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!

Step by step landscape

Here's a little post showing me sculpting a landscape in the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset for my upcoming module, just for anyone curious about the process.

Here's how it started. I took the flat plane, filled it with a sand texture (for the ocean floor), and sank most of it so that it left only a little island in the middle, and a mainland on one side. I put a tower and an NPC on it for scale reference. Then I added a water plane, laid down a little blue tint for later, and started smoothing the island. I caught some of this on video, due to an unintentional Fraps activation, so here it is:

I continued adjusting the height and basic shape of the island until it was approximately roughed out to the right size and shape. Next, I started going over it again with a smaller brush for finer control.

Here, I started picking textures for the island and laying them on. Once I had the basic areas sketched on, I used the texture swapper to try different combinations of rock, dirt, and grass, until I found a combination that looked pretty good together.

After that, I added rocks, grass, trees, and bushes, as well as a dock and some rowboats. I adjusted the water and atmospherics too. Here's a brief video showing the island at this stage:

Then I threw on some textures for the mainland. Since this is off in the distance and shrouded in fog, it's not important to have fine detail, so I used camouflage-style large blobs of colour.

And here's a screenshot of the mainland from the lighthouse island.

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.

Quest indicator mod additions

I think this system is as developed as it needs to be to use it in my NWN2 adventure module, but there is one thing that only recently occurred to me to try that might make it that much more convenient to use. It's pretty convenient already, though, since I've gone through and made it all generalised to the point where you don't have to touch the scripts once you attach them to the appropriate location on your NPCs or objects.

Instead, you assign local variables to your placed instances, and modify them through conversations or by firing scripts on conditional actions, such as "On Enter", "On Inventory Disturbed", "On Death", etc. In other words, anything that triggers a journal update will just need to have this script fired too. Everything else is handled through local variables.

This way, you can also have one questgiver begin the quest, and a second questgiver finish it, which is very important for certain kinds of quests (like breadcrumb quests). Anyway, I've been documenting how to use it in detail.

The video also shows my modification of the dialogue panel from my HD UI mod.

I'm close to getting ready to start on the adventure module itself. I just want to play the game a little bit more first, but I'm really getting anxious to start.

More NWN2 modding

I decided some time ago that I would make an adventure module for Neverwinter Nights, after my earlier Dragon Age: Origins quest mod experiment. I just can't really start on it until I have a decent-sized block of time I can spend on it, and I expect that will be this summer. In the meantime, I've been tinkering, reading the forums, and browsing the Vault's script repository, to determine what can be done in this toolset. From that, I'll decide what will be done.

For my first venture in NWN2 questmaking, I elected to begin with something relatively limited in scope. Any first work with a new set of tools should be small, in my opinion. As a learning experience, a smaller scope can prevent constant revisionism as one's skill and experience grows, by enabling the project to be completed quickly enough that such desires don't have time to develop.

That said, I intend for this to be the kind of module that I myself enjoy playing, and I'll judge my success or failure by how well I accomplish this.

Trouble In Rainesfere took two weeks to complete, not counting the viewing of the toolset tutorial videos that inspired me to create it in the first place. As with that module, I'll document my experience of learning the toolset and making a module, from my perspective as a beginner, which I hope will serve to inspire other beginners to give it a try if they haven't already. I'll allocate 3 weeks for this one, plus another week's worth of research and contingency time interspersed within.

This should be more than enough time, since, unlike with TiR, I will not be designing all of the areas myself. Having browsed through many of the prefab areas designed by other NWN2 players and modders, I was impressed with all of the fine quality work available, waiting to be used by other builders in modules. I don't know which ones have or haven't yet seen such use, but I can certainly do my part to showcase a few. It will save me some time as well, even though landscape design is one of the parts of modding that I find most enjoyable.

In addition, I've opted to adapt a pen & paper module for this project, which will save me some time in creating a design document. It's rather bare bones, and doesn't even include any sample conversations, or NPC builds aside from the main antagonists, so it'll require a bit of embellishment. My aim is to include everything described within, with encounters that have multiple approaches based on player choice and party skills.

Other mods in the meantime

Before I get into that module, I'm just taking whatever free time I can spare and feeling my way around the toolset and the game files, and making some minor cosmetic mods like some "beautiful people" heads for a few of the races, including humans, elves (including drow), half-elves, and halflings. The drow still needs some work in the eyebrows. I had some trouble with the specular maps, but got them to behave well enough.

I just finished something else, though, which I had been wanting to try for a long time in various games. After playing around with some visual effect mods, I had a basis for understanding how to use the Visual Effect Editor. So, after determining that it should be possible, I hacked together the parts I needed to create a DA:O/WoW-style system of quest indicators for NPCs, to make it easy to see at a glance whether someone has a quest available, and whether the conditions have been satisfied to complete it. Such indicators are especially useful in cases where an NPC may not have anything to say until certain conditions are met, or when an NPC you've spoken to before may have something else to say later, which you might miss if you have no reason to think the NPC has something new to say.

I know some people don't like visual gameplay elements in the 3D world for various reasons, but I intend my module to be an enjoyable game, and not an immersive cinematic experience. My module will contain no voiced dialogue, and what few cutscenes I plan to employ will be brief and for the purpose of calling attention to important events or points of interest during the gameplay. Cutscenes take control away from the player, and thus should be employed as minimally as possible.

In the NWN2 OC, they tended to use triggers to ensure that the player didn't miss some available conversation. If you walked anywhere near the NPC, your main character would be forced into conversation or a cutscene. I didn't like that. It was especially egregious during one time in the courtyard of Crossroad Keep when I was trying to walk over to the boy so he could teleport me out to the world map marker, and I was instead intercepted by the Luskan ambassador, and Sand brushed him off and force-teleported me inside the keep, where I didn't want to go!

I'm also going to try to find a way to make the game allow you to attack enemies before they become hostile. I hate those situations where you spot your mortal enemy from afar, but are unable to make a preemptive strike against him because the game requires you to walk up and talk to him first.

Anyway, I made the icons and the associated FX files on that first day. I wanted to make a little test quest just to try out and demonstrate the indicators, but of the quest wizard plugins on the Vault, two were database-dependent for persistent worlds, and the other was compiled for a previous version of the toolset. I don't know why plugins broke every time the toolset was updated, but most of them were dutifully recompiled until the final patch. Quest Maker was one of the ones that wasn't. Fortunately enough, the author provided the source code.

