Episode 30: Animal Companions & Module Integrity!

I am still making gradual progress with module two, although some of the latest scripting affected module one (again) due to some of the coding I was working spilling over into general mechanics of the game as a whole. This was especially the case when my wife (who is playing module one for a ninth time and planning a tenth with other characters) noticed that the "Dinosaur Companion" feat she took for her druid/fighter failed to give her the update after levelling. Read more ...

ANIMAL COMPANION UPGRADE

Basically, my wife discovered a bug in the NWN2 game that did not allow her to use animal companion upgrade feat because she had taken it at the time she had levelled as a fighter. She had just become a 5th level druid and first level fighter, and the feat was legitimately taken. However, upon summoning her animal companion, she was attended by her normal companion and not a dinosaur as expected.

While working on the fix (to allow my wife her new dinosaur companion), she also asked if I could add an option to rename the companion. Furthermore, as I investigated the issue some more, I thought it would be a good time to also adapt the code to allow such characters who can summon animals to be able to choose the type summoned from each calling. It seemed a shame to restrict the PC to one animal type that was determined at the time of PC creation. Therefore, I added another button (alongside the new Change Name button I added) called Change Type, which allows the PC to switch their companion as long as they have the feat, it is on full hit points and they are not in combat.

New Animal Companion GUIs

MODULE INTEGRITY

I have also been privileged to have some feedback from another player. During the feedback, it came to light that the player had enabled some "cheats", which appeared to have had an adverse effect on the module. It came to light that some of these cheats had actually worked against the player due to the way my module works. Suffice to say, I recommended removing said cheats, but sadly, the damage had been done to the module and the player had to start again.

I have now added a warning to the download site, to help warn players of the dangers of applying cheats with my module. Furthermore, I have tried to help circumvent these potential pitfalls for future players in the code. Hopefully, the warning will be enough, and the integrity code will never be relied upon. However, it is now there as a potential safeguard against the player breaking their game inadvertently.

OTHER NEWS

I also recently updated module one to v1.25E after a logical flow bug was discovered in the sewer quest if a player did not speak with Grist again after finding/acquiring the sewer book. If the "expected" path had been followed, then this bug would never manifest. However, if a player should deviate by going down the sewers before speaking to Grist about the book, then it would mean the player would never receive the Sewer Access key from Jed. This has now been fixed in v1.25E. The workaround for earlier versions is just to make sure you speak with Grist after acquiring the book.

Module two is still progressing as well. I did further work on background conversation options, and continued to improve the overall efficiency of the code. I now have a number of quests in the module started, and hope to add more in the following  weeks. Here is a screenshot from one I have been working on ...

A Strange Device!