Problems, Problems & Puzzles

It's been over a fortnight since I last blogged, but in that time I have been trying to carry on gradually chipping away at the project. There have been some distractions, including birthday's, minor operations and small hardware glitches, but between all that I have managed to do a little in the toolset.

Scripting (Animations)

On the scripting front, I have been trying to achieve a "simple" animation: make an NPC sleep and wake up when disturbed in some way. Since using NWN2 (as opposed to NWN1), I have found scripting animations more difficult. In particular, the latest animation I was attempting to create would not stop its loop after being disturbed, so an NPC would "wake up and get up", only to fall back to the floor asleep again. Thankfully, Pain (who I have mentioned in blogs before) was able to give me the answer of passing the "%" sign as an animation, which stops any current animation that may be playing. A useful tip I now share with you.

Toolset (Texture Bug)

Another incident that caused me to slow down on the creative front was the need to update my VGA drivers. After doing so, I noticed that an in-game texture (on one square only) was not looking like it did in the toolset. After some experimentation, I was able to track the problem down to disabling the "Wait For Vertical Sync" option in the graphic settings. Removing the cross from the box (which means it does not wait) allowed the texture to display as it should in the game as well as the toolset. UPDATE: DISABLE Normal Mapped Terrain will resolve this issue with more consistency. The previous method often required the game to still be restarted,whereas the latter method does not. The only problem is that the textures do not look as good using the latter method.

Custom Content (Puzzles)

The material I have managed to add in the last couple of weeks includes a new image relating to a puzzle in the game. I won't go into much detail so as not to spoil it, but it involved creating a new image that once found in the game is a clue to solving one of the main puzzles of the module. There are a few more parts to this puzzle that I still need to do, but I do have the entire puzzle outlined in my paper manual already. I am quite excited about its inclusion and look forward to seeing players reactions and responses when played.

On another front, I am continuing to write conversations for NPCs and am now finding myself having to be extra careful in doing so, as my "open ended" design has me having to consider a number of approaches the player may be coming from. As I mention in a previous post somewhere, I intend to reduce these types of scenarios to help reduce the amount of extra writing these type of open-ended approaches require.

Slowly coming along ....