Wendersnaven.com (a resource for nwn2 builders)

A screenshot of the Tower of Gold, a temple once devoted to Waukeen and recently reconsecrated to the Risen Sun.

For testing in BD. Send them to me at zach[dot]holbrook[at]gmail.com. Also, let me know 1) whether you completed the Castle Joyous side quest with the character, 2) whether you had Gossam in your party with the character, and 3) a basic idea of your character's personality (I know this seems weird, but I have my reasons). Thanks!

That's five.

Well, anyway, after pulling my hair out for the better part of the week, I've finally made some progress. As many of you know, or not depending on if you've been paying attention (and really, the literacy rates these days...) I'm on the last leg of the journey that is building a mod too big for one person to build. I expect to have the critical paths "done" by the end of the week. That is, if things go differently than they did this week. Because it was a huge pain the ass.

But, y'all cats will see why. You're going to trip.

In retrospect, I think I'm doing it the stupid way. The final (not really, I'll come back to that) quests of the mod modify the mod so much that I should have just made another mod with duplicate areas and just filled it in. Now I'm paiting hundreds of waypoints and spawning and deleting stuff every other cutscene. But screw it, it's already mostly done.

It's pretty wild though. Hopefully it doesn't suck because getting the thing to work properly has been a huge hassle.

Anyway, now back to what I was talking about two paragraphs ago, the "final" quest. See, the thing is, the city portion is open ended, so you don't necessarily have to do that one last, and when it's done you can keep going with sidequests. What I'm concerned about now is whether that's a sufficient "ending" to the module. There's two quest chains that are required to proceed to the third, and currently non-existant, chapter. So you could do those two first (well, probably not because you'll need a level or two and some gear to have a shot I think), and then do sidequests until it's done, which I don't think is a very satisifying ending.

So I was thinking about adding on the beginning of Chapter 3 as the ending of Chapter 2 instead, so at least it doesn't end on a diretionless sidequest frenzy. What do you all think?

Thing about that is, I got my wife's leave date, the 2nd of August. Which is great for the family here, but not so great for you all. I was originally projected to be the 7th. So I basically lost a week of time to finish this.

So bearing in mind that if I add an extra chunk, it probably wouldn't be out until September. I could probably get that done before she comes, but my list of "extras" wouldn't make the cut, which I want to do at least some of them.

I guess we'll see how much time I have left later this week and take it from there.

But what do you all think? Weird non-ending now, or a month delay for another 15-20 minutes for a better ending?

Well I admit I've had a heck of a time coming up with a good texture combo for Mouth of Song. I wanted this part to look completely different than the other two forested areas I did. As you can see from my past screenshots, each forest type that I do, despite them all being an Autumn, kind of environment, are completely different in look and feel.

I wanted Mouth of song to be a darker kind of forest but for the life of me I could not come up with a good texture combo, so it's just a derivative of what I did in another forest. Still it's looking very good. And with the Live Oaks set to a 3x scale, they do a very good job of shadowing out the forest floor and making it look like a very deep forest and the base of the "Shadowtop" trees are blending in really well....



This is at least a decent update on Mouth of Song.

No great advances in computer game modding were made this weekend, but I did make it to the beach. Even with the AC pumping my room is a stuffy den of indolence.

I hope that the new president makes everyone in America watch this every day!!! Featuring the lovely ladies of Dungeon Majesty.

By E.C.Patterson

To celebrate our anniversary this year, my wife and I got to spend 36 kid-free hours the other weekend at a hotel overlooking Sacacomie lake. This nearly unspoiled lake (spoiled pretty much only by the hotel) is about 2 hours north-east of Montreal.

What do you think I was telling myself while taking in this view from the restaurant terrace or while canoeing on the lake?

“Damn, another weekend wasted. I could be home in my basement right now working on the mod.”

Just joking! Of course I wasn’t thinking that.

But looking at the islands dotting the lake, the gentle hills crowning it, covered by evergreens, I really was contemplating for a moment just how best I could render this landscape in the NWN2 toolset. This is not by any means the first time I have had thoughts along those lines, and I’m convinced most builders have had them too.

I used to view the world in a similar way at the time, many years ago, when I fancied myself a photographer. Everywhere I looked I wasn’t simply seeing the reality before me, but was constantly evaluating the possibility for a photograph, determining angle, analysing the light.

