyous to finally get it out the door, and hope it's something very different and fun. I also finally kicked my Mass Effect habit last night, so I'm planning on jumping back into the DW3 fray. My little notebook of penciled dialog is next to my keyboard, so I'll be doing a fair bit of typing today. It feels good to get back to things.

I continue to be insanely busy (hence the lac...

June 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I continue to be insanely busy (hence the lack of pretty screenshots). Part of it is due to my recent Mass Effect habit, which I'm hoping to kick relatively soon. I rarely get the chance to play computer games myself, so it's a special treat to indulge so deeply for the last few days.

I finished writing up my Lute Hero interview questions and passing them back to the Neverwinter Vault folks. I'm guessing it'll show up tonight if all goes well.

I'd love to find some time to type up all my dialog and get a key life-changing event written into the game. We'll see if can weasel some free time in between the regular insanity.

I've been insanely busy lately

June 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been insanely busy lately. I did get some time to work with some Mac folks in getting a Mac version ready. I just threw up this test. It turns out that an earlier version didn't have critical campaign files, so I'm going to give this one a try. For any brave souls who download the file, ignore the readme. I've been instructed that the files should really go in the "My Documents" section. Hopefully my stalwart Mac tester can get it working and then I'll post it officially.

I'm expecting some interview questions for Lute Hero soon, and hopefully we can get this thing finally posted.

I'm back from my trip, my notebook full of di...

June 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back from my trip, my notebook full of dialog and ideas for the grand final battle. I had one "duh" moment when I realized a particular event simply had to happen (or at least I had to present the possibility of the event). Without it, I was ignoring significant themes that I've been building on throughout the campaign. Silly me.

I've contacted the Vault administrators and hopefully Lute Hero will be available very soon. As always, I'm excited and nervous. Hopefully it will be well-received.

I whipped up this rather dramatically lit scr...

May 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I whipped up this rather dramatically lit screenshot outside of the lighthouse. The rain was pouring and lightning flashed across the sky. It seemed an appropriate mood for debugging the Sketch Artist module.

I fixed a bunch of issues, though I've got quite a few to work on yet. Teleportation is a fun new skill to play with, though the range seems a little short. You can get to the other side of a locked door you can see through, but can't jump halfway across the map. I'll need to see how well that works if you increase the skill level, though. Coupled with the power, I want to make a bunch of places where players can use their skills to "break the rules" and get into places they otherwise couldn't get into. I love making players feel sneeky.

PJJ reported a couple minor typos with Lute Hero, otherwise it feels pretty much ready to go. I have my eye on a funky multiplayer issue involving servers that don't force a single party. Unfortunately I can't recreate it.

I'm also headed out of town for a family reunion for the next four days. I'd love to do some writing, as there's a ton of things that aren't on the critical path that I'd love to flesh out.

I sent off Lute Hero to the testers, hopefull...

May 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I sent off Lute Hero to the testers, hopefully the last one before release. I also ended up putting together a release movie, which was time consuming but fun. I'll see if I can get in touch with the Vault folks and get things rolling.

I also got an e-mail out of the blue from someone working on the Saving Sigil project. There was a ton of work done on the NWN1 Sigil tilesets and placeables, most of which was lost when CODI disbanded. It's inspiring to see all she's done.

I spent a little time testing the Sketch Artist module. It's working pretty well, except for the part where I can't enter the lighthouse. I also discovered that one of my dialogs was only partially finished, so I finished that up this morning. Busy, busy.

I'm still working away in between the long-we...

May 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm still working away in between the long-weekend activities and birthday parties. I managed to write and record some dialog for this little gnome, the dockmaster for Underhill clanhome.

The two main "key" quests are slowly coming together. Much of my time today was spent reviewing the Sketch Artist quest which had a large number of issues, bugs, and missing things. This included creating a ship cabin for a conversation to take place, some journal entries, and a bit of scripting. Now I've got to give it a whirl and see if it actually works.

Well, I'm a very bad boy, or good boy, depend...

May 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, I'm a very bad boy, or good boy, depending on how you see things. I didn't get a new build to the testers this Friday. Though I was crazy busy yesterday, I managed to write some new dialog for Death, record his lines, and fix a remaining GUI bug. Hopefully soon I can get some time to send it off, or perhaps I'll try to sneak in even more dialog. We'll see what the weekend brings.

It was back to Lute Hero for me this morning

May 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It was back to Lute Hero for me this morning. I tried to figure out a reported issue where sound didn't work right if the players weren't part of the same party. Strangely, everything worked great for me. One player was able to jam out and the other heard it just fine.

I'm hoping the game works well in multiplayer or a persistant world. Theoretically someone could easily transform Death's Domain into their own bar, complete with a stage for performing their own songs. The hardest part would be getting custom music into the module. I'd be happy to hand over my conversion scripts to those brave enough to give it a try, though it's a fairly tricky process.

I'm going to pass along the most recent build to the testers today. Hopefully things will be polished enough for a release very soon.

This proud robotic gardener has his cylon-lik...

May 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

This proud robotic gardener has his cylon-like eye move back and forth in the proper place, instead of around his chin like before. Even though the toolset showed it right, it seems that certain offsets to visual effects don't work in the game. I've since fixed it and it looks great.

Other bugs have been squished and the quest is shaping up to be a fun one. I like that each of the automata puzzles can be solved in a lot of different ways, some peaceful, some distructive.

Today is a lousy day for me to get anything done. I still want to investigate one last Lute Hero issue before I send things out to testers again. Sadly I haven't found the time. Maybe tonight.

I made some good progress with the Clockwork ...

May 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made some good progress with the Clockwork Man quest yesterday. An annoying crash bug has been fixed and my misplaced companions have been found. Even better, the underwater area looks great and I managed to whip up a nice effect for the light ripples that move around on the sea floor. I tried to grab a screenshot that captured some of the more impressive props, such as a shark, sub, and torpedo.

I still have much to polish and fix. Some of the automata puzzles are a little off, but I was able to generally make them work last night. There's some visual weirdnesses that I need to fiddle with as well. Still, I think it's almost ready for wider testing.

I also managed to get back to Lute Hero, cleaning up most of the pesky bugs. There's evidently a multiplayer bug that I need to research some more. Apparently when two people are not grouped, the second one's song sounds horrible. Weird.

I spent nearly an hour trying to figure out w...

May 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I spent nearly an hour trying to figure out why one of the main areas crashed every time I went into it. After carefully checking everything, I figured out I just hadn't baked the walkmesh in the area yet. That'll teach me to ignore that warning message every time I test the module.

I got the chance to play with some of the puzzles in the Underhill Clanhome. I made the prototype over two years ago, so they seem fresh and funny and clever. The automaton that declared "Fashion emergency detected!" and stripped off all my clothes was hysterically funny.

I have another crash bug to track down, this one involving the submarine polymorph. I still need to get to Lute Hero too. Busy, busy.

Mondays are always crazy busy, and today is n...

May 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Mondays are always crazy busy, and today is no exception. I have a bunch of feedback from Lute Hero that I need to get back to. Yesterday and today, though, I've been entirely focused with getting the Clockwork Man quest working.

The good news is that the final area has had a couple bug passes and is generally finishable. More work is needed, as always. The exterior needs a ton of work, even though it has the potential for looking extremely cool. At the moment, you don't turn into a sub properly instead end up running around the badly-lit underwater area. The funniest part is when the subs chase after me, causing very dramatic but harmless explosions.

Slowly getting there . . .

I woke up early today and started in on the C...

May 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I woke up early today and started in on the Clockwork Man quest. The final area still needs more placeables and decoration, but it's getting close. This morning I decided to test it out and ran into all sorts issues. The most amusing was my bald companions, probably left over from the conversion from the NWN1 version. Daniel in particular seemed unhappy about the situation.

Some parts worked great right off the bat. I was able to program a robot to move around and do my bidding. Unfortunately the lever that was supposed to open the door didn't actually work, so my adventure was short-lived.

Yesterday I whipped up a couple pipe placeables using geometry and textures from the Sigil tileset from NWN1. I miss that look and feel and would love to pull it into NWN2, but the difference between tiles and placeables are pretty vast. I've already cut off more than I can chew, so I should probably just focus on what I've got.

I also sent off a new test build for the Lute Hero module. We'll see what fresh bugs this weekend brings.

I finally got a chance to get back to NWN2 th...

May 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finally got a chance to get back to NWN2 this morning, gleefully going through the various Lute Hero bug reports that PJJ dug up. I don't think I've been this happy to fix bugs for a long while. I suppose there was something comforting about playing riffs on my lute and blasting away at my enemies.

The samurai now wear their traditional garb, instead of gaudy feathered hats. The mysterious, unreachable Bedroom of the Dead has the walkmesh fixed. I'm not sure I completely fixed Odin's "giant head sticking off the screen" problem during the dialogs, but I think it's improved. I also indulged myself and stuck a couple umlauts over the Lute Hero title on the GUI.

Hopefully today I can dig up more time for testing, as well as getting back to the Clockwork Man quest. Busy, busy.

My free time has frustratingly dropped to zer...

May 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My free time has frustratingly dropped to zero these last few days. PJJ has some Lute Hero feedback that I've yet to get back to. Maybe I can sneak in some writing time today or something.

I'm actually itching to create some pipes and steampunkish placeables for the Cloockwork Man quest. I have no idea where I'd find the time, though.

I've been slowly working away at things

May 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been slowly working away at things. PJJ and Daniel passed along a batch of new issues with Lute Hero that I need to work on. I ended up working on new areas for the Clockwork Man quest, mostly because it was fun doing it.

I'm going to see if I can hunker down and work on Lute Hero some more. The bugs don't seem too tricky, so hopefully the cleanup won't be too bad.

It's been a rough couple days

May 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's been a rough couple days. My personal site was the victim of a SQL injection attack, due to some sloppy coding on my part from the time before such attacks were envisioned. I think I've finally cleaned everything up, but it was fairly stressful. Normal people have bad dreams about monsters. I have nightmares of my website being hacked, which has happened several times in various ways over the years.

I managed to put in some time with Lute Hero. PJJ sent along some good feedback and I'm trying to incorporate things like a quality switch. So far it's working fairly well, turning off the bells and whistles when playing. There's still lots to fix and polish, but I'm slowly getting there.

I sweated bullets yesterday, working hard to ...

May 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I sweated bullets yesterday, working hard to get the Ghost Ship in the game. The main issue was getting the transparency to work right. I ended up doing some silly things, starting with a lava tile with transparency that worked, and slowly modifying it until it looked like the sail I wanted. Odds are, there's a little binary flag that turns transparency on for a model, but it's just not exposed by the program I'm using.

The good news is that it looks gorgeous. Hopefully I've done Razvan proud, as he was the person who originally made the model and textured it.

That's about all I was able to do, unfortunately. I still have a couple things I need to do for Lute Hero. The Clockwork Man quest is calling to me, too. Busy, busy.

It was back to Lute Hero for me

May 07, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It was back to Lute Hero for me. I made some very good progress, working through PJJ's list of bugs and finding some more of my own. I fixed the most serious one, the inability to actually play the campaign. It turns out that I had to set the starting module to "LuteHero" instead of "LuteHero.mod". Computers are so literal.

It's not completely ready to go. I still have some problems with the score board. It looks great, except for the part where it's supposed to display the player's name. Currently that's blank. There's some other niceties I'd like to add in, such as the dialog properly stopping after the song ends for the combat sections (it works during practice).

I'd also love to get back to the other modules, which I haven't had a chance to touch in awhile. Busy, busy.

As is usual for Mondays, it was crazy busy ye...

May 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

As is usual for Mondays, it was crazy busy yesterday and I didn't quite find the time to post anything.

PJJ tested Lute Hero over the weekend and reported a long list of issues for me to look at. I'm going to try to review them today. He was worried about performance issues on lower end machines, and I concur. What I'm doing with the timing and notes is pretty insane and the NWN2 scripting system isn't really designed for that sort of accuracy. I might be able to turn off effects and other CPU-hungry actions to help out with lower end computers. We'll see how that goes.

