500

I'm happy: Trinity has been downloaded more than 500 times in its first week. Pretty good I think for a platform that's 3+ years old. I told myself I'd be pleased if Trinity got 1000 downloads altogether. Looks like it should surpass that. At this rate, Trinity will make Hall of Fame by April.

Ya right. I'll be stunned if it ever makes it: nowadays, the 5000 downloads requirement imposed on NWN2 modules seems unsurmountable.

Be that as it may, right now, my heart warms at the feedback and that's what matters at this stage. I do wish the feedback ratio could top the 2% mark, but that's ever been the norm, so that's just the way it'll have to be.

Trinity Update v1.02

I've just released a first update (1.02) to Trinity, which (among other things) adds Kaedrin PRC pack compatibility.

Also released this weekend was a Trinity Hints pdf. So if you absolutely want to find all magic items and secrets in Soloria, or don't know what to tell that magic mouth, then you might want to have a look.

Reaction thus far to Trinity is fantastic. I could not be more pleased.

It's up

Vault Download

Thanks again to all you faithful blog readers and commenters for your support. I'd also like to thank my team members who put their own stamp on the mod: Daronas and SirChet, the playtesters (Amraphael, dgraf, Jet Truebow, Lance Botelle, and Starwars) as well as all the content providers who allowed me to give Trinity, I think, a unique feel. And all the players to come: without at least a few of you, there's not much point.

I look forward to reading your feedback.

Thanks.

Any last minute bug reports?

Trinity is being uploaded to the Vault today. If you are among the 50+ people who have downloaded it already, then now would be the time to let me know of any bug/issue you encountered, if any.

If everything went fine, then I look forward to reading your feedback on the Vault!

Thanks!

P.S. I'm taking the download link offline as a new version of the mod will be up on the Vault in the next couple of days. Thanks to everyone who played Trinity thus far!

Trinity Patch #1

Here is a patch to apply after installation, whether you're in mid-game or not, and even if you have not encountered this specific problem.

-Attempts to fix issues with "A Father's Revenge" quest (by far the most complex quest script-wise in the mod :) )

Download

Play Trinity NOW!

Trinity is ready!

While I await FTP access from the Vault, I've uploaded release 1.00 of Trinity to FileFront so you can get to play it first if you want! (and get back to me with some early bug reports if any! :) )

Leave comments here or at ecpatterson at sympatico dot ca.

Download (self-installer only for now) (Mod taken offline as new version will be up on the Vault in the next couple of days.)

ReadMe here: be sure to read it before you play it. :)

I'd like to thank all you faithful blog readers for your support over the past months. Not sure I would have completed the mod without it.

Hope you enjoy!

Bugs, Virus and other Abominations

Bugs
Chet and I must have hunted down over 100 bugs and other issues since alpha began. I fixed most of them now, classified several as low priority (will get to them if and when I feel like), and have been really stumped by just two or three bugs thus far but they aren’t critical ones and, if need be, I know there are workarounds for them.

It’s amazing how bugs just keeping creeping up though. All you need is to forget a journal advance at some point or put in the wrong conditional on a convo node. I cross my fingers we will have caught all of these subtle errors before release.

So bug hunting and polishing has been going at a swift pace… until about two and a half weeks ago.

Virus
It started with my 5 year old daughter contracting a flu, with fever lasting a full week (most likely H1N1). Wife and I split the time at home. Paid-work productivity went down of course, and so did time spent on Trinity.

And then it was my turn. Woke up the day after my wife left for a 12-day business trip to South America with flu symptoms: test results two days later confirmed H1N1. So have been struggling to get over this since. Still not fully recovered. Wife is back now, so that is a measure of relief.

At one point even, my 3-year old had flu-like symptoms, but she was out of commission for just 3 days. Good to see how the young ones spring back so swiftly.

Although at home every day since, I haven’t had much energy to put into Trinity. Did feel good 2-3 days late last week and started work on a brand new area (felt good to sculpt and texture again) for the “drider and destruction” quest. Got a new alpha out to Chet too for a fresh runthrough, and looking forward to seeing the results of his hunt. But I haven’t had the spirit to do much more.