It got really annoying after a while to constantly see the world as a potential picture. And that was part (albeit a minor one) of my decision to let go of that intensive pursuit, and forget about being a photographer.

I hope to be able to guard myself against this happening with modding. So far so good I think.
--------

Into the Forgotten Realms continues to progress. The mod is pretty much at the halfway point now.

As I mentioned before, I’m producing a teaser trailer to mark this event. So some of my modding time lately has gone into filming and editing game footage for it.

Here’s a bit of assembled combat footage put together for the trailer. It’s still a bit crude, and I’m not at all sure it will be part as is of the teaser, but I thought I’d show it to you nonetheless.

ItFR will have heavy combat potential, while being low in hack and slash, if that makes sense. All combat will be logically tied into the plot. The plans are for somewhere around 15 encounters that could result in combat within the 4-5 hours of the mod. The combat minded will be able to handle all these encounters by force, while those inclined to deal with them differently can cut combat by half probably.

Download version (2 mb)

A little comparison operator humor in the title. Could be my lamest joke to date. Determing that may be my next poll.

In any case I'm back, fully fingered, mostly because I didn't actually light any fireworks this year, with the rest of that because being I'm not an idiot. See, last few years the cops have been hammering down on illegal fireworks, and in Wisconsin the legal ones basically are either snakes, sparklers, marigolds (kind of like sparklers, used to light better fireworks mostly), and 3 inch tall fountains.

So there's really no point in even bothering with that, I'm not going to lower myself to lighting sparklers just for the sake of lighting fireworks. I like to think I'm a better man than that. A man who appreciates a good mortar or finding a dud from the 4th on the beach and throwing it into a campfire.

Speaking of Wisconsin, and again bringing up brats, where I'm from there we have a brat fry basically every Sunday year round. Not "we" as in my family, but like going to the parking lot of basically any business establishment anywhere and finding a group of people cooking brats. Which nobody else in the country does, and I find that bizarre. I mean, they're good as hell and an any time of day type meal. Although here in Tennessee, they seem to like to sell either pit bulls or shoes in all of the parking lots. I'll leave that to you to decide which is better (hint: a brat fry).

I also managed to golf for the second time this year, which was a lot of fun. Not that I'm any good at it, ignoring that I did hit this beautiful 250 yard drive that split the fairway. I'm almost at the point where I can hit the ball every time without messing up and rolling it 50 feet because I topped it, but not quite past hitting 3-4 putts every hole.

In any case, I got back a few days ago, and rather than putting up a blog post like all "I'm back" and then talking about nonsense and then people are like "welcome back I guess" or "I like your blog follow this link to some kind of money scam I can't read because the site's in Spanish", I waited a few days so I could say something about my NWN2 campaign. Yeah I know, even I forget sometimes that's what this blog is really about.

Anyway, I've now finished all of the noble house quests, which basically leaves the last section of the main quest and I'm, more or less, done. I have a list of "extras" I want to add, like more companion interjections, some item hunt crap, maybe a pick pocket system and some consequence encounters from how you treat NPCs, but none of that is really critical and I'll do it as long as time permits. Because my wife is coming back for 18 days from Iraq in August, and this WILL be on the Vault before then (thank you again to everyone who's tested throughout, it's really because of that I can pop it out a week or two after the content is done). How much extra is directly related to how much time I have left after finishing the main quest.

Which should be quite a bit, even with an alternate "evil" ending I'm adding. There's one, possibly two areas to build depending on how far I want to take the main quest sequence, but most of it is spawning things and a few cutscenes, I expect to be "done" by the end of this week if things go well.

So that's pretty much that.

Really Late EDIT!!!!

I almost forgot about this.

So anway, I usually have a TV series I like to kick back and watch from time to time. Having seen Oz, Rome, Deadwood, The Shield, and waiting on The Wire, I'm in between shows now. I remember when I was a bit younger, they used to play anime on the Sci Fi channel Saturday mornings, so I've seen like a handful of them. I always thought they were kind of cool, but I don't even know what's good and what's not besides Ninja Scroll.

So I went on a little digging expedition to see what's what, and here's what I came up with. If you all have seen these joints, let me know what's good:

Boogiepop Phantom: The name is awful in pretty much every way imagineable, but these Japanese, evidenced by their RPGs, wouldn't know something cool if I kicked them in their collective asses (still mad I haven't gotten a letter from them like all: Hey Dirty, you're cool!"). It's supposed to be some Twilight Zone type horror stuff, though.

