More Neverwinter Nights 2 modding

One should not take my lack of updates here as a sign that I'm not gaming.  The truth is, I play other types of games as well as RPGs, and I'm not sure that they'd fit well on this blog.  After finishing the module that occupied much of my time over the past couple of years, I expanded back out into a wider variety of game types, and played many other games to completion, though I did also find the time last year to add a Halloween expansion to my campaign.  At any rate, the itch to play and mod Neverwinter Nights 2 has returned.

I've played many modules recently too, of course, and I've even written reviews of them, but I'm not comfortable with posting those reviews.  As a reader may note from my previous reviews (including of NWN2 modules), I can be a harsh critic, and I have rather high standards.  Those standards have only risen higher since those last reviews, since I've not only played a good number of exemplary modules, but I've also seen for myself exactly what can be done in the toolset.  I want my criticism to be constructive, but it's hard to disguise the frustration I sometimes feel at certain common mistakes that cause problems in modules, especially when they're reported to the author and are never fixed.  So as yet I've remained silent.

I've started on another expansion to my campaign, but it's very preliminary work so far.  I've made some new custom content.  One is a recreation of the green devil head, the iconic trap in the classic Gary Gygax module Tomb of Horrors.  This has no real use outside of that module, and I'd hate to see such an iconic trap being used for generic decoration, so the only point to creating this was to test out a sculpting method in Gmax, which was cutting shapes out of a plane and moving vertices around.  It worked very nicely, so I can see myself making more interesting objects now.

Another is a new shiny tintable floor, which was inspired by a description of the evil cleric's room in the classic pen & paper module The Keep on the Borderlands.  Most NWN2 assets suffer from poor texturing.  Low resolution diffuse maps, overwrought normal maps, and very little specularity.  My content is intended to make up for that.

Another is a set of tile floors based on the dungeon floor tiles in the official Wizards of the Coast map tile packs.  These are also shiny and tintable in several ways (you can tint them in ways that make them appear less shiny, and can optionally tint them in a checkerboard pattern).  The scale is not the same as the original official map tiles, however.  The original dungeon tiles were a single tile to represent 10 feet, aligning it with one of the standard measurements (the other is 5 feet).  However, since NWN2 tiles are 9 m to a side, I decided to have 12 tile squares per 9 m, which makes each square approximately 2.5 feet.  This means that a set of 4 tiles creates a 5 ft x 5 ft square, or 8 of them makes 10 ft x 10 ft.  This makes it easy to map out interiors based on the old D&D maps.

Although I have some ideas in mind for my expansion already, I've decided to go through some old Dungeon magazines for inspiration and details, especially for special encounters, traps, treasures, etc.  Each room is a set-piece in many of these older adventures, each containing something new to see or do.  This sort of design goal fits in well with one of my other design goals, that of spectacle and discovery.  Then again, there are also some adventures that contain plain empty rooms.  I'm not particularly concerned with this kind of realism.  I want the rooms to have things in them that are interesting for players to do in a game, whether or not it's more realistic to have empty, looted rooms in a place that's supposedly occupied, or to have traps and puzzles in each room, or just to have rooms piled high with junk or objects too large for an adventurer to move.  Likewise, in a world where everburning torches are a common enough item, there's no real need to play the "realism" card in terms of lighting.

Anyway, here's to more fun times ahead.

Neverwinter Nights 2 module update

Although I've been rather quiet on this blog, I've been steadily posting updates on my progress on my adventure module for Neverwinter Nights 2 on the forums of the Neverwinter Nexus and the Bioware Social Network, where by now I've posted somewhere around 150 updates about it.  I don't think I said much about it here, actually, although I've posted several videos from it on my Youtube channel.

The summary of it is that it's approaching completion, and it's large.

After this module's completion, I can get back to more frequent updates here -- which is certainly not to say there won't be anything here until then.

What I've learned

I've learned an unbelieveable amount about modding and making games from this experience, far beyond my previous modding in other games.  My module for Dragon Age: Origins was a dipping of my toe, and this has turned out to be swimming in a vast ocean.

I've become comfortable with fairly complicated programming/scripting, which turned out to be not only a basic necessity, but a creative opening of the doors that allow me to make any kind of quest I can imagine.  I've also learned the value of writing detailed comments in my scripts, to document what I'm doing and why, and how it affects other scripts, or is affected by them, and where I'm storing variables and other information.