Abominations
Instead, I’ve have been putting time into Dragon Age, and killed a ton (certainly feels like it) of abominations and other darkspawns. Playing as a mage, which is hugely different than playing a wizard or even a sorcerer in NWN2. The quick spell refresh and low spell variety means the same strategy again and again in combat. Though combat is fast and furious, and the animations and especially sounds are extremely satisfying, it’s gotten a little old already, and I’ve put aside the game for now, still, after no less than 40 hours of playing.

Picked up Fallout 3 again, installed a couple of mods from Fallout Nexus, and I’m enjoying the exploration and the quests once again, though I expect killing Super Mutants, Super Mutant Brutes, Super Mutant Masters, and more Super Mutants to get old soon again. But for the time being that’s where much of my time before the LCD screen is spent.

Should be back on Trinity soon.

Thanks for reading.

TRINITY enters alpha phase!

This is a huge deal for us. TRINITY has gone alpha, meaning we’ve reached a point where the game is playable from beginning to end, and has all the required content to test out gameplay and story flow.
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The adventure in TRINITY begins as you stand before the Lord of Shadowdale. Lord Falconhand, acting on behalf of the Dalelands Council, selected you to lead a party of adventurers on a mission to stop one would-be tyrant from succeeding where another one failed twenty years before. Setting off from the Twisted Tower of Shadowdale by the Ashaba river, you will be taken to a section of the old elven forest of Cormanthor near the ruins of fabled Myth Drannor. From there, you will plunge deep underground into one of the area’s abandoned schools of wizardry on a hunt for magic, and a chase for one man.

With gameplay inspired by PnP adventuring, TRINITY is a module for level 6 to 8 characters in which your decisions really do matter. Play length is estimated at 6 hours for now.
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The alpha version is in the hands of our QA department (i.e. SirChet ;) ) for continued testing and we’re moving steadily towards private beta.

The beta version will :

- No doubt fix many bugs discovered during the alpha
- Tie up some story and gameplay loose ends
- Add more creature and object descriptions
- Further balance combat
- Add a couple of cinematic cutscenes
- Integrate opening and closing movies
- Have edited dialogues and descriptions
- Add a sidequest involving driders and blowing up stuff

To celebrate here are four of the custom loadscreens, beautifully mounted by Daronas.

Twit-style

Working towards official alpha version of Trinity. Should be there in next few days.

Got invited to join the Dragon Age Toolset and Community Site Beta. Can’t say more (I believe).

Hellfire got a new screen.

Soundset selection fix made HoF.

I’m kind of busy these days.

Thanks for reading friends! :)

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 ;) )

No time to mod

This ain’t no time to mod. This I tell myself sometimes when the sky is a cloudless blue on late spring days. Like those we had over the weekend.

But if the weather hadn’t been so inviting, would I have modded anyway? Would I have had the time? The energy? Not so sure…

My paid work is keeping me extremely busy lately, and not unsatisfactorily drained at the end of the day. There’s been no time to mod through it all, or very little. But there’s an end around the bend to this intense activity, as the focus of my labors comes to pass next week (big event I’ve been organizing).

I sense this will open up my spirit to Trinity, and my schedule to more modding. It feels within hand's reach, though it seems to flutter away every time I take another step. I’ll catch it. Soon enough. I know.

In the meantime, here are a couple of trinkets from my picture hoard. They'll serve well on a day like this.

Three quarter done

It feels like it's taken forever to get there, but I've finally reached the 75% completion mark for Trinity. Over 90% of all assets are now either done or underway.

What's left to do mostly is to finish up conversations, including those of the companions, journal entries, cutscenes and some encounters. Of course, after that is done, there's still going to be the inevitable debugging, polishing and balancing part.

In there, I don't count at all however an optional side-quest, which does fit into the story, but is mostly meant as a showcase for Ree's driders. I'll get started on that once the models are out. Hopefully that'll be before the rest of the mod is done. But that's still some ways off, which does give Ree some time to work his magic... ;)

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One thing that has been notched as completed recently is this, which I think is the coolest cloak in town. It was done by Daronas, who's been contributing a lot of custom content for Trinity. I just love glow maps.

