Thursday, January 7, 2010

Final testing for the module

Gah. It's ALMOST done. I'm pretty sure I've finished all the scripting and conversation editing, and the area itself is in the 'finishing touches' mode... patrolling guards, tweaking weird corners on geometry, and little touch ups on the texturing, etc.

Here's an (UPDATED 1/8/2010) link to the latest build (~410MB). *edit* the internet hates me. I've signed up for my own hosting, waiting for DNS changes to propigate so I can upload it on my own space instead of trying to schlep off someone else's unused space.

Just dump the folders within into the root of your "My Documents\Neverwinter Nights 2\" folder, and they'll fall into place. To launch it, choose New Module from the main menu, select the "Lorren" module, and use the "Ixobelle (LOCAL)" character you'll find in your character list. I know I had originally said I was going to be posting more frequent updates on this, but the whole learning process had just consumed me for a while (hence the 20 day stretch with no posts here earlier). Plus it's like 400+MB with all the ending movies etc, and takes an hour to upload somewhere.

**edit + update** I was told that the game complains if you try and use my (above) Ixobelle character file without the expansions installed. After much testing with Vanilla installs and/or Vanilla character files, it turns out my module is just too entrenched in the expansions to be able to prune those parts out for people with just NWN2, minus the Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir expansions. Placeable objects, textures, includes in scripts..? It pretty much just crashes to desktop on launch on any box without the whole shebang installed. This sucks, because I was hoping to expose it to a wider audience, but I just didn't realize that was an issue when I began making it. I basically have a meat lovers pizza coming out of the oven, and the vegetarians just called to tell me they're pulling in the driveway. It's too late to try and replace the sausage with tofu, it's cooked in there. For anyone with everything installed, it's a non issue. For everyone else, just take comfort in knowing that I'm more upset than you are. :(


At this point, I'm play testing it myself to make sure all the endings can be achieved. It's hard to see it with a fresh pair of eyes, since I've been working on it so steadily since what feels like the dawn of time. I know the story inside out, and exactly how to pull off each of the ten different endings(!), so trying to see how much of the story is exposed if you only go down path 7 is tricky.

Hopefully I'll be getting it up on the NWN Vault soon for the community to check out, but even then, I won't be able to stand over someone's shoulder and watch them play. My wife can kick my ass at Puyo Puyo, but an RPG full of English is about as far as you can get from that.

Anyway. Back to work, I'm so close that I need to just plow through these final steps, and then get to work on writing up all my documentation in a presentable manner. So I can, you know, present it ;)

3 comments:

Hatch said...

Congratulations! I hope the testing goes well. I don't think I can help test it, since I don't have NWN2.

James said...

Congrats, man. Seriously. Kudos for sticking to it.

I can't promise I'll be able to pull myself away from the Badge of Triumph grind this weekend, but if I can I'll get NWN2 reinstalled and give your mod a try.

Ysharros said...

Am I still in it? Cuz if I'm not, I don't care. (Eh, and god only knows where our NWN2 disks are so I can reinstall it.)

If I am in it, I want royalties or you'll NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN, ya hear?

My people will contact your people.

(Srsly, grats :D I took one look at the NWN2 editor and ran screaming.)