Elfen Lied: Another awfully named horror type joint. Not sure who exactly Elfen is, but he (or she, it's a bit androgenous) is apparently full of it. Um, not sure what to say here. There's a half naked broad on the box?

Gantz: See what I'm saying? Boogiepop, Elfen, Gantz, it's like they pulled their titles out of a Shining Force game. This is supposed to be like ultra nasty horror/action, which works for me. One of the things I discovered about anime is that they are big on using all of their blood red colored ink.

Gungrave: Well, this one comes in a blood red cube instead of a box, which again attests that they Japanese really like their cartoons bloody, or just have an affinity towards red. This one is about a guy that comes back from the dead to kill, which is awesome. However, they kind of dropped the ball by naming the hero "Brandon" instead of "John H. Gungrave" or something like that.

Hellsing: Well, this has nothing to do with Hugh Jackman, Andrew Jackson, Action Jackson, nor "Downtown" Willie Brown, though those last three may come as no surprise. Pretty similar though, guy fights vampires and whatnot. Looks a bit dull, but who knows?

Noir: This looks a little on the artsy side to me, but there's supposed to be a lot of killing popping off. Whatever, I don't know.

Serial Experiments Lain: Again awfully titled. Also about a 13 year old girl. However, it's supposed to be more horror themed and weird, which could be fun. What can I say, the Japanese even like their animated horror stars young. And there's also probably a lot of blood and other weird crap.

So, any input? I know somebody who reads this likes anime, don't be shy now.

I hope I haven't just started something there.

So the introduction movie for Mysteries of Westgate has been posted on the Vault and it's receiving mixed feedback. It's difficult for me to see what some of the criticisms are--the encrusted diamonds on my 30" platinum-coated monitor tend to reflect an obscuring light on to the screen--but it seems that it's low-budget compared to the legacy game's opening movie, and not reflective of the backing and hype the adventure pack has received. Now think about both of those points for a second and apply some logic and you'll realize why I'm glad to be heading off for a week-long vacation tomorrow.

Yeah, it's been frustrating alright. I recall a conversation this time last year where the game was almost finished and we were hoping for a nicely appropriate Halloween release. I don't need to complete the second part of that thought, I expect.

In other news, I haven't yet decided on the fate of the Blades of Netheril. I am, however, very happy with the evident enthusiasm the community still has for the project. Thank you all for your feedback, words of encouragement, and occasional chastisement. The response was greater than I expected, and there was even a thread dedicated to my dilemma. Burning effigies of my devilishly handsome self were heart-warmingly absent.

Now then. Off to the Greek isles for a week or sun, surf, and Steven Erikson. Yep, Toll the Hounds. Has anyone else considered just how well the Malazan world would translate to a CRPG or, in fact, an MMO? Honestly; it's perfect. Tell me I'm lying, and I'll call you a Sicilian.

Laterz.

This Wired article is pretty hilarious. Anyone who has been following 4e's reception on the WOTC boards will recognize all the types represented here. The nerd conservatism (consnerdatism?) that makes transitions from things like D&D 3.5 to 4.0 so painful to wounded souls the world over has a corollary even closer to home, of course--the persistent NWN1-->NWN2 discussion.

Check out the new song (to the left). I'm still not done tweaking it--but as the name suggests, this is the music that will play in the massive interior known as the High Tower of Iriaebor. The female vocals that come in toward the end are courtesy of my roommate. The other vocals are me pretending to be two different dudes.

by E.C.Patterson

I don’t mean to say of course that building for NWN2 isn’t fun. As an act of creation, I enjoy it tremendously and don’t see myself quitting any time soon. At this point, I believe I’ll go on as long as there is sufficient interest in NWN2 mods and the community is vibrant.

No, but sometimes, there are things I’d rather do with my 60 minutes-a-day free computer time than building. And well, since my heart and soul is firmly with NWN2, that often means just playing the game. (I thought sometime ago that Bioshock might steal me away for a bit, but it hasn’t. After a couple of nights playing, it was put back on the shelf.)

