Picking up

Building on Trinity has picked up recently. After feeling under the weather for a while, I’ve regained in the last couple of weeks the physical and mental energy I require to crack open the TS with any serious intent. I’ve since easily logged in 15-20 hours of TS time, which is a good pace for me.

Mostly, I worked on the “final” big encounter where resolution of the story happens. I took some nice cutscene screenshots, but it would be hugely spoilerific if I were to post them. So I won’t. Too bad, cause they really look good. ;) Players might get to see during this scene, depending on their ealrier actions, a new creature "glove" model done by Daronas. I won't say what, but it's suitably gruesome.

I’ve also revisited the large-scale drow battle I alluded to in the past, testing and troubleshooting some of the variations that might come into play depending on the player’s choices (essentially consisting in deciding at what stage in the mod to attack and in which circumstances). This fight, inspired by some of the larger battles in Challseus’ Rose of Eternity (NWN1), is shaping up to be a cool one (at least it is to me).

//Start section of interest mostly to modders ;)

I’ve recently run into two stubborn problems (and in the case of one of them retrospectively stupid) while scripting that scene. One: this pre-placed NPC refused to make a scripted jump no matter how many times I checked if its tag was correct. Eventually, it dawned on me that the object might simply be corrupt. So I deleted it and placed it again, and, voila, problem solved.

The other issue, which I’m still trying to solve, has to do with a convo that is meant to start in mid-combat with one of your opponents. The convo starts, but breaks, as the enemies go hostile again (or maybe they never stopped being hostile…). I’ll pass on the details, but that’s one bug I hope to quash soon. [EDIT: Problem solved! Custom creature event scripts were interfering in that scene because they weren't checking that a convo was in progress before triggering.]

I’ve also found out that while you can apply a VFX_DUR_GLOW effect to a placeable to make it translucid (neat feature), you can’t for some reason remove it. The remove script finds the effect on the placeable, identifies its creator, but the placeable will simply not return to its former state. That’s too bad, but not dramatic for my purposes.

And yet another problem with which I’ve been trying to come to grips elsewhere is with spawning or applying (to a creature) a custom light-event based VFX. While it shows up fine in the TS, it doesn’t show in game, whether placed as a Placed Effect or applied via script or via the creature VFX setting. If anyone has had success with that sort of stuff please let me know. I know it’s feasible because many other VFX have light-events attached to them and these do show up fine. (Unfortunately, simply spawning an actual light in this case is not an option.)

//End section

Alright, well since screenies are always an appreciated feature of dev blog posts, here are a couple that are not quite spoilers. Thanks for reading. :) (If you like screenshots, check out the gallery on the right-hand side for a compilation of previously released pictures, and some never before seen ;) )