A Timelord's Travel in Thedas

Loot System

2011-02-10T11:42:00.000-06:00

In the last post, I covered why I thought the loot system in the vanilla game was not really a good option (in my eyes!) for BaL. This has been at the back of my mind for a long time, ever since I started working on this mod.

The first idea I had was to generate random loot items with prefixes and suffixes based on enchantments picked from a pool defined in a 2DA. Not very original, I admit. I mean, it's not like this hasn't been done in every action-RPG out there. While I was very enthusiastic about the idea initially, that feeling quickly (and rightly!) ebbed away once I realized this will not suit the gameplay at all. Then, I came up with the idea of extremely limited world drops but the player will have the possibility to run some dungeons which will scale loot according to level. Way too much work!

So, what can be done to make loot interesting? The loot definitely has to be of some use to the player and at the same time, there should be a feeling of anticipation when clicking the loot bag. The system I settled on revolves around Crafting. I know Awakening has Rune-crafting as a skill but again, in my opinion, I felt it was not enough.

Old-time readers of this blog might remember me mentioning Phaenan's Crafting GUI Framework a long time back; the possibilities this opens up are endless. The vanilla crafting GUI, unfortunately, had hard-coded ability IDs for the craft-skills which severely limits what you can do to extend that interface. However, with this new interface, the restrictions are removed and more important, customization options are present that makes it much more modder-friendly. Phaenan has already implemented this in the latest version of her Winter Forge add-on and if you are a modder, you can read about the implementation details on the Flexible craft UI project.

Phaenan's Crafting GUI in The Winter Forge (c) Phaenan

So, how can crafting make the loot system better?

The player is always on the lookout for reagents and this can be used to generate loot tables that will be of interest to the player.
The above only works when there is sufficient diversity in the reagents required. As an example, requiring one to just harvest Elfroot while all other reagents can be bought makes the player go ho-hum when he encounters another Elfroot plant/drop.
The crafting itself can be designed to keep the player engaged in creating/modifying key aspects of the game.

Now, I keep saying crafting but only because it is tied to the crafting GUI. As I said before, with Phaenan's modifications, the possibilities are endless. I am working on one such possibility right now and once it all comes together as intended, the player will be presented with a new avenue to strategically modify how the game is played. More later...

Time for an update?

2011-02-07T15:36:00.000-06:00

Work on the new interior level is progressing well. The basic structural pieces are in place now. The tricky part is in finding the right VFX for the level. At this point, I'm not there yet and quite likely, won't get to that part till later. Why? This level was conceptualized around a big boss battle and until I have the mechanics of the battle in place and tested, the level will remain in it's rudimentary form. This way, if at all a rework is required, I can re-do the level quickly and re-test. This will also be one of the final areas the player encounters so as such, there won't be any screenies coming out on this area till release.

In addition to the level building, I have been working on some of the systems within the game, most notably the loot system. I mean, it's high time some of these are done and integrated into the module for balance testing.
First off, the loot system designed for Dragon Age is a very versatile one; requiring one to just modify 2DAs or add additional ones if required. I consider this much more flexible than manually assigning loot for every container/mob and is also much easier to tweak and adjust. So, I won't be making many changes to this system in its basic form.

However, there are a couple of issues with the actual loot in Dragon Age.
One, loot distribution was bad. I am not talking about vendor trash here. Vendor trash is an essential component of any loot system - it is not possible to have every drop contain an item that will be an upgrade to the player. Besides, vendor trash helps generate gold which can be used to purchase other useful things.

This fish is not meant to be cooked!

The problem I see with DA loot is that the distribution of the items for the different treasure levels was bad. Towards the very end, you come upon a locked chest that requires level 4 lockpicking and possibly, extra cunning to break through. You eagerly open it...and find a Health Poultice inside. Oh, the disappointment! Or you find the rare Manuscript Copy. Most of the highest level chests/creatures either gave you potions or money or trash, with some giving runes - which can be more easily purchased.

Second, usefulness of the items. Either the items were inferior to what you already had (even in late-game loot since some of the best items can only be purchased) or you ended up with lots of salves and poisons. Now, if the game mechanics required you to use them, it wouldn't be so bad but I hardly recall using any salve or poison when playing in Hard difficulty. Maybe in Nightmare? Further, unless you are min-maxing and/or playing with a reduced party size, you don't need the best equipment to get through DA. Which results in a lot of gold lying around in the player's inventory. Admittedly, it is not possible to implement a good economy in a single-player game but nevertheless, I think some of these points can be addressed.

How? I cannot just cut down the loot drastically because players expect some reward for the fight they just won. In the same vein, I can't just give out rare and powerful items because that will trivialize the gameplay. There has to be a balance between the two and while there are multiple ways to go about it, I hope to deliver an enjoyable and useful system with BaL. I will cover the details in my next post.

What's going on?

2011-01-27T11:34:00.000-06:00

Eight days, no updates on this blog. For those of you wondering what's going on, between RL, work, WoW and modding, I haven't had much time to sit down and write a post.

My mother-in-law flew back to India this week. She had come down here to help take care of my daughter and the fly-back comes with the usual addendums of shopping for the folks back home. Then, comes packing the suitcases, weighing, rearranging stuff, weighing and so on till everything fits and is within the weight limit. Packing for long-term international travel is an art, I tell you. We also had to send our daughter back to day-care and that means evaluating options, visiting the centre, talking to the people there, etc. All in all, a very hectic week.

This was one of the main reasons why I wanted to finish BaL before February because I knew time would become a little after the last week of January. Oh well. How can there be improvisation if everything fell in place as planned? On to BaL, I did a few more rounds of combat testing and found a few issues (most of which are fixed, I might add).

First, I needed to write my own spellpower and resistance check calculations since the vanilla spellpower calculations won't fly for my player custom class. Specifically, the Dreamweaver class will not be using Magic as a primary attribute at all. That was a fairly easy thing to do and test.
The next couple of issues were mostly with VFX. One of my passive on-hit abilities has a custom VFX that is not being triggered for some reason. Should be a fairly easy thing to fix since the relevant portion of the code is not being fired at all (tested with a PrintToLog statement). Quite likely, there is a mess up in the 2DA somewhere. Then, there are some problems with custom VFX not working at all when casting - that is a long road, I figure and will probably leave that for later.

The Nexus from WoW

I've also started prototyping a new interior level. It's a fairly small level but I hope the design will have a big impact. The concept behind that is inspired by The Nexus from WoW and this will be a good test to see how much I've matured as a level designer. Expect to see some new screenshots on this blog soon.

Speaking of blogs, I discovered this great one - The Rotted Rose - through Paul's blogger profile. The author, with a background in game development, is working on a module for Dragon Age and also writes about DA2 and general game-related topics. I enjoy reading it and hope you do too!
Till later...

Go Play Craggy Island!

2011-01-19T09:31:00.000-06:00

This post is a couple of days late in coming but hey, better late than never. Craggy Island was officially released late Sunday night and can be downloaded from DANexus. Paul has an extensive post about the journey from conception to release on his blog, make sure to check it out; it's a good read.

For me, Craggy Island was the first fruitful collaboration in the Dragon Age space. When Paul first posted the island's screenshots and posted for scripting help, I was a little wary about offering help since the other projects I had done that for had died away after a while. However, this one looked to be different since he continued to work on the other aspects and post progress updates. In the end, I caved in and decided to do the scripting portion - couldn't let a fine island like that go to waste!

It's been a bumpy ride at times when I've been tied up with RL or Blood and Lyrium or the Community Contest entries and couldn't devote the time required to complete the tasks assigned to me, which led to delays on the overall project release. It's been a learning experience too - the most important lesson being sometimes the game and Toolset behave like sentient entities. Serious! The only recourse in those times has been to take a deep breath, let the Toolset throw it's tantrum, do the same sequence of steps again and voila! it's working!

Anyway, enough on the journey. The destination has been reached and Craggy Island has been released. Now, the most nervous phase of a project starts - what will the reception be like? So, go play Craggy Island and make sure you post your feedback - good or bad - in the comments section; it will definitely help in us maturing as better game designers. Cheers!

Release!

2011-01-14T13:56:00.001-06:00

Well, almost there. I'm talking about Craggy Island, of course.
The past week was a bit unsettling because of all the various ways the game decided to test our conviction that the module was ready for release. B2B area loads didn't work, quests working in one build didn't work on another, plot actions that had been working for a long time were suddenly breaking - it was like a pre-go-live crunch period, which in a way, it was, I guess.

After numerous exchanges of full and incremental B2Bs, we finally decided to take the big step of wiping out the database on Paul's side and loading everything from scratch from a B2B on my machine - which had a bigger percentage of the anomalies working correctly. Things finally started going in the right direction yesterday though Paul had to spend some hours renaming the VO files - I always import B2Bs with 'Create New Strings' checked.

Don't worry, son; you are almost there

Still, what's done is done. We are currently testing the B2P package on both our machines and while some snags are hit, they are being speedily resolved as we encounter them. So, Paul's stated release date of 16th looks like being the D-Day for sure!

The quest that won't complete

2011-01-10T11:04:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend, I had one minor issue to fix for Craggy Island - there is a quest which isn't getting updated after meeting the required conditions. Pretty trivial, eh? That's what I thought and I had put an estimate to get it completed (along with a few other minor things to implement) by Saturday evening.
You would have already guessed that this was not a trivial fix (or why else would I write a post about this?). I was testing it with some debug scripts so I didn't have to play through from the beginning and it worked fine. Then, I loaded the full B2B I got from Daeltaja a few days back and again, worked fine. The problem? It didn't work on his setup.

The chest that won't co-operate...on a selective basis

We went over the relevant pieces of code line by line to make sure we both had matching scripts - shouldn't be necessary since I had just loaded his B2B but sometimes the Toolset works in it's own strange ways. Recreated the offending resources, refreshed the objects in the area and in general, made sure everything matched up. I even did a full run-through to make sure it wasn't something happening earlier that was affecting it - worked fine.
We must have spent like 4 hours trying to nail the problem down without any success.

I am doing one of my periodic database refreshes on my office laptop and after that, will import the B2B again and if it works, send that to Daeltaja and hopefully, get this issue out of the way by today. Goes to show, even the littlest of things can screw up things in a big way.

Till later...

Looking back at the year gone by...

2011-01-07T12:19:00.000-06:00

It's close to 10 months since I started working on Blood and Lyrium. When I started out, the story was pretty simple and I had hoped to finish it by October. Then, as I got more familiar with the Toolset and started 'living' the story during development, it gradually blossomed into what is now a far better story. There are still a lot of things I want to add to it but pragmatism dictates that the line be drawn somewhere. I've also spent a fair amount of time working on Craggy Island and that has been a good experience on the collaboration front.

I also started this blog, my first ever. The sole inspiration behind doing this was Challseus' Rose of Eternity Daily Journal. There were times in the beginning when I would easily get frustrated with the Toolset and I would be reading his daily updates and would think - Man, how can this guy do so much in the toolset on a consistent basis?!! And that too with a 4-hour commute! Many a time when I've faltered, I used to read his journal and get motivated to have another go at the Toolset and that's when I thought - it would be good to have a blog to record what I am doing too. And it has helped immensely. When I check the stats on this blog and see the number of people coming to read it on a regular basis, that provides additional motivation - there are people who are definitely interested in BaL and want to play it when it's done.

I've also come to realize some of the limitations that cannot be gotten around within a short duration - cinematics being the prime example of this. Still, I've persevered where I can and while there have been delays, I am still extremely enthusiastic about sharing this story with others.

I've mentioned in many posts that I want to release this before DA2 comes out; more accurately, around the beginning of February. Well, that is not going to happen. So, when is the new targeted release date? At this point, I really don't want to set another release date only to revise it again. So, it's going to be done when it's done.

To that end, the plan going forward is going to be simple - get the alpha out first. Then, streamline the work to proceed with an area at a time. There are times when I have jumped around when I've had inspiration strike only to go back to a previous area later and struggle to get back into the right 'mood' for that area. A simple thing, maybe but when all you have is a few hours daily, it is an avoidable time-sink.

So, what have I been doing on the BaL front these past two weeks? Dialogue and combat-testing. I've been writing dialogue like a man possessed - vast sections of quest dialogue have been overhauled and the companion profiles are starting to come through in conversations better. I have only a few more to go before the alpha is cut and I have already enlisted MysteriXoX to proof-read what I've written. A good story and great combat mechanics will fall flat if the player is not engaged enough to play through the module and dialogue is one of the primary means of engaging them.

Combat testing! That warrants a whole separate post and will be made shortly, along with some additions to this blog. Till later...

Woe is me, with my old Type 40

2011-01-05T16:41:00.000-06:00

Apparently, my TARDIS didn't realize that it shouldn't malfunction when I have holidays. Not that this is the first time that's happening. I really need to go back to Gallifrey and get the guidance system looked at. Instead of the quiet mountain retreat (with internet connection!) for which I set my coordinates, it ended up materializing in a dingy server room at work! What's worse, the room was crammed with engineers attempting to fix a slew of new-year bugs in various live projects and they weren't about to pass up the opportunity of a Timelord helping them. Even though I tried to tell them that I cannot work without my access credentials (I was silently thanking the person who forgot to extend it), they insisted that it would be simple enough for me to work through the ancient means of email and IM. Add to that the absence of a robot like K-9 and no wonder the Timelords consider Earth to be so primitive!

Still, all's well that end's well and that ending is well in sight now. If I can somehow manage to sneak into my TARDIS, I can try to go back to the time before the holidays and this time, make sure the guidance system works correctly or in the worst case, make sure that at least the chameleon circuit works so that TARDIS looks just like another piece of furniture and I don't have to come out!

A more detailed update will follow soon.

Creature Scaling

2010-12-27T13:13:00.000-06:00

This past weekend, I came to terms with WoW. Yes, I know - another post on WoW. Well, not really. I like the game. Like it so much I've already got the first two expansions and a game card to keep me playing till March. I also realized one important thing - there is no need to finish the game. In fact, it can't be finished! So, why devote all my time to playing it? Weekend nights are going to be WoW time but other than that, I'm going to focus on getting this module (and the second part) completed. I mean, this is just an assurance that I am not abandoning this module - the lack of regular posts recently might have given that impression and I just wanted to get the expectations straight.

So, what's been going on with BaL, you ask? Encounter design. More specifically, creature design. Even more specific, boss creature design.
Now, I am not a fan of this auto-scale system at all. Frankly, I think it's wasted effort. Now, some might argue that the non-linear design of the campaign made this a requirement but in my opinion, it wasn't needed even there. My recollections of the OC might not be 100% accurate but by the time you finish Lothering, you are already at level 7 or so. Looking at the area-data file, except for the final quest chains and battles, almost all areas are scaled between levels 7 and 10. Where's the need then?

I wouldn't be going on so much about this if I hadn't been disassembling the autoscale scripts over the weekend. There's just so much code in there for so little gain!
Just to determine the scaled level (let's not even go into the subsequent work done to actually initialize the creature),

check against the min/max level for the area
check against the player level
check against the LevelScale in autoscale sheet
check against the max level for that appearance
check against the min_level in the creature table
check whether appearance level limits are disabled in the module and area

Going through all those 2DAs and setting up the variables isn't something I wanted to do. It's just too much work!
If I want to remove auto-scaling, it pretty much meant gutting out the entire logic in there and writing my own creature core script. This is what I have started doing this weekend. My vision for BaL involves some complex boss battles, based on the difficulty level in-game and I don't want auto-scaling to botch it up. So, I need to add my own version of auto-scaling - the difference being only the difficulty level selected in-game counts. This way, regular players who don't want very involved boss battles can play on Normal while Hard will pose a definite challenge. Nightmare isn't in the plan yet since doing this IS a lot of work.

The result of all this will hopefully be a definitive combat experience that the hard-core players like because, let's face it, combat design in the OC was never a strong point for Dragon Age.

Preparing for the lull ahead

2010-12-20T15:02:00.000-06:00

The lull at work, that is. We have one more deployment this weekend which should take a couple of hours at the most but other than that, there's not much going on at work. I've started compiling a list of things to complete over the next 2 weeks since this will be the time when I can focus on developing.

