The Great NWN2 Modding Thread

[Starwars]

In short, while the town asks for help finding out more about the goblins migrating in great numbers into the region and perhaps to just kill them all to be safe, the player actually has the option of making the goblins fight each other, or helping them out by telling them about the town's defences and so forth. It would take too much scripting work to actually show the results of that (burnt down towns, invasions, closing of questlines, etc), but assuming that such consequences would take a few weeks to pan out, you could show it in the ending slides.

 

I think the ending slides is often the best way of showing such things, mostly because it often feels awkward to return to a place that has changed greatly because of your actions and not being able to do anything meaningful about it (if it's negative I mean). A good example of this is the famed Tenpenny quest in Fallout 3. Sure you can kill the bastards after the quest has ended, but that only leaves Tenpenny Tower oddly barren for the rest of the game. Sticking it in an ending slide would've worked better I think.

I'm still not sure how to treat the ending in my mod. I find it pretty hard to wrap up the stories and such, but I think it'll come as I expand more upon them.

 

What UI is that in your screenshot Tigranes? Your area looks pretty nice I think. It showcases another thing which I find hard personally, and that is getting "hilly" terrain right. And I hate laying out the walkmesh.

[Tigranes]

Absolutely. If the goblins used the player's information about the town to raid it, that would take a massive amount of work to show in-game properly - redoing the map, changing lots of dialogue, etc. Much better to show long-term consequences.

 

Search for BGUI on the vault for the UI. Back when NWN1 was released I was really disappointed at the slick, metallic style they had gone for (and have stuck to since) - I think it really looks out of place with the setting and is rarely pretty anyway. Kind of sucks how you can't move some of the stuff (or I haven't figured out how, yet), but still.

 

Oddly enough I'm pretty comfortable with hilly terrain and such, but really struggle with rocky stuff. If you look at somewhere like the Old Owl Well or whatever it was called, the 'cliffs' are actually mostly dirt with seemingly random streaks of cliff rock thrown in, and big boulders sitting in the middle - it all looks really patchy, but somehow when you're playing it's fine.

 

I hate how much work the non-playable areas create in NWN1/2 exteriors, but that's what fogs are for:

 

From above, no fog.

 

edit: wow, I need to fix that wagon.

 

It annoys me that you can't do walkmeshes precisely, triangle by triangle, because if you set a brush to 1 / 0 it doesn't really do anything most of the time. You notice this with grass or elevation as well - sometimes it just won't let you touch that precise place.

[Guard Dog]

Absolutely. If the goblins used the player's information about the town to raid it, that would take a massive amount of work to show in-game properly - redoing the map, changing lots of dialogue, etc. Much better to show long-term consequences.

 

Search for BGUI on the vault for the UI. Back when NWN1 was released I was really disappointed at the slick, metallic style they had gone for (and have stuck to since) - I think it really looks out of place with the setting and is rarely pretty anyway. Kind of sucks how you can't move some of the stuff (or I haven't figured out how, yet), but still.

 

Oddly enough I'm pretty comfortable with hilly terrain and such, but really struggle with rocky stuff. If you look at somewhere like the Old Owl Well or whatever it was called, the 'cliffs' are actually mostly dirt with seemingly random streaks of cliff rock thrown in, and big boulders sitting in the middle - it all looks really patchy, but somehow when you're playing it's fine.

 

I hate how much work the non-playable areas create in NWN1/2 exteriors, but that's what fogs are for:

 

It annoys me that you can't do walkmeshes precisely, triangle by triangle, because if you set a brush to 1 / 0 it doesn't really do anything most of the time. You notice this with grass or elevation as well - sometimes it just won't let you touch that precise place.

 

From the ground level it looks really nice. As for the sunken wagon wheel, if you cannot adjust it by moving the placable or adjusting the terrain height (which can throw somethng off elsewhere) little things like that can be hidden with a grass placable. Are you using any plug ins for area design?

[Tigranes]

After looking around, I might leave it because 99% of people would never look from that angle (besides which, this is a test area for no purpose).

 

Not at the moment, no. I know of powerbar, but I am waiting for SOZ and then the patch.

 

Fiddling with conversations and scripts now - I've done convs before and of course there's not an issue there, but scripts are indeed the most challenging and time-consuming for me. I get the smallest and weirdest things wrong, so I'm building myself back up from the basics, doing stuff like variables, effects and whatnot.

[Guard Dog]

I've spent the last two days working with the Overland Map. I'm trying to edit the nEncounterTable for custom encounters. Obviously I'm doing something wrong because when I cross the trigger with a PC, no monster. It really is very irritating trying to learn something new with little documentation. However, the area does look nice.

[Tigranes]

Bit of a hiatus after I completed my mod writeout, and also moved home. Set up with two monitors which should help immensely. I'm still going to need quite a bit of script practice before SOZ arrives. Maybe make a little quest to find a dog, or something silly.

 

GD I gather that while you've completed quite a few areas, you aren't wanting to show any yet?

[J.E. Sawyer]

I've spent the last two days working with the Overland Map. I'm trying to edit the nEncounterTable for custom encounters. Obviously I'm doing something wrong because when I cross the trigger with a PC, no monster. It really is very irritating trying to learn something new with little documentation. However, the area does look nice.

I'll try to coordinate with Nathaniel and Jeff on this, but there's a bit of a disconnect between the reality of the SoZ campaign, the overland map tutorial, and creating your own overland map.

 

Some of the scripts Nathaniel refers to in the tutorial .pdf have nx2_ prefixes. Jeff created some generic scripts that are in the global SoZ data that can (and should be) referred to instead.

 

For example, an nx2_tr_terrain trigger should use for its On Enter, On Exit, and On Heartbeat scripts gtr_terrain_en, gtr_terrain_ex and gtr_terrain_hb instead of the nx2_ prefixed variants.

[Monte Carlo]

I have Campaign Cartographer, an older version that I used to use for P&P games.

 

It's pretty awesome. When I look at the world map for Medieval TW2 it pretty much reminds me of what I could come up with after playing around with CC2 - in fact I wonder if the Creative Assembly actually used the same software. I don't know how you could segue it into a NWN2 mod, except I suppose send it out as a separate file to provide a nice presentation of what the game world looked like.

 

All I will say about the older CC is that it wasn't the easiest thing to play around with straight out of the box - lots of messing around with X and Y axes etc.

 

Cheers

MC

[Guard Dog]

I don't know how you could segue it into a NWN2 mod, except I suppose send it out as a separate file to provide a nice presentation of what the game world looked like.

MC

 

I was thinking of using it to create world maps. After working with the OL map I'm really not sure it's worth the trouble it is. For my modding project I am ditching it in favor of a world map ala the OC or MotB. For the Souther Adventures project I comitted myself to making it work.

 

@Josh I'll give those a try in the encounter triggers. I was not using those. Thanks!

[Tigranes]

Replayng MOTB and noticing just how broad Obs people have painted their areas. They pick a consistent theme (mix of X and Y textures, whatever) and provide huge areas full of it. i.e. the Red Tree clearing, Ashenwood, Skein, area outside Mulsantir. But they are all very consistent. One of the things I really get annoyed with in mods are tiny intricate areas and corridors that look nice, but you can't see anything because its just fighting with the camera. Camera to blame, maybe, but no camera could deal with providing the range of viewpoints NWN2 does while keeping up with one-tile corridors that turn in knots.

 

Also noticed how badly "spawn monsters" trick works in NWN2 because they don't pop into life, they fade.

[Starwars]

I haven't looked closer at the texturing in OEIs campaigns for some reason. There was some that I thought stood out as poor in SoZ, that being the beach area near the start of the game. The area designer was going for sort of sandy rocks but it looks quite bad there. Kind of strange since I found most area design in MotB and SoZ really good.

 

I agree with the spawning in of monsters. It happens in Ashenwood and also in the dreaded Orc caves in the NWN2 OC, where mobs just "fade in" right on top of you. Really not a good choice. Another problem is also, if you spawn in monsters in a room which the player is approaching for example, there is a slight "stutter" as the engine loads them in. This obviously ruins much of the element of surprise as the player will think "aha, the mod just spawned some mobs!"

I haven't really played around with monster placement and so on, but is it not viable to have all monsters spawned upon entry of an area? Does it mean performance problems? Or am I missing something?

[Tigranes]

The stutter is not present on higher-end computers (and with my old comp, everything lagged anyway).

 

I think in MOTB the spawns are there because otherwise, you can see them frmo a mile off, and when you have access to Meteor swarm, storm of vengeance, bombardment and so forth, there's not much of a challenge. As it is you can be surprised by a couple of huge earth elementals falling on top of Safiya.

 

I don't know if it's because of performance problems. Looking at mods like H&C and MOTB I see a lot of trees and grass and creatures and they're all handled pretty well; usually it's an abundance of spell effects. I suppose it really depends on just how many creatures... the orc caves for instance (which just proves that the orc caves weren't a good idea to begin with).

[Draxes]

Didnt know where else to post this but here it goes. I read thru the post here and glad I found a good modding communitte for this game. I just started playing around with the tool set and picking up on it rather quickly. Still having problems with scripting and conversations, but I'm hoping to have that hacked out within the next week or so. Anywho, I'm working on a campaign series called The Lich of Dragonspine. Right now the jump off point is Toliver, where you'll head north towards Dragonspine Mts. Mixing in lots of variables, and trying to push the tools to their limit, I hope. If anyone can pass along any knowledge on anything involving the tool set, I would greatly appreciate it. Still kinda learning, but like I said, I'm hopeful :/

[J.E. Sawyer]

The toolset forums have a lot of info, Draxes.

