Monday, February 9, 2009

First-time partial run-through

I made a first-time run-through of 2 of the 3 “zones” of Trinity this weekend, which, at the pace I’m able to mod, is a milestone in itself.


There are 3 “zones” in this adventure:


1) The staging areas of Shadowdale Keep, where one gets the main quest briefing, can purchase some equipment and gets a few sidequests;

2) The Cormanthor forest areas near Myth Drannor, where a group of surface drows are stationed;

3) And Soloria, the dungeon-esque underground school of wizardry, which is the heart of this adventure, and the part drawn from Ed Greenwood's 1986 Dragon Magazine adventure called Into the Forgotten Realms.


So I played through the Keep and the Soloria parts and it took me a little over 2 and a half hours, clicking quickly through the convos for the most part. This was reassuring, since it tells me I'm probably going to reach my goal of making a 4-6 hour mod.


Now however, I've 9 pages of bugs, oddities and other required adjustments recorded for those parts. But they are small, handwritten pages, and I write sloppily. So it isn’t as bad as it sounds. Going through most of those will be my work for the next week or so, I should think.


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Here are new screens showing a new VFX I’ve also been working on (in actuality it moves). It was inspired by the water reflections in underground submerged caves we visited in Mexico (that was cool!). If someone knows how I can project a texture horizontally against a wall though, please let me know.


8 comments:

Lariam said...

The progress sounds good to me! It could be that I just have such a limited time for playing NWN these days, that my expectations with regard to the pacing of the module releases have got somewhat lower, too. :)

Wyrin said...

nice milestone to hit, and I tend to think that you can often multiply the time the builder takes by 1.5-2 for the players

I loved the 'cenotes' in mexico too. Swimming in one of those was amazing - we had to be blessed by a local tribal chief before being allowed in.

I saw your post in the forums about projected fx. Can you pull apart the window beam fx to see how that works (that projects the window grid onto the floor)?

dgraf said...

Congrats on the milestone! I am looking forward to this one. Remember to shout out if you need testers!

Frank Perez said...

Congratulations on this significant milestone. I'll bet it feels great knowing that the end is in sight.

Jclef said...

Woohoo - great news, E.C., and I really like that visual effect you have there! :D

EC said...

Thanks guys! The encouragement means a lot.

Thanks Denis for the offer :) Yes, I'll be looking for as many playtesters as possible down the line. Hopefully, the bugs will have mostly been quashed by then (SirChet is redoubtable!), so it'll be a matter of highlighting weaknesses in the mod and making suggestions for improvements. I hope many of you guys will volunteer! :)

Thanks Wyrin for the tip re the playtime multiplier. As for the window effect, I'll check it out, though I believe it's a vertical projection coupled with a beam effect.

Swimming in a cenote is one of the two outings I wanted to do while there. I'm glad we got the chance!

Anonymous said...

I'm looking forward to playing this, great to see that the end is in sight!

EC said...

Thanks Starwars! I'm happy to hear that.

Sometimes I wonder just how "in sight" the release really is, but it'll get there, that's for sure. :)