Towards that, I've been concentrating on wrapping up Craggy Island as best as I can and barring one issue where ambient animation is not resumed once combat ends, everything is good to go from my end. Sometimes, even the smallest thing that you know you could probably get to work while you are asleep gives so much trouble and that was the case here with codex entries not appearing. After a lot of debugging, it was due to the infamous duplicate GUID bug. Anyway, all's good now.

The focus for the next 2 weeks is going to be tying things together in the new areas and creating NPCs and ambient behaviour for them. And then, finish up the remaining abilities for the custom classes since those will be needed to play-test these areas.
I do have to spend some time to finish my PBEM tourney for Shadow Magic. Now that I am at the semi-final stage, I want to make sure I go all the way through and regain my Championship crown! So, I'll have to spend some time to map out the strategy for the finals - assuming I win the semis, of course!

Till later...

Behind the Scenes Work

2010-12-14T16:14:00.000-06:00

Past few days have have seen a lot of behind-the-scenes work, both on Blood and Lyrium and Craggy Island and mostly on Skype.

I think I've mentioned this before, DahliaLynn is working on an important cutscene for BaL and so far, it's looking absolutely terrific! We've been going back and forth over it but it is mostly complete now except for some fine-tuning. Today, we got the revised voice samples for that scene and will be integrated into the conversation shortly. After this is done, I hope to retain her services for a few more cut-scenes; frankly, the ones I've done so far are not good. Of course, I've received a lot of suggestions and advice on cinematics from her but going back and re-doing them will not be a quick task and with the amount of things still left to be done, they will have to wait.

How do you know this is from the Toolset?

The good news on the progress side of things is that the Evermist re-work is complete (well, except for the final polish but that's true for all my levels) and I've started integrating the area work done previously. There is also an extremely cool side-quest in that area, if I do say so myself. One that's innovative in it's use of the game resources; I got caught up in implementing it and while it's not working as intended currently, it's just a question of hacking away at it because that's primarily what it is ;)

I also fixed most of the big issues with Craggy Island, including that auto-level up templates for companions. I was kicking myself for not double-checking everything after finding the causes - the character template had a min-level and preset abilities that was screwing up the final output. I was calculating the XP needed to level from Level 1 to 7 and the min-level was already set to 5. So, what happens? The game bumps her up to level 9. I tell you, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure this out.

In addition to the fixes, some more cool VFX effects have been implemented that gives the scene that authentic touch. I know I said this previously too but these ones are way better, trust me! One more day will be dedicated to CI to code in the character pre-set and fix some niggling issues but after that, it will be time to beta!

For those out there wondering, I have not completely succumbed to the temptations of WoW...yet! But the pull is strong! :p

Combat Design - The role of a Tank

2010-12-09T10:32:00.000-06:00

When Dragon Age was first released and players were talking about having a tank in the group and discussing whether Alistair or Shale was a better tank, I admit I really didn't understand why you'd need a tank in the group. In almost all encounters, a couple of mages in the party will wipe the opposition before the tank even has time to pull aggro. In rare cases when it is required and the tank goes in first to draw threat, the battle is anyway over soon enough. Couple that with the fact that party members cannot die and I didn't see any role for a tank in Dragon Age.

Now, most of my gaming has been with single-player games and the ones I have played multiplayer (Unreal and Shadow Magic), the concept of a tank is non-existent. Well, maybe a little in Shadow Magic but since that was PvP always, that didn't work as expected.

Enter World of Warcraft. Yesterday, I did my first dungeon run - two actually. Being the first time, I didn't even know every member had to talk to the quest-giver to get the quest to show up in the log; just assumed it was handled on a party basis. Even worse, I had a full inventory (I was out doing the regular campaign while queued) and couldn't pick up the items I needed. Second run, I died and couldn't remember the path to get to the other members (this was in Blackfathom Deeps). Anyway, the thing that really struck me about these runs was the importance of a tank. The tanks really played a part here - unless they maintain aggro, it usually leads to a wipe. The mages and other DPS had to make sure they are not drawing too much threat or it's back to spirit form - I learned this the hard way the first time.

Transposing this to Dragon Age, one gets similar skills in the Warrior Shield tree. However, the effectiveness is vastly reduced due to two important factors -

threat calculation missing/removed from a lot of rogue/mage talents. These classes, primarily DPS, can do damage without being at risk most of the time.
the mobs (and even bosses) are too weak or too few for the tank role to really shine.

I must say, those dungeon runs were a revelation. As I've said before, Blood and Lyrium will feature custom classes for the player and most companions. In fact, except for the Warrior class...at least, till yesterday. The warrior class in BaL already has no access to the 2H tree so this gives a perfect excuse to maximise the utilization of the Shield tree and design the combat around the concept of a party as in WoW. Since the classes for most companions are fixed, I don't have to deal with the possibilities of a significantly gimped party due to player choice and can pretty much anticipate how strong the party is going to be at key points in the story. I tell you, this is going to become very interesting.

Steady Progress

2010-12-06T16:24:00.000-06:00

As mentioned in the last update, I've been working on two things primarily - finishing up the scripting for Craggy Island and reworking the Evermist level.

The work on Craggy Island is almost done. We've added some VFX to the final area to make things seem a little more coherent. The actual VFX that was to be implemented is not present in the default VFX_base worksheet. For now, a similar VFX has been added and while it does look fine, I think the original one (fxe_mist_p) had a 'blowing-out' animation that's missing from this one. In the end, we might just have to extend VFX_base and use the VFX that was originally intended to be in the area.
There is also an annoying issue with the auto-level up template for the companions - just doesn't seem to work. I'll have to spend some time tomorrow going over that and trying to fix it.

This weekend, I spent a considerable amount of time on the Evermist level. Even if I do say so myself, it is starting to look much more like a proper village than a random collection of houses on elevated ground. I've taken pains to bring in some distinction to the various areas within the level - for example, rich farmers will have shingled roofs on their houses and the immediate area around them will look better with cobbled pathways and bigger houses, the poorer sections will have thatch roofs, closer-spaced houses, patch-worked walls.

I had planned to take some before/after close-up shots to show the difference but didn't have time yesterday night. Maybe in the next post :)
Here is a screenie of one of the streets that is near the entrance; still need to add a few more props but I also have to make sure not to overdo it. As it is, the level is prop-heavy due to all the constructed structures!

Oh, and I managed to spend only a few hours on WoW - enough to advance my gnome by about 7 levels. Reading about the latest patch on the WoW forums, it appears that the initial leveling process has been made faster ;)

World of Warcraft

2010-12-02T19:55:00.000-06:00

That's right! THE drug, going by what I've read and I must say, it's true to an extent!

I saw a BF deal for a free monthly pass for WoW and decided I'll give it a shot. I got one of those 10-day trial invites so I can decide whether to sell that pass or not and it looks like I *might* subscribe instead. I should have taken a screenshot of the first time I entered Eitrigg. I guess it was a busy time in the realm - there were scores of characters around! That first glimpse sucked me right in though I couldn't log on to that realm after that (almost always full!)
Instead I created a gnome mage in Norgannon and it's been a blast playing that little 'un. I don't know about others but I find the graphics extremely appealing. It's so colourful and lively, compared to DA.

The starting area for a gnome character

The other thing I noticed was that even for unimportant quests - simply to go to another place, for example - you get a detailed reason. Far more detailed than any of those Chanter's Board/Blackstone Irregulars/many other side-quests in DA. I really liked that there is a story behind all these fights against the Troggs, Rockjaws and Frostmanes.
The other important distinction from DA that I immediately noticed were the ambient animations. Here is a screenshot (badly taken) of a guy carrying another. He actually goes and lays the guy down on a makeshift bed and goes back and waits for another survivor!

Anyway, as much as I am enjoying this game, I am making a conscious effort not to play for extended lengths of time. I still have a module to finish; make it two actually. I am in final stages of scripting for Craggy Island and after that, it's just going to be bug-fixing (which we've already done a lot) and polishing. Hopefully, it gets out around Christmas; last I heard, VO is in progress.

Meanwhile, while re-working my Evermist level, I've also been taking breaks on and off (it feels like I've been working in the level editor most of the time!) and re-working dialogues to change references to the locations that have moved. I'm also working on fleshing out the setting with a lot of ambient dialogues during these breaks so it doesn't get boring - which is quite easy when re-working a level as huge as this one. I'm also making sure some of the buildings fit more into a village setting; an example is the marketplace which was very big and spacious under a huge tent-like awning previously. Now, the shops are more closely-packed and cluttered with make-shift roofs.

Re-worked market

Once I finish this, I have around 4 cutscenes I need to create in this area. That will definitely take some time! Till later...

Level Re-work

2010-11-28T03:12:00.000-06:00

It's been some time since the last update - I've been completely swamped with RL work and had to put Dragon Age stuff on hold. Hey, need that money to finance these hobbies! Still, I managed to finish the required work on Thursday itself so the past two days have been spent on DA - minus the time spent researching and buying stuff on Black Friday. I ended up buying some games that I will probably won't play for another 3-4 months (Alpha Protocol, Resonance of Fate) and even got myself WoW to try out for a month and some other stuff I didn't think I needed till I saw the price :)

With the aim of getting an alpha out, I started playing through Evermist which was the level I submitted for the Community Contest a while ago and which is a crucial area in BaL. When I was playing through it, I realized something was off. First, it was too big for what it's purpose was and when I say this, I mean way too big. The idea behind this area was a small farming village between Denerim and West Hill but that feeling of being in a village wasn't there. The roads were too wide, the houses spaced too far apart and while I really liked the different mounds from a level-building perspective, they were a little too high and too numerous.

After trying to patch the level for a few hours, I decided to bite the bullet and start reworking it. I redesigned the level on paper - first, removing superfluous stuff like the roads circling the village. This was a very bad design decision in hindsight - these roads provided numerous paths and almost all of them have no scope for interaction with the villagers or the environment. It's just a cliff face/forest/fence on one side and a smaller cliff face on the other side. As I said, a bad design decision.

Still a WIP but this should give a sense of scale (the height is 288 vs 256, btw)

Then, came the real re-work of re-arranging the houses and getting the houses closer together without feeling congested. One of the goals of this rework was also to reduce the level size. The previous one had a playable (green boundary) area of 5 x 7 which is way too huge. The reworked one will have a 4 x 4 playable area which is more than a 50% reduction in size. The main reason for this downsizing is the removal of those 'ring' roads. Without those roads, I can leave the structures outside the playable area.

One advantage of having a level as a basis for this new one is the ability to export and import selection groups. Since I had been fairly meticulous in organizing my structures (save for the last minute addition of numerous props), it was easy to copy a lot of the stuff over. I hope to finish this tomorrow and have a play through and finalize things.
Till later...

Slow Week

2010-11-22T14:38:00.000-06:00

This is just a short post to let everyone know that work is keeping me extremely busy. We had a go-live on Saturday that was aborted at the last minute due to data issues and that cost me precious time in rolling back changes and re-testing stuff. The kicker is - I will have to do all those changes again this week (yeah! during the Thanksgiving Holidays which I was counting on to make some serious headway with BaL). I also have one more go-live in progress currently that's expected to be done by tomorrow.
All in all, a totally shitty week and BaL will have to stay in the freezer till my time is freed up.

Till later...

Busy, busy, busy

2010-11-16T16:42:00.000-06:00

Things just got a little more exciting and a little more hectic! I've taken over a new role at work, managing the projects we are working on and with it comes a ton of admin activities. Being an individual contributor till now, I've never really appreciated the amount of work that actually goes into managing a large scale project such as ours and this was sort of a rude awakening. Still, I've jumped in with both feet and I've got to make this work!

On the BaL front, things are progressing slowly but steadily. The important cutscene Dahlia is working on is expected to be completed this week and I am recruiting a VO artist for the lines required for this cutscene. This will help in the visualization, I am told ( I tell you, I am a noob at cinematics!) and it will also give me a chance to get the whole voice-over related activities into my build workflow.

Are you the one I am looking for?

Currently, I am working on populating the different areas with ambient NPCs. Leeward, in particular, has this big campsite party that will have quite a few ambient NPCs and I am trying to find varied animations for them so they don't all appear as clones. This does involve creating new ambient patterns and I am trawling through the ANIM_base worksheet to see what I can cook up. After that, I have a couple more cutscenes to create (nothing complex but since I will be doing them, anything can happen!).

Then, comes the big activity - packaging and play-testing the alpha. I plan to do this on another computer to simulate a user playing it so that it's easier to identify missing resources, etc. This will also free up my desktop to tweak and run the lightmapping on the levels that need it - parallelism all the way! Now, if only I had 48 hours a day...

Getting back into the groove

2010-11-13T16:32:00.001-06:00

Of course, I wasn't away from the Toolset for that long that I need a break-in time to get back into the groove. In fact, I didn't even manage to keep my word that I'll not touch the Toolset till Thursday! We identified the pesky bug at work and while fixing it will take some time, we at least have the damn thing in our sights.

I spent a day brain-storming the talents and talent trees for one of the new classes for the companions. While the basic idea behind this class was established a long time back, it was time to go into the details -> finalize the ability names, what each ability will do, the various other information associated with abilities and most important, the specializations. I am extremely happy with the way the specializations have turned out - rooted in lore and distinct from what is currently offered in DA.
I am planning on having a separate page soon with all the new classes, abilities and trees so folks reading this blog can have a sneak peek at what's in store for them come February :)

WIP Shot

I've also started collaborating with DahilaLynn on cutscenes and we've been having a lot of discussions over IM on this one important cutscene (for now!) that she's directing for me. I must say, those chats have been extremely useful - showed me I still needed to go a-ways in the cutscene department (for example, she was talking about adjusting dof and I had to google it!). For those who haven't, check out her Alistair's Royal Wedding over on DragonAge Nexus - that should give an indication of her directing expertise.
...which reminds me, I need to do some lighting and stage work in the area where the cutscene is taking place and send it to her.

Till later...

What Bioware cannot do and I can...

2010-11-09T19:10:00.000-06:00

Write a better story? Check.
Create better levels with realistic lighting? Check.
Create more complex characters each with their own lives/opinions/agendas? Check.
Tie all these together into a module better than the official campaigns? Check.
.
.
.
.
Well, maybe :)
What Bioware cannot do and I can is take a break!

The past two days have been extremely hectic at work, so much so that work has spilled over into the evenings at home. I've ran into a bug that's driving me nuts and is likely to be a show-stopper for the project go-live if I don't get it resolved soon.

Added to that, I've been experiencing writer's block - totally! I guess it's because by the time I fire up the toolset, I'm mentally drained from work (don't you dare tell me otherwise! :P). The inspiration just doesn't want to come. So, I've decided to take it easy for a couple of days. No Dragon Age stuff - I am going to spend whatever free time I have in the evenings to catch up on all the books I've downloaded to my Kindle!

The way I figure - better a couple of days off and come back with a fresh mind rather than trying to plug away at the Toolset and develop stuff I will have to rewrite/redesign later. I wonder what David Gaider does when he gets writer's block? Or Laidlaw runs into a wall with a design idea? Definitely not take a couple of days' break, I bet!

Another Exterior Level Done!

2010-11-07T22:23:00.001-06:00

The weekend started off pretty quietly - for the whole of Saturday, I was not able to work on BaL though I wanted to. Sunday looked to be turning that way - we had the daylight savings kick in and I realized I actually hadn't gotten up early :)

Still, I managed to finish the level I was working on - it is a fairly small level and will be used in one of the area transition encounters. It resembles a small clearing in a forest with a path winding through it - the sort of area where you'd stop to camp. It's so hard to create the illusion of a forest though, especially one around the rim of the clearing. For one, there is no terrain darkening tool and I wasn't able to find a suitable texture to substitute for that. Second, there is, as far as I was able to determine, no way to remove light from a particular area. This is very significant for forests as trees in Dragon Age do not cast shadows.

The view from near the entrance to the area

For now, the level has been marked complete which means it is 90% done. I will probably do the shadows later when I have time. I also tried using negative lights for this purpose but apparently, they have some other purpose.

