So these three guys go on a podcast…

…and hope they don’t make fools of themselves!

Daronas, SirChet and I were interviewed by Trey and Michelle of our one and only NWN Podcast this past weekend. You’ll be able to hear the result on the next episode (episode #99!), which might come out as early as this Friday.

On the show, you might learn a few things, including what happened to LadyElvenstar, and whether SirChet is wearing pants this time.

Thanks Trey, Michelle for having us on! It was lots of fun.

Hall of Fame!

Great news! My 2007 mod Daark Twins has FINALLY made it into the Hall of Fame! WoOt!


Ok, so that's a belated April Fool's. That's really never going to happen.

But my SoZ OM encounter reducer has made it, and that's kind of nice.

A little embarassing too, since it has to be one of the Hall of Fame honorees that has required the least effort in the history of the Vault: there's about one and a half line of code involved in that submission... I guess I did have to figure out which script to edit, but that took all of 15 minutes, tops. Of course there was the testing too, and writing the Vault entry description... ;)

But I guess it's not just a recognition of effort put into the submission, but also of the need that it met for many players, including me. This little edit turned an annoying game into a fun and playable one. I am happy to find out it wasn't just me who felt that way.

Dragon Age: Friend or Foe?

I don’t know about you, but I am preoccupied with the impact of DA on NWN2 building and its community. The quality of its toolset will be determinant in that regard (of course, assuming DA itself has sound game mechanics – which I do expect it to have.)

Bioware has just started taking applications for Beta testers. So, in the hope of getting a chance to understand the TS’s potential better, I have applied.

Will you?

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.

What kind of madman’s hobby is this anyway?

I’ve been spending the better part of my modding time in the past week (10 hours or so), finishing up the dialogue for one of the major encounters in Trinity.

Finishing up. This was already a 1900 word convo. But, builders, you know how it is: I needed to devise the different resolution paths (this particular encounter can be resolved in one of four different ways, including combat), script what each of these paths demanded, adjust and complete the convo to reflect them, plan and write branches for different states of that particular encounter etc. And through it all, I added barely 600 words… And I haven’t even tested it thoroughly yet.

Over a dozen hours total, counting the first 1900 words written way back, but not the area design for that encounter, the creature blueprints, the NPCs’ custom equipment etc. All this for an encounter that may last 3 minutes in total (not counting the optional quest or combat).

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Am I nuts to spend so much of my free time on this?

I remember Josh/Anduraga once said on the NWN2 Forums that one had to be a masochist to build a mod, or something like that. I don’t know about masochist, but it certainly takes a certain type of person. At the root, obviously, it takes someone who is willing to dedicate huge amounts of time to a (mostly) solo creative endeavor, at the expense usually of other activities. That’s one reason I sometimes equate mod building to other solitary artistic pursuits (as a way to explain it to friends, family, wife… and myself): writing, painting, sculpting, photography etc.

For a variety of reasons, I always thought one had to be a little crazy to be an artist.

But artists also love their art. And that’s part of why they keep at it.

Same here.

(Yes, mod building is art. :) )

Have a good weekend everyone!

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.”