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.

Why mod? A quote.

I’m back. We had a great time in warm Mexico, caught somewhere between a dream and paradise.


With no computer and toolset over there, I read quite a bit and took a pretty good bite off of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. I needed a break from the usual medieval fantasy I read these days… ;)

I found this quote that expresses well one reason why I keep plugging away at Trinity. On and off over the last months, I’ve been building a mental list of reasons why I build. Someday it might get consigned to this place. Till then, here’s the quote. If you haven’t read Pillars, it might help to know that one of the stories in there is about a man whose lifelong dream is to build a cathedral:

“Then he thought what a thrill it would be to create something from nothing; to see, one day in the future, a new church here where now there was nothing but rubble, and to say: I made this.”

No one likes to play alone

This will be old news to those who visit our site, but I thought I’d finally officially post the results of the poll we conducted some time ago on preferred party size.

Sixty-eight people responded to the question (a great turn-out!): “In a solo mod, what is your ideal NWN2 party size?”. And the results were:


Two results of special note: no one likes to play solo, and a larger proportion of players like to have 3 companions to adventure with.

Sure seems like the folks at OEI got it right in SoZ with their party of 4 player-created characters, doesn’t it.

Trinity is built around a party of 5 and you start off with the full roster of 4 companions. While players will be able to dismiss any of them at any point in the game without breaking conversations or quests, the mod will be balanced for the complete party and a good part of the banter and interjections will rely on all party members being present. My recommendation then will be to play with all companions, on a first run-through at least.

If I were to do it again, I’d probably go with 3 companions. But now, I’ve grown too attached to each of them and can’t see myself cutting anyone from the roster.

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.

'Tis the season

Summer and its lingering warmth are behind us. The trees are bare, their leaves cover the ground. The wind and rain batter the few pale flowers that remain. It is cold. The sky is gray.

Yay!

This means it's modding season in Canada! Let the games be built!

Mod building might be a bit like professional hockey. There's much more happening between October and May. There's less reason to spend much time outdoors (at least for those that hate the cold, like me), and less reason to feel guilty about it.

So I now expect building on Trinity to pick-up.

Still I'm pretty pleased with progress lately. The mod's now about 60% done. Conversations represent one of the big chunks that account for the remainder. Progress on that front is sss-loooowww. I really am rarely able to write fast. And have my fill of it after 90 minutes or so. Add to that the fact that I don't often have 90 minutes-worth of quiet time where my mind is rested and cooperative, and you get the picture.


Wife is taking the kids away for a full 36 hours this weekend. This means one Vin Diesel movie pumped out of the surround sound, and some good quality time with the TS. If I can get in 3-4 90 minutes writing sessions I'll be pleased.

Besides writing, I've been working lately on scripting and gameplay mechanics for a corpse cremation puzzl-ish sequence, some light/ambiance scripts, area design (one has been chalked up in the Completed column), and some custom item blueprints, including a very rare 300-year old bottle of Elverquisst, amongst other odds and ends.

(EDIT: I just realized that Trinity has been in development for exactly one year... Is that cause for celebration, or is it depressing? Not sure... :) My first backup is dated Oct 20 2007 - yes, I have one year worth of backups...)

And this would be the ideal time too for the community Halloween beta mod to go up. I really can't wait for this.

And now for some very interesting NWN2 building community news.

Great balls of acid

by E.C.Patterson

No I’m not talking about any hallucinogenic excesses, but about the VFX for the Melf’s Acid Arrow spell. Cool VFX. Doesn’t look anything like an arrow though.


These are pix of a drow wizard unloading his wand of acid arrows on a couple of companions, poor Autamma and Thelvar (PC was long down and out). I thought they were pretty neat (even though the sky color and lighting does not look like any of my settings. Don’t know what’s up with that yet.)