I'm having lots of fun with the Sketch Artist quest. It's quite a piratey quest and looks really good to boot. It's also one of the few areas in DW3 that I have a prototype for, which makes things like dialog and scripting very easy to set up.

I've been doing some extremely preliminary testing as I build the area and take a few screenshots. Already I've found some serious issues that need to be fixed before it's a playable module. Still, it feels remarkably complete considering I started on it last week.

I really want to get back to the Clockwork Man quest, which has a lot of cool elements in it. I think I have one more area to build and then I've got to check all the scripting and such. Slowly getting there.

I finished texturing Razvan's Xebec and I've ...

May 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finished texturing Razvan's Xebec and I've taken the initial steps of getting it in the game. Razvan made a ton of ships over the last few years, though I haven't managed to get all of them in the game (as most are untextured). I'd love to expand the ship selection considerably. The current set has the basics covered, but there's a lot of neat additions that could be put in there.

As for today, I still need to get Drake's ship put together, as well as the ghost ship. The latter should be easy, as it's already textured and looking great. The first one may take a bit of effort, depending on how enthusiastic I'm feeling.

For a weekend, it was surprisingly busy

May 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

For a weekend, it was surprisingly busy. Still, I managed to sneak in some time here and there. I added seven new placeable paintings on an easel. They were for a specific part of the Sketch Artist quest, and turned out relatively well.

The caverns are in place now and generally seem to work. I've also finished the exterior area, though half still needs to have all the creatures, placeables, and scripting in place. I also need to add a couple ships, which could prove to be somewhat challenging as one needs to be textured.

Slowly getting there.

I think I sorted out the last of the Lute Her...

May 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think I sorted out the last of the Lute Hero issues. The standalone version of the game seems to generally work, though there were some weird issues along the way. I also ended up fixing some core gameplay problems that I'd somehow missed. For example, the various cool effects only worked if there was a dead opponent nearby. Now your lute playing can zap, fry, and generally flash dramatically around the screen.

The other funny thing that happened is that I was fighting angels, died, and returned to the practice area. Unfortunately the ActionForceMoveToObject command is a little too hardcore and the angels magically appeared in Death's Domain where they did battle with the zombie hordes. When a riot breaks out at your gig, you known you're a real rock star.

I passed along my rough version of the game to a tester to poke out. If I haven't missed anything horribly embarrassing, I'll probably do more serious testing and then start pondering a release of Lute Hero as a teaser for DW3.

Yesterday I spent a bunch of time working on ...

May 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Yesterday I spent a bunch of time working on the exterior for the Sketch Artist module. I feel I got the storm just right, with rain, lightning, and thunder working exactly the way I want. There's a flash of light, then the sound of thunder a second later. If you look off into the distance, you can see lightning bolts coming down from the sky. It's the little things that count.

I've been testing the installer for the stand-alone Lute Hero module. Unfortunately it has some fairly serious problems and isn't loading at the moment. I suspect I left out something critically important, such as a tlk file or problem with the campaign. I had it working with multiplayer briefly, but it was pointing to the wrong campaign and my switch to a new campaign caused things to fail miserably.
As for today, I'd like to work more on the Sketch Artist area. It's fun building areas, almost relaxing in comparison to figuring out why code is misbehaving.

Finally, it looks like the Academy of Modding Excellence has me nominated for Pirate Cards and Dark Waters. If I win, I hereby promise to spend my ill-gotten booty on grog and wenches.

For the last few days, I've been struggling w...

April 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

For the last few days, I've been struggling with a weird bug where Heather and Daniel wouldn't equip their drum and flute as expected. I cursed the coding gods and couldn't figure out why my perfectly reasonable commands were being ignored.

I finally figured it out this morning. I was doing everything right, but right before I played a song, I stopped any existing one. Unfortunately this unequipped the drum and flute, and generally screwed things up. It's nice to have things working normally again.

I ended up making a "mini dialog" box specifically for Lute Hero. The normal NWN1-style dialog box is pretty big and looks weird on the screen. I've made it so that you can hide it under the Lute Hero GUI and you can pretend it's not there. The reason I still need it visible is that there are a few NWN1-style dialogs the player can still trigger and I at least want it to be workable. It would be vastly frustrating if they started using the SAGE system and suddenly they were locked in an invisible dialog, unable to exit.

I continue to feel perpetually behind. I have the basics in place for a Lute Hero installer, but have yet to test it. Paul recorded some dialog that I've yet to attach to anything. I got the last of Vicki's dialog in the game. Yesterday I started in on the "Sketch Artist" module. There's a fairly huge exterior area that involves light houses, wrecked ships, and lots of things to convert from the prototype. We'll see how far I get today.

My plan is still to test out Lute Hero multiplayer soon and make sure the installer works, then get it to testers. As expected, it's taken some time away from Dark Waters, but hopefully there's value in a steady trickle of releases, rather than the usual long delay between each act.

Sometimes I fear I've switched from being the...

April 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Sometimes I fear I've switched from being the Dark Waters developer to the Lute Hero developer. Hopefully my little detour is worthwhile. At the moment I'm focused on getting Lute Hero polished up for a possible solo release. I still need to get some scripting issues figured out and actually test the thing in multiplayer. Part of that entails making a stand-alone version as it's a pain to do multiplayer tests when a single module is part of a campaign.

The only downside is that it means other things have been put on hold. I have voice actors I need to get back to, areas to convert from the prototype, and lots of dialog to write. We'll see how it goes.

I added six more songs, doubling the number t...

April 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I added six more songs, doubling the number that are in the game. Trogdor by Strong Bad is my new favorite. It's now theoretically multiplayer, with all the necessary script references now changed. People should be able to play in different areas of the module. No dueling guitars, but they can play on different stages.

I'm still seeing some funky bugs, probably due to my script updates. More testing tonight, perhaps.

I don't normally double-post, but I have a Fr...

April 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I don't normally double-post, but I have a Friday treat for everyone. Here's a movie of the current early technical demo for Lute Hero. There are issues and bugs that you'll see (why is Heather blowing her gun and Daniel banging swords together?), but the game looks far better when you're not looking at screenshots.

Yesterday was really busy, so I didn't get as...

April 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Yesterday was really busy, so I didn't get as much time to work on things as I'd like. I did get Vicki's sound files, and massaged them into the game properly. I was worried about the sound quality a little, but it actually turned out reasonably well. During testing I noticed a few quirks, such as the wings detatching during the conversation, but the voice itself sounded pretty good.

This morning I took a bunch of movies of Lute Hero, as static screen shots don't really do it justice. I continue to ponder whether or not to do a stand-alone version of the game. I still think it would be cool, especially if it were multiplayer. I'd absolutely have to fix the code and add more songs, though. We'll see how enthusiastic my morning coffee makes me.

It seems my crash fix solved at least one per...

April 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It seems my crash fix solved at least one person's problem. It would be nice to figure out what's causing it, as it continues to remain a mystery.

I worked more on Lute Hero yesterday. The background of the GUI changes depending on which guitar you're playing with, which looks rather snazzy. I also updated the score, note streak, power level, and a bar that builds up until you play eight good notes in a row (after which it unleashes an effect). I also cleaned up a couple misbehaving cameras, added more effects for the practice session, fixed the textures on the "Madness" lute, and generally polished things up.

I got an email request to turn Lute Hero into a stand-alone game like I did with Pirate Cards. The main issue at the moment is that the game is fairly limited. I'd want to add more than six songs. I'd want to make sure it works with multiplayer and persistent worlds. Still, I like the idea and may spend some time working on that today. I think all the other modules are jealous of how much attention this one has been getting.

I may have a potential workaround for the cra...

April 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I may have a potential workaround for the crash bug some people have been experiencing. Basically what I'm doing is replacing the "bad" High Seas module with a "good" clean version on the fly. Here are the steps that seemed to work:

* Download the clean version of the High Seas module here.
* Find your save game from right before the crash and copy the file into it.

At this point, I've only tested it with a sample bad version of the module. I'm still unsure what might be causing it. There seemed to be an unusually high amount of heartbeat AI loops using some of the debug commands, but it's hard to know what's going on.

The game itself seems to be running. The log file continues to be updated and I can hit ~ and run debug commands. I was even able to close some of the GUI screens and see the map and chat window. Unfortunately neither seemed to work.

Basically it seems like something got stuck in these bad versions of the modules. I might poke around a little more to see what's going on, or perhaps add more debug tools so I can better diagnose the issue in the future.

Sadly my earrings did nothing to cause the ga...

April 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Sadly my earrings did nothing to cause the game to crash. The crash bugs are annoying in that I can't pin them down to any particular issue. I'm going to start looking at people's saved games in hopes of tracking down the problem. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, I typed up a bunch of dialog and semi-finished one more quest area. I still need journal entries and some special items for a store, but it's slowly approach a testing stage. I still have a ton to do, but it's nice to make progress.

The bug reports continue to come in for DW2, ...

April 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The bug reports continue to come in for DW2, including a possible workaround for the infamous crash bug. Theoretically dropping earrings before making the transition fixes the problem, though I've yet to verify it.

I also spent a bunch of time yesterday on DW3. Three of the four map piece quests are roughly finished. The Isle of Flesh is nearly done. I tweaked the visual effect for my Flesh Elementals, making them even more wet and meaty than before. I was stuck in a boring meeting and ended up scribbling down some dialog for the main quest of the area. With a little editing, I can throw together a little quest and cross that one of my massive to do list. It's awful fun to use the word "sphincter" liberally throughout a conversation.

Lute Hero is approaching the magical "finishe...

April 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Lute Hero is approaching the magical "finished" stage, at least finished enough to send on for testing. I need to make sure I can get from beginning to end. I tried a couple times yesterday, but got stuck on silly little issues that kept me from moving on.

I recorded my Death lines this morning, though they need to be added to the game. I worked on the QA item for DW3 as well, making sure I can jump around to the various places I need to get to.

Though Lute Hero has been a lot of fun to put together, I'm looking forward to doing something else for a change.

I decided to be a good boy and work on some b...

April 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I decided to be a good boy and work on some bugs that had previously been reported. I've spent a couple hours today trying to fix the magic card deck quest. It's been frustrating at one level, with most of my problems due to the fact that campaign scripts don't compile unless I open all the relevant ones and compile them with the module scripts.

I did have some rather epic battles against my Woodhaven card playing foe. He gets an extra 50 hit points, which makes for the occasionally nail-biting games. In one game, he summoned a Hellspawn, which got me down to 16 hit points, but I managed to hold on and kill it and then finish him off.

It's taken far longer than I ever imagined, b...

April 18, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's taken far longer than I ever imagined, but Lute Hero has turned from a crazy idea into something that might actually be called a game. I tested out both the practice sessions and the combat, and it seems to generally work. The camera no longer wildly moves around in crazy directions, but has more of an "American Bandstand" feel, panning around the area as the lights flash and effects go off. I'm still having some problems with the combat effects, so that's next on my list to work on.

Unbeknownst to me, a version of NWN2 for the Mac was released. Of course, my installer won't work on a Mac, so I've got to put together an installer for those folks. Busy, busy!

Update: For any Mac users out there, you can try this download. It includes all the lastest patching I've done, which hopefully is a good thing. I'd consider this fairly beta as no one has tested it to make sure my instructions work or if I've included all the right files.

I continue to plug away at Lute Hero

April 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I continue to plug away at Lute Hero. I hopefully cleaned up some of the misbehaving camera motions and added a few more. You now have to find songs before you can play them, giving a fairly standard progression of difficulty and rewards. I also added some assorted treasure along the way, though I still think it needs more.

Finally, I ended up making some rather pretty Chinese paper lanterns this morning. They look very nice, especially with a glow map. I should probably make them tintable as well, though I've yet to get around to it.

There's a new voice actor by the name of Jame...

April 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

There's a new voice actor by the name of James Gray who's been helping out as of late. It's always fun to hear an actor's take on my dialog, and they often bring out feelings or humor unique to their reading. James has been voicing dialog for some of the deities. Even lines I thought were a little dull manage to sound greatly amusing. Here's a few samples of his work.