I also managed to finish (read: 90%) an important cutscene that sets the stage for the plot beyond the first couple of areas. It is still a little rough around the edges at certain points but it's functionally complete and that's all that matters for now.

Till later...

Tutorial - Recoloring Trees

2010-11-05T14:12:00.002-05:00

One of the level prototypes that I did this month was for a forest area. This is a crucial point in the story and I wanted this area to be distinct from the forests you see in the OC or other mods. So, I thought, let's make it an autumn forest. With all the fall color variations, one can go really wild and the effect should be a totally different visual experience!

I love autumn!

So, I started exploring the SpeedTreeCAD.exe which the Toolset wiki claims can be used to customize the huge number of parameters a tree has, which it can do. Unfortunately, in the limited time I've spent fiddling with it, replacing textures seems a tad difficult. You can select your own diffuse map but for some reason, the individual leaf/frond textures don't update. So, I went about it in another way and the result is another tutorial - Recoloring Trees!

Tools you will need -

SpeedTreeCAD.exe (strictly not necessary - XVI should suffice)
A hex-editor (I use XVI32)
An image-editing program (Gimp or Photoshop)

Before we go on, there are a few important points to note about the SpeedTree files. A tree is made up of different components - a bark texture, one or more leaf textures, one or more frond textures and an overall diffuse map containing the leaf and frond textures. In the below workflow, we will be modifying only the leaf and frond textures and frankly, that should be enough to present a different type of tree. Anyway, on to the workflow!

## Export from speedtreetools.erf

Open up speedtreetools.erf present in the packages/core/data_tools folder under the Dragon Age installation directory and extract all the resources to a folder of your choice. We will be using this as a reference.
Copy the .spt and .dds file for the tree you need to modify.

Examples for this workflow - a bush (bsh_c_boxwd) and a tree (tre_f_oaksmall)

You can copy the .tga files and edit them individually too - entirely up to your preferences. I will be generating them from the .dds file.

## Image Editing

Open up the diffuse map in the image editing program. I will use Gimp as a reference for this tutorial. When asked to load mipmaps, select Yes.
A simple way to adjust color is to go to Colors -> Components -> Channel Mixer and play around with the settings. Once you've settled on your choice of color, save the file to a different folder. The name should follow the following convention:

[3-character tree type]_[1 character]_[anything]_diffuse.DDS Make sure the character length is constant Example: bsh_t_boxwd_diffuse.DDS or tre_t_oaksmall_diffuse.DDS

After editing the colors in Gimp - the left 2 are leaves and the one in the right bottom is the frond

The next step is to generate the TGAs. We will resize the canvas to the appropriate TGA dimensions and save them.

Bush DDS files are 512 x 512 and TGAs are 256 x 256 Tree DDS files are 1024 x 1024 and TGAs are 512 x 512

Go to Image -> Canvas Size and change the size to either 256x256 or 512x512 depending on which tree type you are editing.
Adjust the canvas setting - in Gimp this can be done by simply moving the image around so that the desired area is within the bold box in the Preview Pane. The objective is to do 3 exports - 2 for the individual leaves and 1 for the frond.
Export these as TGAs and save them in the same folder as the modified DDS. File name doesn't matter for now.

## Open the .spt file in XVI32

Search for diffuse (case-insensitive - some files have caps). There will typically be 2 entries for the diffuse DDS map. Change the file name referenced to the name you've saved your DDS file as.
Search for tga (case-insensitive). There will be at least 3 references:

BK_ - leave this as it is (unless you've modified the bark texture too) LV_ - note down the file name(s) FR_ - note down the file name(s)

Go to your modified TGAs and name them in a similar format but change something to identify it as yours.

Example:

Boxwood bush: LV_t_boxwood1.tga, LV_t_boxwood2.tga, FR_t_boxwood.tga

Oaksmall tree: lv_t_oak_1.tga, lv_t_oak_2.tga, fr_t_oak.tga

Go back to the hex-editor and replace the names present with your names (make sure length is constant!)
Once the changes are done, save the .spt with another name. This should follow the same conventions as the diffuse DDS file

[3-character tree type]_[1 character]_[anything].spt The name length doesn't matter here

## DA Toolset

Copy the modified TGA, DDS and SPT files to the core/override folder you use - I do level-building from the Single Player module so these have to go under packages/core/override while building. Once the level layouts are done and moved to your module's core/override folder, you can move these files there.
Open up DA Toolset and insert a new Tree Controller. If you've done everything correctly, you should be able to see and place the new trees in your level.


Toolset shot

Do the regular export process and you should be able to see it in-game without issues -

In-game shot

If you see blocky leaves in-game, then, it is possible that you've messed up the TGA editing.
One obvious thing to note here is that you do not want to replace the textures in the existing speedtree files -> not unless you want those modified trees in all your levels where that tree is placed.

Well, that was a long one to write and format. If you have any questions, post them here or better, in the BSN Custom Content Forum thread

Conversation Choices + The DT:CoM release

2010-11-04T20:22:00.002-05:00

One of the biggest time sinks in module-making in Dragon Age after level building is writing dialogue. Even when you start with a concrete story and well-defined NPCs and companions, writing dialogue is not so easy. The most basic issue, at least for me, is trying to keep in mind that I am not writing a story but an interactive adventure.

What does this mean? Let's take an example - I was writing a conversation today and at one point a companion says the following line: "I don't want to talk to you. Ask him what he wants". Now, this interjection is not completely necessary to the conversation but it helps the flow and builds on an already established relationship between the companion and the conversation owner. Only when I was reviewing the conversation did I notice the "him". A few copy-paste as links and plot flags later, the conversation was complete.
Now, the above is fairly simple but this is one area I wish the DA conversation system was a little more flexible and allowed us to use tags to reference race/gender/class/background/specialization/etc. It seems almost unintuitive to write multiple lines just to change one word.

The bigger problem (and unrelated to the conversation system) is trying to come up with dialogue options - the backbone of an interactive conversation. Now, in some cases, these options just flow organically. I was writing a conversation for a minor NPC and multiple choices at each node was so easy. Then, I started writing another piece for a companion and ended up being stumped. Offering choices while maintaining the flow of dialogue is extremely important - irrelevant options can easily destroy that flow and tone set previously.

I take pride in my writing skills in English even though it is not my native tongue. However, I've lost track of the number of times I've referred to an online dictionary/thesaurus to make sure I am using a particular phrase or idiom in the correct way. And I don't even want to talk about writing emotional scenes - I just plain suck at those, a fact I've come to accept. I spent over half an hour today writing eight lines, eight lines with no options at all and it's still not final. Anyway, the journey continues and hopefully, these efforts help to bring the story together in a cohesive manner in the end.

Lastly, good news for the DA community - the first installment in the Dark Times: Confederacy of Malkuth saga has been released. Check out the details in the official announcement thread. I haven't had a chance to play it yet (have set aside time during the weekend for it) but it appears to be fairly long and involved and most important, it is, as far as I know, the first significant addition to the Official Campaign...and this is just the first part! For those ruing the fact that Bioware won't be releasing DLCs for DA:O anymore or that they can't continue their Warden's story (seriously, what's with this Warden fixation? If you don't believe me, go check out how many threads in the DA2 forums refer to this), head over to the DT:CoM thread and fill that void up!

Art!

2010-11-02T19:37:00.000-05:00

Some of you might have noticed that the header image on this blog has changed ;)

It's an extension of the project image I posted over at BSN a few days back. Basically, I wanted to extend the width of the blog layout since even on my 14" inch work laptop, there were gaps on either side. When I did that, the previous header image didn't fit and I thought it is high time I change that image from a more generic DA one to something more specific to what I am working on currently.

It's a blend of three images I found over on http://abstract.desktopnexus.com/cat/fantasy/

On to more interesting stuff!

My 2D Art progress has been at 0% for a few months now - not something I was proud of, I can assure you ;)
Yic17, after seeing my October Monthly Report post, kindly offered to help me in this area. This was yesterday and I promptly added him to the developer group I created for BaL (for some inexplicable reason, BSN still shows discussions in private groups in the public profile feed - though as it turned out today, that is not always a bad thing - more on this later!) and created some threads to explain what I wanted.

One of the things that had always been at the back of my mind was to lend some distinction to the Dalish clans in my module of which there are 2 primary ones. One way I thought of doing this is to have customized clothing for each of them with their own logos/emblems/heraldry - similar to how you can see the Chantry sun in the standard Chantry robe in vanilla DA:O. In BaL, the player is a member of The Silver Claw clan and I wanted something along a claw-gauntlet hybrid for this purpose. Yic17 came up with some stunning designs in a very short time (less than an hour!). Here's a sample -

I was simply floored! Of course, a couple of them are too abstract for Dragon Age but the work is just fantastic! Now, I am confident that at least one area will show progress in the next monthly report :)

There's also been a slight change of plans in what I planned to do this month. Now, I have to do some research and finalize the workflow to get these images into the game's clothing and armor. I can't ask for help and refuse to do my part of the job, can I? Hopefully, it shouldn't be too difficult to do that.

Blood and Lyrium - Monthly Report - October

2010-11-01T12:23:00.001-05:00

The past week has been extremely hectic - with the Scripting contest coming to a close today and my projects at work throwing up nasty bugs, I haven't had time to work on BaL as much as I wanted to. I have a couple of go-lives this month too - one on 15th and another on 29th so this is going to be another busy month! I have decided one thing though - no more Community Contest stuff till BaL is done. Well, unless it is an exterior level contest, in which case I can submit one of the levels I am currently working on.

I did manage to finish up my entry for the Scripting contest - The Cranky Harem and you can download it from DANexus or BSN.

A 7x7 game board with highlighting turned on when you place game pieces

With that out of the way, on to the Monthly Report.
In the October monthly report, I had mentioned how I need about 6 small exterior levels to serve as entry points into other areas. I am happy to say these are done! They are primarily reworked OC levels but it did take a fair amount of time to edit those levels and get the lighting right.

I am also close to completion on the first custom class for BaL. This will be the class the player will play. I know I have mentioned previously that the player will be allowed a choice of 2 custom classes but I've restricted it to one now. Why? The whole module now integrates the background of this class as an over-arching story within and will continue to do so in the next iteration of this module. The second custom class will now be restricted to a particular party member.

The prototypes for 2 other external areas are also complete and I will start building the levels this month. It's going to be a fairly intensive process, as level building always is but it should go much faster now that I am comfortable with this aspect of the toolset. Also, all the interior levels for the alpha release are done! I made an excel workbook to keep track of areas, creatures, conversations, etc and realized BaL will have 57 areas! I can tell you, it took some time to digest that as I had never quantified that - in my mind, it was always the the function of that area that was predominant.

On to the percentages then!

Story - 100%
Quest Design - 90%
Companion design - 40% (no change!)
Custom Classes and Abiltities - 50%
2D Art - 0% (again, no change!)
Level/Area Design - 90% (just one more level to go!)
Level/Area Implementation - 40%
Conversations - 30%
Scripting - 20%
Cutscenes - 10% (no change!)
Monster/Encounter Design - 0% (I should really start on this)
Custom Systems - 40%

Overall, the module is around 30% complete. I was hoping to make big gains in October but sadly, that didn't materialize. Here's to hoping November is better!

Plan for November:

Finish up the alpha release for testing - target: Nov 15th
Finish the 2 prototypes exterior levels

I am going to keep it simple this time so I can report more-than-expected results next month! The things one has to do...

Till later!

The Cranky Harem

2010-10-27T19:12:00.000-05:00

As most of the readers of this blog might know, I've been promoting the Community Contests initiative whenever I can. Currently, we have a mini-game/puzzle scripting contest running - basically to create a short, reusable mini-game or puzzle. The focus, as the title of the contest suggests, is on scripting and related features like plots and vfx.

A couple of weeks back, we had only three potential contestants (including me!). Potential, I say, because no one had confirmed their participation at that time. These past two weeks though, there have been a number of confirmed entries - a nug chase by BloodySongVengeance, Weighted Rock-Paper-Scissors by Mengtzu, a scavenger hunt by shadow5973, an 'assembly' mini-game by mikemike37, a capture-the-flag by Noob766 (who works on DT:CoM) and a chess-rules-based game by yours truly. Things are looking up, I say!

Now, many people won't like it if I tell them this is a chess game! So, I had to present it in a way that is more appealing. So, here's the backstory for that -

Once upon a time, Lord Oneisall of Chessdom, a city-state in the Free Marches was host to a dignitary, Har'emaal, from lands across the eastern sea. In spite of the grand ceremony put forth to welcome him and the lavish quarters prepared for his stay, Har'emaal was extremely contemptous of Lord Oneisall and refused to even sit at the same table with him for supper. Initially, Lord Oneisall ignored this obvious rude behaviour but as the populace started talking about the supposed disregard for their Lord by a foreigner, he decided to put an end to it and went to meet Har'emaal.

Har'emaal refused to meet the Lord and instead sent a note through a steward stating 'I will not treat a lesser man as an equal, even if he is the king of these entire lands you call Thedas'. Incensed by this summary dismissal, Lord Oneisall confronted Har'emaal with the point of his sword at the latter's throat - 'I have given you a royal welcome and treated you as I would an equal; what do you find lacking in me that you would call me a lesser man?'

Oblivious of the sword at his throat, Har'emaal proclaimed - 'A man who can satisfy only one woman is no man at all! Where I come from, a man's stature is determined by the women he can call his own and even the lowliest of nobles have at least twenty women!'

Stunned by this revelation but obviously excited (for he was a man!), Lord Oneisall published an edict allowing all men to have more than one woman and to set an example, he himself picked the most beautiful in his lands and built a separate palace to house them. To honour the memory of the person who gave him the idea, the palace was called a Harem.

In the present day, Chessdom is ruled by Lord Allaremine and he is facing a unique problem. While it was customary for the men to play favourites amongst his harem to elicit extra 'favors', matters have spun out of control in the Royal Harem. The mistresses are killing each other and only a few survivors remain. The few guards allowed inside the palace cannot keep watch over all of them.

You are an adventurer from another land and are on an important mission to save the world from an ancient evil. You have come to Chessdom to get something done - the details are irrelevant. However, you have to help Lord Allaremine before you can proceed.

I wanted some custom models to simulate the harem - it has to look like a bedroom (it's a harem!) but be small enough to see the whole mock-up. So, I bugged Mike and used up my points from the previous contest to get some models done.

A mock-up of the harem rooms

It took a lot of time to place those things down and align them and tag them. Now, the actual work - scripting - is underway. I am trying to present it in such a way that the player won't feel like it is a chess game - board size variations, game mode variations, game difficulty variations - all are being coded in. Further, the whole game should *hopefully* be very visual if I can find the right VFX for the rooms.

A close-up of one room

Going back to coding now...more later!
Oh, and if you can spare an hour or so, check out the two entries I've linked at the beginning of this post - there's still time to play them and give feedback to the authors.

Level Completion Process

2010-10-24T13:09:00.000-05:00

As part of the Community Contests initiative, I had submitted a level for the Settlement Contest. One of the comments reported by the judges was that terrain collision was not properly built (in all those sloping areas). That was something I had definitely planned to do - I could walk all over the place! - but I forgot. Yesterday, I was testing one of the night versions of my levels and forgot to build the collision for the water planes in that level. Sigh!

So, I decided to put together a list of things to do before calling each level complete. I've gone through the level editor and through my level building process and compiled this list. If I've missed anything, let me know - this is going up behind my monitor as a sticky and will be my level processing mantra from now on :)

If an exterior level,

Build Terrain Collision where needed

If exterior level and has water,

Auto-tessellate water planes
Generate water collision geometry for all water nodes

If an interior level,

Make sure Room Properties are set for each room

Make sure Single Player module is active

Render Lightmaps
Render Light Probe
Place Start Point after naming the exportable area - if name is changed, delete and place Start Point again
Clear out the SpeedTreePackage Temp folder [for some reason, I've had the billboard tree issue only when there are files here - deleting these files and posting trees again always gives me good trees]
Do All Local Posts

Have I missed any other steps?

Baldur's Gate Release and the Scripting Contest

2010-10-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

First, the news...
What is the most important happening in the Dragon Age modding community this week? The release of Baldur's Gate 2 Redux! The BGR team has put together one awesome module - check out the details here if you haven't had a chance. It's expected to be released later today and can be downloaded from their DANexus page.

If I were to pick one area of Dragon Age modding that I am really comfortable with, it would be scripting. It might be due to the fact that I do a fair amount of LUA and Perl scripting at work but DAScript itself is a fairly complex system with hidden nuggets waiting to be unearthed. So, when the Mini-Game Scripting Contest was announced, I was excited - finally, a contest catering to my strengths! I didn't have a chance earlier to spend time on it but this past week, I've been doing some prototypes at work.

The 8-queens problem

The game I am designing is loosely based on chess - no, not the chess game but logic games within the chess rules framework. If you are familiar with chess, you might have heard of or even played the game where you have to place 8 queens on the board such that they do not attack each other.

Now, there are a lot of variations to the above 'standard' game. In fact, a quick search will show you hundreds of math papers written on this subject dealing with unique solutions, solutions for generic NxN boards, 3-dimensional boards, n-dimensional boards (n dimensions! brings back memories of my Differential Geometry course...where nothing can be visualized as in the real world).

What's this? A triangle immersed in a saddle-shaped plane (which is a hyperbolic paraboloid) as well as two diverging ultra-parallel lines. Math! You gotta love it.

For this contest, I've put my own spin on it and attached a simple story to it so that the game can be played in that context. The number of variations that can be played are currently at 25. The real problem was putting down solutions on paper so that I can provide hints if the player is stuck. Now that that part is complete, on to coding. One of the most useful script add-ons released is, in my opinion, is Craig Graff's Variable Storage System. Terribly useful when you have to keep track of a lot of stuff and plots either won't work or are too cumbersome to implement. I will be making extensive use of this in my contest entry.

I am also resizing some models and changing them a bit to provide a good layout where the game plays out. I plan to release this as a stand-alone game too so it has to look polished enough. Will it win? I don't know but I certainly hope so. Will it be well-received? I honestly don't know. Some players might approach it as a chess game in which case it will lose some of it's charm. If taken purely as an interactive game, it might work out better. The model-work that I am doing is in part to distance the setting from the chess board as much as possible. Let's see if it succeeds.

Backup system in place

2010-10-20T15:34:00.000-05:00

It's one of those things that every self-respecting software engineer knows must be done but never is - versioned backup. I've been guilty of that myself - I've been putting off doing a full backup for a long time now. Many a time, when I know I am going to try something that might break what's been written/directed till now (because I don't know what exactly that is going to do), I check in the script/conversation/cutscene into the database but that's only for designer resources. For art resources, I've been sticking to having multiple copies and rotating through them on each save.

Now, I've run into issues with my levels in the past which made me up the number of copies from 5 to 10. Still, it's always been in the back of my mind to get a good backup system in place. I finally bit the bullet and did that yesterday.

Since I am just one developer, I wanted something that was simple to set up and use and that I'll never have to worry about. After some research, I decided to use AutoVer. It's free, folder-based backup with customizations that can be applied to each folder and most important, comes with a basic versioning system. I downloaded it and added the folders used for Dragon Age modding to it first

Levels folder
Level layouts - it takes way too long to export everything again
BaL root folder that contains all other work (2DAs, images, icons, etc)
BaL module override folder - containing all the other mods that I plan to use
Tools folder - different DA:O and other games' tools that I currently use (I don't even know where I got some of these)

I also checked in all my designer resources and exported the database and backed that up too.

Now, the funky thing about AutoVer is that it constantly watches those folders and backs up any change you make! While that's a good thing for certain resources like 2DAs or scripts and you can customize how often you want the backups to be done, I still didn't want to go that route. So, I set up a scheduled task to export the database every Sunday evening and start AutoVer to do an incremental backup at that point. So, I'm all set now - the only thing remaining is to do an automated backup to Skydrive (25 GB free space!) every month or even every week. There is a nifty way to create a mapped drive of your Skydrive folders but haven't tried it yet.

In between, I also managed to submit a head morph for the Mini Character Contest. It's for a character who will be making an appearance fairly early in BaL and who has an interesting back-story too - not a companion though.

Vaelina - my entry to the mini character contest

Other than this, I've been tying up a lot of loose ends and placeholders I had in place for testing. While I was doing that, inspiration struck and what was originally a mundane battle in one of the starting areas is now more tightly integrated with the lore and the combat setup is also a little more complex. It should now provide a satisfying finale to an area where almost every dialogue and action is heavily lore-oriented.

A productive weekend

2010-10-18T01:39:00.000-05:00

So, it turned out to be not so bad after all.

I managed to finish the scripting required for Craggy Island on Sunday morning. There is still a niggling issue where a particular item is not getting added to the player's inventory - there is no fancy code in the back end, just a simple call to UT_AddItemToInventory. It is working in other places so I am not sure why it is not working here. The only difference is that this is an equippable item and the initial testing was with an uninitialized character (Jaden). However, even after generating the correct player character, it is not working. Not a really big deal but I am curious to find out why it is not working in this case.

Out of the 2 cutscenes I had planned to finish, I managed to finish only one. I don't know whether to call it fairly short or lengthy since it is only 20 seconds but it is lengthiest one I've created so far and also the most complex. It has around 9 characters and 2 creatures and a bunch of VFXs. The hardest part was finding the animations for the bears and in the end, I couldn't find anything suitable. I had to resort to taking a small portion of an existing animation and repeating it a few times.

The doors can only be opened by the bears!

In the end, it didn't turn out all that bad. I figure I still have some tweaking left to do with the weights and transitions but I am happy for now! I also have to start investigating the facial expressions for the characters as, right now, they are a little bland and static.

I tried to use Sunjammer's new tool - the Cutscene Companion - but I wasn't able to capture anything. Then, I tried to use Fraps but in-game, the cutscene was playing at location (0,0,0) in spite of having a stage assigned to it. I was hoping to generate a movie and club it with some other shots and create a sort of trailer but I guess it will have to wait for another day.

The target for this week is to complete the remaining cutscenes while I still have that directing bug and create/modify some VFXs for my custom classes and integrate all that into the module. A big task, I admit, but it has to be done at some point and the sooner the better.

Till later....

Back to writing dialogue

2010-10-16T14:54:00.000-05:00

I've been really focused the past couple of days - writing lots and lots of dialogue. Some introductory ones to the different areas were finalized but I've taken care to make each one of these expositions distinct. No walking up to the know-it-all inn-keeper and getting all the information from him. Since most of these will involve some animations at least while transitioning in and out of dialogue, the next step is cutscene work, which I'm not too thrilled about since that is one area I'm not really good at.

I've also been adding 'bark' nodes to the existing dialogues so that the NPCs have something to say when none of the other conditions are met - like between the nodes where a quest is given and the one where the quest is complete. Or even as simple as having different nodes during different stages of the main plot and having something to say when that particular conversation option for that stage is exhausted.

Next step is to work on the cutscenes and finish that monumental task. To realize the goal of releasing an alpha of the first few areas by the end of October, I will have to create about 5 cutscenes and at least 3 of those are fairly intricate ones (for me!). I hope to finish up at least a couple of them this weekend but that is after I complete the work required from my side for Craggy Island. That involves just a few minor scripts but that's holding up the development of the next stage for CI so best to get it out so Daeltaja can continue working on it. We'll see how the weekend goes...

Bioware talks Community Contests!

2010-10-13T15:59:00.002-05:00

If you had been visiting this blog regularly, you would have noticed the new Community Contests banner on the right. This was part of a...campaign of sorts to promote the Community Contest effort further so as to pull in new faces. We pinged a lot of our forum friends who had blogs or websites asking them to put a similar banner up on their sites; mikemike37 talked to greywardens.com and I was still thinking we could do more!

Then, Challseus came up with the idea of talking to Fernando Melo, who is sort of like a community representative over on BSN, about posting in the Bioware Blog. So, I messaged him and he forwarded the request to 'Evil' Chris and Victor Wachter. The result - a post on the Bioware Blog about the Community Contest and an announcement by Victor in the Dragon Age forums.

The significant part though is this sentence from that blog - Starting this week, I’ll be taking a look at the toolset community and the mods they create, and featuring them on the BioWare Blog. It will be a big boost to the mods that have been released if they are featured in the blog. As it is, with the Featured Projects section broken and the popularity system not so popular among modders, they need some other avenue to promote their content and this might just be the shot in the arm some of them need. Here's to Bioware! *cheers*

One other thing we've done over at the Community Contest group is to create an Info thread which summarizes the salient points about the contests and how people can help out. If you are interested in helping out or just want to know more about the group without having to go through all the threads out there, this should help you out.

Till later...

Working with images

2010-10-12T12:54:00.005-05:00

As mentioned earlier in my Contests post last month, I'm taking part in the Shadow Magic 1-vs-1 Tournament this year. Since I am a moderator for the PBEM forums over there, I've also been doing some organization work for the tourney. One of my areas of responsibility has been designing the scorecards for the different rounds.
The first round was easy enough to do as I just applied a watermark to a scroll picture and copied the text from Excel. For the subsequent rounds, I spent some time trying to create something that was different from what we've used so far and in that process, learned a lot more about layers and effects and how to manipulate them. The end result was something I was really pleased with -

Shadow Magic Tourney Bracket

Running high on the feeling of satisfaction from creating the above image, I decided to take a shot at doing one of the first maps for Blood and Lyrium. Creating a nicely textured map from scratch is a lot of hard work and requires far more time and expertise than I have so I decided to use the Thedas map as a base. At some point in the past, I found a link on the EA site to a really high resolution map of Thedas (6680 X 5010) and I used a small portion of that map to create mine.

Blood and Lyrium Map 1

I still had to do some work to remove all the existing text and if you notice, even at full resolution (you can click the image to get there), it is almost impossible to find out where the original text was and I am really pleased with that.
Next step is to start integrating this into the module and hopefully, people will be surprised when they actually encounter this map in-game. Why? Well, you'll have to see for yourself!

In this process, I accidentally solved the issue with the 24-pixel border on the maps but was not able to replicate it. The accidental solution was to have a black canvas around the image but doing that again didn't work on this map. Need to investigate that more!

Dialogue (woes)

2010-10-10T04:05:00.000-05:00

These past few days, for some reason or the other, I didn't feel like scripting at all. I know I have a lot of things to finish up on that end; hopefully, I'll hit the spot sometime this week. Instead, I've been writing...a lot, in fact.

First, I've started work on a concise story document that I will be able to use in the future as a reference when I need to discuss the module with anyone. This also helps me to view it from a high level and decide whether there are further opportunities to flesh out the story or add side-quests.

Next, I've been writing a lot of dialogue - completely new ones and changing/adding to existing ones too. One of the most complicated ones I wrote in the past week revolves around a game the player can choose to play - it has only a little over 1000 words but the amount of link-backs numbers in the hundreds.

It is an interesting game, I tell you...or rather, would have been. I forgot one tiny little thing - the Dragon Age engine will show only the first six options. And mine had 10 most of the time. I was kicking myself for not play-testing the conversation earlier. I was feeling more frustrated due to the back-end scripting that was also completed for the game but the testing was broken due to the choices not available to be selected. That could possibly be the reason why I am feeling a certain apathy towards scripting now. Oh well...

Now, I have to either (a) break the choices down into 2 sets, which would make the game extremely cumbersome or (b) find an alternate way to play it or (c) ditch the whole idea. Sometime back, FollowTheGourd posted an interesting idea for text-centric dialogues in the Alternate Dialogue Modes thread. I'll probably do a quick check with him to see if that allows for more options and if so, use it for this conversation. After all, even if I do plan to get my module voiced, I don't have to do VO for every single line. I'm thinking more BG2 style where the first line and important conversations are voiced but the rest are just texts. I think VO is highly over-rated anyway...

In other news, the judging for the Community Contest 2 - Prop Model finished on Thursday and the winners have been announced. You can congratulate the winners here and read about/grab the entries from the links on the Community Contest 2 Page. Show them your support, folks!

Building a settlement....

2010-10-05T19:21:00.000-05:00

...is more than just creating a level or an area.

This new area I am working on is based on the level I submitted for the level-building community contest and it is a huge one! With a huge area, especially that area being a village comes the added task of populating it. Now, I have the plots for this village all written down but it is variable enough that the actual populace placement has to be finalized and additional things like ambient movement, non-critical NPCs, sub-plots, stages set up. What I've started doing nowadays is - as soon as each level is sort-of finalized, I export the minimap and put it into my Dropbox folder. Whenever I have free time at work, I open the level and start jotting down things on the image itself.

Plot-critical populace

Obviously, everything can't be fit into a single image so I use one for NPCs and any ideas I come up with when putting them down, another for quest flow and one for ambient movement. It varies with each area but I've felt a lot more focused when I am back home and open these images to translate the jottings into actual implementation. All the thinking is done during lunch and smoke breaks and once the toolset is opened, the goal is only to get as much of those thoughts implemented and nothing else.

Sometimes, I do get diverted. For example, I've been putting off tinting/recolouring items since the beginning and every now and then, I decide to start on it and go to the wiki. I still haven't managed to get through that tutorial, unfortunately so it just ends up as a wasted few minutes of diversion. I'm trying hard to stick to my plans for October and so far, it's going well. Still, a lot of days to go...

Till later,

World Map Tutorial - Part 2

2010-10-03T00:03:00.000-05:00

In Part 1 of this tutorial, the basic setup for custom world maps was covered. In this tutorial, we will unravel the event flow when using world maps and the functionality that can be embedded in each of those event handlers.

First, a short illustration on the event flow tied to world map usage:

Event Flow related to World Map usage

It is good practice to define a primary world map in the EVENT_TYPE_MODULE_START event just to avoid any gotchas later. This just makes sure there is a world map displayed if the player initiates an unforeseen transition ;)

object oWorldMap = GetObjectByTag("<world map tag>");
WR_SetWorldMapPrimary(oWorldMap);

If you want, you can also set a secondary world map using:
WR_SetWorldMapSecondary(object oMapID);

What is the difference? A secondary map enables the second icon in the World Map allowing you to see both world maps. To give an example in the OC, it would be like Denerim and the Wide Open World. When in Denerim, doing a transition would take you to the Denerim map. Clicking the secondary map button would take you to the Wide Open World.

EVENT_TYPE_TRANSITION_TO_WORLD_MAP is the core event where you evaluate plot flags or put in checks to determine which world map to show and actually show the map.

SetWorldMapGuiStatus(WM_GUI_STATUS_USE);
OpenPrimaryWorldMap();

Two important checks (if you have the associated features in your module) that must be done here are:
If the player is exiting out of a random encounter, you have to make sure that the player continues on his way rather than selecting a new destination (this is just for the animation part)

if (GetEventString(ev, 1) == RANDOM_ENCOUNTER_TRANSITION_ID)
{
// exiting random - encounter - finish travel animation
WorldMapCompleteRandomEncounter();
break;
}

If the player is exiting out of a party camp and you want the Party Picker to be shown, you do it here

if(GetEventString(ev, 1) == CAMP_EXIT_TRANSITION_ID)
{
SetPartyPickerGUIStatus(PP_GUI_STATUS_USE);
ShowPartyPickerGUI();
break;
}

The constants used above are defined in the world_maps_h which is a core include and hence, can be included directly in your script - unless you want to change some of the functionality.

Once you show the World Map, the player can select a Map Pin to travel to. This triggers the EVENT_TYPE_BEGIN_TRAVEL where all the grunt work related to area-related plots, random encounters, camp travel is done. Finally, the WorldMapStartTravelling function is called to start the travel animation (important when random encounters are specified; otherwise they will not work)

A few important checks that are usually done here would be -

Check if waypoint overrides are set for the map pin (this is actually passed as an event parameter - GetEventString(ev, 2))
Handle random encounters - this is basically handled via plots unless you want really random encounters. In any case, this is scripted independently
Store the target map pin's area and waypoint tags - the area tag is passed as GetEventString(ev, 1) and the waypoint tag is determined from the waypoints 2da unless a waypoint override is present. This is important if you have random encounters (see EVENT_TYPE_WORLDMAP_PRETRANSITION event below)

SetLocalString(GetModule(), WM_STORED_AREA, sTarget);SetLocalString(GetModule(), WM_STORED_WP, sWP);

Camp related checks

Store the current location from which the world map was accessed so that when transitioning back, you can jump the party straight back
If source area is camp and, then basically don't do the animation trail. Jump the player back to the previous area (tied directly to the point above)
If the target area is camp, again, don't play the animation but do a direct transition
If source and target are both camps, empty the party and place the followers in their positions

EVENT_TYPE_WORLDMAP_PRETRANSITION is a pretty basic event that is called at the same time as the animation trail starts. All you do here is do the actual transition to the target area - except when the target area is the party camp, in which case it is done in EVENT_TYPE_BEGIN_TRAVEL itself. No fancy stuff here.
The one important thing to remember here is - the player will not be able to click on a map pin when exiting from a random encounter. Hence, you cannot get a target area from the event parameters. This is the reason why you store the target area and waypoint in the module variables in the EVENT_TYPE_BEGIN_TRAVEL event.

string sArea = GetLocalString(GetModule(), WM_STORED_AREA);
string sWP = GetLocalString(GetModule(), WM_STORED_WP);
UT_DoAreaTransition(sArea, sWP);

EVENT_TYPE_WORLDMAP_POSTTRANSITION is an optional event in the sense that it need not be handled for the world map to work correctly. However, this is a great area to do all those 'whats-happening-in-the-evil-genius'-lair' type of cutscenes. Remember the cutscenes with Loghain in the OC or the ones with The Valsharess in NWN-HotU? These can be done in this event.

EVENT_TYPE_WORLDMAP_CLOSED is also not a compulsory event unless you have a party camp in your module or multiple primary/secondary map combinations. The important (and only?) event parameter here is the first integer parameter:

GetEventInteger(ev,0)
0 when the world map action is cancelled by the player
1 when it is closed after a travel is completed

Obviously, the above events can be analyzed and dissected even more but I don't plan to do that. The above information is enough to get world map transitions working in your module.

Now, let's get to the interesting part - customizations/changes from what's done in the OC.

The waypoints 2DA is not an integral part of the world map functionality. It is deduced via scripting through the WM_GetWorldMapTargetWaypoint function in world_maps_h. All it does is go through the 2DA line by line to compare the area tags and then, get the waypoint tag. You can, instead write your own 2DA to put in waypoint tags based on plot conditions or specify a list of random waypoints from which one is picked to jump to (a diablo-esque dungeon with multiple entry points?) or if you have just one entry point in your areas, skip this 2da altogether, keep the area and waypoint tags same and use GetEventString(ev, 1) from EVENT_TYPE_BEGIN_TRAVEL for both.
The first 2 integers in EVENT_TYPE_BEGIN_TRAVEL are used in the OC to determine random encounters based on terrain. That's not a hard and fast rule since random encounters are scripted and there are no core functions tied to them. What does this mean? Random encounters have to be entirely scripted by the module maker and as such, can be entirely different systems. In that case, you can use these 2 integers coupled with the waypoint changes above to get a more extensive waypoint handling system.
Let's say you want to show something to the player - a written scroll with hidden clues (National Treasure, anyone?) or a picture clue. You could create a map with that scroll/picture and show that to the player with OpenPrimaryWorldMap (after setting it to the Primary map, of course) - basically, it can be used to show any image.

I actually had a couple of other ideas but haven't explored the system yet to see if they would actually work. You think you know everything and then, the game throws a googly at you by hard-coding something within the engine or the GUI (the blight animation in this case).
I hope this tutorial proves useful to you. I will be posting the tutorial on the social wiki soon so if you find something that needs further explanation or if you uncover anything else related to the map-making process, please add it to the page. Feedback is also welcome here, if you need further clarification on any of the points above.

One last thing - the process to integrate custom world maps into the OC/Awakening is the same process as described in Part 1 of the tutorial. The only difference would be that you will have to intercept the above events prior to them being called by the official game and prevent them from being handled if you so desire. Since these are all module events, it is pretty straightforward to override them in your custom module script.

Blood and Lyrium - Monthly Report

2010-10-01T16:57:00.000-05:00

So, I decided to do some accounting today to see where I am at with the overall module progress. Seeing as my target is to release the module before Dragon Age 2 ships or more accurately, at least a month before Dragon Age 2 ships, the latest I can shoot for and still hope to have a decent-sized audience would be the beginning of February. That is just 4 months away and I still have a ton of work left to do!

Levels: The biggest time sink for my module will be building the required levels. At this point, I've realized I cannot build every level I require from scratch so I'll end up reusing some of the official levels for the house/tavern/etc interiors. Sure, they won't exactly match up with the exterior layout in many cases but I think it is a small price to pay for an early release date. Even with that, I still have a few levels, mostly exterior, to create (it's unfortunate that none of the Community Contest entries really fit in with what I want):

Small exterior levels - usually as entrances to other areas or for encounters - 6
Big exterior levels - full-blown villages/town - 3
Interiors that cannot be reused from the OC - 5

Given that, if I break up the work done so far and try to assign percentages (not really a good indicator but let's do it anyway)

Story - 100% (I am really happy with this!)
Quest Design - 80% (need to check the feasibility of certain ideas)
Companion design - 40%
Custom Classes and Abiltities - 30%
2D Art - 0% (icons mostly but there are a lot of them + some other stuff)
Level/Area Design - 80% (on paper ;))
Level/Area Implementation - 25%
Conversations - 20%
Scripting - 10%
Cutscenes - 10%
Monster/Encounter Design - 0% (I should really start on this)
Custom Systems - 20%

Overall, I would say the module is about 20% complete. Now that the story is set and the overall quest arcs are almost finalized, I can start focusing on the implementation. Of all the things above, 2D Art is really not my forte - I will have to ask if anyone from the Community Creations forum can help out. I also wish we could hold an interior level Community Contest so I can get some free levels :p

Plan for October:

Test and finalize quest design
Finish the custom classes' implementation
Finalize level design on paper
Finish the small exterior levels and at least one big exterior level
Complete quests/conversations/plots/etc for the areas designed till today.

That is a pretty ambitious list, I know (*cough* I think I am coming down with something and won't be able to go to work for a week or so ;)) but if all goes according to plan (does it ever?!!), I hope to have an alpha of the first few areas out for testing so I can start getting some feedback. Here's hoping!

One last thing I'd like to point out to potential modders (not just for Dragon Age) - Mengtzu has made an excellent post on encounter scaling and learning curves for the player when playing a module and how modders can try to avoid some of the pitfalls related to those. I will definitely be re-reading that blog post when I start my encounter designs and monster tactics.

World Map Tutorial - Part 1

2010-09-30T01:07:00.000-05:00

Well, I know we already have a Map Tutorial on the Bioware wiki (which will be updated shortly by yours truly) but as far as I know, no one has been successful in getting a custom map to work in a stand-alone module. Or, if someone did, no one has come forth on the forums to help those who've had problems. So, here is a step-by-step tutorial on getting custom maps to work.

Step 1: Map Image

The map can either be in .tga or .dds formats.
TGA: You can use a freeware image editor like Irfanview or Gimp to convert a .jpg/.jpeg file to the .tga format.
DDS: You can use nvdxt.exe present in the <Dragon Age Install folder>\tools\ResourceBuild\Processors folder to generate a DDS file. nvdxt.exe is a batch utility and to use it you need to open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and enter your command. An example to convert x.tga to x.dds is:

nvdxt.exe -file x.tga -output x.dds -nomipmap -8 u8888 -prescale length width

-prescale length width lets you put in the size (should be multiple of 4) to which the x.tga should be scaled before conversion

If you are using Photoshop, you first need the Nvidia Photoshop plug-ins and if you are using Gimp, you need the Gimp DDS plug-ins. In Photoshop, I saved my DDS as DXT5 ARGB 8bpp with Interpolated Alpha and No MipMaps.

The game requires the image to be with the client's localized name but the toolset reads the actual image so you need both <image_name> and <image_name_en-us> (for English clients). You have to place both images in your addin's module\override folder.

The game's world map (both OC and Awakening) is 912 x 687 pixels - this is the canvas size. The images have a 24 pixel transparent border which would make the actual image 864 x 639 (640 if you are using your own map)

Why is this important?
The map is anchored at the top-left corner of the book image and this corner is actually slightly above the book border. Without this transparent section, your map will never be aligned exactly in the center of the book.

Sample map in add-in module with DDS extension

There are ways to work around this but I will cover them in Part 2 if I am unable to figure out the transparent border.

Step 2: Building the m2DAs

You need to extend two 2DAs for the worldmap to function correctly in-game and create as many worksheets as you need based on the TargetWpTable entries (see below). All these 2das go into your module\override folder.

worldmaps from worldmaps.xls: A few things to note here:

worldmaps_tut 2da

The ID has to be between 0 and 255. Anything over that and the map will not work in-game and you will see the infamous grey square at the top left.
Bioware uses 1-5 for the OC and 10 for Awakening. I doubt the other DLCs use different world maps - if anyone has played them and has seen a different map, let me know.
The TargetWpTableID should match the IDs used to extend the m2da_base 2DA
The TargetWpTable entries should match the different worksheets containing the Source/Target waypoint information. I have yet to test whether this is actually used.
The MAP column contains the names of your map images
The Label column is the one used by the Toolset
As far as I can determine, the NameStrRef is not used anywhere so you can keep that at 0

m2da_base from 2da_base.xls: Create a new entry for each of the TargetWpTableID used in the worldmaps 2da extension. Keep in mind that the m2da_base is, in itself, a m2da so you need to only have a worksheet with the new rows.

source-target waypoint 2das: You can copy the existing target_wps_* worksheets and edit them if you so wish. It is basically a table with source and target areas on the rows and columns respectively. Their intersection contains the waypoint tag you will be transitioned to when traveling from the source to the target area.

test_map_1_wp 2da

Step 3: Setting up the map in the toolset

This is probably the easiest part. Fire up the toolset, navigate to the Maps tab, right-click and select New -> Map.

TIP: If you didn't know, going to the appropriate tab (Maps, Scripts, etc) and then selecting the New option by right-clicking there automatically positions the corresponding resource at the top of the menu. Selecting a folder and doing this creates the resource within that folder.

If you've done the previous 2 steps, you should see the map name (Label) in the drop down list for the Map within the toolset and the image should appear correctly.

To test what you've done till now in-game, just create a couple of map pins, save and export without dependent resources. Create a placeable using one of the Area Transition type placeables and set the PLC_AT_DEST_AREA_TAG to world_map (this is a hard-coded value inside the utility_h script). You can use any placeable for a transition but it is not as simple as this and I want to keep things simple till I start Part 2 of this tutorial :)

Fire up your module script and add the following lines of code:

#include "events_h"
#include "global_objects_h"
#include "sys_chargen_h"
#include "sys_rewards_h"
#include "world_maps_h"

void main()
{
    int nEventHandled = FALSE;
    event ev = GetCurrentEvent();
    int nEvent = GetEventType(ev);

    switch(nEvent)
    {
         case EVENT_TYPE_MODULE_START:
         {
            object oWorldMap = GetObjectByTag("<Tag of the placeable>");
            WR_SetWorldMapPrimary(oWorldMap);
            break;
         }

         case EVENT_TYPE_TRANSITION_TO_WORLD_MAP:
         {
            SetWorldMapGuiStatus(WM_GUI_STATUS_USE);
            OpenPrimaryWorldMap();
            break;
         }
    }

    // if this event wasn't handled by this script fall through to the core script
    if(!nEventHandled)
    {
        HandleEvent(ev, RESOURCE_SCRIPT_MODULE_CORE);
    }
}

Export the resources for your module, start Dragon Age and launch your module. Once you click the Area Transition placeable, your map should be displayed.

Lastly, to show that this works with more than one custom map in the same add-in, another image. This one uses a .tga file as the world map and is bigger than the other one - just to show that there is no limitation on the size of the image - but you can notice the icons inside the map area -> the underlying book size is hard-coded.

Sample map in add-in module with .TGA extension

Part 2 of the tutorial will cover the scripting behind transitions, how to bypass/override certain events, customizations possible within the existing event framework and an explanation (or workaround) of the 24-pixel border. Stay tuned!

I did my testing as part of my module so if any of you who read this run into issues or find something inadequately explained, let me know and I will see what I can do.

Community Contest 2 Ends!

2010-09-28T15:53:00.000-05:00

The second Community Contest to create one or more props for use in a level is now complete and the entries consolidated and uploaded to DA Nexus!

Though we have only three entrants for this competition, two of them have submitted multiple props which should be nice additions for different kinds of level settings. We also have a cool-looking fountain from Mike for use in those upscale city neighbourhoods.

Download and judge for yourself the contest entries here.

While packaging the module, the toolset again exhibited one of it's many quirks - it can post level files which generates all those .rim files but apparently, it cannot package them up for distribution! You have to manually do that yourself.

Rename the .dazip to .zip
Extract the contents
Add a new env folder under the (addin-name)\core folder
Copy the posted level files into the env folder. Going by Bioware's example, just place the .rim files there. Don't package it into an .erf or the layout won't be available in-game.
Zip up the contents again - make sure the root contains the Manifest.xml and Contents folder or DAUpdater will throw an error while installing.

It's a good thing the .dazip format is just a renamed .zip format - I cannot think how difficult it would have been had it been a proprietary packaging format!

This highlights one of the problems David Gaider touches upon here - it's not a trivial task to package up a toolset for the community and test it and support it. I would go so far as to say that it is not restricted to the toolset alone but is relevant for any kind of modding capability. I just hope that when (if?) they do release a toolset update after DA2 (is anyone still hopeful that we will get a toolset patch before then? :p), it will fix some of the obvious flaws in the toolset.

Marketing - Get the word out!

2010-09-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

Continuing on from my previous post about the importance of marketing in the modding arena, I would like to touch/expand upon the means by which one can market our mods.

How successful is my marketing?

Blogs, as I've mentioned before, are a very good means of showcasing the development of a blog. However, I've found that when the blogs go beyond the standard fare - i.e., go beyond just the mod updates and include articles on inspirations behind the mod, design decisions, analysis of game mechanics, to name a few - I find them more enjoyable and the impression it creates of the author is better. One excellent example is Challseus' posts in July about the inspirations behind RoE. That made for a fascinating read - I was on vacation so I read through those posts later in one go but I can see how readers will want to come back and read more of those inspirations. It also lends some credibility to the modder; that they are not just changing things to be different but in fact have a good reason to do so.

I actually penned a series of articles related to BaL's design and why certain things were being changed/added/removed but I felt that it would give too much of the game away and I had to stop after a few posts. There's that fine line between revealing too much thus destroying the element of surprise and revealing just enough to build up the anticipation for release and I've yet to find that sweet spot.

The other important aspect is presentation; especially now when there are so many modules to choose from. It makes your content stand out - be it good screenshots (I'm guilty of taking too many dark ones myself), an attractive project page layout or a well put together trailer. If the presentation is good, it will automatically draw people's interest and then, you have to make sure that the content within stands up to that presentation ;)

What are the other means by which modules can be promoted?
Some time back, Mikemike37 suggested Twitter as a means for promoting my blog. The only time I've used Twitter so far is for the Bioware challenges during the infamous Bazaar event but I can see the potential there. It might be more so for a module like Baldur's Gate Redux since it comes attached to a familiar name but who knows! I'll have to get around to doing that soon...

The other option - interviews! In the context of Dragon Age, getting interviewed on the Dragon Age Podcast is sure to get you and your module those few seconds of mass recognition which will, in most cases, translate to increased visibility of your module - more views, more downloads, more ratings.

Well, that concludes my thoughts on marketing for now - this can easily change into a discussion about using social media for online brand marketing but that is an entirely different subject and too vast to be handled here! As always, I'm interested in hearing others' opinions on this subject.

Now, if you've been reading my blog before, you would have noticed these last two posts are not the norm. I was recently interviewed by a thesis student doing his Masters in Communication in Singapore and one of the aspects of modding we talked about was marketing. It was a lengthy interview and a lot of time was spent on this subject which served as inspiration to post here - an evolution of the discussion we had, if you will.