They were taken while I was working this weekend on the largest battle encounter in Trinity (previously called Into the Forgotten Realms, and likely to know at least one other name change before it’s released – latest poll is sort of telling me as much…;) ). It’s a battle to take down a surface drow encampment, which could take place at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the mod, or not at all really, depending on how the player feels about it. There’s no way, I think, the party would be able to succeed on their own. So they’ll have two different options for allies. One of them will involve driders. Enough said. ;)

I started off with at least 60 enemies in the scene, but even with AI tweaks it was too much of a mess to play: there was just too much happening. So I’ve been taking down the number of belligerents to more manageable numbers, while making them a bit tougher. Also using some custom DCR scripts to control when certain groups jump into the fray. Fun stuff do to this battle setup, but hard to get right. Not quite there yet.

One final word about all that: Tony_K. After waffling on the question, I pretty much decided to include his AI into the mod. It really makes creatures behave more intelligently. I just have to get more comfortable with how to tweak it, but for the most part it’s just like the default AI (except there are no X2_L_BEH_* variables).
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No surprise here, Trinity building time has been at a high premium these past couple of months. There’s been the 3-week family vacation during which, even though I had my laptop, I wasn’t able to do much. Then there were the last days of summer, just calling me outdoors, do the last bit of gardening, go to the park with the kids etc. And also there’s the Halloween mod project that tricked me into handing it over almost a week-worth of building time. ;)

It’s not just a question of time of course, but of energy too. When 10 p.m. comes around, and the kids have been put to bed, we’ve had our dinner, and the kitchen has been cleaned-up, I don’t always feel like sitting down to write or do some other mod stuff. Sometimes I’d really rather just play (or do something else), which I do. In the past 2 months, I managed to finish MotB (many great, great aspects, but a story that’s a bit too supernatural really for my tastes), Pool of Radiance Remastered and dgraf’s beta of Price of Honor. And I’m now, finally, well into Raith’s Sand of Solvheil I.

All fun stuff. One thing that’s for sure: I’m nowhere near trading in NWN2 for another game.

ItFR – Teaser World Premiere!

by E.C.Patterson

Here now is the teaser trailer for Into the Forgotten Realms I mentioned I was working on (the teaser actually reveals a bit of a title tweak…).

You can get instant satisfaction with the YouTube version, but I recommend you get the 16MB download which has much better images and sound.

Download (16MB)

YouTube

The release of this teaser marks the halfway point in the production of ItFR. I'd like to take this occasion to thank you all for your ongoing support, which has without a doubt helped us get to this point.

ItFR: Moving pictures

By E.C.Patterson

To celebrate our anniversary this year, my wife and I got to spend 36 kid-free hours the other weekend at a hotel overlooking Sacacomie lake. This nearly unspoiled lake (spoiled pretty much only by the hotel) is about 2 hours north-east of Montreal.

What do you think I was telling myself while taking in this view from the restaurant terrace or while canoeing on the lake?

“Damn, another weekend wasted. I could be home in my basement right now working on the mod.”

Just joking! Of course I wasn’t thinking that.

But looking at the islands dotting the lake, the gentle hills crowning it, covered by evergreens, I really was contemplating for a moment just how best I could render this landscape in the NWN2 toolset. This is not by any means the first time I have had thoughts along those lines, and I’m convinced most builders have had them too.

I used to view the world in a similar way at the time, many years ago, when I fancied myself a photographer. Everywhere I looked I wasn’t simply seeing the reality before me, but was constantly evaluating the possibility for a photograph, determining angle, analysing the light.

It got really annoying after a while to constantly see the world as a potential picture. And that was part (albeit a minor one) of my decision to let go of that intensive pursuit, and forget about being a photographer.

I hope to be able to guard myself against this happening with modding. So far so good I think.
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Into the Forgotten Realms continues to progress. The mod is pretty much at the halfway point now.

As I mentioned before, I’m producing a teaser trailer to mark this event. So some of my modding time lately has gone into filming and editing game footage for it.

Here’s a bit of assembled combat footage put together for the trailer. It’s still a bit crude, and I’m not at all sure it will be part as is of the teaser, but I thought I’d show it to you nonetheless.

ItFR will have heavy combat potential, while being low in hack and slash, if that makes sense. All combat will be logically tied into the plot. The plans are for somewhere around 15 encounters that could result in combat within the 4-5 hours of the mod. The combat minded will be able to handle all these encounters by force, while those inclined to deal with them differently can cut combat by half probably.

Download version (2 mb)