I had never touched anything like Visual C# Studio, but if I wanted to compile this plugin so I could try it out, I had to learn. A tutorial informed me that the necessary tools were free, so I installed the software and did everything it said to do, though some bits were harder to follow since the program had different names and locations for commands than the tutorial said.

I had to do some troubleshooting, since I told it to compile the DLL directly into the toolset's plugin folder. This caused the toolset to crash on open, and the reason seemed to be that it had placed a lot of unnecessary files in there. I cleaned them out and recompiled elsewhere, and dropped only the DLL into the plugin folder. It still didn't work!

Finally, my search led me to a forum post, where Marshall of the Legends Plugins had encountered the same problem, and most importantly, where he had reported how he solved the problem. The answer was that it had to be compiled for VB 3.5 instead of the default 4.0. This time it worked. Thanks, Marshall!

Quest indicator success

The next day, I spent maybe 6 hours figuring out how to get the quest indicator system working, and writing a quest to demonstrate it.

I'm still very much working in the dark with this script, and my hacks involve a great deal of trial and error. Getting the exclamation point to appear over the NPC's head was the easier task. Getting it to go away when I wanted to change it to a question mark or remove it entirely was the part that took many hours. I searched through tutorials, reference works, and forum posts, and tried three or four different functions, and changed variables and coding structure, all to no avail.

Additionally, the QuestMaker plugin I compiled yesterday seemed to only work partially. Possibly I did something wrong when I used it. I used it to create an "explore an area" quest so I could easily test the indicator system, but for some reason it didn't actually create the trigger with the code that would advance the quest, so I had to figure out how to script a trigger. I tried using the generic one and applied some variables to the instance, but I apparently did it wrong. I ended up trying out LilacSoul's Script Generator for the first time, and that succeeded. I really wish Marshall's Legends Quest Plugin worked for single-player modules.

Finally, I found a forum post that mentioned a function that I hadn't tried, and that successfully removed the effect from the NPC. Finally, it worked.

The code's not pretty, and it needs a little more work to generalise it, but I can use it in my module as it is now.

A bit more on my choice of quest indicators: It's much like the difference between making every barrel in the city lootable, with most of them empty, or having the barrels with contents stand out from the others somehow (such as by not allowing the empty ones to be opened). This is all about determining who is important to talk to, and who is only there as decoration.

I consulted some friends about their preferences in this regard, and got a reasonable range of responses. One was mildly against them, but thought it would be fine to use them the way I have in mind -- solely to mark the questgiving NPCs, and not to point out anything quest-related on the map. Two were okay with them, as long as they could turn them off, which I should be able to code.

Others were more positive and enthusiastic about them. One brought up how they would have been nice to have in Mass Effect, notably in the between-mission "party camp" on board the Normandy. With the party members being spread out between several decks, and knowing that they would have new things to say on occasions throughout the story, players like them (and me) got tired of running back and forth through the ship and up and down the decks to check each party member, only to get told over and over that they're too busy to chat because they're in the middle of some calibrations.

I've heard other systems proposed, as well. Questgiving NPCs could be distinguished by giving them occasional text barks or gestures to beckon the player to them. I like this idea as well, but I don't think it would work very well in a city environment with a lot of unimportant NPCs walking around, who I also want to have text barks to liven up the place. Of course, I've heard some players don't like text barks at all, and insist it ruins the immersion to see text floating over characters' heads, but all I can say to that is that those players will not enjoy my module.

Questgivers could be the only ones with proper names, with everyone else having names like "Commoner" or "Townsperson". That could work fine, too. I don't prefer it, though, because I don't know of any ways to make NPC names always be visible, rather than having to mouse over them to see the names. I would actually like to have visible names in addition to the quest indicators.

Other, more minor visual indicators are things like having questgivers dress in brighter colours, or wear a special badge or piece of gear, or have them emit a subtle glow, or even have all questgivers share a single appearance!

In any case, I like the exclamation point solution best. Personally, it delights me to walk into a new area and see lots of new quests for me to accept, and I think nothing does that better than the exclamation point!

This of course opens the door to a wider range of visual indicators, such as for merchants, healers, or innkeepers, but I don't know if I want to take it further than just questgivers. Those NPCs tend to be easy enough to recognise as long as they're located in logical locations (such as in a shop, in a temple, or behind a bar), and it would probably be enough just to have their names indicate their role.

Neverwinter Nights 2 interface mod

Installing user interface mods is one of the first things I did for this game, but it was tricky to balance the different things I wanted. These mods work by replacing the XML files for each piece of the interface, and sometimes I liked the changes made by two different mods that affected the same UI panel. For instance, I play at a high resolution, so I want big panels that take advantage of the large screen size, and also large fonts so it'll be readable.

Usually, portraits are vertically rectangular, somewhere around a 1:2 aspect ratio, including painted portraits of real people from history and modern photographic equivalents. It's simply more aesthetic to have the head and the shoulders in the picture. The ones in NWN2 are square, which not only looks cramped, but since it shows only their heads, and the characters are made from the same 3D models and are all facing the same direction with the same expression, it's rather difficult to tell any of them apart, especially at the tiny size those portraits appear as in the dialogues.

I have a large collection of good looking portraits at a 1:2 aspect ratio (like Baldur's Gate and NWN1 used), and I wanted to use that aspect ratio for the portraits rather than the square ones. I found a good mod that added support for 256x400 pixel portraits, as in Neverwinter Nights 1, called Character Sheet NWN1 Portrait support, and that worked very nicely, though it was made for resolutions a bit lower than what I'm running.

I also wanted all my inventory slots showing as one big bag, instead of them being broken up into multiple bags that I have to flip through to find things. I know some people prefer to organise their items by putting them in different sections, but I prefer to have as much visible at once as possible. Again, I found a mod for that, though again, it was made for slightly smaller resolutions.

I would also prefer the inventory icons to be large, like in NWN1 (though perhaps not quite so large as that), so I can more easily distinguish items at this resolution. I haven't found a mod for that, and I may make one at some point.

I tried using a UI creator program from the Vault, but on starting it up, it claimed there was a newer version available and insisted that I download it, and refused to run this allegedly "out of date" version. I checked, and the version number on the web site was exactly the same. I redownloaded it anyway, but this freshly downloaded version made the exact same claim, and refused to run. This raised my suspicions about scams and malware, but whatever the reasons, the effect is that the program is non-functional.

