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! :)

Hell's screen

Dunniteowl brought to light that Hellfire, one half of the RWS guys, saw his monitor go up in flames recently. For now, he's unable to continue with the work we all admire.

Think now what the NWN2 CC scene would be like without Hellfire's work. Think about what it will be if he, together with Baron Rosencheck, don't put out material for a while, if ever again.

Hellfire's given us plenty of great new toys to play with. Maybe we could think about getting him one now in return.

You can donate a few bucks for a new monitor via RWS's paypal account on their homepage.

Space Marine Head WIP

I haven't posted anything for awhile(as usual). ;)

Well, I've been working sporadically on a WH40k Space Marine. For those interested he will be of the Black Templar chapter. Most recently I've been working on the head. It has been a real challenge for me to find the character in the head. I think finally it is starting to look like a Space Marine. The texture is totally hand painted.

This will be for a still image. I'm going for a game cinematic level character, not totally realistic. I know it's not perfect. I hope to getter better over time.

Breakin’ the 80’s

Just got back from a 2-week vacation with the family in beautiful Bic National Park and in kid-friendly Pohenegamook, which was just a short walk away from the U.S.A. (Maine).

Got a chance to work on the mod a couple of afternoons and a bit most evenings, and wrote about 3700 conversation-words, which is not bad for me. Some stuff in there is pretty ok I think. Suitably tragic and dramatic. I'll be able to send Chet a few completed convos shortly so he can turn them into proper english. Knocked off a few scripts too.

And this has decisively taken the mod above the 80% completion rate.

In March (!!) I mentioned reaching 75%. Since then, I actually broke the 80 mark a few times, but no sooner had I done so that I’d think of new assets I forgot to factor in or realized I needed a few blueprints, a couple of scripts and the like to achieve what I had in mind.

That actually happens a lot. I’ve known for a while now, in a general sense, what I want to do throughout the mod. But it’s often only when I sit down to work on a particular encounter or situation that I figure out it requires all these scripts, blueprints and dialogues. It’s not really scope-creep, more like scope-misestimating. I would have had to plan much more thoroughly to avoid that, but that would have risked killing much of my enthusiasm for modding. So I make do, and take the time to realize what I’ve had in mind.

No screenshots this time, but a few of my favorite pics taken during the trip (when the weather was not so nice...). As always, thanks for reading.

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 ;) )