The Importance of Marketing

2010-09-23T16:58:00.001-05:00

Anyone creating content - be it a video game mod/module, a home video, fan fiction or mobile apps, to name a few - realizes the importance of marketing or if they don't, should realize and respect it's importance. The ultimate goal of content creation is consumption by the public; a narrow demographic for certain types of content like video game mods or the general public for things like home videos.

How do we get people to consume the content we create? Obviously, the first step is to make them aware that such content exists. Now, some modders might say (and I have heard this before) - I'll let my work speak for itself ; I don't need marketing. My question is - how will the work speak for itself if it is not even in the radar of the folks looking for such content? Alley of Murders, an excellent add-in for Dragon Age and if I recall, one of the first, had less downloads than other add-ins that were released after it. I think one of the problems was marketing.

Granted, most hosting sites have methods in place to show new content that has been uploaded. However, when there is so much content being released on an almost daily basis, will that one day of visibility be enough? It will most definitely be enough for a very small amount of content - The Phoenix Armory for Females is one such example. An extremely well-crafted, beautiful armor set that doesn't look out of place in the Dragon Age world and it's already garnered over 200 endorsements in the past 2 weeks.

It will also quite likely be enough for any content related to sex, as the BSN project page shows.

How can we modders then ensure our modules - which have had hundreds of hours sunk into them - are given that visibility? How can we keep them in the public eye even during development so that we will have an eager audience waiting to play it upon release?

One obvious method is to use signatures. Almost every module creator I've seen for Dragon Age has the project link in his/her signature bar. Signatures, however, are only effective if the module creator takes the time to post in a variety of forums - not just the DA Toolset forum, which is frequented only by other module makers and it is a reasonable assumption that they are already aware of your work. The task here is not only to maintain visibility to those who know about your project but also to pull in new people.

The other option that works well in the BSN forums is the 'What's New' feed. Everything you post in your project page (be it private or not, hehe) and status updates are visible to your friends. Making regular updates to your project discussion pages and friends posting in groups/discussions related to that propagates those posts to the 'What's New' feed of their friends. It's a fragile chain to be sure but a chain, nonetheless.

Blogs, I've found out, are really good tools for marketing. For one, there is the cross-promotion that happens as the "mod-blogger" community evolves - modders link to or follow other people's mods and this is usually reciprocated, resulting in increased traffic which translates into increased visibility. The other advantage is that visitors know that you are working on the module - especially when you post screenshots and provide regular updates on where development is at. Of course, stagnant blogs quickly lose the edge so you have to keep posting and updating your blog to keep the interest up.

One common denomination among all the above methods is that you have to keep working on the PR front as well as doing the actual modding if you want to ensure your module is consumed by a large portion of the community.
What do you think - is marketing necessary or are we over-burdening ourselves? Are there alternate means of promoting our content?

More on this in the next post...

A lull...

2010-09-21T15:51:00.000-05:00

In my earlier post,I had mentioned that I would be able to get the level I submitted for the contest tweaked and ready by the weekend. Well, that didn't happen. In spite of the long list of ideas I had on Friday, the weekend for the most part was a complete bust. I had to work on a production-critical demand issue and after spending almost an entire day on it, I was drained. I did open the toolset but I couldn't even get myself to write a simple trigger script - completely blanked out! Towards the of the weekend, I finally wrung out some energy to fix some of the glaring omissions in the level - floating buildings. I also went through the level in-game, both in tactical camera mode and third-person view to find anything else that was amiss and I recalled Mike's comments about the carts balancing on wheels and went about fixing those.

Where are those invisible oxen?!

I did manage to have a long conversation with Daeltaja on Sunday evening and have a list of things I need to complete for Craggy Island - minor scripting stuff for the most part. The one important thing I'm overdue on is getting a play-through done so I can get a feel for the current state of things. I plan to get that done with today so I can finish the work required from my side - after all, I volunteered for this so I definitely don't want to be the one holding things up!

On the Shadow Magic front, two of my first round games were won successfully and the last one is in progress. I want to win this too so I can be assured of a second round slot - with the modified swiss sytem we are using, two wins might not cut it if the opponents don't get many points. I would probably need to spend some time preparing for the second round once the map is announced and that will likely happen toward end of this month.

Tweaking stuff

2010-09-17T14:10:00.000-05:00

One of the good things with the level building contest was getting feedback from the judges. Mike and Semper have given some valuable feedback, including a tip about ambient animations that will go a long way toward polishing my level-building skills. So, that's what I've started doing now - fixing up the contest entry to remove some of the obvious mistakes - there were two floating buildings a small distance off the ground that I am really ashamed of as I went through the level specifically looking for that! I will also start addressing some of the things I wrote down in my earlier post and hopefully, get the level finished this weekend.

In the meantime, I've started dabbling in 3ds max when I get time so I can do some basic stuff. One of the first things I wanted to do was to get the fence prop with a relatively straighter upper post so it would look better when placed in a chain. I was able to do it though the end result wasn't that good - I just pulled all the vertices up and exported it, which I guess is not the way to do it :)

There is also a scripting contest coming up and I've already got ideas for 3 possible mini-games. All of those would fit in nicely with BaL though the 2 mini-games/puzzles I had planned for BaL won't be entered in the contest - I need to keep some original stuff for my module as well! I also have a cool idea for the setup for one of the games that would involve some new models but after going through some video tutorials yesterday night on 3ds max, I think it should be pretty simple (the available options to create models are staggering!)

Now that the contest is over, I'm also spending more time working on Craggy Island to get the scripts written as and when Daeltaja finishes writing a particular sequence and so far, there haven't been any real hurdles there. I might have to write a custom placeable script to strip out some of the features in placeable_core but again, the core functionality isn't being changed so that should be relatively simple.

Community Contest Submission Done!

2010-09-13T11:30:00.006-05:00

I know...you think it's not really that big of a deal since a lot of people managed to submit some exceptional work for the contest. For me, however, the contest set a couple of important milestones with respect to level building.

A bird's eye view of Evermist

This is the biggest level I've created till date. To be honest, this dwarfs the other 3 exterior levels I created. The size of this level is 224 x 288 and the playable area is 160 x 224 (or 5 x 7 using the default chunk size)
This is also the quickest I've created any exterior level - it took a little over 10 days to complete this monster (well, it's still got a few tweaks that have to go into it but it is playable right now!)

Again, the above might not seem like major things but keeping in mind that every exterior level I have right now requires additional work (floating trees, night version to be created, more props), it was a very good effort, even if I do say so myself. The contest provided an end date to the work that I really didn't have before - I could create the other resources required for BaL and still be working on the module. Not so here.


Evermist - a view from the Chantry balcony

As I said above, there are still a few tweaks that have to go into the level -

I need to put in more fencing around a couple of raised up areas
More props need to be added to the houses
Some texture rework is required (I was not even sure whether I had utilized one particular texture in more than one area and some areas are still a little bland)
I need to cut down on the grass in the fields - I think I have nearly 2000 trees in the level and about a quarter of them have High draw distance. Not a good one for lower-end machines
Some custom props have to be designed to replace tons of replicated props
Put in the mist that gives the village it's name :)

Given how I've handled these things before, they'll likely be pushed out till I get the level building bug again - and I'm praying it's not for some time yet. I literally haven't done anything else except level building over the past 10 days and man, do I need a break from that!!

To give you an idea, I was building the final toolset export today morning and I hit an error with the SpeedTree capture for a particular tree (condsn_a, I think). So, I deleted the files in the trees folder, did a post trees alone and it was successful. Just to make sure, I load the area layout in a test area and damn, all the trees except the 'wall' trees were missing their leaves!! I was in panic mode! I did a full post again, same error with the same tree, removed the textures from the SpeedTree temporary folder and another full post, which was finally successful. I go back in and same issue!!
Thankfully, I noticed that the trees closer to the camera were fading in and out as I went near...and then realized Fade Cutaway was selected!!!

Quick Update

2010-09-11T19:25:00.000-05:00

I've been really busy with the Settlement Level contest and pretty much devoting all my time to it. One good thing is, as I'm molding the terrain and putting in props, ideas keep coming up. Not all of these are game-play related ideas though. Many are logical ones - lot of fields and a bakery in the market, maybe add a windmill to grind grain into flour? or a prominent fish-selling meat market gave the idea for a stream through the village, etc.
Also, lots of ambient conversations just write themselves in my head when I am doing prop work. I must admit, most are just explanations for why things are in a particular way but I think even these complete the area as a whole.

Anyway, enough rambling...here is a screenie for your consumption and I'm off to spend more time with the level editor - need to finish prop placement, texturing, more fields/orchard planting, vistas and getting the water to look right.

Contests!

2010-09-07T15:09:00.000-05:00

Yep, in plural!

I had been toying with the idea of submitting the Leeward level to the Community Contest. However, it is not *technically* a finished level since the village is not complete. The incomplete areas are not accessible in Blood and Lyrium but that wouldn't be enough reason to make that entry a valid one according to the contest rules.
I had started design work on the next big area in BaL, a village called Evermist. This would be a crucial area in BaL so I had spent some considerable time to make sure that all I needed could be presented properly.

Design on Paper

Given that I had the design work complete around middle of last week, I decided to take the plunge to try and finish it before the contest deadline. It is a fairly large level (192 x 288) and I've decided to use a lot of elevations and custom-built houses which makes it even more time-consuming.
At this point, the initial prototyping is done and it is looking pretty good - by my own low standards :)
The contest deadline is just 6 days away so I will be slaving away at it whenever I get some free time. I would love to hear any suggestions or feedback on the posted images either here or at DANexus or in my project feedback thread so feel free to share your thoughts on the level.

The view from the Chantry

The other contest, rather competition, that I am participating in is the Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic PBEM 1vs1 Tourney. Historically, though I've been a Singles Champion, I've never been able to see a 1vs1 competition through to the end. These tourneys typically go on for about 5-6 months and in both competitions held in the past, I've been forced to forfeit due to RL delays. Hopefully, this time, I can play till the end.
Of course, I haven't had much practice since I haven't been playing PBEM for nearly 9 months now but as luck would have it, my first round is relatively easy and I hope to go through to the final 16 without any major hiccups. Here's hoping!
Being on the forum staff, I'll also be helping out with the organization (setting up threads, resolving any disputes, etc) a bit so that is going to cut into the time I can spend on DA.

Too many things going on!
Till later...

Playtesting + Craggy Island

2010-09-05T02:25:00.000-05:00

I finished the area (Leeward) I was working on for Blood and Lyrium a couple of days back - finished as in, the required NPCs for the various quests are in place and their dialogue is written and plots and associated scripts are done. Technically, that means I can play through till this area and the story will progress accordingly. Of course, there is some additional play-testing to do to make sure everything is alright. I can't speak for other module-makers but for me, it is very difficult to do more than one or two runthroughs of an area if I haven't added something new to test. I know there are alternate options to choose and different approaches to the same goals (well, most of the time at least) but I just can't seem to muster the willpower to do it. I don't know - is it that the content is not interesting enough or is it just my psyche?

Anyway, the good news is, as I was play-testing, I got a very good idea for a quest at the beginning of the game. Now, some players might not like having to answer lore questions to progress through a main quest line. I even thought of adding in an alternative way to do it but then, ditched the idea. After all, Blood and Lyrium is about a Dalish protagonist and I didn't want to dilute the experience right at the start. I just made sure that the player can find the required answers either through conversations or codex entries before starting the quest.


New Quest - The camera needs a bit of adjustment still

A few posts back, I was talking about Craggy Island and how the island itself was looking beautiful. As it turns out, Daeltaja was looking for some help with scripting and I've decided to set aside some time to do just that. This last week, we went through a few hurdles getting B2B to work right but after the initial hiccups, managed to complete the initial plot and associated scripting. The module is not planned to be very lengthy so I expect, if we keep up the kind of communication we had going last week, to be done with the scripting front by end of this month. I hate to put an end date on things still in development (I've already revised BaL's release date twice!) but I reckon I will take a chance with this; especially as the main developer (Daeltaja) will have a couple of weeks vacation this month.

Till later...

DLCs - the future of gaming?

2010-09-01T13:59:00.000-05:00

During my weekly visit to Gamespot, I came across this video article talking about DLCs as the future of gaming. DLC, as most gamers are aware, refers to DownLoadable Content and this is a topic I (and many others, it would seem) have strong opinions on.
When I started playing games - which was pretty late, in my late teens - the additional stuff was always free; primarily because almost all of them were community content done by fans. Map packs, custom clothing/armor, total conversions, unofficial patches, new creatures, etc. All free.

Quake TC for Doom 3 - FREE!

I guess it was just a matter of time before someone in Corporate noticed the demand for these extras and decided that this was a good money-making opportunity. That's a perfectly good capitalist thought and it was a win-win scenario for both parties - more content, polished and with the official seal of compatibility for players and more revenue for the studios. The fallout of this model, at least in my eyes, is the death of the expansion pack. Games hardly have expansion packs nowadays - it's just more DLC to bridge the gap between sequels.

Civilization 4 - Fall from Heaven 2 - Better than most DLCs and free!

In the past couple of years though, the DLC scene has come to signify corporate greed and an utter lack of principles on the part of the publishers/studios. That's not to say all DLCs are bad - some rare ones are good but many of them don't justify the price tag. For example, the Bioshock 2 MP DLC - Sinclair Solutions - was already on the disk and the $5 price for the DLC was to get an unlock code. The reason behind the decision - players need to have exactly the same content to play online (btw, when has this ever been different?) and the DLC potentially is tied to engine updates and such that it had to be included in the disc. Then, there was the infamous Versus Mode DLC for RE5, a fiasco if ever there was one - a 1MB download for playing online, which made it so obvious the content was already there.

...and now, Dragon Age.
Admittedly, we know that the teams that do DLCs are separate from the 'main' development team. However, with the core development team concentrating on DA2 for quite some time now and the game and the toolset in desperate need of some patchwork, does it make sense to keep churning out additional DLCs? I swear the Feastday Gifts/Pranks was one of the worst ideas EVER - when players were still experiencing game-breaking glitches. And what do we get in the patch? Compatibility files for Awakening for the most part.
Why can't this DLC team work on fixing the bugs in the game? Most of these bugs are in the same category as content creation - they can be fixed with a toolset. Why can't some of these guys move over to DA2 development and free up one or two resources in the 'core' dev team to patch the toolset/engine? What's even more frustrating is that these bugs are acknowledged by Bioware. A couple of these (that I know of; maybe more), related to the chargen process, have even been fixed but apparently, there is no time to test and include the fixes in a build. Isn't that sad?

As I said, not all DLCs are bad. I am looking forward to The Witch Hunt for I know it will be good! Why? One word - Morrigan. Bioware knows that if they screwed up her story, it will be their worst debacle yet, bar none. I mean, they can't create a character such as Morrigan, give her the great build-up as in Origins and just let her fade away in a quick adventure, can they? I hope not.

Props, Textures and Lighting

2010-08-30T10:58:00.001-05:00

This past weekend was spent mainly in adding props to the existing levels to flesh them out and playing around with the textures.

It is embarrassing to admit but I only recently discovered the UVTile setting in the terrain mesh properties. I had been going back and forth between my levels and the official ones to figure out why my terrain looked so blotchy, for lack of a better word. I had just decided to post in the BSN forums for help when Eguintir Eligard created a thread about the very same thing last week. After setting the UVTile to a higher number for the levels, the effect was instant. If only everything else in the toolset was so simple to fix!!

I also went in and played around with the atmosphere settings and lighting to get that misty morning effect since the area the players start out in is at the top of a mountain. I might add some fog effects on the ground later too to firm in the idea of a Misty Mountain...then, all we need is Bilbo to complete the picture.

Below are a couple of screenshots before and after the texture and prop/vegetation work done this weekend (you can open the images in a new window to see the full-sized image).

Camp Before

Camp After

Start area - Before

Start area - After

I am really pleased with the effect and have exported the atmosphere settings to maintain some semblance of consistency between the immediate areas the player can transition to. Obviously, there will be certain areas that will have a both day and night version (including the start area) so the time frame of the transition should also be taken into account.