So last week I had a couple of good runs on MotB taking me all the way to the City of Judgment. As with any good thing, I wasn’t eager to end the game right away, so I’ve put MotB on hold for now, and decided to finally play the last chapter of Pool of Radiance Remastered. While RP’ing does feel quite limited in PORR, the mod has fun gameplay and well-crafted areas. Because of its general look and feel and its length, I consider it the most professional-grade NWN2 community mod out there right now (for better and for worse ;) )

Nonetheless, Into the Forgotten Realms has progressed somewhat in the past days. Xandurpein (author of Shadow of the Underdark and Tanithiel’s maker) and I have been having some great discussions on plot for the Cormanthor section of the mod. You’ll have to deal with the drow presence in the area, and while wiping them out will be an option (expect tough, monumental fights if you decide to go this way), it will not be the only course of action. Xandurpein, a drow expert of sorts, will be writing much of the drow convos for that part of the story. I’m glad of that because if there’s anything bogging down ItFR somewhat right now, it’s all the writing that has to be done.

Besides that, there’s been a bit of area building happening, including this catacomb, which makes me feel somewhat productive.

So, Joyeuse belated Saint-Jean-Baptiste to Quebecers reading this (if any!) and Happy Canada Day too. This is the heart of summer here with two national holidays within 7 days of each other. This, and the nice weather, isn't helping building on ItFR much either... :)

1. The blog has gone through a few mostly superficial changes lately. As you can see, there's now a section for NWN2 blogs that updates regularly and another section with other links (there are some blog links here, too, because blogspot can't read certain blog types). If you have a blog and want to be added, let me know!

2. I have a new debugging notebook all for Bron's Daughter. It's the same style and size as the old one, but white instead of green. Here's a scan:



3. Did you know I'm on Facebook now? It's true. Feel free to get in touch with me on there.

A subject I've talked about with Michele in both of my NWN Podcast interviews is my love for naming things in mods. A new review of an old book on Slate brought this fondness to mind. Is this fondness a reflection of growing up, like the author of the review, amidst a hodgepodge of differently evocative names?


On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn't much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there. Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of promise. Only later, reading George Rippey Stewart's Names on the Land, did I discover that I wasn't alone.

I guess one of the things that's nice about the Realms is the fact that you can get away with a wild assortment of names there, just like you can in America. But for a lowly modder working in the Realms, most places have already been christened and canonized, so I don't get to make them up--though I do take liberties once in a while. (The Netherese library of Nevreveh where Manfred discovered his important secret was my invention, for instance.)

The names of H&C's characters gave me more freedom. "Ianth" comes from "Ianthe," and some or all of the associations I wanted from that name are probably obvious. "Manfred" is named after the main character in Byron's dramatic poem of the same name. "Vroman" I just liked the sound of.

On top of being addicted to Mass Effect for the last week, I've admittedly gotten a little behind with regards to building.

You know, you can tell where Mass Effect was dumbed down for the console crew, but at the same time Bioware managed to overcome the limitations of the Console at least to a certain extent, and on top of that, the backstory in the game has a depth and richness I haven't seen in some of their games in a very very long time. The more you explore, the more you find. It's a veritable smorgasbord of story depth all hidden that you can find little by little. The more you find, the richer it becomes.

My addiction level to the game is finally subsiding so I'll be building again, but I'll be honest it's one of the best games I've played over the last year. It tops Bioshock and Crysis as far as sci-fi goes and the depth of the world around it is just unbelievable.

I had meant to build a bit this weekend, but I friend's Bachelor party distracted me this weekend. Wow... I don't think I was sober all weekend. We bumped into a Bachelorette party while we were out there too and I know I ended up with a Bachelorette's garter I remember tongueing it off her leg, and there's pictures of me wearing it like a bandana over the weekend (wow those things stretch, she was a tiny girl), so while a lot of things were a blur, I am pretty sure I had a lot of fun.

Well back to building, I have started on Mouth of Song, but admittedly have only gotten the height map done.





The little speck on the hill is a human.

This area is going to look like Deep forest. The trees here will be huge. In the Forgotten Realms there is a tree called a Shadowtop. Basically they are enormous trees that blot out the sun in a deep forest. I'll be using live oaks scaled up by a factor of 3. They'll actually be taller than the hill. I'll also be turning off the fade for them (which works now by the way).

Mouth of Song is a small shrine to Elistraee, it will have a night and day cycle and if players enter at night they will run into a coven of Ellistraee worshipers here. They will then send you to the Grove of Fangs to hunt for more clues in order to find Claw Hollow.

I may add some encounters here, daytime perhaps some kind of Trolls or perhaps some Wyverns along with a nest nearby. At night perhaps a Drow Raiding party looking to kill some Ellistraee worshipers.