Eventually, I got around to examining the XML files myself to see what I could do with them by hand. I downloaded and skimmed through Lance Botelle's NWN2 XML & GUI Coding For Beginners, mostly looking at his examples of what different formatting codes looked like. Then I examined the code of two of the mods I was using. One of them had some comments telling what the original values were and what the mod was trying to accomplish, which was useful.

My dialogue box mod

Before adding frame

In this case I was working on a mod for the conversation panel (what the game files call the "quick chat" panel). I prefer the dialogue to be presented in this manner, rather than the "cinematic" style that's the default in the toolset.

But I wanted the box to be much bigger, since I consider the dialogue to be an important part of the game. You can't do anything else while you're in a conversation, why not make it the main focus of the screen while you're in it? Putting it in a little box in the corner is no good, especially at this resolution, where the font is rather squintworthy.

While I was working on this, largely through trial-and-error, I found that I could just keep the game running, make my changes to the code, and then switch back to the game and start conversation again with a handy nearby NPC to immediately see how the changes looked. I was glad I didn't have to reload a save, or restart the game, which would have made progress painfully slow for this kind of trial-and-error work.

The code on which I based this had already changed the background image and font colours to a black-on-parchment style instead of the white-on-charcoal. I actually thought the original colour scheme was fine, but I do indeed find that black-on-parchment is easier on the eyes, so I just made tweaks to that -- I changed which of the parchment textures it used to better fit the larger box I coded, and changed the dark green of the response text to a deep burgundy colour to better go with the parchment colour.

I made the conversation portrait twice as large as it was, to put more focus on the subject of the conversation (though still only half the height I set for the character's dialogue), and with the portrait aspect ratio change I was able to just put it in a kind of "column" on the left, with both the NPC name and the dialogue in a second column to the right of it. One note about the altered aspect ratio, though...I couldn't find any parameters to adjust the camera placement for the default "rendered" portraits made out of snapshots of the character model, so it basically looks like a slightly off-centre closeup. The custom portraits at the intended aspect ratio look perfect, though.

Final version

The portrait frame didn't look good when stretched to the new dimensions, so I commented it out and left the portraits unframed for a while, until I found a more suitable replacement. Now it looks good, and I think it's a pretty good size for both the NPC's dialogue and the list of your responses. Now you can have up to 10 response options visible at once without the scrollbars appearing, if they're all of a typical length. How much empty space you see is, of course, dependent on the amount of dialogue written for any given part of the conversation.

After using and enjoying this new conversation panel size and style, I did find one reason the parchment background isn't the best of ideas. The OC has a couple of places where descriptive text is delivered in this panel using near-white text, which is nearly illegible against the light parchment background. Additionally, user-made modules sometimes use bright colours for special text as well. So, I think it'll have to go back to the white-on-charcoal, even though it's not as optimal for readability. I'll offer the first version I made as an option with that caveat.

Next, I expanded the portrait selection window to show much larger portraits, to make it easier to choose one. I tried to make it more than four columns, but I couldn't get the portraits to appear correctly in the additional columns, so I just left it at four.

Finally, I expanded the column of portraits for your party members to use the full height of the screen at 1920x1080. Even in the vanilla game, there are times when you can have 5 full companions and enough animal companions/familiars/summoned creatures to make you have to scroll through the portrait column to check your companions' health or status effects. Now there's less unnecessary scrolling at 1920x1080.

Some of the male and female portraits from the NWN1 art, in my expanded selection panel

Since my conversation panel mod depends on the portraits being in the NWN1 aspect ratio, and other code based on the work and examples of Ragnorak, Shin-Anubis, Thanatos2001, Fire&Ice, and WhatIsSol, I'll have to include that code in my distribution, as well as the other panels that would affect, though some time later I can design another version that keeps the square ones, even though I don't like them.

Although the mod is functional and ready, I need to figure out how to handle its packaging before I upload it.

Edit: It's online.

Trouble in Rainesfere, my first quest mod

Making a mod for Dragon Age: Origins was a very spur-of-the-moment decision -- a decision which I made shortly after successfully building a pleasant landscape in the toolset after following one of Mikemike37's video tutorials on Youtube. I documented the whole process over two weeks on the Nexus forum and the Bioware Social Network, so there's no need to retread that ground here, but if you're interested in a behind the scenes look at the process of making a mod in the Dragon Age toolset, you might enjoy the read. There are plenty of screenshots there, too.

Download either on Nexus or BSN.

I'm generally satisfied with how it came out, with the adage in mind that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Users can expect a relatively small download and a short questline that doesn't take itself too seriously, in brand-new locales.

I imposed time restrictions upon myself for it, to ensure I would get it finished and available for people to play while I still had the free time to spend on it. I know that if I left it as an open, unplanned schedule, it could have become one of the countless abandoned entries littering the "Projects" section of BSN with high hopes and broken promises.

Early on in this process, I was taken by how easy it was to create new landscapes (much like in Oblivion), with the sculpting and texturing of land. The placement of vegetation was also fairly simple, though it wasn't very intelligent about the height at which the scatter tool placed them. I had to adjust the height of every shrub, grass, and tree so it wouldn't be floating above the land (and then of course there was a strange export problem right at the end that resulted in extra floating trees anyway).

I thought the ease of new landscape creation was a strong argument against the reuse of areas in the Dragon Age games (especially in the second game), and in some senses it still is, despite my troubles with other aspects of it -- namely the light mapping. Since we modders didn't get the same lighting software Bioware used, one would expect that Bioware employees didn't have quite the same problems as I did with the rendering of the light maps after the design of the land was done.

The necessity of rendering baked lighting with EclipseRay made the experience excruciatingly slow and full of problems I didn't understand. It's enough to make me want to avoid any future mod that would involve that process. So I could probably fill my new lands up with new side quests and characters, but not make more lands, unless I could pass them off to someone else to render the light maps. The dialogue and quest/plot system is actually very nice, and a positive first experience for me in quest modding.

Anyone examining the code and dialogue trees in my mod (if they can do such a thing with the files I released) might find numerous tangential story elements that did not make it into the mod as released. I "commented out" those elements (by setting conditions that couldn't be fulfilled) because of problems getting them to work correctly or because it would have required too much more alternate story development for too little justification. There are still some unresolved bugs in conversations which I can't figure out, in regard to party members, but since they didn't interfere with the gameplay, I considered it an acceptable flaw for the sake of people having something to to play. There's also some "ghost" code in various scripts where I wanted something to happen, but nothing did, and I just left the code in without even commenting it out.

When faced with such problems in the code, I devised workarounds so that I essentially got the desired effect, albeit through different means.

A good taste, but an appetiser for something more?

"The depth of the Dragon Age toolset, with Bioware's long history of community innovation, will ensure that the Dragon Age community is a thriving centre of creativity and content for years to come."

--Jay Watamaniuk, Bioware Community Manager

I wasn't aware until I started this mod that the toolset was no longer receiving support from Bioware, but I suppose that should have been obvious by the fact that they ceased further DLC or expansions of DA:O long before the time that they promised at the outset that they'd do so. I pre-ordered the game partially due to their promotion of it as a platform for gaming, with its powerful toolset and the promise of expansions for years to come, as it was promoted in the beginning. "The future of gaming mods", they called it in their promotional video. While perhaps true, that future didn't last long before the company moved on. The abrupt abandonment of that "platform" and the quick release of a sequel shifted it away from that concept, and the cessation of expansions means that it will not receive any new official assets that can be used in modding.

In my catch-up feast of old forum posts on the topic of Neverwinter Nights 2 (a game which I had previously overlooked due to my dislike of its forerunner), I've recently seen that many of the names I got to know from Dragon Age modding had originally been prolific or otherwise well-respected modders for NWN2, and I see that they moved to Dragon Age with the understanding that it would be as long-supported and expanded-upon as the NWN games had been. With that promise broken, and compared to NWN2's sheer variety of creatures, spells, placeables, and the rich and detailed lore to draw upon, I can see now that the paucity of Dragon Age's bestiary and sundries makes it a far more restrictive system to work with for telling the variety of stories one can tell in NWN2. Perhaps, like me, others might notice this, and take another look at Neverwinter Nights 2 as a modding platform, as these experiences (and my subsequent playing of NWN2) have led me to revise my previous opinion that Dragon Age: Origins is the best modern game engine to create Baldur's Gate-style adventures.

My next post will be about Neverwinter Nights 2.

More Dragon Age: Origins

I mentioned earlier that I was planning on going through the rest of the origins in Dragon Age: Origins that I hadn't played through yet, as well as trying out some quest mods. I started up a Dalish elf rogue, and enjoyed the origin story very much. And it makes me realise how much more depth this game has than DA2. Each origin that I play reveals more about the world and how it all fits together. I had no idea until now, for instance, that Merrill from Dragon Age 2 was also in DA:O. The focus of the origin was the discovery of some ruins which contained some kind of portal/communication device in the form of a large mirror. Is this the same kind of mirror that I've heard is involved in the Witch Hunt DLC?

The only origin left for me to play is the dwarf commoner, and I wonder what new perspective I might gain from that one.

But in the meantime, I've discovered I really like playing as a rogue, and ended up playing beyond the end of the origin at Ostagar, and have actually gone through Redcliffe, stopping after fending off the undead attacks. From there I headed to Denerim, because that's where the Community Contest 7 quest mods begin. But before I began those, I found an NPC I'd never seen before, named Slim Couldry, offering rogue-specific quests! As a mage in my first playthrough, I had never encountered this character, and I'm not sure if it's because I was a mage, or because I hadn't had Leliana pick any pockets until after getting to Denerim. In this playthrough, I had picked some pockets in Lothering, so it could have been either that or just the fact that I'm a rogue that triggered his quests.

His quests were pretty simple for the most part. Pay him increasing amounts of money for increasingly lucrative thieving opportunities that simply don't exist unless you have the quest. I went through all that he had available, though he said he was planning on getting more. I don't know if he'll really have any more in the future, but I'll check. They may be related to my level, since the last one was actually very tough -- fighting a warehouse full of Arl Howe's men to get the cargo they were guarding. It's the first of the thieft quests that actually involved violent crime, but it is Arl Howe's crowd we're talking about. When I say this one was tough, I mean it took me 4 or 5 tries to do it successfully (without being wiped). This was the toughest fight I've experienced yet in this playthrough, and I'm playing on Hard with two dual-wielding dagger rogues (Leliana and myself, with Leliana specialised as Ranger for the animal summoning), Morrigan respecced to mostly entropy plus the ice line, and Alistair on sword and board. The first time around, I used Sten as the tank, and had 2 mages (myself and Morrigan), and Leliana using bow and arrow.

Not all roses

Despite how much I like DA:O compared to its limited competition in the current market, there are still some issues which are very annoying. I mentioned the frequent crashing in my last Dragon Age post, which had not been a problem during my first playthrough. That's a strange development that I don't understand, but I have found a couple of workarounds that dramatically reduce the number of crashes.

First thing is to add a command switch to the game shortcut to force it to use DirectX 9. The switch is "-dx9". I'm not sure how much this helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt, and I use it combined with the second fix. The second fix apparently must be done while the game is running, each time you run it. Start the game, then switch to Windows task manager, find the "daorigins.exe" process under the Processes tab, right-click it, choose "Set affinity", and set it to use only one core (like "CPU 0"). It doesn't seem to reduce the performance of the game (most processing is probably in the GPU anyway), but the game's stability is markedly increased.

On my last session, I forgot about doing this, and I loaded up a game as normal. When it loaded, the first thing I did was to check the inventory to see what I had equipped, and it crashed immediately on trying to show the inventory. Starting the game again, and doing the same thing resulted in another instant crash. Then I remembered to set the CPU affinity to a single core, and it worked without crashing again.

I'd love to know of a way to force it to always run like this without having to manually change it each time while it's running.

The other, non-technical issue with the game is perhaps a design choice. There are many combat encounters that force you into dialogue before the hostilities begin, once you get close enough. This happens regardless of whether you're in stealth mode, and/or have the rest of your party waiting back down the hall in another room. Suddenly, the game teleports everyone right into the middle of the ambush, kicks your rogue(s) out of stealth, cancels any spells that were in progress, and shows you walking casually up to talk to the clearly dangerous, threatening NPC and his army (or showing you and your party charging in recklessly and stopping short in apparent surprise at the enemy, as if you hadn't been scouting ahead in stealth mode). Forget positioning! Forget preemptive tactical strikes! Forget even having your weapons out and ready! If the game decides you should have a little chat first, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even use a preemptive ranged AoE attack against the group, because they're immortal until you talk to them!

Contrast that to the Baldur's Gate games, which don't restrict your attacks in this way. If you're sneaking around in a dungeon, and you find the boss, and the default action when you click on him is to initiate conversation, you don't have to. You can instead sneak up behind him, click the "attack" button, and make a preemptive strike. You might miss out on interesting information or even a quest if you do that, but so be it! It should be your choice.

Not having looked into the settings in the toolset, I don't know if this is hard-coded into the game engine, or if there's a flag the quest designer can set to prevent forced dialogue from happening if the player is invisible, or prevent it from teleporting everyone else into the room, etc. Seeing how well some mod quest designers have been able to script encounters, though, I'm pretty certain there must be a way around it, even if it is hard-coded.

Combat issues

Speaking of problems with stealth, I'm also not happy with the mechanic that rogues can't enter stealth if the game thinks they're in combat, unless you get the "combat stealth" talent. I'm not talking about situations in the heat of battle, where you'd just vanish in front of an enemy's eyes, but a situation where you've cleared out a whole room full of enemies, but you find you're still "in combat", because there are some enemies in another room behind a closed door that's never been opened, who can't see you and do not suggest they're alert to your presence! (This is possibly caused by the enemies in both rooms being defined as part of the same "team", which all aggro at once.) I think you should be able to enter stealth mode whenever you're out of view of enemies, like in Baldur's Gate, where if you could just get around a corner, you could lose a pursuing attacker.

But perhaps it wouldn't be a problem if we could just tell the game that we're not in combat anymore, in those situations. Or, it would cancel combat mode if you got far enough away from the enemies. It's especially annoying since the game doesn't let you save if you're "in combat" either.

Summons

Rangers can summon animal minions, and mages can summon skeletal warriors, but these summons disappear on any area transition. This ranges from entering or exiting a building, to simply walking from one section of a forest into another. This shouldn't happen (especially in the latter case).

Even worse, the forced unsummoning causes the summon ability to trigger a cooldown period. Ridiculous! Not only has my minion been taken away for no reason, but now I have to sit around waiting for the cooldown to expire so I can summon it again! Either that, or I have to look out for area transitions coming up, and unsummon my minion ahead of time so it'll be off its cooldown by the time I cross the threshold.

This works all right for the ranger, but the mage can only raise a skeleton from the remains of a recently killed enemy, so it really screws the mage.

Dungeon design

Did they hire the ghost of Sarah Winchester as house designer?

In general, Dragon Age dungeons seem rather uninspired, at least in the vanilla game without DLC. Instead of being unique spaces with personality and purpose, they rather seem to be just a jumble of tileset corridors with an occasional large room for bosses. No regard for architecture, no logic in design, and almost no spaces that make you stop and simply admire the place. Not having seen any of the DLC aside from the Stone Prisoner, I can't say whether this is improved elsewhere.

I'll highlight a typical example, as shown in this screenshot. This isn't a cave or a mine, which could have such a rambling structure, but a supposedly abandoned house, with a badly-hidden secret door leading to this random sequence of rooms and hallways. Imagine how much real estate this building must occupy! Is land that cheap in the heart of Denerim?

Bioware used to be pretty good at making unique, interesting interiors which had believeable floor plans, as I highlighted in some of my Baldur's Gate posts. When I say "unique", I mean that each "dungeon" should be a noticeably different experience from another, with its own special flavour, to make these places appeal to the players' sense of exploration and discovery.

Nevertheless, despite all of these various criticisms, I still consider DA:O to be the best overall choice for designing a Baldur's Gate-style quest/adventure mod in a modern engine. I must say, though, that I've very recently become aware that Neverwinter Nights 2 has the elements that I found missing in Neverwinter Nights 1, and I understand it has a very large set of resources to build with, so I'll be investigating that soon, as well.

Quest mods

Speaking of which, I'm also enjoying some excellent quest mods, including the two quest mods from Community Contest 7. Spiders and Knives is a good one to start with, since it's pretty short and straightforward, adding a couple of new quests and locations and an NPC with a fun personality to Lothering. Eye and Shadow is good for Mengtzu's creatively orchestrated and challenging boss fights, set in a beautiful new location from one of the previous community contests.

Now I'm playing an even bigger treat: Dark Times: The Confederacy of Malkuth, Act 1. I'm not sure exactly how large this mod is, but if I take the new world map as an indication, I should call this an unofficial expansion pack, or even a sequel! I had many hours of play time racked up doing quests around the first town before the world map was unlocked, and when I saw it for the first time, a huge smile came to my face at the prospect of more hours of enjoyable gaming to come.

I don't think I can adequately communicate how enthusiastic I am about this mod. It has everything you could possibly want in a Dragon Age expansion. 32 new locations, many new NPCs and 3 new party members, lots of personal stories and side quests, new factions to join or fight, new loot and artifacts with background stories, new unlockable character specialisations, possible new romance(s), and some really heavy-duty moral choices to make.

Some areas need some polish -- mostly in spelling, a missing mesh or two, and some various bugs, but this in no way casts a shadow over the incredible overall job this team did with what I've seen of it so far. They've accomplished a great deal, and I'm very happy to know that they're working on a second act.

One very interesting thing here is that they seem to have cracked the 4-member party limit. Multiple times I've been joined by one or more NPCs, and although they don't get their own portraits on the side of the screen like other party members, I am nevertheless able to access their character screens, level them up as I like, add and remove equipment, adjust their tactics, and even directly control them. I wonder if the Baldur's Gate Redux team could use this kind of system to allow a full Baldur's Gate 6-member party in their mod.

There are numerous other quest mods that I've saved and I'm eager to try out, from some well-respected names in the modding field. It's also been somewhat inspiring to try my own hand at it.

Planescape: Torment portrait mod

If you've been here before, and want to know what's changed, jump directly to the Revision History or Update News sections. A copy of the readme file follows.

Download link

Tchos' portrait mod for Planescape: Torment

by Tchos

Purpose

To replace the 3D character portraits in the game with high-quality hand-painted portraits, as other Infinity Engine games used, such as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, which are more aesthetically pleasing than the 3D character portraits in PS:T. These replacements occur where they appear in the PC/NPC section of the journal, in the stat screens, and the inventory paperdolls. Ideally, future releases of this mod will include replacements for the portraits at the bottom of the gameplay screen, as well as replacements for the rest of the recruitable party members, and perhaps more general NPCs.

Screenshots

Inventory paperdoll example -- The Nameless One, before and after

Stat screen example -- Fall-From-Grace, before and after

Journal portrait example -- Annah, before and after

Installation

This mod comes with a WeiDU installer. To install, copy all of the files into your PS:T "override" folder, located wherever you installed Planescape: Torment, run the file Setup-Tchos-PST-portrait-mod.exe, and follow the prompts. To uninstall, run the file again.