As for me, I just finished turning all of James' dialog into properly formatted sound files. Now I need to hunker down and attach them to the dialog itself.

Lute Hero continues to be polished. All the areas a pretty much done, though I need to make a treasure pass and sprinkle appropriate loot throughout the areas. The Lute Hero system itself needs some tweaks and bug fixing, but generally works. It's hard to believe I've sunk so much time in this one module out of the many in the third Act. Hopefully it'll be a fun experience for folks, and markedly different than other NWN2 modules they've played.

My son is getting into building with the Orie...

April 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My son is getting into building with the Oriental Construction Kit. He's decided to spend his hour of computer time each day not playing games, but instead creating elaborate structures. I suppose it's borderline educational, as he's learning about Asian architecture and advanced GUI standards like multi-selecting objects with the Shift key.

In any case, I spent a ton of time working on the Lute Hero module yesterday. Most of the "afterlife" areas are finished. I tested out the basic mechanics and it seems to work fairly well. Eventually I need to play all the way through, as I think you theoretically can now.

This morning I put together the camera motions for the practice session. It's pretty fun, and I suspect lots of players may just hang out with Death, playing guitar and watching the undead dance around.

As for today, I want to work on getting some of the new voices in the game. James sent along a bunch of stuff that I need to process. I need to create some creatures and treasures for Lute Hero. I did some bug fixing for DW1 and 2 yesterday, but it could always use some more. Busy, busy.

I downloaded and integrated the Oriental Cons...

April 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I downloaded and integrated the Oriental Construction Kit on Friday and have been working hard to integrate it into the module. I have a Celestial Bureauracracy level that is supposed to have a beautiful Asian-themed environment. The construction kit is challenging to work with, but produces amazing results and is very flexible. My son is enamored with it and has been working away making little buildings. I broke out the cherry petal falling effect from my Dreamcatcher days and adapted it for NWN2.

I have a ton of work ahead of me, from writing dialog to fixing bugs in DW1 and DW2. We'll see how much I manage today.

I've had the kids this weekend, but have man...

April 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've had the kids this weekend, but have managed to sneak in a little time here and there. My battle areas for Lute Hero are slowly coming together. I try to keep reminding myself that this isn't a full module and I should keep this "little" side quest relatively simple. Unfortunately I keep doing silly little things, such as making these RPG-themed inspirational paintings.

The entire Lute Hero section needs more polish, but it's turned out extremely well considering just how crazy the concept is. It's still surprisingly fun to play a song and click on frets to lay waste to your enemies.

I've been hunkering down and getting some wri...

April 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been hunkering down and getting some writing done yesterday and this morning. I had my daughter read the very short "Princess of Lies" dialog. The entire Isle of the Dead area is turning out to be highly comedic, hopefully not too much so for the tone of the campaign. It's hard to resist playing up the humor when the player is rocking their way through the afterlives, magical lute in hand.

In terms of the gameplay itself, I'm slowly getting the kinks worked out. Being attacked while playing is currently somewhat fatal, as the dialog that drives your playing fails and you get swarmed by enemies. I think I have a workaround for that, basically clearing your combat state and starting the dialog again. It was working fairly well this morning.

The battle effects need some more refinement, though admittedly my focus when playing is watching the frets. I may end up using my "camera companion" approach to try and get interesting shots of the battle. We'll see how it turns out.

As for today, I need to finish my dialog and get it to the voice actors. I have a couple who are itching to work on something fairly soon.

Half the fun of Lute Hero is looking and soun...

April 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Half the fun of Lute Hero is looking and sounding cool. Because of this, the player will have several lutes to choose from, including this rather nifty demonic-looking one.

The other day I sweated bullets getting the scripting in place for Lute Hero. You can now teleport to the afterlife and play your lute. There's lots of bugs to fix, but you can sort of smite foes with your music. The big issue at the moment is that if you get attacked in any way, the dialog used to capture keystrokes fails. I might be able to make it uninterruptable or somehow make the player invulnerable to direct attacks. Still, it's nice to see the game mechanic in action.

As for today, I'm writing dialog. I have a bunch of voice actors ready to go, but without something to read, it's not very useful. I've been working on some of the characters in the afterlife. Odin is fairly amusing in a brash sort of way, and I wrote a short one for the Princess of Lies. Good times.

I got the last of six songs in the game

April 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got the last of six songs in the game. The title is "Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny", which is exactly as awesome as you might suspect. The song itself is hard to play, but fun. My first time through, it turns out some double notes made it in the game, which are impossible to play using my wacky dialog method.

There's now visual confirmation when you play a note correctly. I'm also tracking notes played correctly, a score multiplier, the score, and a "power" rating. If you play eight notes, an effect is played. In practice mode, these are just nice visuals. When in combat, the effect will damage opponents. If you've played flawlessly, the damage will be increased depending on the score multiplier.

Different songs will have different special effects. There's also some nice choices to the player. With a simple song, it's easier to play it well, which increases the power of the effect. With more complex songs, it's harder to keep your power multiplier up, but there are lots more notes and the effects happen more quickly. Hopefully today I can actually get some of that worked out.

I continue to work on a patch for DW2. James Gray voiced one of the missing NPCs, actually managing to pull off a Jamaican accent. He's also done a couple characters for the Alphabet Assault module, which is relatively finished.

Oh, and it looks like Dark Waters 1 won the Bronze award for last year's Module of the Year contest. Many thanks to all of you who voted. I'm thinking DW2 is a stronger contestent for this year, and hopefully DW3 will be well received as well. Though I'm sure I'd carry on regardless, it's nice to get these little moments of recognition.

It's always amazing when something goes from ...

April 07, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's always amazing when something goes from a concept to something that's actually fun. I finally got the module so that it recognizes missed notes if you don't play anything or play the wrong note. It keeps track of how many notes you've got right in a row, which will tie into the power of each effect. Eventually I'll put together some kind of scoring system just for fun. I also changed the way the songs are selected. They're on the side and disappear after a selection, which lets the player see the screen better. Finally, I have five of six songs in the game and working properly. The last one plays, but no notes appear.

The good news is that after slaving away for hours this weekend, I was testing and would keep playing past the point I needed to. The tunes were catchy and it was surprisingly fun to pretend to play along with it.

There's still tons to do. I need to set up the non-practice areas. There's camera movements that have to be created, as well as lighting and animation. It's lots of hard work, but I think the most technically challenging part is over now.

Work on Lute Hero continues

April 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Work on Lute Hero continues. The game is slowly becoming a reality. The basic game mechanic basically works, though I worry a little how well it'll fare on slower PCs. I have the note playing tied to the effects system, so you can play the song and watch flames shoot out from either side of the stage. There's also a practice mode and a battle mode, at least in theory. Players can come back to entertain the undead even after completing the quest.

It's still very rough and needs lots of attention. I made icons to allow switching between the songs, though I'm not entirely happy with the mechanism. Right now I have six songs planned, which is fine for the little quest, but more would be good. The fret icons are now colored, which helps with visibility. Slowly getting there.

I've been fiddling with Lute Hero and the Isl...

April 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been fiddling with Lute Hero and the Isle of the Dead. My little play put on by the Troupe of the Damned is pretty funny. My daughter wanted to watch it over and over, as she liked the silly voices.

I continue to work on Lute Hero. I was wanting to make it work anywhere in the campaign, but due to the inability to create sound objects on the fly, I think it'll be limited to the Isle of the Dead.

I found a bug that caused the sound effects to be off by a little. I'm also working on getting a second song in the game. The notes and song don't seem completely lined up, so I continue to work on the basic scripts. It's hard work, but I'm hoping it turns out well.

I managed a fair bit of miscellaneous work ye...

April 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I managed a fair bit of miscellaneous work yesterday. The Isle of the Dead is more than a flat grassy plain. Hopefully it's appropriately ominous, which the giant skull carved out of rock tends to help. Even better, I took my old recording for the Troupe of the Damned and chopped it up so that it can be added to the game. I had to make a bit of custom content for the occasion as well.

I still find the dialog for the play hysterically funny, a spoof on those French farces from long ago. The fact that it's Death, wearing a giant demon mask and entertaining his undead horde, makes it doubly funny.

I made a bunch of progress in other areas yesterday. I added several new gems for the SAGE system, suitably powerful for the final act in the game. I finished up one of the Port Brighton side quests, though I may still tweak it more. Today I'm going to try and work on Lute Hero some more, see if I can put together an actual game. Fun, fun!

One of my favorite April Fool's jokes was Bli...

April 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

One of my favorite April Fool's jokes was Blizzard's new Bard class. Ironically a lot of the tone and humor is exactly what I'd like to do for Lute Hero. We'll see if I can pull it off.

I still have a bunch of e-mails in my InBox that I'm slowly going through. If I haven't gotten back to you, I suppose I'm ignoring you, but at least you're in good company.

I'm itching to get cracking on DW3, balanced by my desire to keep working on patches for DW2. We'll see which urge wins today.

I've been working away at my little side ques...

April 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working away at my little side quest, trying to make Port Brighton an interesting place to explore. My goal is to continue to tie together all the various themes and story lines so that as the player continues to have those "Aha! So that's why . . . " moments.

This morning I whipped up four new set items known as Death's Vestments. Death is such a fun character in the game that I decided to have some special equipment that went with the Death theme.

Coming back to work after four days off, I'll likely be crazy busy for awhile. Hopefully I can finish up my current side quest and get to other things.

Update: And it looks like my podcast is posted now.

Yet another update: I posted a beta patch for DW1 and DW2. You can find them here, as usual. I haven't tried to fix all the issues. I'm getting reports of crashes around the docks, for some odd reason. The big fix with this version is the Pirate Card "card vanishing" issue. You can find the other bug fixes here.

I worked long and hard on a hook hand system ...

March 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked long and hard on a hook hand system yesterday. I keep feeling like my goal is to maximize the Pirate Quotient of the game, making sure I have adequate parrots, eye patches, and the like. I may have to work on peg legs next, just to make sure things seem complete.

The hook hand system feels pretty solid to me, with enough hard choices to make it interesting.

As for today, I've made a long list of things to work on. I've got a side quest that needs to be fleshed out. I have interior areas to build. The list is long, but they're fun to work on.

I got Jonny's hooks in-game and equippable by...

March 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got Jonny's hooks in-game and equippable by the player. I'm currently scheming a hook system that should be entertaining to play with.

I was a very good boy yesterday and whipped up a possible solution to the "disappearing card" issue in the Pirate Card game that strikes some players. It uses a different approach to finding the cards that have been played and bringing them back into your hand. There's arrays, sorting, and other complicated things. The most bizarre part is that the first time I tested it out, it worked perfectly. I'm still slowly working away at a new patch that should fix some of these more obscure issues.

Today I'm heading to Portland, which gives me a two-hour car trip to theoretically write. I was digging around for a good notebook and found a bunch of dialog from the first pirate mod I was working on. This was the one for Bioware, which never quite worked out. Some of the dialog is great, though, so I think I'm going to steal parts.

The meek may inherit the earth, but the sea belongs to the strong.

Yesterday was my big writing day, and I crank...

March 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Yesterday was my big writing day, and I cranked out a hopefully funny side quest (which is still entirely unscripted), among other things. I hope to do more today, and again tomorrow during the car ride up to Portland. I'm trying really hard to keep Port Brighton as an interesting hub full of various things to do.

I'm still working away on a patch for the game. Holger recorded some great dwarven voices for Logan. I think I want to try to fix the weird "disappearing card" issue that some people are having. I thought I'd fixed it early, but evidently it's coming back for some folks.

I added some more goodies to the campaign yes...

March 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I added some more goodies to the campaign yesterday. Here's a shot of Lord Brighton showing off his ethereal sextant and demonic chalkboard. These came from the forbidden archives of the City of Doors Initiative, a Planescape-themed venture from the days of the original NWN game. They made some great stuff, some of which didn't make the light of day. I did some touch-up and got things ready for NWN2, but it's otherwise their stuff, and I think they look great.