I'm going to have to decide on the Texturing though, the ones I've tried so far haven't looked the way I wanted it to, so We'll have to see how it comes out.

I'm going to visit the family over the 4th, so I'll be out for the next week and a half.

Alright, that's all.

The other day at my daughter's gymnastics class, which I don't participate in leaving me a good chunk of time to sit around and do nothing in a building that's not my house, I picked up this magazine they have. One of the things I like about my dentist is that he has Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine; I'm not a real big sports fan, but it beats the hell out of Ebony or Redbook or the other BS that's at the gymnastics place. But I did check out this Entrepreneur (or something like that) magazine, which had Mark Ecko on the cover. Apparently the dude is a billionaire.

Then it occured to me that I don't have any of his clothes in my wardrobe, which, you'll note from earlier I have about an hour to kill with little to do, got me thinking why I don't, you'd, or perhaps I'd, think I'd like those kind of clothes being a big hip hop fan and all. But I don't really get in to those stupid urban/rapper clothing lines that much. And I figured out why: Most of these rappers look like they raided their grandma's old clothes box.

Seriously, look at these guys. I guess the last thing I want to do is take fashion advice from guys who wear diamond earrings the size of a marble, shiny tennis bracelets, and fur coats (dude, my mom wants a fur coat).

I do want to know how they keep their hats on, but can never keep on their shirts, or some kind of half-shirts like they couldn't decide what goes where even if it looks a little suggestive in a bad way.

Also, here's a hilariously misleading condom ad.

But on to the update:





Those are two areas I did this week to further the noble house quests. As the title suggests, only 4 more quests to go, then the two final stages of the main quest and that about does it. Getting very close now, and not much to talk about, hence my tirade above and below.

Now, more Baldur's Gate:

Last time, I had just left the prologue on my quest to find out why people are trying to kill me and succeeding in killing Gorion. Turns out this involves a lot of walking and stumbling in to things. Since the only thing I know about so far is a pile of loot to the north I can steal from Gorion's corpse, that's the first stop:



Then I stumbled into more things, like these guys:



Meet Xzar and Monteron, two mildly annoying guys. One is near worthless in battle, the other when scripted tries to hide in shadows constantly instead of moving to his waypoint (also, the pathing in this game is terrible, again I'll chalk that up to age because the logarithms used today may not have even existed or been too costly to use). Anyway, didn't know this when I said it's cool to come along, plus a full party is better than nothing.

Anyway, I told them I had to go north to the Friendly Arms Inn to meet some friends instead of going south to Nakresh like they want to. Hopefully, I thought to myself, I will find some sidequests and and a CGI(?) cutscene. And I wasn't disappointed.



After arriving in town and being nearly murdered again, I found some more friends, Jaheira and Khalid:



I'm assuming because there is no more space for companions, that I have a full party. That means sidequest time. The first one I found was from what appears to be a completely nude woman who lost her ring.



Obviously I accepted, as it seems simple enough and I haven't seen a game yet that punishes you for taking quests, often puzzling why a "no" option even exists because you can just ignore them anyway (luckily, many BG quests you just get from talking to a guy...but you can ignore them.) I did that, killed the hobgoblin who had the ring, but his corpse was sort of behind a tree so I didn't notice it and continued north thinking it was up there, where I found a whole new batch of sidequests, including some bandits who you literally scalp, which is kind of nasty.



I don't know why an innkeeper would want to buy a dead guy's filthy bandit hair, but I don't ask those questions.

A little further north I found a farmer who's son is missing, which I'm supposed to find. After a very brief time looking, I ran into one of these things.



Notice my party is a little smaller? Yeah, that's because these things can literally explode your guys into a spray of body parts. They don't just regular kill them. It lead to this screen:



That's my hand melting away.

So after a reload, I did manage to win but lost most of my party again. I just wanted to see if I could do it.



But, after careful consideration, I decided I'm in the wrong area because these things are a little strong for a level 1 party; even Xzar with his 4 hit points and no offensive damaging spells was having trouble. I think that's why he bothered me to go south to Narakesh. He was punished for it, because I'm evil:



I made him wear a belt that made him a woman. Then Jaheira started bugging me too about going there, and so did my journal:



Most of the quests end in "by the way, maybe we should go south to Narakesh?" So I caved in, lacking another gender bending belt.



And here I am at level 2: