Two-thirds of the way there

In spite of what the lack of recent updates might seem to indicate, I’ve been steadily plugging away at Trinity these past few weeks (and enjoying it :) ), in between sessions of Storm of Zehir (and Mass Effect… and enjoying that too), and have managed to reach the 67% completion mark for the mod.

Mostly it’s been work on gameplay mechanics (means of blowing things up, for example), creature blueprints and combat encounters (making use of several community-made creatures and items in the process), scripting a complex convo and the like. All in all, not much I really can show or talk about in detail without getting into spoiler territory. But here are a couple of new screenshots nonetheless, to liven this blog post up if nothing else. By the way, the hood in these shots is courtesy of Arsan and was exactly what I needed for this NPC. The community does put out a lot of great stuff.

All told, about 84% of the assets of the mod are in varying stages of production right now. I hope to get SirChet a partial but playable version of the mod in the near future, for a first reality-check on story-flow, gameplay and duration (and to see how many serious bugs he can find! :) ).

Now, if you've been pining to walk in one of Ayrin's areas, you'll be happy to know this just came out. I'll certainly check this out ASAP.

SoZ – Less CAN be better

I started Storm of Zehir last week and have been having lots of fun. The level of detail put into the areas is particularly impressive, so is the ingenuity and creativity deployed to build in such an enormous number of skill checks. I also got much more of a kick than expected out of building my own 4-member party and am finding the party conversation system more fun and much less burdensome than I was afraid it might be.

As for the overland map, that’s been interesting too. It sure is a great way to tie together disparate quests and adventure locations and give a feel of open-endedness to the game.

But, boy, those hostile encounters do zap in like madness. That started to become annoying very quickly once into the game, more than anything else ever in NWN2. So I found the script that controls the probability of hostile spawns and applied a modifier to it to reduce the rate at which they are teleported onto the OM. That worked and I can breathe now and not feel like I’m playing Space Invaders or something like that.

If you feel that way about the OM, you too might be interested in downloading the tweak I uploaded to the Vault recently.

We also uploaded the GPS No-Ring UI mod some time ago and have apparently made a few people happy. What more could you ask for.