More on Neverwinter Nights 2
Halfway through the Official Campaign now (yes, I like creating alts. I have about a dozen of them) and enjoying it. However, despite promises to the contrary, Neverwinter continues to largely be a male dominated (except for the dancing girls), light skin dominated area, and still mostly human. There is more diversity, but not tons.
For kicks and giggles, I explored the available fan sites, and stumbled upon IGN’s site. It’s chock full of stuff for players, developers and module designers. As an inveterate fan of mods, I downloaded a couple. First, some new heads for my characters (my fembot army) with more hairstyles. Next, the ability to set a vastly greater number of skin, eye, and hair colors.
Then I started (work was slow that day, and despite the fact that I’m a professional and my boss never checks up on me, I still don’t dare play WoW at work outside my lunch hour) exploring all the different categories of stuff to be had.
When I first opened the toolset to explore the idea of writing my own module, I saw all the options, the lack of documentation, and the non intuitive camera functions, felt abject terror, and exited quickly. In my pursuit of notworking, however, I ran across the Don’t Panic tutorial (ripped off, of course, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and moseyed through it when my eyes began to blur from paperwork. With this in hand, I attempted the toolset again last night and earlier this evening, successfully creating a long empty plain with a tree and a church, which was linked to the interior of the church. Voila!
And how the hell is this related to feminism? Newsflash, fellow feminists. The Good Ol’ Programmer’s club would have you believe that building a game module is too complicated for our fuzzy wittle womanly heads. It’s not. It’s just not. In fact, given that I’m taking a couple of extra days off this weekend, I should have the mechanics of the toolset down sufficiently to begin designing my first “real” module — and I’m going to go all Shakespearian on their asses.
Romeo and Juliet, that is. I’ve always wanted to re-write the silly play because it’s really just Medieval gang warfare with a tragic ending because kids can’t be trusted with romance. So, suppose I create a module with all the drama of the original, with NPCs I can design myself to be just as diverse as I want them to be, with story endings (good, evil, and neutral story lines) the way I like them.
Now, time is not on my side. I’m a busy woman, so don’t expect anything much until fall…. but I suspect that more than playing the game, I’ll enjoy designing for it. OMG is it fun! It’s like painting and writing and directing a play all in one.
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:06 am
I started to work on a module for NWN2 but apart from my lack of time I ran into some bugs early on, but then I had some pretty lofty goals for my first area.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:10 am
I’ve thought long and hard on the issue of balance in terms of beauty of the areas and storyline, and decided that storyline and action come out ahead. For the most part I’ll use pre-fab areas and the blueprints already provided in the game or through other developers, without over filling areas with placeables, and concentrate on conversation trees and scripts that really make a difference to the plot, along with action sequences that are really fun, interesting, and challenging.
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:37 am
How do I get the new heads/hairstyles and are they difficult to install (for someone who doesn’t mod neways)?
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:00 am
I’m still groking the scripting methods for NWN2 — it’s basically C# and I have to dust off my knowledge of C/C++. But yeah–conversation trees, basic object placement, and basic triggers are a cinch with the world builder.
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:06 pm
I’ll find the hairstyles for you and post a link…you simply unpack them into the “override” (or something like that) folder and they’ll be there. Also, there’s a scripting page for NWN2 as well, http://www.nwn2scripting.com/index.php?ID=1
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:56 pm
“Romeo and Juliet, that is. I’ve always wanted to re-write the silly play because it’s really just Medieval gang warfare with a tragic ending because kids can’t be trusted with romance. So, suppose I create a module with all the drama of the original, with NPCs I can design myself to be just as diverse as I want them to be, with story endings (good, evil, and neutral story lines) the way I like them.”
Romeo & Juliet is one of the greatest works of literature ever created and for you to dismiss it as “silly” makes you look like a philistine. To change it so that you provide “good, evil, and neutral” endings confirms that you have the depth of understanding that one would expect from a bowling ball.
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
… because, you know, no one has ever re-written any of Shakespeare’s plays, or used them in other venues (including video games), or re-imagined them, and if they had, they would all be philistines, for how dare they pay homage to great literature by having fun with it. Oh grow up.
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:25 pm
…a shakespeare fanboi? I understand the drooling masses of Zelda and Tetris fanbois eager to flame anyone who says something they don’t like (even in jest…even pointed out in jest…even pointed out to them IN HUGE TEXT)…but shakespeare’s got fanbois too? Now I *have* seen everything.
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:36 pm
ODanu, Im with you on this, people can do what they like with Shakespeare’s works. He’s dead anyway, so he aint that shit hot. And Ive been in his house, and its shit!
Plus hes a TK’ing faeg!1!one!11!
(I was joking in all of that, bar my agreement with ODanu)
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:45 pm
I would love to see the endings to Romeo and Juliet with good/evil/neutral storyline. I can see it now. I can already see the Evil storyline - where Romeo and Juliet (instead of poisoning themselves) poison their families and inherit their vast fortunes creating a monopoly of power in Verona… … though i feel like there should be more after that, I’m having trouble thinking of it.
Neutral could be like, the original storyline (no one wins).
And good would be all puppies and rainbows where Romeo and Juliet convince the families to stop their feuding and they all live happily ever after …. oooor maybe not. Meh… but I really like the idea of an evil storyline.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
I would love to see the endings to Romeo and Juliet with good/evil/neutral storyline
But this is D&D! That means storylines for all nine possible alignments
Neutral could be like, the original storyline (no one wins).
I reckon the original storyline is the Lawful-Evil ending. Your ‘poison their families to inherit a merged power monopoly’ is the Chaotic-Evil version.
I say this because Romeo are Juliet themselves are quite obviously NPCs, being manipulated (mind affecting: will saves) by the PCs — Nurse (Rogue?), Friar Lawrence (Druid?), and Mercutio (Bard?, and I would have been a wuss and reloaded after his little mishap in scene three, but obviously Will Shakespeare is a much harder core gamer-dude than I) — who have been tasked (off stage) by the Prince of Verona to ’sort out this whole Montague/Capulet feud problem for me once and for all’.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
LOL, it sounds so exciting. Yes, I’d forgotten that there are 9 alignments and not just 3.
May 28th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Yeah, I’m definitely having trouble with baking — even painting an area as walkable, it seems like only a portion of the map is baking correctly. I’ll have to play around with map size and features to see what sort of limitations the engine has.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Well, I have a very rough outline, but MP, you’re scaring me now. My new designer-fu is very weak. Perhaps I will have to gain a few more levels (:-) before implementation.