All in all, a good weekend's worth of work given that I was tied up with RL (Woodbury Days took up almost an entire day and I was too tired after that to do any work) and Divinity 2 (still haven't finished it but am close)

When can I call the story complete?

2010-08-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

If I were a Blizzard employee, I would probably say 'When it's done'. If I were employed in the game industry, I would probably be bound by contracts, deadlines, etc. However, as a hobbyist working on a module in his spare time, where should I draw the line?

When I started writing the story for this module, I had a very clear objective in mind - the story should progress in a very organic manner and the character driving the story (you, the player) should never feel that the story is taking a backseat to some inane side-quest. Of course, there will be times when the story takes precedence over the player's actions - the bane of every RPG in the eyes of the hardcore role-player but that is a limitation of the process.

As the plot progressed and I started making the levels and writing dialogue, so many possibilities sprung to my mind - why is this character behaving like this? Should he have a back-story? Should I have a side-quest where the player uncovers the truth behind the NPC's actions? After spending a week revising the story, I realized - why would the character, undertaking a critical task that is of personal importance, take the time to learn about every person he meets? It just didn't seem logical; the flip side is, without a convincing backdrop against which the player-NPC interaction occurs, the experience can turn out to be shallow, to say the least.

Then, I had what can only be termed as a serendipitous moment - in my attempt to provide many of the NPCs a background, distinct patterns had emerged. Taking that a step further, I revised the story again to introduce multiple factions into the story - each with their own objectives - and while they might collide with the player's story at some point, the ends are distinct.

...and then came DA2 and a brief PM chat with David Gaider.
After the initial DA2 announcement, I hadn't been following that too closely. I needed some clarifications on certain things I was including in the module and wanted to make sure it would fit in with the lore so I pinged David. Between the PMs and the initial promos for DA2, I realized some of the story I was including would vary from minor interpretational differences to portraying a completely different world. That resulted in the final revision which I have decided I won't change, come what may.

That defiant stance is primarily because most of the areas where I have applied my creative license to the lore would likely be delivered in a sequel to the current module - more on this later (it's all in a flux in my mind right now)

Short update on the blog

2010-08-25T17:00:00.001-05:00

AmstradHero pointed out that the Comments feature wasn't working on my blog. I had been wondering about that for some time now - the stats show that I am getting new and old visitors consistently and yet, no comments!
It seems this is a fairly common problem with custom templates on blogger. I remembered switching the Comment posting option to a 'pop-up' in my earlier template; after switching it on this one, it is finally working now! Made a mental note to test the comment functionality every time I change templates.
So, go ahead and post those comments!

I've also done some minor changes to have the Comments and Email link on separate lines and increased the line spacing to avoid the clustered look.
Since this is a custom template, I couldn't get the Reactions widget to work out-of-the-box too. I've added the required code in but for the life of me, I can't get the damn reactions left-aligned. Looks like I will have to ask Google for help on that one.

Lastly, I have added 2 more blogs to my reading list (well, Daeltaja's blog has been there for some time now).
Craggy Island is a stand-alone module being developed by Daeltaja and the levels are looking just fantastic. Check out his blog for some excellent screenshots.
The Dark Times Chronicle is a newsletter penned by MysteriXOX and is set in the Confederacy of Malkuth. It is an excellent source for all kinds of information on the DT:CoM world - interviews, culture, weather (yes!) and even classifieds!

Happy Reading and expect an update on BaL in a day or two!
Till later...

Tying things together

2010-08-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

This weekend was a good one. In-game testing revealed that the level I had termed as 'functionally complete' in my mind (the one mentioned in the last post) had some issues that had to be ironed out. One major problem was that the important interactions and areas were all in one side of the area - which means there was no reason to have the rest of the level. I spent some time reworking the structures and adding a small sub-quest to the area to accommodate that.

The other issue was that the level almost extended to the edge of the level grid - which meant I needed to have some way to block the player from going past the green box without it being too obvious. One simple option was to place an area transition there but it didn't make sense. I ended up with a solution that, if I say so myself, makes me quite happy! It is one of those instances that go against the player mentality when playing games like these. I am throwing around ideas to see if I could tie this in later with subsequent plot points but that's undecided at this point.

Here is a screenshot of the level - it is now officially complete except for texturing and additional vegetation work. Comments welcome!

Leeward, as you see it when you enter it

Next up is to do 3 more cutscenes in this area. Now that I am relatively comfortable with the cutscene editor, things should go along pretty smoothly. One of those will be a very complex scene and I am not even sure if the animations exist for those. If not, I might have to get creative with the camera angles but I will be asking for help in the BSN forums before I go that route!

Till later...

Making good cutscenes....

2010-08-21T23:05:00.000-05:00

... is a lot of work, I've come to realize.

The problem is that the conceptualization keeps changing when the cutscene is being developed and sometimes, that involves reworking a few seconds completely and then, making sure it blends in seamlessly. As an example, I had initially planned for an actor to pour wine from a cup he held in his hand but later, I felt it would be better to walk to a nearby table and use a bottle. A very simple change but the blending with the previous and subsequent animations took some work and not least because I am still not that experienced with the cutscene editor.

The first really big cutscene I am working on involving 4 actors

I also had problems with the cup (and later bottle) as I was initially animating them separately. I thought, what the heck, let's post in the cutscene forum to see if there is an easier way and presto! there is! Sunjammer and Eshme pointed me to the 'Link to Actor' option and SJ, in particular, gave a very detailed post that was very helpful.
However, there were still issues with that - for one, the Use Offset is not really that useful as you still have to pretty much set the orientation in a lot of frames (I believe that is called 'bracketing'). The other one was that DA doesn't really come with a decent cup - there is a goblet that will look totally out of place in a tavern and a huge mug straight from the Prancing Pony in LotR (which was another reason to switch to a bottle)

Anyway, the cutscene is almost complete - after another minor rework once I realized you can't have a conversation cutscene if there are dialogue options.

Till later...

The Dark Times Chronicle

2010-08-18T19:18:00.001-05:00

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time on the BSN forums - not browsing the actual forums but taking a shot at the various riddles and puzzles being posted in The Dark Times Chronicle group. Created by Team Z, which is a dev team for the Dark Times: Confederacy of Malkuth, the group plans to release regular newsletters to keep the folks interested in learning more about the DT:CoM universe entertained. And so far, they've done that rather splendidly!


The Team Z logo

With lots of riddles, puzzles and threads dealing with weird happenings, truisms, etc., the group has been an enjoyable place to go to for a break and MysteriXOX is almost always around to keep the momentum going! The most important thing, though, is that the first edition of The Dark Times Chronicle is being released in 2 days so keep an eye out for it. It will contain information on the DT:CoM module and interviews with the developers as well as more riddles and puzzles.

A lot of small things...

2010-08-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

In the last post, I had set a target for myself to complete the exterior level I had started earlier by the past weekend. Unfortunately, that didn't happen due to a variety of reasons. One thing I realized after putting all the structures in was that some of the interiors didn't match the exterior portrayed in the level. This may be a minor thing but once I saw the discrepancy, it just became a niggling thought that just wouldn't die!! Below is an example of what I mean -

The interior shot of the room

The exterior of the same room

(Sorry about the exterior shot but that's the best I could salvage from an earlier screenshot I had taken - all my 5 backup saves have the updated design)
If you look at the exterior shot closely (you can enlarge it), you would see that the door is set in a small alcove and there are two corners were the edges are not perpendicular and instead have another wall at around a 120-degree angle between them. Neither of those were reflected in the interior area.The other minor thing was the windows' placement but that really was a very minor difference.

Changing the interior level would have meant reworking a lot of things - more/less space which I would have needed to fill/empty, rearrange NPCs and tables and most important, rework a cutscene that takes place inside. Changing the exterior meant using different models in the same space - I had been too lazy before and just put together two house models back-to-back. Instead, I just put together the walls and windows as in the interior - didn't take too long to do that either :)

As I am writing this, I *think* I could have got away with the cutscene if I had just enlarged the interior to accommodate the differences but oh well, what's done is done and I did have to rework more than that one structure anyway. The level is close to completion now; I need to fill out the level with more props and do the lighting but at least all the required pieces are now present to test in-game.

Alongside this, I have also been working on dialogues and one big cutscene in the interior area shown above. I had mentioned earlier that the module will require a Dalish Elf player and the cutscene should help set the tone on how certain NPCs within Orlesian-occupied Ferelden react to Dalish - keeping in mind the historical tensions between Orlesians and Dalish.

Till tomorrow...

Back to level building

2010-08-11T15:58:00.000-05:00

After a weekend spent in rewriting and polishing up the first act-and-a-half, I decided to take a break and do some level building. There is still a fair amount of work to be done on the story though. To give you some background, when I initially started writing this story, I had a clear idea on what the end-game should be - the setting, the areas, the story-arcs in those areas and even a few quest lines were already semi-finalized.

The problem was - getting the player to the end-game. For reasons that will be clear when BaL is released, I couldn't just ask the player to go to the end-game areas via direct questing because that is not possible given the setting. Instead, I came up with various story arcs that would eventually lead the player there and these are driven by different factions each having their own agendas - with one manipulating the other, sometimes unwittingly; some with common ends but different means to get there, etc.

So, at this point, I have a very well-defined start and a semi-finalized end-game. The details on the transition between the two are being worked on as I find time - this will be the point in the game where some factions' lives are ended and other factions gain notoriety. Or something like that.

This week has seen the re-emergence of the level editor in my 'Frequently Used Tools' list. I've been working on the exterior village level that I started before going on vacation. I hope to finish it by this weekend and get it into a state that can be submitted for Community Contest #1. I've also been tweaking some of my earlier levels as I play through them and identify mistakes...like the one in the screenshot below with the tree prop stopping short of the ceiling.

The tree prop has been neatly sawed off to prevent structural damage :)

The second one to enter the 'Frequently Used Tools' list after a long time is the conversation editor. I went back and modified all the earlier conversations to use my own plots for skill/stats checks, generic functions, etc. As part of the story update, I also fleshed out all the interactions in the first half of Act 2 which has resulted in a lot of conversations penning themselves. I still have to put them into the toolset though *sigh*

In between, I have also been playing Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, the sequel to Divine Divinity (I really didn't like Beyond Divinity that much). It's been a fantastic ride so far and I am close to unlocking my dragon form which should make it even more enjoyable. Really, there is nothing like a hack 'n' slash to kill an hour or so of free time and Divinity 2 is doing great in that regard!

Storyboarding and Phaenan's Crafting GUI

2010-08-06T14:47:00.000-05:00

I come back from vacation and open the word document containing the various details of the story I had put down earlier. The one month I never opened it turns out to be crucial as a lot of things I had thought plot-critical were contrived means of forcing the player down a particular path and a lot of things I had thought to be quite creative were in fact, not.
The past week has been a sobering one as I went back to the basics and started re-writing large parts of the storyline. Additional options, both in dialogue and actions, were added and the motives of the different primary factions were given more depth and meaning. While doing this, I was conscious not to add something for the sake of choices - a trap all too easy to fall into. I also made sure I wasn't playing the story mentally while writing so that particular choices appeal more than others - a factor in the earlier version when some actions were upgraded to be 'plot-critical'.
You would have noticed that I haven't added any screenshots for quite a while. That's because I haven't run through the areas in quite a while as I had been coding and testing in a small bare test area. However, this weekend, it's back to the level editor and testing areas in-game so you can expect more BaL shots soon.

The one thing I am excited about is Phaenan's new customizable crafting GUI. For those that don't know, Dragon Age uses Scaleform for its UI which means it cannot be modded easily without the source files or the SDK (or so we thought!). I had been talking to Phaenan and FollowtheGourd about changing the crafting GUI for BaL to accommodate the additional crafting recipes - since that is far more elegant than doing it via conversation or via placeable interactions. I had even resigned myself to learn some flash coding to modify the default crafting GUI to read my crafting ability IDs instead. Then, Phaenan announces the Flexible Crafting GUI - now I don't have to worry about writing a bunch of scripts to do the work that the GUI will handle using M2DAs. Thanks, Phaenan!

Till later...

Community Initiatives on BSN

2010-08-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

The hangover from a long vacation is always bad - unpacking, a ton of work waiting to be done and on top of all this, several interesting happenings on the BSN forums.

One of the exciting things is the new Community Contests initiative started by mikemike37. The idea is to hold content-creating competitions on various aspects of DA modding with the entries being available for the entire community to modify and use - freely. It is an excellent idea for generating community content, which has been extremely scarce in the DA.
The other interesting part are the prizes - in the absence of material prizes for now (there are talks underway to get them), interested community members can devote a fixed amount of their time as a prize to help the winners with their projects. This will definitely help bring together community members and provides an option to help people who are lacking skills in a particular area while also giving exposure to those who are proficient in their own areas.

Go here to read more about this effort - Community Contest Wiki Page and sign up here if you are interested in helping out. Two contests have already been announced - a level building one and a prop design.

The other 'happening' I want to touch on is one that is generating a bit of controversy - the Open House initiative started by Proleric. The idea is to make freely available all the projects hosted on BSN with a wiki list to make navigation easier. The ultimate goal of the project, while good, has led to some friction between community members due to the way it is being implemented. While I endorse the idea of open content, putting the onus on project creators to classify their works as 'not open' is a bad idea. The stance that 'open is the default mode' for projects seems to be driven by community members coming from the NWN/NWN2 modding scene - which, to my mind, is against most of the other modding communities I have seen. It's still in the early stages though so it might mature out to be a palatable option for all content creators but then again, it might not. We just have to wait and see how it evolves.

Talent Coding - tougher than I thought it would be

2010-07-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

I don't have any substantial progress to update here - vacation here has been truly a vacation and most of the time I had planned to spend modding has been spent playing snooker with my friends. I am working on the talent scripts as and when I can and while coding them, I realized how some of them can appear so simple in conceptualization but extremely hard to code. One example is the new Phantom Strike ability where the dreamweaver can disappear from the waking world and materialize behind the target to deal a devastating blow to the surprised target. Getting the location and setting the facing, etc is not a problem - but determining whether the nearest safe location is actually near the target is another problem altogether.

Anyway, the short update is that I am working on the talents as and when I can - the last few days of my vacation are drawing near and the evenings are going to be definitely longer than usual. Let's see what can be done.

On Vacation

2010-07-15T06:47:00.000-05:00

I suppose I should have made a quick post here on my blog about my vacation. Well, I am in India right now and the past 2 weeks have been hectic, tending to familial and visa matters. I finally got a chance to go online and was browsing the wikia site for some information on spells when I saw the DA2 announcement in the news feed. Boy, was I shocked! When nothing about DA2 was announced during E3, I was actually very happy - hoping that Bioware would fix some of the outstanding issues with the current toolset and give the modding community some much-needed support.

I have no doubt DA2 will be an outstanding game in its own right but I am shocked at the announcement of a sequel so soon after a big expansion (Awakening). I am worried about the future of the current modding community. Some of the most promising mods in development look set to be released around the end of this year or early next year. Given that, where will the DA audience be? I just hope DA2 is in the vein of what Shadows of Undrentide was to NWN.

Enough of that...
The past two days, I have got back to modding with a vengeance and it is not just the announcement of DA2 that makes me want to finish the module on time. Now that I'm doing a lot of 2DA and scripting work, I am running into small, niggling issues that are taking up too much dev time to fix. Especially, the coding for the new abilities. I want to finish coding all the new abilities (currently estimated to be around 40-45) by the end of this month and tie together all the required 2DAs for the new classes, abilities, etc - when I don't have the power of my desktop to tempt me into doing level or area work. That is the only target I currently have set - coming back after a 3 year break has meant a lot of visiting and catching up to do and I don't expect to have the amount of free time I thought I will have.

Till the next post (which will hopefully be in a week's time)...

Custom Class - Dreamweaver

2010-06-25T16:26:00.002-05:00

Uthenera - the ancient Elven custom where the Elders retired into an endless sleep to give the young a chance to lead. A tradition honored and celebrated by all Elves when they still ruled Arlathan. A facet of Elven history that slowly faded away as their immortality was eroded by the touch of humans' short lives and finally receded into oblivion when Arlathan fell.