Most of the files are in .bmp format, which can easily be viewed so that you can preview the portraits, and perhaps remove any you don't like.

Notes

I've tried to find portraits that adhered as closely as possible to a certain style (leaning toward realism) and a high level of quality, and so there are a couple of party members who are not replaced here. Although I did find art of some of those characters, they fell too far outside my criteria for this mod. This may seem too arbitrary, especially since some of the official concept art I used strays pretty far from realism, but I'd like to leave the door open for future version releases of this mod to include good replacements for them, if suitable art becomes available in the future.

Of course, this mod could not exist without the permission graciously given by the artists whose work appears in it. I encourage users of this mod to voice your appreciation to those artists, where they may be found in the credits to follow.

Credits for original art, used with permission:

The Nameless One:

Artist: Samizé

• http://samize.blogspot.com

Fall-From-Grace:

Artist: Eleni Tsami (Eilidh)

• http://planewalk.net
• http://eilidh.deviantart.com

Annah:

Artist: Michele Chang

• http://deadred-art.blogspot.com

Misc. NPCs

Fell (and general Dabus), male and female tieflings.

Artist: Phaere (Lisette W.)

• http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=User.EntriesListing&id=15745
• [Web site and Deviant Art accounts are defunct]

Her comments posted on her mod resource submissions collection repeatedly give permission to use any of the portraits in mods:

"You can change the portrait as you see fit." "If you wish to use any other portrait you can, so long as you credit me." "I only want my name mentioned if it in a module for public use. Other than that; use any picture you'd like."

Official concept art used:

• The Nameless One (cover art, used for stat screen)
• Deionarra
• Vhailor
• Wererat
• Various creatures

Revision history

• Version 0.90
  • Released 2011-04-08
  • Replaces journal portraits of: The Nameless One, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Vhailor, Deionarra, Fell/Dabus, male and female tieflings, wererat, larval worm.
  • Replaces stat screen portraits of: The Nameless One, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Vhailor, Morte
  • Replaces inventory screen paperdolls of: The Nameless One, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Vhailor, Morte
• Version 0.91
• Released 2011-04-09
• WeiDU installer kindly provided by GhostDog

Update News

2011-04-09: Updated file to 0.91, incorporating a WeiDU installer, kindly provided by GhostDog.

2011-04-08: I wasn't able to get the animated portraits done for this release using BAM Workshop II. The portraits just didn't work. I'll try later if I can find a better BAM editor. In the meantime, here is release v0.90. Do not link directly to the download page, because updated versions will require a different link. Link instead to this blog post, which I will keep updated with the latest information.

Closing remarks

As I plan to update this mod as I am able, please inform me if you want to host this mod elsewhere, so I can be sure to keep them all up to date. I can be contacted through my blog at http://tchosgames.blogspot.com

Download link

Planescape: Torment, part 1

After finishing Baldur's Gate and its expansion, I wasn't sure which game I might focus on next. I ended up dabbling with several, including Classic Adventures, a total conversion for Baldur's Gate 2 that I'm writing about for a future post, as well as Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Arx Fatalis. This post will be dedicated to Planescape: Torment.

This was one of the games from my X-mas list this past December, and it was the highest priority on that list. My time playing it has confirmed that priority to be warranted. It is an excellent game.

I'll begin with a brief overview of my impressions of the gameplay, interface, and graphic design, to get all that out of the way first, since I have harsh critiques in those areas. My praise will come afterward, in regard to its well-deserved reputation as a very well-written game. Some of it is extremely moving, especially as accompanied by the beautiful character theme songs (especially Annah and Deionarra's themes).

My setup

I own the GOG version of the game, so that means no CD-check to deal with. Installation went smoothly, and was followed by the mods as listed in this mod installation guide. The Bigg's widescreen/high rez mod, Ghostdog's UI mod to fix up the UI for the higher resolutions (and to make the font more readable), The Ultimate WeiDU Fixpack for bug fixes and spelling/grammar corrections in the text, Qwinn's Unfinished Business patch for restoration of some additional content that was cut from the game as released, and finally Qwinn's PS:T Tweak Pack, for some convenience tweaks (stackable rings/scrolls/etc.), banter acceleration, and other things.

The graphics

The primitive 3D graphics are very unappealing -- especially the character models. They have not aged as gracefully as BG and Icewind Dale, which used hand-painted artwork for the characters. The backgrounds aren't as bad, aside from everything being overly busy in texture and lacking specular highlights. I suppose lack of specular highlights is better than "default" specular highlights, which is responsible for so much early 3D looking like smooth plastic, but properly done specular maps can work wonders in the richness and appeal of a surface, and such functionality was basic to all 3D rendering software of the time.

I was able to replace the large portraits in the character database section of the journal (and a couple of the NPCs) with beautiful, hand-painted artwork of the characters drawn by various independent artists, for everyone except Dak'kon, Nordom, and surprisingly Morte. For some reason, finished paintings in a similar style focusing on those characters are proving elusive, even after hours of searching. Ignus is one of the few that doesn't necessarily need to be replaced, since he's just a man on fire.

I've been given permission by three artists to use their Planescape character paintings in a portrait replacement mod for everyone to use (The Nameless One from a detail of a painting by Samizé, and Fall-From-Grace from a painting by Eleni Tsami, and Annah from a painting by Michele Chang). There are also a number of NPCs, such as Fell the Dabus, and some general townspeople, which have open permission from the artist Phaere to be used in mods, and there are a couple of pieces of official game concept art that I think I can use as well, such as one for Vhailor, and the wererats, and one of the creatures. My plan is to release a version 1 of the mod containing this allowed art and the official art, and hope to be able to find appropriate (and allowed) art for the other main characters for a more expansive version later. This will replace both their portraits in the NPC journal, and their face icons in their stat screens. I may also go ahead and replace their paperdoll graphics with the portraits, since they don't actually change to reflect worn equipment anyway (aside from TNO wearing the Dustman robe), and those figures with harsh black shadows in front of bright primary coloured backgrounds is rather off-putting. I thought perhaps they were trying to establish some kind of colour-coding for each character, but then why is TNO's orange background so similar to Dak'kon's orange background?

The "animated" portraits at the bottom of the screen, however, are posing more of a challenge, and my first release will probably not change them.