 

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewf....html?forum=113

[Draxes]

Thanks for the link I found lots of stuff I was looking for, even made my first successful convo

[Tigranes]

Well I've been lazy, but waiting for SOZ and waiting to finish the SOZ campaign *was* important, as I suspected. I haven't dug in the toolset for new functions and whatnot yet, but just in terms of art assets, it opens up a lot of interesting possibilites and lets me get away more from the "Highcliff Look" without having to rely on custom assets.

 

Nearly done with my grad applications, so probably going to start fooling around with an area, but this time an actual one.

[Logan]

I did a lot of work with the NWN1 toolset but never published anything, I did some of my own scripting though and made some scripts that I thought were nice, ones that spawned monsters randomly or had general random results, most of the boss fights would spawn random text over their heads, saying things like "I'll kill you" and so on. I thought it was a nice touch.

 

Then I got NWN2 and I had to upgrade my video card to a BFG 7950 GT OC, all the sudden I could not use the NWN1 toolset and I could not play NWN1, it locked up. So I basically lost all my scripting (yeah I know I can get it back, I'm just lazy)

 

Then I was out of work for a coupls months and I built 80% of keep on the borderlands in NWN2 toolset as an exercise to learn the tools and to finally publish a module (I always wanted to for NWN1 but could never finish the project, sound familiar anyone?), anyway then life came along and module building went away (I had a baby boy)

 

I had some nice features in Boarderlands, lots of companions and I uncoupled XP from the PC, so no leveling up of all characters at the same time, I also made death permanent for companions and tried to keep magic limited, although it is hard to do that and be fair to all player types.

 

What I want to do is build a mod with the new overland map and try to just paste in community modules to create a super-mod where you could access a bunch of different mods with the SOZ party system, problem is that you would probably have to do some work on the community mods to get them to work right with the party system, and you might piss off some builders by taking their work.

 

Better yet would be to get a bunch of community members to build small mods for different levels and paste them into a overland map, just get everybody to use the same mod template and naming cconventions and agree on loot (I prefer low loot, where you really appreciate the good stuff you do get and it doesnt seem like you can get a +1 to +3 of anything at some Kmart of magic)

[Tigranes]

Awesome, more people!

 

I started work on what should be the simplest of the five outlying areas in my module - a tiny island off the coast, where a miner/forager has found a way down into an ancient sunken city. It's my first time using sandy / rocky textures as the main base though, so it doesn't look all that nice. Oh well, good practice.

 

Better yet would be to get a bunch of community members to build small mods for different levels and paste them into a overland map, just get everybody to use the same mod template and naming cconventions and agree on loot (I prefer low loot, where you really appreciate the good stuff you do get and it doesnt seem like you can get a +1 to +3 of anything at some Kmart of magic)

 

This is probably more feasible, and sounds quite similar to what Guard Dog's doing with his new team. Check a couple of pages back.

[Rhomal]

For the PW I ran I had a over reaching metaplot/storyline. I was thinking of taking my custom setting and the plot and turning it into a series of modules. Somewhat like the BG series but certainly smaller scope/scale.

[Draxes]

Well so far no screenies of areas yet, still working on particulars and doing PnP maps for the areas before I start mapping them to detail. However, here is a listing of the areas that I'm eventually gonna cover: Tilverton (3 exteriors, 2 interiors, and 1 mini cave), Rode to Shadowdale (nuff said there), Shadowdale (1 exterior, 2-3 interiors), Dagger Hills, Border Forest, and Dragonspine Foothills (all random encounter areas. May put in a few sideline quests in these areas), Dagger Falls (1 exterior, 2-3 interiors), Snowmantle (2 exteriors, 3-4 interiors which includes a large cavern), Fortress Crypt of MaHa'Dul (well that is the big one, so I'm gonna keep that to my self atm). Since I'm officially in lay-off status, I have plenty of time to work on them, plus I had to withdraw from school so no distractions from that . Hopefully I'll have some screenies by next Monday.

Edited January 30, 2009 by Draxes

[Draxes]

I've ran into a snag as far as quest creation. If I've read my tutorial sources correctly, I need to make a varialbe script to have an npc give my pc a quest. I have read through a tutorial about scripting and it covers alot of things for NWN2. The one thing it doesnt cover is scripting a mission for pc's to accept or refuse. Anyone have a link to something that has more depth to it's instruction.

[Starwars]

I was looking around a bit at some cool NWN2 custom stuff and ran across this again:

Don't know if people here have seen it, so might as well post it.

 

Made by the same guy who modeled the popular Beholder among some other stuff (he's also working on driders and new werewolves that I think will be released for the mod called Misery Stone). Pretty amazing what you can do with the engine with a little talent, hehe.