I've recently expanded my asset-creation knowledge from my existing forte of texturing, to learning how to make custom models, and creating new UV/UVW maps for them, using Gmax (a sort of "lite" version of 3DS Max, if I understand correctly).  I've created a number of new placeables for this project, first by simply retexturing existing models and by texturing the models supplied by others, and later by making the meshes in Gmax.

I also learned how to use other tools to import custom music and sound effects, and performed mass extraction and conversion of the game's sound assets so that I can more conveniently browse through them and pick appropriate sounds for my module's situations.  The built in "sound objects" that can be placed in the game are convenient for many purposes, but they don't include anywhere near the entirety of the assets available in the game files.

Before that, of course, I had also learned about how to made the graphic user interface elements in XML, and I used my graphic design experience to make them look nice at HD resolution.

I'll have to make a post to showcase the new placeables at some point, and ultimately I'll be releasing them as a pack separately from the module that I made them for.  I'd like to showcase the scripting systems, too, but code doesn't lend itself well to showcasing in that manner, despite being very interesting in other ways.

Lighting in this engine is another thing I've been learning about.  I can see that there were some mistakes in how the original campaigns were lit, and unfortunately those mistakes are what prompted me (and no doubt many others) to disable point light shadows.  And the poor engine optimisation caused many others to eschew even medium-level shadows.  A great shame, since with full shadows enabled, and a module with properly adjusted lights, the lighting can be very beautiful in this game.

I don't use these cinematic cutscenes, preferring the text box for its much longer capacity for each line (and perhaps more importantly, how it gives the user the ability to absolutely control the pace of the dialogue), but if I were to use the cinematic cutscenes, I would certainly use a classic studio 3-point lighting setup, and specifically chosen camera angles (rather than the default random angles) to create an appealing and dramatic scene.  Lighting is often not given the attention it should be, though it plays a very important role.  Some conversations I've experienced in some modules have taken place entirely in the dark, and not for any artistic reason that I could tell!

Likewise, I have come to believe that the washed-out look that I'd noted in some areas and objects in my original playthrough of the original NWN2 campaign is due to the fact that those assets were intentionally designed with a low colour saturation so that they could be tinted as needed.  And some level artists apparently didn't tint them.

One of the first things I learned was how to handle the game's two-dimensional array files (2DA).  Understanding those is really the first step in using almost any custom content.  I can clearly recall how foreign and mystifying they were when I first attempted to use one, which was the restsys_wm_tables.2da file used to select random wandering monster encounters for the resting system that was added in Mask of the Betrayer.

For that matter, learning to create a campaign and to import systems added by the expansions was a very valuable experience.  Creating a campaign was thankfully simple enough, since there is a very good tutorial for it by Kaldor Silverwand.  Importing the other systems, on the other hand, involved a lot of reading through scripts and examining settings in the official campaigns.

And of course, several mishaps underscored the importance of backing up your work often.  Fortunately, my backups have been frequent enough as to prevent the loss of more than a day's work.  If you're reading this, and you haven't backed up your current work in more than a day, take a break from reading and do it now, just in case.

Ways of learning more

Since there are no intermediate-to-advanced tutorials for creating modules that I could find, I think there's nothing better that you can do than to open up the default scripts and read them.  Especially the include files, and the scripts for special events and encounters in the campaigns.  Many of them have decent documentation that teaches you a great deal, and since these scripts were written over a period of years, and also by different people, there are a lot of different approaches shown in them.  In the few months I've been working on this, I myself have used multiple approaches for the same tasks, based on different factors, such as directness, extensibility, reusability, elegance, brevity, ease for other people to understand it, and others, so it's no surprise to see so many methods on display in the core scripts, especially those left over from NWN1.

In addition to just reading the scripts, it's extremely helpful to just play through the official campaigns, and take note of when the game has you performing a particular task that's similar to something you want to have in your module as well.  You can open up that file and see how they did it, and then use that knowledge to make your own version.

Anyway, I've really been enjoying this process of learning and discovery (aside from a few annoying things like working with the walkmesh).  So back to work for me!

New NWN2 module underway

I've officially begun work on the module I've been planning. I'm calling it The Black Scourge of Candle Cove, and I'm discussing my progress on it in threads on the NW Nexus and the Bioware Social Network.