I'm sure they had high ideals for these animated portraits when they decided to do them, but the result is frankly terrible, as if major concessions had to be made, and they didn't have time to just scrap them altogether. Bad, very unconvincing single-frame "blinks" make up the bulk of their "animation", while the rest is occupied by occasional unclear actions which simply distract from the gameplay when they occur. For instance, Grace occasionally moves into a profile and places her hands together as if to pray, but then immediately returns to her normal position, or Ignus occasionally seems to yawn and stretch, with the flames behind him suddenly coming to life for the brief time he's moving, before freezing in place again. If they had simply gone with the still-image method that the rest of the Infinity Engine games had used, they would have been much easier to replace with more appealing hand-drawn artwork. I hated them so much, I actually went and investigated the BAM file format, educated myself about their purpose and use, and downloaded some tools to modify them. My attempts were partially successful, but they became glitchy if the characters took enough damage. I'll have to try a slightly modified method.

Positive aspects of the interface

The journal and quest tracking system is very well done. I might say it's better than the one in Baldur's Gate, since it's separated into categories to create more of a knowledge database as new things are learned, with characters you meet, a bestiary of monsters, and the usual diary entries and current/completed quest sections. The only thing it's missing is a user notes section, as in BG, where you can type additional information for future reference, or for role-playing purposes. This would be especially useful in this game, since there are many more puzzles, scattered clues, and items that may be useful later. I also think I may have forgotten about a stash of items or two (which, in hindsight, is pretty appropriate for this game). In Baldur's Gate, I tended to store items I didn't want to carry with me in the chest by the door in the Friendly Arm Inn, but the only place that feels like a "home base" in PS:T (the little crypt near the mortuary where you can rest for free) doesn't have a storage chest inside, so I stashed items in a few different locations. Setting things on the ground outside of a chest seems to risk letting those items disappear.

Of course, what I really should do is simply get a real paper notebook for these games, since most games don't have that BG-style user note section anyway. Some games don't even let you make notes on the maps, although PS:T does have that function. I've written notes here and there on little notepads and scraps of paper, but I think I'd like to keep a more permanent set of notes as I play.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to make random NPC comments appear in the dialogue window, as they can in BG, or certain other technical information that tends to appear over the character's head and then fly away out of sight when I might have been distracted by something else on the screen.

Complaints about the interface

Despite finding the game to be a positive overall experience, I find the interface to be slow and clunky compared to Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The interface departed from the intuitive and simple to use action bars that previous games enjoyed, in favour of a very counter-intuitive system wherein right-clicking would pause the game and pop up a radial interface, from which you then choose from several sub-menus such as "use item", "cast spell", or "use special ability". Confusingly, right-clicking on a character's portrait does not, as I would have expected, bring up the context menu for that character -- instead, it brings up the context menu for the currently controlled character, because it doesn't appear to matter at all where you right-click, just that you right-click. Worse, even though pressing the space bar pauses and unpauses the game in any other circumstance, it does not unpause the game when the menu is up, even if you already issued your command. You have to right-click again to make it go away, or hit escape or enter.

This is horrible interface design. Aside from the inconsistency in the functions of keys depending on context, why the need for submenus at all? Space on the screen is not at a premium here. If you're auto-pausing the game anyway when you bring up the menu, why not expand it, letting it take up all the screen space it needs to show all options on the screen at once?

Also, why a radial menu? Radial menus make sense when you're using a game controller, and you can point the analog stick toward the action you want to take. They could even make sense if you could press the arrow keys to select an option when it pops up. But here, it seems to have no function whatsoever. I tested every key on the keyboard, and found none that would act as directional selectors for that radial menu.

Movement in the game is also worse than Baldur's Gate. Characters pause noticeably between you clicking on your intended destination, and their departing for it. Pathfinding seems to take much longer here than it should, especially on a modern system.

This game also complains if I try to quit the game by hitting Alt-F4, which is nevertheless the fastest way to quit, bypassing all the menus and "are you sure" prompts. BG only gives one such prompt if I use it: "Are you sure you want to quit? Boo will miss you." PS:T first gives me a warning that since my desktop is set to higher than 16-bit colour, movies won't play in windowed mode (needless to say, when attempting to close the program, this is of little concern to me) before giving me the "are you sure you want to quit" prompt.

And the rest is praise

An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: "Now your third wish. What will it be?"

"Third wish?" The man was baffled. "How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?"

"You've had two wishes already," the hag said, "but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes." She cackled at the poor berk. "So it is that you have one wish left."

"All right," said the man, "I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am."

"Funny," said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. "That was your first wish."

--A little story told by Morte in Planescape: Torment

I was unfamiliar with the Planescape campaign setting of D&D, though I knew about some of the planes that one might travel to, and that the plane where Baldur's Gate was located is called the Prime Material plane. This game takes place mostly in a "city of doors" called Sigil (so far it hasn't been explained if there's any intended significance to the name, but sigils have nothing to do with doors), where there are doors/portals leading to every other location imaginable, though they will not open unless you have the "key", which can be anything -- even abstract things like a memory, a thought, or a gesture. A couple of quests, in fact, revolved around finding keys that people had lost, so they could return to their homes. Most of the doors don't look like doors, though, in case you're picturing a city with actual doors covering every surface. Instead, any space that's bordered on all four sides by something can become a door under the right circumstances.

Anyway, I like stories where magic doors to distant places can be opened almost anywhere if you either have the key or know the time and place, like in Neverwhere, Time Bandits, Pan's Labyrinth, The Lost Room, etc. (and in some of those cases listed, it was one of the few things I liked about them). Unfortunately, as a gameplay mechanic, it made me worry about whether I should sell anything at all, and instead just cart around as much junk as my party could carry, just in case some item might open a door somewhere. Eventually I relaxed, and started selling stuff off.

Character build

You play as a predefined character -- a human male with a past. I've criticised other games for this, so why not this game? It helps that this character has no memories, and the game establishes that each time he loses his memories, he tends to develop a different personality. Thus, I as a player am creating his new personality from scratch. The game has a recurring theme of "What can change the nature of a man?" Well, losing all your memories would probably do it.

In this regard it also makes sense that you cannot choose your class at the beginning of the game (you start out as a fighter), as having a class means you have training in those class-related disciplines. In this game, if you want those disciplines, you'll have to find someone willing to train you.

This is a game where you get a lot more out of it (or at least a different experience) if you invest in certain stats. The descriptions of the stats indicated that Intellect and Wisdom are very important for regaining lost memories, and since I prefer to play mages anyway, I invested heavily in those stats. I couldn't become a mage until about a week into playing, of course, for the aforementioned reason.