I also dutifully worked on the patch for DW2. The fixes are pretty minor. There were a couple dialogs that wouldn't fire if you only docked in Brighton Underground. There was also an issue when invading a thieves den. One of the NPCs would stand there while you attacked. It turns out his AI was rushing to grab a dagger, but it was in an unreachable place due to walkmesh issues. Easily solved.

As for today, I continue to hope to get to some writing. I got the new hooks in the game yesterday and had to give the owner of the Black Spot one to match his eye patch. Plus the parrot is now missing and there's only an empty perch. I sense a story brewing.

I'm busy as usual

March 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm busy as usual. Yesterday I hunkered down and finished the Clocktower model I needed to make for a certain area. It's not fancy, but it doesn't really need to be. Mostly players will see it on the high seas map and then later wander in and down the stairs to the city below.

I've been a little scatterbrained as of late, jumping from area to area as the mood strikes me. With so much to do, I suppose I have that flexibility at the moment. Eventually I'll need to hunker down and start finishing areas.

I'm also getting lots of volunteers for voice actors at the moment, which is great. Of course, now I've got to actually write a bunch of dialog for them to speak. I'd be tuckered out if this whole thing wasn't so much fun.

Once again, Jonny at Bouncy Rock has come up ...

March 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Once again, Jonny at Bouncy Rock has come up with something amazing. He's whipped up three types of hook hands that work with all different races and genders. You can see a bigger version here. I can't wait to start getting these into the game and bump up the Piratey Quotent a few more notches.

I'm still slowly getting through e-mail this morning, as is typical for a Monday. It looks like there's a few bugs, and a few workarounds I'm coding in for the next patch. There's a weird issue for the import/export method I propose to get around the "can't buy a ship" bug. When you export a character, it strips out item variables, which causes the Blade of Victory to revert to a single gem slot. What I'll be doing is checking to see if the player has the sword, and setting the variables as appropriate.

I'm starting to think of those sort of issues with DW3. What I'll probably do is provide a way for players to jump right into it and select which choices they made (e.g. allied with Lord Brighton, romanced Heather, etc.). That should help for both testing and players who skip playing the first two modules.

As for today, I'll probably spend a little time working on bug fixing (most of which is fairly minor. Mostly I'd like to work on the core modules and getting the beginning put together properly. There's lots to do, but fortunately it's fun.

I worked on the Belly of the Beast area more ...

March 24, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked on the Belly of the Beast area more today. It's taking forever, but looks pretty good. I've ended up making some extra placeables, visual effects, and other supporting custom content. I also worked on scripting for a couple parts of the area, and have a couple more to go. I'm generally pretty happy with the way things are turning out, though I have at least another week to go.

My kids kept wanting to play as I fiddled with it. Emma wanted to explore and kept asking how to make Lucy appear. Sam wanted me to make the hair as long as possible and kept pushing me to get the scripting done.

Jonny whipped up another awesome hook hand fo...

March 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Jonny whipped up another awesome hook hand for your piratey enjoyment. Yet again I'm endlessly thankful to all the folks who have helped with Dark Waters. I couldn't have done it without you all.

As for me, I've been working on the Isle of Flesh. PJJ poked around with the barely playable version and pointed out that the "Belly of the Beast" area didn't look very good. I had simply remapped the textures of a tileset, and it admittedly looked pretty lousy. I'm redoing it using an exterior and it looks orders of magnitude better. Even better, I have some interesting encounters planned that should make for some unusual combats.

I redid the external area, getting rid of the...

March 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I redid the external area, getting rid of the sky map entirely. I think it's getting closer to the final, dreamy look that I'm shooting for. There's a bit more scripting required, but the area is pretty close to done (it's a very short intro area, basically).

Now I need to figure out what area to work on next. What I'd really like to get to is some more writing today, but I may end up working on converting the Clockwork Man or lighthouse modules. They're somewhat lengthy, so they'd take awhile.

Jonny at Bouncy Rock has already made a hook hand to add to the Dark Waters piratey goodness. It's always a treat to watch a professional modeler at work. I would have been happy with something vaguely pointing sticking out of an arm socket. Getting something with rough straps of leather and grooved steel is a treat. I think he's going to do a fancy version as well, which is extra cool.

As an aside, it looks like my podcast should arrive next Friday. Finally everyone will get to hear me as a real person, and not some monster, seductive Frenchman, or Death itself.

The bug reports have been trickling in this w...

March 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The bug reports have been trickling in this week, but at a much reduced rate than what I'd expected. Hopefully it's a sign that those many months of debug time have paid off. While most of the issues are rare, it looks like the 64-bit version of Vista has a fair number of crashes with the game. Sadly I'm not sure there's a lot I can do to fix those. In terms of the other bugs, I'll probably put together an update in a week or two, though the issues are fairly mild. With the 1.12 patch out yesterday, I'd like to update the 2da files and see if the patch causes any problems.

In the meantime, I've continued to work on the next act of the campaign. This morning I worked on the "Place Between" area, trying to make it suitably eerie. The scripting needs some work, though, as when I tested the starting point of the module, I became invisible and no one came to talk to me. Sniff.

Finally, the folks at NWN Podcast have graciously volunteered to make a hook-hand for the next module. I'm horribly excited to get some hook-hand pirates in the game, so I appreciate Jonny's help immensely.

I woke up early this morning and started writ...

March 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I woke up early this morning and started writing code. The Alphabet Assault module is slowly approaching being done, with just a few script tweaks, fixes, and combat balances before it's ready for testing.

I'm trying to figure out which module to work on next. I might do Sanity Defense next. That one should be pretty easy to cross off my list. Then there's the main quests, and of course the grand finale. I'm holding off on that until towards the end.

Decisions, decisions.

I've been working on the end of the Alphabet ...

March 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been working on the end of the Alphabet Assault game. It's still way too much fun to pause and see if I can spell some incredibly long word. There's something about summoning literary destruction upon one's foes that fills me with glee.

I see five or so e-mails in my In Box. Just glancing at the descriptions, half are congratulatory and the other half are bug related. It seems the "Pirate Card game discards cards" bug has returned, even after slaving away at it for so long a few weeks back. As far as I could tell, the issue had to do with bugs in the GetNearestCreature function, which is frustrating. In any case, I'll summon my courage later this morning and read the details.

I'd really like to finish up the scripting for Alphabet Assault module today. There's not much left to do and I'm having lots of fun building for a change.

I've been hiding away from email ever since N...

March 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been hiding away from email ever since NWN2 went live. I'm sure Monday will bring the usual madness of huge volumes of email I need to sort through. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with my family and leisurely working on the next Act of Dark Waters.

I'm working on the traditional epic battle at the end of one of the modules. It's sort of tongue-in-cheek epic, which makes it fun to do. The dialog is written, and now it's just a matter of scripting everything. Of course, this is still just one of many modules in the final Act, so I've got a long haul ahead of me.

Well, today's the day, I think

March 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, today's the day, I think. I decided to be a fickle perfectionist and did one more build before going live. This one fixes an issue with Robert only being level one when you meet him in DW1. You also couldn't get the magic card holder in DW2 due to a typo on my part.

Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

I have a few odd errors I'm still investigating. A couple people are reporting crashes when returning to Port Brighton. They'll do some things there, leave, but can't get back in. So far I haven't figured out why that might happen.

Otherwise, I'm trying hard to do fun things when I can. I worked on the final level of the Alphabet Assault game, making it suitably epic-looking (though I'm still not sure why there'd be pools of lava in a library).

Since I'm typically disconnected from e-mail over the weekend, hopefully the go-live later today on the Vault will go smoothly.

I'm uploading the files to the Vault as I typ...

March 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm uploading the files to the Vault as I type this. It probably won't be until tomorrow before everything is posted on the Vault. Files have to be shuffled around and the interview has to be organized. It will have been over three years since I started working on Dark Waters. I'd like to extend my thanks to everyone who helped out through that long process.

I suspect the next week or so will be spent focused on release issues, but hopefully I can sneak in some time on the next act of the campaign. Hopefully the number of bugs will be relatively minimal after spending the last six months fixing bugs. I already know of one issue where Robert isn't at level 3 when he joins you in DW1. It's easy to fix, but probably won't make it until a post-release patch.

Though I'm always nervous about doing so, I ...

March 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Though I'm always nervous about doing so, I ended up making a new build tonight in preparation for Friday's release. Raphael finished his Lord Brighton voices. The readme file got updated. I fixed a couple minor issues with the High Seas system. There was one semi-serious bug with High Seas where if you captured a pirate ship and returned to port, it would still be there afterwards. It turns out I wasn't making the captured ship enough like a player ship, and I think that's finally working properly now.

You can grab the latest files here:
Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

If someone with far too much time on their hands wants to give it a shot and capture a pirate ship, that would be lovely.

There's something entertaining about hitting ...

March 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

There's something entertaining about hitting people with a severed, decomposing arm. I whipped one up this morning and had fun playing around with it a little. I need to finish up the quest that lets you get it, but I couldn't wait to make the thing.

Yesterday while my son was at his fencing class, I wrote some more dialog for an upcoming quest. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to actually make things for a change. Hopefully I can get the dialog in-game relatively soon and see if I can get the module itself ready.

I might start uploading DW1 and DW2 to the Vault today, depending on how things go. I'm always nervous that I missed some horrible problem before release. The occasional bug report trickles in and I have a few more sound clips I want to add, so it's a challenge to decide when the actual go-live date should be. It feels like I'm sticking to my course despite the occasional wave and gust of wind. Steady, lads (and lasses). Not much longer.

One of the recurring themes of Dark Waters is...

March 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

One of the recurring themes of Dark Waters is the coming of magic. In the third Act, this takes on a more physical aspect with a giant Veil that stretches across the sea. The sea and islands on the other side of the barrier are different. This morning I hooked up High Seas to these new islands, so modules that were merely little test systems now feel like part of a larger game.

I need to finish up writing my responses to the Vault interview today. With luck, tomorrow is the release day. For those who are curious, here are the bug notes from yesterday's fixes. I'm really glad to take care of the crash bugs that have been plaguing me for so many months.

I took it easy for a few days, the calm befor...

March 10, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I took it easy for a few days, the calm before the storm of release. Yesterday I started to get into the next module in earnest, having a good time working on new islands in the High Seas area. I would feel negligent if I didn't include the archetypal skull-shaped mountain. It's the home of Death, and the player can now pay him a visit.

Though the third act is only barely playable, you can now sail from the docks of Port Brighton to Death's lair. Hooking up the rest of the islands is straightforward, if tedious.

On Friday I put together a "Crash Team" of the people running into crashes. One person reported success by deleting all the placeables and placed effects from the areas causing problems. Why that would matter, I have no idea. I see I have more reports in my in box this morning, so I'll have to take a closer look.

I'm tentatively shooting at Wednesday for release, unless I get any show-stopping bugs. Typos and other minor things will likely wait for a post-release patch.

Update: It looks like deleting placeables and visual effects didn't fix anything, but AlanC9 reported success when resizing the areas that cause problems to 2x2. Evidently tiny areas cause crashes for some people for some odd reason.

Later Update: I have confirmation that we've finally found the cause of the crash bug. It turns out that some people have problems entering an area that's 1x2 in size. This should be fixed in the most recent version:

Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

Someone also had an "area not available" bug when trying to board. That should be fixed now. There was another typo. Heather and Daniel's familiar and animal companion were missing names. Everyone extend a warm welcome to Mister Snuggles and Buddy.

The preview is up at the Vault, now

March 07, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The preview is up at the Vault, now. YouTube is starting to put up higher resolution versions of their movies, so I prefer this one when blowing it up to full screen. The below one works fine when smaller, though.

First off, here's what I'm hoping is the abso...

March 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

First off, here's what I'm hoping is the absolute last version of the modules:

Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

The only significant difference is that this version has a few more lines recorded from Chris Serani (aka Daniel), including this classic.

Theoretically the Vault will put together a spotlight for Dark Waters today. It should have a pretty movie and screenshots for all to see.

I continue to work with the handful of people who are having crash problems. What was really weird is that I passed along a very boring, vanilla module and they still had crashes. At this point I'm pinning my hopes on the 1.12 patch for people who are running into these problems.

In terms of the final release of the game, I'm thinking next week seems good to me. I'd love to get the 1.12 patch installed and do a final test to make sure it doesn't break anything (and maybe it'll even fix things). If it doesn't come out relatively soon, I'll plan on releasing and hoping for the best.

I was a very good boy yesterday and this morning

March 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was a very good boy yesterday and this morning. I probably fixed twenty typos, a puzzle logic problem, a crash bug for the pirate card game, and lots more. You can take a look at all the issues I fixed here.

I took another shot at fixing the infamous crash bug some people get when trying to enter the Armory, tattoo shop, and the Mad Hatter. When I was looking at the Gnome Engineers for the Pirate Card game, they never appeared as visible and would often crash the game. After lots of fiddling, I recreated the creature blueprint from scratch and everything started to work again. Using the same logic, I ended up recreating the NPC in each of the affected shops. Though it's a long-shot, this might prevent crashes for people.

My testing took me all over the place, with little typo fixes in both DW1 and DW2. There were a few issues I couldn't replicate, which is always frustrating. In general, though, I feel very good about the state of the module. Even though the campaign is extremely complicated, things generally work as designed.

Here are the latest files:
Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

The PR blitz should start up shortly. If these versions generally work, I'll plan on getting them to the Vault right around the same time. Neato.

I got a few more bug reports that came in las...

March 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got a few more bug reports that came in last night. It's still amazing that there can be typos buried in there after so many months of testing. There also seem to be some bugs with the "magic card holder" quest that the dwarven boy gives you. I think that before the last build, it was too hard to actually complete it (you had to win certain cards from an opponent, which was really challenging).

I also fired off an e-mail to Maximus, so I think the ball is officially rolling. I didn't promise I'd be done tomorrow, so hopefully I have a little more time left. I can fill those familiar pre-release jitters, hoping I didn't miss anything horrible or break anything with my last build.

I've been sniffly, but on the mend

March 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been sniffly, but on the mend. This morning I packaged up some new installers which you can get to via the Downloads page. Here are the bug notes. Over the weekend I got one more of the infamous crash bugs, along with some minor ones. As long as my high seas fixes in this latest build didn't break anything, I'm hoping I'm pretty much ready to release. I'd love it if the 1.12 NWN2 patch would come out, but I haven't heard any hint that it's coming out real soon.

I think I'll get the ball rolling in a day or two.

Well, I got a few more bug reports from the H...

March 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, I got a few more bug reports from the High Seas system from someone who plundered his way to fame and fortune. It turns out you couldn't sell Ninjas in port, along with any other high-numbered crew. It also turns out I let pirate ships cheat, by having more weapons than their ship type allowed. In order to fix that, I created two types of pirate ships, big and small. The bigger ones are a bigger challenge to players, as they can carry more weapons and crew, though the smaller ones carry more cargo.

Other than that, I was sick yesterday, so I didn't do much of importance. We'll see what bug reports Monday brings.

While it would be silly of me to hope that to...

February 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

While it would be silly of me to hope that today's release will be completely bug-free, I'm hopeful it's the closest I've ever been. I fixed over 80 different issues in this most recent build. A few were highly annoying, such as your cargo miraculously duplicating under certain circumstances. Most were milder, including typos and the like. Many were fixes to issues with DW1, and I'm happy that the first module is getting polished up as well. I feel I rushed the release the first time around, and some things weren't as stable as I would have liked.

I still have people reporting crashes when entering some areas in the game. The good news (for me, anyway) is that if the player switches to another computer, the crash issues seem to go away. Evidently there's something about certain computers that is causing the problem. I'm pinning my hopes on the NWN2 1.12 patch fixing things, as I'm not sure what else I can do.

Here are the links to the latest beta patches:
Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)
Like before, if it seems relatively bug free come Monday, I'll start the ball rolling on getting things posted to the Vault.

I did a podcast with the NWN2 podcast folks (I don't think it's posted quite yet). I mostly rambled on for a half an hour, though they did manage to make me do my Death voice for a short bit. They also asked me about lipsynching and installers, so I ended up posting my lipsynch/wav conversion utility and sample installer files over on the downloads page. For those rare few of you who fiddle with such things, hopefully you'll find it useful.

I might do a bit of work with the next act today. I still want to get Lute Hero a bit more polished. I think I was dreaming about it last night, so it's evidently haunting my psyche. Better nip that one in the bud.

Well, I don't think we'll move from beta to f...

February 28, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, I don't think we'll move from beta to final this month, as there's only another day to go. Still, I'm hopeful I can declare this thing polished and ready to go next month, maybe even in a week or two. The only show-stopping bug I've seen lately is the "crash on area load" one that randomly shows up for a small number of people. I'm putting my hopes in the upcoming NWN2 1.12 patch, as I keep hearing that these crashes happen in the official campaign as well.

I finished cleaning up the last of the DW1 bugs, including some fairly obscure ones. Now I'm into DW2 again. Most of the bugs aren't too serious (other than one person getting the infamous crash), but they're certainly annoying enough to fix. In one case, a magic item with a unique power did nothing. In another, the descriptions for NPCs were showing up with quotes instead of apostrophes. It turns out that copying from Word inserted a slanted quote, which NWN2 turned into a double quote. Swell.

I'm going to spend today fixing as many of the DW2 bugs as possible. If all goes well, I'll get a new build ready for the weekend.

I'm also doing a podcast tonight. Hopefully I won't embarrass myself too badly.

I've been grinding through the list of bugs

February 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been grinding through the list of bugs. It's amazing to think that there are still hidden ones buried away after all these years. Jessica dug up some rare ones, such as dialog for Heather and Daniel that could never fire and was only visible in the toolset.

This morning I had a couple reports that you couldn't gain friendship with Heather. It turns out you actually could, but the opportunities were so rare that most people didn't see anything. I'm going through the dialog this morning and adding in more places to make friends and influence people, or at least Heather.

Yesterday I got Chris' Mad Hatter lines chopped up and in the game. They're an order of magnitude better than my work, surprisingly funny in a twitchy sort of way. Plus I got to edit out soda belches from the raw source file, which is always a treat.

Michele asked me to do a podcast, and we're ironing out the details at the moment. People will get to hear my normal voice instead of the bizarre ones I do for the NPCs. Maybe I'll do the whole interview as Death, just for fun.

It appears my hubris in thinking I was nearly...

February 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It appears my hubris in thinking I was nearly done has angered the gods in the deities.2da file. The heavens opened up and a host of bug reports drifted down. Unfortunately I had yet another person report a crash bug, this time when trying to get to Port Brighton from the High Seas area. Once the problem gets "stuck" in a save file, it seems to happen consistently. Very frustrating.

On the plus side, PJJ said he could play through without problems. Holger sent me some voice files for one of the unvoiced NPCs, which I hooked up. Chris sent me some MadHatter lines which I'll chop up and attach today.

The other silver lining is that the 1.12 patch will hopefully come out before Dark Water's release. If I'm really lucky, it'll magically fix the mysterious crash issues and all will be well in the world. And maybe I'll get a pony too.

I had two luxurious days of not working too h...

February 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I had two luxurious days of not working too hard on Dark Waters. I played around with a new idea for a game called WordPlay, which is a bit like Apples-to-Apples. The tricky part is the AI, which relies on huge array that lists the best choice given different card combinations. If I have 100 adjectives and 300 nouns, that's 30,000 possible combinations. To add to the fun, I'd like to have different styles of players, such as the Paladin who looks for the literal connections (e.g. "Vile" and "Undead" go together nicely for him). For the Trickster player, he might pick "My Spleen" when faced with the adjective "Tasty".

The only way I could possibly create those connections is by turning it over to the masses to do it for me. It's still a lot of work, but perhaps some of the folks out in Internet-land would be willing to spend a few minutes each day deciding that the best match for "Buxom" is "My Animal Companion". Anyway, we'll see how that wacky idea pans out.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Lute Hero game I'm working on. I have to do some really crazy timing things in order to get the song to synchronize with the note display. I had an epiphany that I could just set the time so that the seconds and milliseconds were zero at the start of the song, which made it vastly easier to keep track of things. The wacky game now seems to work, which means I suppose I have to build an actual module around it.

This finally gets me to the state of Dark Waters and whether or not I'll be officially releasing it before the sun burns out and humanity retreats to underground caverns.

It looks like the people who were having crashing problems continue to have issues. The number is small (maybe less than 5%), but it's super annoying and I'm to the point where I'm hoping the next NWN2 patch takes care of it. The only crazy workaround I've heard might work is opening the module in the toolset and running it from there. Why that would help, I have no idea. The only other vaguely good news is that entering those crash-prone areas isn't absolutely necessary for completing the game.

I got a couple presents in my in box this morning, some more voices for a couple characters. I had a few bug reports, which I'd like to investigate, but they may belong to the "happens every once in awhile" category of bugs. I also got some reports of minor plot inconsistencies, which I'm almost happy about. It's nice things have gotten to that point for a change.

So, I'm thinking that I can put together at least one more build, but unless there's something really serious after that, I'd like to go live. After six months debugging and polishing, it feels pretty darn' ready.

I hopefully squished my last bug this morning...

February 22, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I hopefully squished my last bug this morning (well, I doubt it, but I'm ever hopeful). There were some issues with Daniel's romance that I needed to fix. After writing a bit of code, I activated the QA item, and picked the dialog choice to turn on the romance.

I was greeted by a scream and realized that activating the quest involved killing off one of the NPCs. Daniel and Heather appeared nonplussed, but I bent down to pay my last respects to the poor guy.

Soon enough, I was romancing away. As planned, I had to leave Woodhaven and hop on a ship before the romance would be active again. The first time around, I didn't get my variables all right and ended up stuck behind the house in a holding area with some pigs. Damn pigs.

I fiddled yet some more, this time getting everything working apparently smoothly. I had gotten reports of crash issues, which I finally experienced myself. My guess is that if Daniel wasn't fully loaded before I took control of him and moved the player around, that might cause problems. I added a short delay before the excitement began and that seemed to do the trick. Daniel was well on the way to true love and I'm able to finally get this module out the door. Well, hopefully. We'll see what bug reports I get this weekend.

I'll be posting the latest build momentarily as it takes awhile to upload everything.

Update:
Okay - here are the latest files. With luck, everything will go well this weekend and I can finally declare this thing done. Can't wait!
Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

Last night it was back to DW1 to test out som...

February 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Last night it was back to DW1 to test out some new fixes and make sure they didn't break anything. I'd forgotten how big a contrast there was with DW2, which feels far more open in comparison. Everything feels oppressive and tense, wandering through those abandoned halls.

I posted new builds over on the downloads section, and here's the latest bug notes. The problem was serious, but not happening frequently. I added some "just in case" scripts that hopefully prevent a cutscene from endlessly repeating.

PJJ reported another weird bug with DW2. Running over a trigger accidentally can cause problems with Daniel's romance (along with a crash). I think I know what I can do to prevent it, so I'm going to try and fix it today and get a new build out tomorrow. If the weekend goes well and no serious bugs come in, I may declare it done and set things up with Maximus at the Vault to get it finally posted.

I worked on some countdown graphics for Lute ...

February 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I worked on some countdown graphics for Lute Hero today, a short warning for players before the song begins. The Lute Hero system is actually working pretty good these days. Last night I was actually able to play through a song and the notes only seemed off by a second or so. I think I can fix that last issue, add a bit more polish, and actually have a working system.

I did get a report of a fairly significant issue that can happen in DW1, so I added some fixes and need to test it again tonight. Hopefully it'll go quick and I can get a new build to everyone tomorrow.

I'm itching to get working on the next act in the campaign. Some of the new systems are pretty fun to play with, though they're not glued together very well yet.

After the whirlwind of the weekend and yester...

February 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

After the whirlwind of the weekend and yesterday, today was very quiet. I tinkered a bit more with Lute Hero, realizing that my "note display" code needs a bit of work. I pondered more about the rest of the campaign, lose ends I need to tie up, gameplay I'd like to have, and how I'd like the game to come to a conclusion (or which of several conclusions the player could guide the story towards).

I haven't heard anything about the most recent build yet. If nothing particularly dramatic is reported, I'll likely begin the process of getting this thing released into the wild.

I spent many hours last weekend, fixing bugs ...

February 18, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I spent many hours last weekend, fixing bugs and polishing things up. It's amazing how many odd little issues still remain after so many months of testing. The most hair-pulling was the Pirate Card issue, which should be working as designed now. I also snuck in some possible fixes to the crashing issue, though it's likely superstitious optimism on my part. Here are the latest builds for the day:
Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)
Here's a list of the latest bug fixes. Dark Waters 1 has some slight changes this time around, so it's best to grab both if you want the full experience.

I've got at least another build in the works, but I feel pretty good about the state of the game. I've never spent so many months polishing a single module and I think it shows. PJJ played the game for fun and claims to have enjoyed himself. It's usually hard for me to get much more than a sense of satisfaction when something works right, though I admittedly like going back to the Pirate Card game and soundly beating that little girl.

I try hard to look towards the future and the next act of the campaign. I think I've figured out why the frets in Lute Hero don't match up quite right to the song. It should be easy to fix with a little fiddling. I also enjoyed watching Heather play her flintlock pistol like a flute. Now that's a talented woman!

Periodically NWN2 drives me to the brink of i...

February 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Periodically NWN2 drives me to the brink of insanity and then gives me a little shove.

I had gotten reports of the left-most card in the Pirate Card game vanishing at the beginning of every new turn. Sure enough, if that card hadn't been played, it would disappear as if it wasn't in your hand. I spent hours pouring through the logic of the code and couldn't make any sense of it. I made an odd discovery this morning where if I stand to the left of my cards, it works fine, otherwise it doesn't.

Pulling my hair out, I rewrote the code that finds the cards in your hand. I changed the GetNearestObject function to a GetFirstObjectInArea function. It works fine now, other than the order of the cards not being the same between draws. The only thing I can imagine is that some NWN2 patch introduced a subtle bug with GetNearestObject, as previous versions of the PirateCard game seem to work fine. Very frustrating.

I might see if there's a more elegant solution that retains the card order. There's also some visual effects that should probably be cleaned up. I'm also hoping that a hunch I had yesterday fixes some of our crash issues. I turned off the Environmental Audio Effects for all the areas in Port Brighton. It's a complete hunch, based on EAX not being the most stable thing on every system. We'll see how it turns out.

Even after all these months, people are still...

February 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Even after all these months, people are still finding the odd little bug here and there. I'm running across some of my own as well, typically bugs I thought I'd fixed previously, but I didn't quite do it.

I tested the High Seas system quite a bit this morning. It turns out the trading tips weren't displaying properly, which was easy to fix once I figured out what was going on. I had previously made a change (I thought) so that if the enemy captain dies, the rest of the ship surrenders. It turns out I had a typo which prevented it from happening, but I think it's fixed now.

Boarding actions in High Seas are generally pretty nail-biting. I ended up getting involved in some pretty crazy mêlées, but coming out the winner in the end. There's something quite satisfying about sailing across the ocean, a pirate ship meekly in tow.

I have a handful of other bugs to look at and some weird DW1 issues to investigate. I'm also going to incorporate the sound changes that might possibly fix the crash issues into the next build. They shouldn't really impact the play experience, so I think I'll give it a try.

I got another batch of bug reports, though th...

February 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got another batch of bug reports, though they're getting increasingly minor. Hopefully this release is one of my most polished, which is great as it's also the most complicated of any I've done. Chris is working on some new voices, I'll probably do some more debugging and tweaks this weekend, and the 1.12 patch hopefully will emerge soon. A handful of people are still experiencing crashes and I continue to be befuddled. One odd suggestion that seemed to at least temporarily help someone was to open Port Brighton in the toolset, increase the music delay, and decrease the volume of ambient sounds. Dunno. It's always hard to say what change is related to what fix, especially if the problem is intermittent.

Just for fun, I played a little more with Lute Hero this morning. I go back and forth trying to decide if this is worth doing. The "Alphabet Assault" game was a thing of beauty - the main coding came together in a few days and I could see how cool it was within a week. Lute Hero is taking a lot more time to work the kinks out, but I'm hopeful it'll be fun. This morning I fixed the problem so you can actually play the notes again. I still get periodic issues with the display getting messed up and the notes and song aren't quite synchronized. Hopefully those issues are all fixable, but it's one of the trickier things I've tried to do. Hopefully it'll be worth it.

I spent this morning testing the changes to t...

February 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I spent this morning testing the changes to the deity selection scripts. You now have to select one of the "approved" deities, though you should have a variety of opportunities to change them as you discover certain items in the game. As it was, you could pick whoever you wanted when you leveled up, which sort of defeated the point.

In any case, I spent a lot of time playing with my Lathander-blessed shield, leveling up, and choosing different deities.

We're still working on getting the crash issues resolved today, if at all possible. At the moment we're looking into possible issues with the Port Brighton area, which is one of the largest and densely populated in the game. It seems to be one of those problems that hits some people fairly consistently, but not others. For some, reinstalling the module or their game seems to help. Very mysterious.

Update: Another day, another build:
Dark Waters 1 (full)
Dark Waters 2 (full)

The fixes are fairly minor - you can see them all here. I continue to flail around trying to figure out crash bugs. There doesn't seem to be a lot of sense around what it takes to prevent it, but I continue to fiddle.

Chris, who voices Daniel, has graciously volunteered to re-voice the Mad Hatter and another dialog, so that'll be less of my annoying voice you'll all be forced to hear. As the days move on, it feels increasingly close to done, other than that one remaining crash issue.

Yet another update:
I'm getting even more people saying that they've fixed the GUI bug by uninstalling Dark Waters 1 and reinstalling the latest version of DW1 and DW2. I'm thinking about including it in my installation instructions.

I think things are getting really close

February 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think things are getting really close. It turns out the last build of mine introduced two issues, which I'm fixing in the next build. If you tried to do Daniel's romance in Woodhaven without getting on a ship in-between, the game would get to an unplayable state. I also managed to mess up the walkmesh in one part of an area after fixing it somewhere else.

I put together a series of test modules in hopes of tracking down the crash problem we've been having. I'm still mystified as to the cause, but perhaps there's something I can actually fix. I had another person e-mail me and let me know that a reinstall of the module fixed the crashing problem.

I'd like to test some of the changes I recently made, and I'll likely do a new build tomorrow.

I made some really good progress squishing bu...

February 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I made some really good progress squishing bugs last night. Without further adieu, here's a link to the most recent file:

Dark Waters 2 (full install)

You can also head over to the downloads section to the right to find the Lite versions as well as DW1. Here are the bug notes for the curious.

The biggest fix was a nasty loop in the "party keeps drinking" animation script that caused everything to slow down. I think there's a moral about drinking and coding in there somewhere, but it escapes me.

I also voiced the Mad Hatter. It's not exactly my best work, technically or acting-wise, but silence bugs me more than yet another NPC that sounds like me.

I was also completely unable to recreate the "I enter area X and the game crashes" bug after going through the Mad Hatter area. I really wanted this to be something I could fix, but sadly it may be part of the bug fixes for the upcoming NWN2 1.12 patch. Rumor has it that won't be out until the end of the month, which puts me in a weird position of either waiting or releasing, knowing that some people will have problems and blame my module.

For those of you who are manually patching to fix the GUI-related issues, you can find the patches here.

It's really weird being on the edge of releasing a module I've been working on for nearly a year (over a year if you include time spent on the prototype). With the first module, I pushed it out the door prematurely. With this one, I find myself having a hard time letting it go. Perhaps I'll see what the next round of bug testing brings and then start the final PR and release push if all looks good.

I'd also like to extend my thanks to everyone who downloaded the module to test it out. It looks like over a hundred people gave it a try. I really appreciate it.

Update: I'm getting reports of people fixing GUI problems and crashing problems not by reinstalling NWN2, but by installing the most recent version of DW1 (which you can find in the downloads section on the left). It's possible that there's still some junk left over from DW1, so the safest approach is to uninstall your old DW1, install the new DW1, and then install DW2. Hopefully that's the least painful option.

I finally figured out the format of the MIDI ...

February 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I finally figured out the format of the MIDI files that go along with the Frets on Fire songs. That means that the notes for Lute Hero should display as expected, as opposed to my previously nonsensical pattern of notes.

In terms of the rest of the game, I've had some successes and failures. The zombies in the audience now do a vague dance of sorts, where before they stood around unimpressed by my wicked lute playing. Unfortunately the notes aren't always displaying right and it doesn't recognize me correctly playing notes. More work is required.

In terms of this Dark Waters beta I'm supposedly working on, I had a new batch of e-mails come in over the weekend. There's a critical bug that needs to be fixed (at the very end, of course). There's also an assortment of other issues I need to look at, though I'm reserving my deepest frustration for the "can't buy a ship" problem and the "game crashes when entering area X" problem.

It looks like the game crashing error may be fixed in an upcoming patch (1.12). In terms of the GUI issue, I'm still baffled. Some people are saying that none of the troubleshooting steps I suggested work. Another seems to have fixed the issue by patching and restarting. It is indeed a mystery.

In any case, I hope to work on fixing things today. I might need to add in some GUI work-arounds, just in case. I wish I understood the problem better. Is the GUI problem a symptom of a larger problem? Does a reinstall fix things? (I've had a lot of problems in the past with people modifying their NWN1 setup, especially with things in the override folder) Does the issue have to do with the operating system? Does the expansion or patch level matter? Inquiring minds want to know.

Update:
I just got an emailfrom Easthaven, who managed to fix the GUI bug by doing the following:

1. Reinstall nwn2
2. Reinstall motb
3. Manually patch with "nwn2_pcx1_english_from1101115_to1101116"
4. Manually patch with "nwn2_pcx1_english_from1101116_to1111152"
5. Manually patch with "nwn2_pc_english_from1111152_to1111153"
6. Restart the module from the beginning of chapter 2.

After all my debugging, testing, and slaving ...

February 10, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

After all my debugging, testing, and slaving away, I decided to do something fun yesterday. I turned to the frustratingly broken Lute Hero and decided to see if I could resurrect it from the ashes.

Sure enough, it now is actually kind of playable. Notes stream down and you can click on the number keys to play them. If you miss, it plays a "missed note" sound and turns down the volume the guitar sound object. If you get it right, the volume of the guitar sound object goes to max. It's complicated, but the general idea is that it mimics the way Guitar Hero works.

There are still weird issues. If I simply don't play a note, the guitar track still plays. My undead horde continues to dance around even when the song is over. I need the ability to switch between easy and hard modes. The program that generates the note track needs some work. I need to be able to switch between practice and battle mode. Practice mode needs camera movements and effects. The fret icons need to have better colors.

Still, I think I'm convinced it's a viable mini-game. Hopefully I can tell soon enough that it's fun as well. We'll see.

Well, I was up at the crack of dawn again, am...

February 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Well, I was up at the crack of dawn again, amassing a fleet, talking to parrots, and generally doing odd things in the hopes of getting things finalized.

I did run into a problem this morning, a realization that I screwed up and overwrote some fixes I made earlier in the week. The only good thing about it was that it was easy to redo, but I still felt pretty stupid about it.

Most of the minor issues should be fixed at this point. The serious ones, such as periodic crashes, no ship polymorph, and dysfunctional GUIs are far more mysterious. I don't have the problem, nor did most of the testers. I've been reading how some crashes with MotB are fixed with a reinstall, but that seems a rather drastic and annoying solution. I've added a troubleshooting section in the readme that hopefully helps with some of the problems people have been experiencing.

I still haven't read through every single e-mail I've received regarding the beta (there were a ton), so I'd still like to do that before release. I suspect there's a lot of cases of the same issues being reported, but it's still good to check. For those interested in all the bugs fixed with this build, here's the patch notes.

I'm busy slowly uploading all the latest files to the FileFront site and deleting all the old ones. For now, here's the latest versions (only DW2 should have any changes):
Dark Waters 1 (full build)
Dark Waters 2 (full build)

I'll upload the rest as the day goes on.

Update: Okay - all the files should be uploaded and I deleted all the old ones.

I'm slowly getting a handle on some of the mo...

February 08, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm slowly getting a handle on some of the more mysterious problems that have plagued the beta release. For those of you having problems, here's a quick troubleshooting guide:

• Make sure you're running the latest NWN2 patch (1.11). If you aren't, you'll need to repatch and restart the module.
• Try restarting the game (e.g. export your character, start DW1, and choose "Jump to next module"). If you turn on debug mode before you talk to the dock master, I think you can buy a ship immediately (if not, leave the docks and come back). This can at least tell you if the ship buy problem was fixed.
• Check your override folders and make sure there's nothing in there.
• If you're running VISTA, make sure you run NWN2 as an administrator (right-click and choose Run as Administrator). If you don't, it seems that NWN2 can't create files in the temporary folder needed for a campaign to work. You can end up never getting permission to buy ships and other weird issues.
• Turn on debug mode using the Game Options and try whatever's breaking. Sometimes useful tidbits show up in the chat window.

I was up at four o'clock this morning, testin...

February 07, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was up at four o'clock this morning, testing, fixing, and preparing for the real launch of the game. I'm hoping that the "can't buy a ship" and other issues may be related to people playing with a slightly older NWN2 patch. It turns out that all sorts of things will break, forcing you to patch and restart the module before you can play again. Unlike NWN1, it appears NWN2 doesn't block players from playing modules created with a toolset with a higher patch.

I also spent some time putting together some high resolution screenshots. I haven't fiddled with my quality settings for a long time and was vaguely surprised I couldn't have shadows and 4x anti-aliasing. It also turns out my video card could handle a lot of the high-end features turned on, so I went ahead and did so.

PJJ, one of my longtime testers, reported a few issues with the build from last week, but is otherwise hopeful we're close to release. I still haven't gone through all the bug reports yet, but hopefully I can do that soon, put together a final build, and go gold (or the non-CD equivalent) after getting the final okay from the testers.

I'm making updates to the Dark Waters 2 beta ...

February 06, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm making updates to the Dark Waters 2 beta test installer faster than I normally would, in hopes of fixing the mysterious "can't buy a ship" problem:
Dark Waters 2 - full install

It also incorporates a few of the other fixes I'm tinkering with. Theoretically the duel with Jack should be more robust (sometimes it would cancel out in the middle). The psionic feats now have thier correct descriptions.

I'm still way behind in checking e-mail and making lists of problems. I really need to get cracking on gathering up the latest batch of bugs and start working on fixing them. It's a funny mix - some are really minor and some are horrible, with very few in between. What drives me nuts are the ones I can't reproduce, such as crashes to the desktop or when saving. It doesn't make any sense at all.

I continue to work away at the infamous "Can'...

February 05, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I continue to work away at the infamous "Can't buy a ship" problem. I think I actually made things worse with my last build and made it hard to buy anything besides a Fishing Boat (they can buy it, but the button is invisible). I did some more work and came up with a different way of displaying things, but I'm still not convinced it fixes the problem.

I'm getting reports that it's not just the ship GUIs, but the sacrifice button in the Pirate Card game too. It would be really weird if there was some global "custom GUIs don't work on some PCs" problem. Hopefully I can get some more information that might shed light on what's going on. The most bizarre thing is that during alpha testing, the issue never came up.

All this makes me glad I've taken my time with lots of testing this time around. It's crazy to think that the entire Shadowlords campaign was coded and released in nine months, which is about how long the second act of Dark Waters is going to take.

Mondays are notoriously busy for me, so it's ...

February 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Mondays are notoriously busy for me, so it's unlikely I won't be able to do much actual fixing today. Skimming through the 10+ e-mails that came in for the beta test, it looks like a fair number of people are running into weird problems. I'm thinking that at least some of them may be due to weird stuff in the override directory. Others, such as crashes when going into certain areas, are harder to diagnose. Maybe it's general NWN2 instability, maybe it's unique to the player's system, or maybe there's something especially idiotic I'm doing that makes it periodically break.

Lute Hero continues to make me nervous. This morning I added in the ability to click a number on the keyboard and it plays a note. The main issue I kept running into is that periodically the scripts would slow down and things would pause. Why it happens, I'm not sure, as it's not consistent. I may have to optimize the code, switch to a different approach, or give up entirely if what I'm trying just isn't feasible. We'll see.

It's been a bit of a rough weekend

February 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's been a bit of a rough weekend. My wife was in Portland, I was watching the kids, and Emma was pretty sick the whole time. Though I didn't do much debugging, I managed to work on Lute Hero a bit more.

The more I fiddle with it, the more I realize how close to the edge of what's possible with the NWN2 engine it is. I'm hoping I'm inspired-crazy instead of stupid-crazy, but I probably won't be able to tell until I get a little further more with testing. I worry about things like processor speed, as I'm updating the GUI roughly once every hundredth of a second. Occasionally if things start going on, the display pauses, making it impossible to actually play.

Hopefully soon I can get the guitar playing aspect down. The notes are being read from the 2da file. I have an easy and hard section, though they currently do nothing. I have the song playing and the guitar sound object ready, but the volume is currently zero. The theory is that if the player hits the right notes, the guitar will play at the maximum volume. If the note is played wrong, I'll play a missed note wav file and the guitar object volume goes to zero. We'll see how it goes.

Tomorrow will likely bring more testing and bug reports. Supposedly the annoying "can't buy a ship" problem continues for some. Sigh.

I spent way too much time yesterday and the d...

February 01, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I spent way too much time yesterday and the day before gathering up reported bugs, fixing them, and trying to do tests to make sure the fix works. There's still a few mysterious and seemingly random game-crashing bugs, but most of the others were cosmetic and fixed without too much trouble. I feel pretty good about this latest build and should be posting the latest version shortly, along with notes about all the things that were fixed.

For the curious, this screenshot was taken from the end of Dark Waters 1. Previously, Heather and Daniel were invisible due to an issue with having companions join right before teleporting them to another area. When Dark Waters 2 gets released, there's a ton of bug fixes for the first module as well.

Update:
Okay - the latest build has been uploaded now. I have a somewhat organized list of fixes. Here's a direct link to the files in case they're not on the Downloads page yet:
Dark Waters 1 (full install)
Dark Waters 2 (full install)

Second Update:
One of the more mysterious show-stopping bugs is that some people can't buy a ship. They get permission, but when they click on the button to buy the ship, nothing happens. It works fine for me and many other testers, of course. Very frustrating.

I was up at four o'clock this morning, trying...

January 30, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was up at four o'clock this morning, trying to fix the big list of problems that have come in. One of the most critical is that when doing boarding actions, sometimes you'd end up stuck on the ship after killing the entire enemy crew.

One brave tester gave me the clue - that the problem happened after the first boarding action. Sure enough, I was able to replicate the problem. The heartbeat that kept track of the crew counts kept firing, but seemed to die on the part of the script that kept creatures from getting stuck in the walkmesh. The latter issue was rare, so I yanked it, which seemed to fix the problem.

I ran across a couple bugs I found myself. The first was that fishing boats went a bit too deep in the water, so they always looked like they were sinking. The second was that when I captured a ship with special cargo, it created an infinite amount of them in my inventory. It was a nice bonus, but one I sadly had to fix.

I'm also getting reports that some people are having problems buying a ship. They click the buy link, get the pop-up "Are you sure?" message, but clicking on that does nothing. I think I'm going to redo the way it works and get rid of the "Are you sure?" box entirely. Why it works for some people but not others is a complete mystery to me.

I'm going to do my darndest to work through as many bugs as possible today. I might not be able to fix them all, but hopefully I can keep the caffiene going and the bug fixes working.

The bugs continue to pour in

January 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The bugs continue to pour in. I hopefully fixed on this morning, I hope, though I suspect the issue has more to do with the GUI not giving good feedback. It turns out you could try to buy a ship if you didn't have any gold and the player with speak "not enough gold." Unfortunately it was hidden behind the GUI, so you couldn't really tell. I've now switched it over to a very obvious pop-up box.

It's been a little nutty today, as our little...

January 29, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's been a little nutty today, as our little valley has been blanketed in snow. We usually get rain all winter, so they closed the schools and I try to work from home. I did get a good list of bugs to sink my teeth into. Hopefully I can look at some fixes tonight.

I put together a nifty little movie for the g...

January 27, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I put together a nifty little movie for the game, complete with appropriately naval music. It was fun to do, though now I have to collect some screenshots that are always requested whenever an interview is done. Tomorrow I'll see what the latest bug testing has revealed and decide if it's time to chat with Maximus at the Vault and set up a formal preview thingie.

I'm itching to do some coding on Lute Hero and get things to the point where I can actually play some notes. I think I have all the tricky stuff in place and now I just need to find some time to make the rest happen.

The movie making continues

January 26, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The movie making continues. I captured an epic boarding action with some pirates. I decided to go straight for the enemy captain, a ruthless Pirate Queen. Ironically we ended up killing each other almost simultaneously. The crew shouted out "I surrender!" as I died and they dumped my corpse over at the docks of Port Brighton.

I also accomplished one of the more tricky tasks for Lute Hero. I have a system that analyzes the midi files that accompany a Frets on Fire song. Theoretically it'll let me time the guitar notes to the song so the Lute Hero game actually works. I may end up creating different difficulty levels for each song. Though you can't play simultaneous notes, sometimes the notes come in pretty close to each other. Lots of testing will be required.

Hopefully today I can find some time to put together my preview movie. If the latest release looks good from a QA standpoint, I might actually ponder releasing relatively soon.

It turns out the Vista problem was indeed rel...

January 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It turns out the Vista problem was indeed related to permissions. Running NWN2 as an administrator fixed the issue.

The last of the descriptions are in the game and I'll be creating new builds shortly. I'll update this post as soon as the new version is out. The main fix is switching the skill gem activation to the GUI rather than the broken dialog, so you can actually increase your psionic skills. I've also added descriptions to all the NPCs, which is a nice little detail.

This morning I started putting together movies for the grand PR blitz. My goal is to show off the novel features of the game without showing off too much. I think I've captured about half of my footage, but still want to get some ship-to-ship combat and boarding actions. Fun, fun.

Update: I got distracted, but you'll find the most recent DW2 version off the download page.

Work continues

January 25, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Work continues. I have descriptions for all the NPCs in the game. I got my first bug report from a beta tester, a really weird one that has to do with the modules acting like they're not part of a campaign. I suspect permission issues with Vista, but we'll see.

I'm feeling a bit better today, taking some t...

January 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm feeling a bit better today, taking some time to work on descriptions for each of the NPCs in the game. It's a fairly time consuming job, but I think it should add some more depth to the game. Here's a few tidbits:

This laid-back man seems to be in a perpetual conversation with an unseen creature perched on his shoulder. Strangely, no one else in the room seems to pay him much attention.

This beautiful woman wears a revealing outfit, seemingly to show off the intricate tattoos that cover her pale skin. Her every movement and glance seems like a practiced flirt, as if she was aware her appearance often sold her services to sailors who wished her hands on their body.

With luck, I can put together a new build to the testers in a day or two. I'd also like to start getting some promotional material together - screenshots and movies and the like. Not much longer, I think.

I've been getting really nasty headaches the ...

January 23, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've been getting really nasty headaches the last couple of days, but I'm feeling better at the moment. I managed some bug fixing this morning, hopefully taking care of a couple of the issues PJJ reported. One of his requests was for more descriptions added to characters, so I'm going to see if I can undertake that effort before release.

Hopefully not much further . . .

Over the weekend, our family played way too m...

January 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Over the weekend, our family played way too much Guitar Hero (look here for the video - I'm at the very end). It inspired me to revamp the Lute Hero game I've been fiddling with lately.

There's now a working GUI with numbers that float down from the top and a background that smoothly scrolls. The hardest part was getting it to synchronize properly with the music. The DelayCommand wasn't accurate enough, so I ended up calculating the number of centiseconds from the start of the song (that's hundredths of a second). If something took up some extra processing power, I might have to adjust the position of the background and frets a few extra pixels.

The other hard part is getting the music working properly in the game. I'm using songs from Frets on Fire, which conveniently breaks each song into a guitar track and the other music. Each song is a placed object, allowing me to adjust the volume level accordingly. The plan is to have the guitar music stop if you play the wrong note.

There's still tons of work to do. The hardest will likely be making a program to read midi files to generate a notes file that NWN2 will read. I need a specially crafted dialog box that stays hidden while letting the player press number keys to play notes. Some things won't be possible, such as pressing multiple keys or seeing of a key is held down. The game engine just isn't that flexible. Still, with the lighting, effects, and camera work, hopefully it'll be fun. I'm already thinking of some over-the-top dialog that could be quite funny.

In terms of a beta release, I had a few bugs come in over the weekend, so it won't be a perfect install, but hopefully all the major bugs are fixed. You can find links on the Downloads page. There are new versions of both DarkWaters 1 and DarkWaters 2. If you want to replay DW1, there should be new fixes and features (such as achievements), or you can jump straight to DW2 from the first dialog.

As always, feel free to send me an e-mail if you run into problems. I'll be working on a new build this week to fix the bugs that have been reported. It might be fun to put together some PR material such as movies and photos for the Vault. It's weird getting so close to release.

I have been seeing portents, praying to forgo...

January 20, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I have been seeing portents, praying to forgotten gods, and making unholy alliances. Tomorrow is looking like the day of beta release.

Yesterday I fixed the last reported crash bug, fixed up some dialog, and corrected a few miscellaneous issues. There was some voice files left unattached, so I got those taken care of. I'm feeling pretty confident that tomorrow is the day. If the beta test doesn't produce any major bugs, I'll probably do a big release on the Vault soon afterwards.

The insane busyness continues, but I found so...

January 19, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

The insane busyness continues, but I found some time to work on sound clips. Some of the voice testers passed along some new clips and I tried to fake a Scottish accent. It turns out that having Scottish blood in my ancestry doesn't automatically give me the right accent. I muddled through, in any case.

I marked, but hadn't read PJJ's latest bug notes until today. He dared speak the "beta test" phrase, which is the first time I've heard it bandied about. There's still one very serious bug I need to fix, and a few minor annoying ones, but I'm thinking that if I can pull it off, I might post a link to the full build early next week.

Release day always leaves me with a mix of excitement and dread. I know there will be problems that I miss and I get to play tech support to the world, but hopefully the joy of getting this project out the door will make up for it all.

My life is crazy

January 17, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My life is crazy. I'm summoning time from the very ether in order to work on my project, beating back the assorted demons that nip away trying to get my attention. I have some great e-mails from testers and voice actors, waiting for my time. In my remaining minutes today, I'm going to do my darndest to respond.

I had a few minutes this morning that I spent fiddling with the Lute Hero mini-game. I added some nifty geysers and have most everyone animating relatively well, now. I'd like them to vary their animation based on how well the player is doing. The zombies are also just standing there, hunched over with that "Got Brains?" vacant look in their eyes. It would be nice if I could get them moving too.

Typically game development is a surprisingly ...

January 16, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Typically game development is a surprisingly dry affair. I write code, test out ideas, and hold up gameplay to some Platonic measure of Fun. Still, when I was working on animating the audience today, I got a pretty serious chuckle. I decided to simply animate my audience of undead in a loop and they proceeded to do some sort of synchronized ballet move endlessly. I guess you had to be there.

In terms of today, I worked more on the Alphabet Assault areas. It's fairly area-heavy, which translates into lots of room decoration, creating items, naming creatures, and so on. Creating areas is a bit like playing with dolls, assuming you were some sort of disturbed child that likes demons, lava, and treasure. I think I want to do one final level and call it good.

I've noticed that in the last three screensho...

January 15, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I've noticed that in the last three screenshots, I've taken a screenshot right after clicking effect #1, which is a stream of fire and smoke erupting from my lava pool on each side of the stage. I'm trying to add other things, including sea monsters, geysers, and the like, just to get the proper psychadelic light show feel to the mini-game.

I also woke up the other day with the answer to a programming problem bouncing around in my brain. It's probably a sign that I think way too much about my little hobby. In any case, I implemented it this morning and the little circles appear properly, are clickable, though don't do anything interesting yet.

The problem with the last build was embarrasingly simple. It turns out I'd moved the start point of the module to my test area and forgot to move it back. I made a new build and have to get it uploaded sometime today . . .

My brave group of testers are reporting probl...

January 14, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

My brave group of testers are reporting problems with the latest build. I've got to take a look, though I'm having problems finding time on this busy, busy day.

I sunk more time yesterday into getting what I'm tentatively calling "Lute Hero" into the game. Basically circles appear on the screen, slowly shrinking. The goal is to click on them when they reach the inner circle. It sort of works - meaning the circles get smaller and you can click on the inner one to make a script fire. Now there's a tremendous amount of details to sort out.

I sunk a huge amount of time last night getti...

January 13, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I sunk a huge amount of time last night getting ready for the Lute Hero mini-game. In addition to simply having notes to click on, I want to make sure that it's visually stunning. In order to do so, I worked with the good ol' Gestalt camera system, enhancing it with an invisible object camera that lets me do all manner of wacky camera angles and movements. Additionally, I have an "Effects Board" sort of panel that lets me choose camera movements, effects, lighting, and animations.

It's pretty cool to fiddle with and it should theoretically let me plan out specific camera motions while the song plays. The goal is to cycle through a variety of camera cuts, dependent on whether or not the song is starting, ending, and how well the player is doing. Though it's mostly for my purposes, it might be fun to let the player fiddle with it as an unlockable thing.

Hopefully today I can start integrating the actual music and get the player's GUI started.

I was a very good boy and sent off a new buil...

January 12, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I was a very good boy and sent off a new build to the testers yesterday. There's still some things I'd like to review, but in general I'm feeling pretty enthusiastic about the state of the game.

I did get a report that there was a problem with Dreamcatcher 1 and the new NWN1 patch. I may have to dust things off and take a look at that. Amazingly enough, people still play it even after all these years.

Finally, I started in on Lute Hero and/or Zombie Skaraoke. At this point it's mostly plans, an area, and a custom placeable for lava lighting effects. It'll take awhile, but hopefully it ends up being fun.

Debugging continues, as it has for the last f...

January 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Debugging continues, as it has for the last few months. You'd think at this point I wouldn't be amazed at how long debugging a game takes. My general rule of thumb these days is to allow for debugging time equivalent to the time it takes to make a game.

I worked on the bug list again last night, as well as sneaking in a few more features. I went back to the Catspaw quest, fixing some horribly broken AI and having Lucy show up. I also took care of some obscure and bad bugs, such as Chronomancer issues I managed to break with my last fixes and grave digging problems if you decided to do it during the day.

As for today, I'm going to work on the Firestarter quest and any other odds and ends I might have missed. With luck, I can get out a build this afternoon or perhaps tomorrow. I'm itching to work on some of my wacky mini-games for the next module and maybe I can find some time this afternoon.

It's been busy, but I've managed to sink in a...

January 11, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It's been busy, but I've managed to sink in a fair amount of work on the latest bug list. The issues range from me being careless, such as moving the start position to a module, to minor oversights, such as forgetting to pay the player for completing a small quest (well, begging really). I also sent out a request to finish the last of Lord Brighton's dialog, along with apologies in case I misplaced them somewhere.

In terms of the module itself, Lucy makes a few guest appearances and is occasionally useful. I need to sneak one more of those in, and then I'll call it good.

I'm really hoping to find some time today and tomorrow to clean up bugs. With luck, I can get a new build to testers this weekend.

I'm back from vacation and buried in e-mail t...

January 09, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I'm back from vacation and buried in e-mail this morning. I see a couple more bug reports have come in, though at first glance they seemed relatively short. Needless to say, I'm going to try very hard to work on them this week.

One of the up sides of having such a long QA period is that I keep sneaking things in. I realized that Lucy didn't make an appearance in this second module after playing a fairly pivotal role in the first. She now shows up and has some dialog (thanks to a recording session with my daughter).

I'm also tossing around ideas for the third module. My son named it "Zombie Skaraoke" and we were trying to write zombie-themed lyrics. We'll see if it makes an appearance in the game, but I'm hopeful.

I think I have the last of the bugs sorted ou...

January 04, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I think I have the last of the bugs sorted out, at least all that have been reported. The list was huge (over 60 items), but I think I got 'em all. I don't think any were game-stopping, but some were pretty ugly and more than a few were embarrassing.

I wasn't able to fully test out each and every fix, but I wanted to double-check the big ones. I headed back to do the Firestarter quest and found myself really enjoying it. It's one of my favorite traditional quests in the game, with lots of alignment-related choices and multiple ways to resolve things.

The other bug I checked out this morning was one with the ending. It turns out my fearless crew continued to drink their blades or pistols well after the "drinking and chatting" conversation. It was amusing, but not exactly something I wanted in the final game.

I'm working on getting a new build together today. My very convenient "create all builds" batch file just kicked off and it's grinding away. Next will be uploading the nearly half a gigabyte of files up to the server, which may take awhile. After that gets done, I need to send a letter to the testers and see how things go.

I'll be away from my the Internet for a few days, I think. We're headed to Bend for a final trip to play in the snow before the kids go back to school. I'll brave my wife's eye-rolling and take along my computer, as usual. I'd really like to put some effort into the third module, perhaps lay out the world map and start hanging some of the modules off of it. Everything is incredibly rough still, but I'd like to show things off to the testing group and get some early "fun/not-fun" feedback.

It feels good to be getting towards the end o...

January 03, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

It feels good to be getting towards the end of my massive bug list. I'm down to a handful of bugs, half of which I need to investigate a little more before declaring them fixed. Still, I'm going to try really hard to get a new build out tomorrow so everyone can test over the weekend.

I ran into a funny bug last night, one that was strangely familiar. I jumped to the docks to test the high seas system and found a giant werewolf waiting for me. It turns out my "get lead ship" code was returning garbage and deciding it was okay to spawn in a ship and polymorph it to be a werewolf. Silly code.

No pretty pictures or video today

January 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

No pretty pictures or video today. Just a progress report that I'm debugging many, many issues that have been uncovered. I ran into some more "Aha!" moments when I finally figured out a long-running issue that I never really resolved. There's a few more "Grr" moments where NWN2 refuses to do my bidding, such as the PC clones appearing in the Chronomancer quest. I'm tempted to create a specific "Clone Cleanup" script that runs every second or two and destroys any clones it finds that have been marked for disposal.

I did some more recordings of voices this morning, filling in some gaps. I think Jessica will do some of the female opponents at Woodhaven. I still need to circle back with Raphael to make sure all of Lord Brighton's lines are voiced. I think there's still a few missing.

I'm going to try really hard to get a build to everyone by the end of the week. I doubt it'll be completely problem-free, but it's nice that you can finish the game now and hopefully have fun doing it.

I got a funny Christmas card from Jay at Bioware

January 02, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

I got a funny Christmas card from Jay at Bioware. I think it's from my almost-contract with them years ago. They're such great guys that they continue to send along Christmas cards. My favorite was the Jade Empire one from a couple years ago. There were paper cut-out action figures for each of the characters. My kids shredded them, of course, but not after lots of fun games.

I've been very good this New Year, doing hours of debugging. The most elaborate fix was adding situation-specific hints to the psionic combat section. It'll give you general hints, as well as suggesting certain creatures to exploit your foe's weaknesses.

Jessica has been a debugging maniac and I'm less than halfway through her reported issues. The most obscure was a continuity issue with Daniel's last name in the first module, something no one noticed until now. Gold star, Jessica.

Yesterday I worked on some tilesets for the alphabet assault game. Tiles have always been a pain to work with, and NWN2 is no easier. After lots of work, I think I made seven new ones, with only minor weirdnesses.