It also helps that this game has long, detailed dialogue options, which sometimes also take into account your favoured stats. This engages the role-player in me. Having a good selection of detailed responses is the primary element that raises it above games that only offer brief responses of no consequence, especially those that are presented as mere summaries.

The intellectual stats also play an interesting role in dialogues, as you can get hints that people are lying, or get opportunities to shame/embarrass people who mistake you for a brainless oaf or otherwise underestimate your intellect. Your wisdom can also stop you from saying the wrong thing in a conversation that might lead to an unwanted (perhaps violent) resolution, though you're free to disregard the warning if that's what you actually want. I hear Fallout 1 and 2 make heavy use of stat-related differences in dialogue options as well, which is something I really like.

As it turns out, the recovery of memories from high Wisdom gives you more than puzzle pieces to the mysteries of the game's story, but also rewards you with items and special abilities, as you remember locations of old secret stashes, or forgotten arts (such as how to raise the dead).

The puzzles

The first puzzle I encountered in this game was an ancient copper earring. Examining it gave a description, suggesting it bore further examination, and it had a "use" button. In Baldur's Gate, various items have such buttons, but these had always been limited to things like expending charges on an item that buffs your stats or similar things. But this item's description also included a helpful note explaining that the "use" button in this game allows you to manipulate items through dialogue prompts. Interesting! This adds another new dimension to the gameplay! Through the dialogue, you can attempt to open combinations by making choices such as "Turn it this way," "twist it that way," "do this other thing," etc.

Stats seem to play a role in puzzles as well (giving little indications such as "this way feels right"), and in the ability to answer riddles without being told the answers in-game. It seems that if your intellect isn't high enough, it won't even give you the option of answering correctly, which eliminates the multiple-choice aspect that usually makes riddles in these games easy to beat (since there's usually one answer that makes perfect sense). This could be frustrating if I really did guess the answer and wasn't allowed to enter it, but that's one of the differences between an RPG and some other kinds of games -- the limitations and advantages are based on how you build your character, rather than what you as a player know. In this case, however, I couldn't even guess the answer in reality:

Ahem! Now, think of words which end in "-GRY". Angry and hungry are two of them. There are but three words in the Common Tongue... what is the third word? The word is something that one uses every day. If thou hast listened carefully, I have already told thee what it is.

Although I couldn't guess it (because either my intellect or wisdom wasn't quite high enough), what I was able to do was challenge the riddler to a riddling contest. Unfortunately for me, since I enjoy riddles, this was a section where my character automatically knew the answers, so I couldn't pick them myself. This contest, however, presented some that were new to me, and clever, like this one:

What is the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, the beginning of every end, and the end of every place?

Answer: The letter E.

The story delivery

PS:T takes its narrative a step further than BG. Aside from having a lot more flavour text in the descriptions of locations (the ones where clicking on an item in the scenery gives you a description of it), it also takes the dialogue from script-style (mostly spoken lines, with occasional descriptions of actions), to full literary style, with the dialogue in quotes, framed with descriptions of actions, expressions, tone, and internal thoughts, as you would see in a novel.

For instance, when you initiate dialogue with a non-hostile NPC in Baldur's Gate, it begins with the NPC's opening dialogue, and then provides you with response options. In PS:T, initiating dialogue first provides you with a description of the NPC, including their appearance, current actions, expression or attitude, and how they may be reacting to your approach. At that point, you are given the option to actively greet them, or leave them alone.

Additionally, during dialogues, you are also often given two versions of the same answer, except that one is marked "Truth", and the other is the same statement, but is marked "Lie". I'm not sure exactly what effect this has on the game aside from the obvious role-playing benefits (you can say something advantageous that you don't actually agree with), aside from the idea that telling the truth is considered Lawful, and lying is considered Chaotic, in terms of alignment. I also understand that making vows in this game is taken seriously, and will affect your alignment one way or another depending on whether you uphold that vow.

That leads me to another interesting difference in this game, which is that alignment is something that evolves via your actions, instead of it being something you decide upon at the beginning of the game. You begin as True Neutral (aka Neutral Neutral), and your actions determine whether your order side swings toward Lawful or Chaotic, and your moral side swings toward Good or Evil. I think it's correct to characterise the "good" alignments like this: Lawful Good characters do good things because it's the law. Neutral Good characters do good things because their empathy moves them to do so. Chaotic Good characters do good things when it suits them to do so. In my case, my actions pretty quickly landed me at Neutral Good, and it has not changed since then. I suppose this means that I've been right to think that my natural inclinations are toward that alignment.

The music

The main theme song makes great use of French horns and strings to evoke a sense of a haunted character with a tragic past. The percussion and certain other instruments also contribute to create an eastern feel to the music, highlighting the exotic and foreign locales where the game takes place. (The end credits theme song goes further with its eastern exoticism in a rather strong departure from the rest of the music, before suddenly transitioning into a surprising electric guitar solo.) The majority of the character themes are variations on the Nameless One's theme, with their own particular flavours.

Deionarra's Theme, the theme of the anguished spirit of a girl whose love had been betrayed by one of my prior, crueller selves, incorporates a heartbreakingly beautiful piano bit which, combined with her dialogue, moved me to vow to do whatever it took to put things right with her. Much of the game, in fact, seems to consist of me trying to clean up the mess left behind by my former selves' actions.

The game calls these previous selves "incarnations," but that's not exactly appropriate. "Incarnation" denotes a singular spirit entering a new body (essentially meaning "into the flesh" in Latin), whereas The Nameless One retains the same body, but is essentially a new "spirit" each time, as a tabula rasa. Although this is not a normal usage of the word, perhaps we could appropriate the word "inspiration" for this, since it literally can mean "the drawing in of an animating spirit" (or also breath, since "spiritus" actually means "breath" in Latin, but that's irrelevant here).

The other standout track is Annah's Theme, which came to my attention shortly outside of the Mortuary, near the Gathering Dust Bar. I didn't understand that it was Annah's Theme at the time, since I didn't know characters' themes play whenever you pass nearby them (or during dialogues with them), and Annah had been standing around outside that bar. I'll reserve my impressions of her and the other characters for the next post, however, since there's a lot to get into, along with my reactions to the story as it progressed, but her theme (which remains my favourite of all of the soundtrack) solidified my admiration of PS:T's music.

That should do as an introductory overview post.