Uthenera - transformed from a natural progression of Elven life to a gift for the most ancient bloodlines who could resist the human taint. When Arlathan fell and the Elves were forced into slavery by the Tevinter Imperium, the last vestiges of these bloodlines lingered in the few who chose bondage over death. The center of a makeshift society of elven slaves, they were cared for and protected - a symbol of hope for an unlikely future and a reminder of the culture they had lost.

When Shartan, with the help of Andraste, brought freedom back to the Elves, these descendants of the most ancient finally had a chance to learn and master the craft which allowed them to be in harmony with the land beyond the Veil. The few that did master the art learned to their dismay, as their Elders had, that the Fade, now corrupted by the Magisters' pride, was not a welcoming place anymore. The absence of Falon'din to guide them made Uthenera a self-inflicted punishment rather than the ritual it was meant to be.

A few Elves began to experiment with the teachings of Uthenera in an attempt to protect themselves when in the Fade. Though unsuccessful, they did stumble upon a means to siphon the spirit energy from the Fade to protect them while in the waking world. These few were called Dreamweavers - masters at controlling the spirit energy that makes up a world usually entered only in dreams.

When Halamshiral fell, the few Dreamweavers almost faded into extinction. The few who remained roamed the lands with the various Dalish clans. Their descendants, trained like the other Dalish with sword and bow and inheriting the innate skills of spirit mastery, are the Dreamweavers now in existence. Usually at the front of any foray into ancient Elven ruins, they still thirst for the knowledge that was lost when Arlathan fell - a time when the forerunners of these Dreamweavers were even more powerful and capable of acts that are only spoken of in hushed tones of awe...and scorn, for they chose not to use their talents in Arlathan's defense.

The Dream Skill tree in TQ (from TitanCalc)

Inspired in part by the Dream skill tree in Titan Quest, this class will feature a suite of spell-like abilities focusing on spirit damage and proficiency with melee weapons. They will inherit the Sleep chain of spells from the original game; everything else will be custom talents specifically written for BaL.

Of course, it would be too much to expect the creation process to go smoothly in the Toolset. There is an issue with the character model not showing up when the background is selected and it has been reported by many in the forums. I did have this working at one point when I first started experimenting with custom classes so it is just going to be a matter of going over each 2da and script change and see what is wrong.

...and of course, the icons. These are just placeholders for now till I start working on creating icons for the classes and their abilities.

Game World Update - Leeward

2010-06-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

Before I go into the update, I must confess that the majority of the past week was spent (re)playing HoMM5 and Divinity 2. I was having designer's block and couldn't get myself to finish the level I had started. Instead of ploughing ahead and ending up with a lackluster level, I decided to take some time off and it did wonders. After getting the fan-made manual for HoMM5, I decided to play on Heroic difficulty and I must say, it was much more enjoyable - the fights were difficult but the knowledge of every game mechanic (thanks to the manual) made it a vastly superior experience compared to the first play-through I did.

Tactical battlefield in HoMM5 (left) vs AOW:SM (right)

Though the tactical battlefield paled in comparison to Shadow Magic - where the battlefield was about 20 times bigger and units had more varied abilities, it was still fun!

On to Blood and Lyrium...

Leeward is a village on the rise again.
Founded by a group of miners who had struck gold on the hills near West Hill, Leeward was once a booming frontier town where the reach of law was present only to accept bribes and killings over gold were a daily occurrence. As the gold dried up, Leeward shriveled and the hardy folks who had nowhere else to go made a living out of poaching and wood-cutting.

All that changed when a lone poacher by the name of Isiah stumbled upon an untapped lode high in the mountains. Leeward was forced to reprise it's role as a frontier town - only now, nobody wanted to stay there for too long. Meghren's tax collectors regularly visited the town with armed guards in tow and confiscated all the gold they could.

Work in Progress: Village of Leeward

Small groups of prospectors stocked up in Leeward and spent days camped out near the lode, hunting for the vein that would make their future. Those that were lucky enough to strike rich braved the perils of the surrounding woods and escaped back into the lives they had left behind. Those that weren't went back to Leeward to prowl the streets looking for the next group that went up to prospect - either to hire themselves out as guards and guides or to steal their supplies so they could go prospecting again.

I put this level down on paper with all the details I would require. However, I still had to rework the entire level from scratch after my first attempt resulted in too small an area - I realized I still hadn't got the sense of scale when designing exteriors. The plan is to finish this level before this weekend and get the basics of another exterior level complete before I leave for my vacation in July. That way, I can concentrate on filling them out and tying them together on my laptop during the vacation and polish the levels up later.

I also plan to start posting more frequent updates (when possible!). The next one will be on Friday and will feature one of the new classes that will be available in Blood and Lyrium. Till then....

Design Decisions - Part 2

2010-06-16T11:05:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I had mentioned how certain skills were unusable given the current design of Blood and Lyrium where the player will take on the role of a Dalish Elf ruin-raider. For those that aren't familiar with Dragon Age lore (are there any readers of this blog who aren't? but anyway...), the Dalish live in isolation as much as possible. They do not live among humans or dwarves, they do not undergo military training alongside them and they most certainly do not learn magic in the Circle of Magi.

The same classes for races that pretty much live in isolation

Given this, I did not want my Dalish Elves to follow the same Warrior/Rogue/Mage classes that have been established. I understand Bioware did this since they had to cater to each origin and having race-specific classes would have added a big overhead (though that would have made the UI more flexible at least). But hey, us module makers have the freedom to do that! Players in BaL will have the option of choosing one of the two new classes for playing - and only one of those two.

The custom classes to be added in BaL do not have a rogue flavor. This meant that the core rogue skills - disarming traps and lockpicking - had to be factored in as skills so that the player will have access to them. That was another reason for the redesign of the skills system.

On to level design...
I finally decided to buy a replacement RAM kit since the RMA was taking too much time (and this will put me in a position to get up to 8 gigs when it does come). I finished up one more interior level and will be working on filling it out with NPCs, dialog and quests this week.

The Lucky Horse Tavern

This area will feature a lot of ambient behaviour on the NPCs and will probably require a few scans through Beerfish's excel utilities to pin down the animations required. This will the first time I am going to do extensive ambient behaviour set up so it should be interesting.

Till later...

Design Decisions - Part 1

2010-06-09T11:42:00.001-05:00

One of the primary concerns with any custom module is to judge how far a character will progress in that module - what is the optimum level range that a player will end up at? What sort of skills will be used in the module? Will there be redundant skills or talents that a player will never find a use for?

For Blood and Lyrium (and the game, in general), I felt some of the skill trees were redundant or tacked on or just plain unusable given the module design (more about this in the next post).

For example, we have an entire skill tree dedicated to making traps. However, only the rogue gets the necessary talents to disarm traps. This seemed illogical to me - if a person is skilled enough to put together complex traps, shouldn't he be able to take part those same traps? Or at least simple ones?

The other thing that bugged me was stealing. I am a big fan of improving skills as you use them a lot and stealing is a prime candidate for this. How can a warrior in heavy armor and wielding a great sword (especially, one of those ridiculously big swords in the game!) steal successfully from anyone other than a dead person? And unless you had a Fagin to 'mentor' you, how can you just become better at stealing?

Skill Tree in Blood and Lyrium

In my module, there will be just one skill each for Stealing and Trap Mastery. That's right - Trap Mastery. The player will be able to both construct and disarm traps using this one skill. Trap and stealing difficulty will be handled via Cunning and Dexterity as primary modifiers and armor/weapons as secondary modifiers.

Combat Tactics will also completely disappear from the skill list. The player will be given a set of slots at the beginning of the game and that's it. I am toying with the idea of purchasing additional tactics slots by undergoing training from select mentors but it would have to fit in with the whole story to make something like that work.

I am not completely happy with the way the skill tree turned out, though. I will probably get in touch with FollowTheGourd on the Bioware forums to see if he has any idea to hide the empty squares and arrows.

...and lastly, a short update on the level design progress. My RAM started throwing errors and causing random BSoDs so I had to RMA it. While I am waiting for a replacement kit, I am stuck working on my laptop which means less level building. I have been using this time to finish up some of the 2DA and scripting work required and also writing up more of the story so it hasn't been a complete waste of time!

More on design decisions for Blood and Lyrium in the next post!

Level Design

2010-06-02T10:29:00.000-05:00

First, the big news - I am going on vacation for a month in July. Back to my parents' place in India with it's sunny weather and rolling farms. I will be taking my laptop with me - it is a pretty decent laptop but I am not sure how it will handle the heavy level editing required for Dragon Age; certainly not on par with my desktop at home. So, the focus for this month is going to be level design and building - I can then work on the areas, scripting, conversations, etc. while I am on vacation.

I have been laying out the levels on paper - I am not going to make the same mistake of reworking entire levels like I did when I started modding. The plan is to get the basic level design complete for Act 2 and a bit of Act 3 too. These acts will contain a few exterior levels and these are the most resource-hungry to design so the first priority is to get them done and out of the way. They are also going to be different in terms of layout - one of them will be a small one-street town, two will be small villages and there will be at least 2 more forested areas.

The next few blog posts in this month will showcase those levels. I also plan to start writing a series of articles about the game-play changes being done for Blood and Lyrium - there are some aspects of the core functionality that I feel are superficial or can be re-designed.

Before I sign off, I would like those of you not familiar with AmstradHero's blog to grab yourself a cup of coffee and read his latest articles on level design, texture blending and general game design. A very coherent and useful series of articles for any builder (player's feedback welcome too!)

Week of Deadly Calm

2010-05-27T14:15:00.001-05:00

For those familiar with HoMM 5, you'll know what this means. A week when nothing really happens. I have been sick for the past few days and have hardly been up - I didn't mind it for the first couple of days since it was a welcome break from work but boredom slipped in pretty soon. It's difficult being lazy and doing nothing!

I played around a bit with the lighting to get it right for the interiors - still a problem; the exteriors look a lot better.

I did manage to finish most of the conversations required for the first act. Now, to put them all together and make sure the stuff works properly. The coming long weekend should give enough time to finish up Act 1 and move on to the next stage.

Penning Dialogues and Directing Cutscenes

2010-05-19T20:43:00.001-05:00

The past week has been really fruitful; all the level layouts required for Act 1 of Blood and Lyrium are complete. I still have a few more props to put in but I will come back to those later. I am starting to get burned out on level-building!

I have started work on the dialogues and quests for Act 1. The major dialogues are in the starting area and the final area that I built this week and one of them is already complete. Dealing with two quests and companion and NPC interjections made it quite complex and over 2000 words - I am wondering if I should trim it down a bit (I admit, I ramble a bit when I start writing!)

I also finally started on the stages and cut-scenes. Though I was hesitant at first (the tutorials are so lengthy!), it was not that difficult. Well, I was mostly doing stages and a very simple cut-scene; once I start on the intro cut-scene, that will really test my skills. The major plots have also been put down and associated plot scripts written. Next step, once the dialogues are done, is the journal entries.

The custom ability implementation for Arms and Armor is still an open issue, unfortunately. I will have to get back to that soon though since Ambaryerno has made good progress in the design department. Check out his new sword models here.

Level Building Tips

2010-05-12T11:24:00.003-05:00

The ability coding for Arms and Armor is nearing completion though getting the new abilities to actually work is still an issue. For those interested, I have opened a topic - Custom Ability Implementation - on the Bioware forums for getting some help on this issue. If anyone has any inputs, post a comment here or in that thread.

Here are some tips for level-builders. I suspect almost all of these are common knowledge but I figure these will come in useful for someone at least!

Copy and change x-y coordinates (Interiors): Many of the models which are part of the same logical set (eg: Tevinter Interior Tileset - small wall, small roof, floor) have the same size on the x-y axis. So, if you want to line those 2 floor tiles up perfectly, copy and paste the floor tile and change the X or Y units by +/- 8 (depending on the direction). The same applies to the walls and ceilings. Sometimes, the length/width would be different than 8 but once you figure it out, lining them would be a snap!

Replace model file names: When building interiors, it is easier to build the skeleton using the same models for walls, floor, roof, pillars, etc. Once the skeleton is done, you can go into the model properties and change the model file name to the one you actually want there. This is easier than placing the new model there and copying the coordinates.

Cutaway Override in model properties: When you place a picture/coat-of-arms/torches/etc on a wall, going into Tactical Mode in-game cuts away the tops of these walls. The props placed on the walls look like they are hanging in space. To prevent this from happening, you can set Cutaway Override to FALSE in the properties for that model/prop. I didn't know about this before and had to realign a whole bunch of wall torches onto pillars!

Shadows without models: Let's say you want to build a dark pit or a dark circular area within a big room. Place a model of the appropriate shape (doesn't matter which model) right above the area you want to darken and adjust the model properties to set Export To Game as FALSE and Lightmap as TRUE. Place a light directly above it to cast a good shadow. Once you render lightmaps, you will see a dark shadow beneath the model but the model won't be present in-game. There is a bit of work to get it just right since the model can cast shadows from other lights too.

Here is a link to a detailed tutorial about lighting done by the BG2 Redux team. Post any comments or questions you might have in this thread.

Update!

2010-05-05T19:30:00.002-05:00

(yeah, couldn't think of something better for the title)

Most of the time since my last post here has been spent taking care of RL issues so time spent on developing Blood and Lyrium has been minimal - just some conversations and plot scripting.

However, a good amount of work has been done on Arms and Armor, scripting new talents for 2-handed Light weapons. M2DAs are yet to be created for them, though and the passive/sustained talents still need to be completed. I expect to be done with that by this week so that it can out in the next alpha for testing (and I can go back to developing BaL)

An interesting discussion came up in the Bioware forums about compatibility between different modules. With the scores of add-ins available now, each changing a small aspect of the core gameplay, this has become one of the constant issues the user faces - and this is even before the user-made module scene has fully taken off (like in NWN, for example). If you are reading this and have an opinion on this or just want to offer support for the discussion, head on over there!

If anyone reading this is interested in doing some level work for my module, post a comment here or head over to the project page to post in the discussion thread or comments area. Thanks!

Switching modules

2010-04-26T13:21:00.008-05:00

This past weekend was really good in terms of development time. It was raining most of the weekend so I had a good reason to stay indoors in front of the computer. The first draft of the exterior level is done and I have started populating NPCs and dialogue associated with them. There is still work to be done on texturing and props (and the sky - trying to get a twilight feel but I am just not able to get the color right!) but for the most part, I am satisfied with how this has turned out.

This area requires 2 cut-scenes, one of them a fairly complex one so the next task at hand is to learn how to do those but that will come later.

The priority for this week is to finish up as much scripting work as possible for Arms and Armor (AAA). When I was writing up the story for Blood and Lyrium, I decided to pitch in and help Ambaryerno with his mod. AAA will have more realistic weapon models, new weapon types and associated talents and in general, will add more variety to the existing weaponry in Dragon Age. Since I plan to implement new weapons and talents for my mod too, this will be a good learning experience (and I have to worry only about the scripting front on the AAA mod!)

Revamping the interiors

2010-04-23T10:06:00.004-05:00

Level-building...it can oscillate between fun and tedium pretty quickly. Play-testing the interior area I built earlier resulted in almost re-doing the level as it felt too big and empty. I had to rework most of the level to bring the size down - I should have used a test creature for getting a sense of scale right from the start. Further, while I initially envisioned this area to have a minimum of combat, it does look like I will have to add more now - primarily because most of the actions in the puzzles and pseudo-riddles do not have any side-effects at all. At least one quest can do with some hostile spawns on selecting a disagreeable answer.

Here is a screenshot of one of the main rooms in this level. The lighting is not yet perfect but it is getting close - I wanted a dark ruined level with sporadic patches of bright light to accentuate the darkness more. However, some of the props, the statues and ivy primarily, have blotchy shadows.

This area still looks a little bare, I know. I am working on the plots and conversations for the various placeables and the plan is to complete this area by this weekend.

Meanwhile, I started working on the exterior level and I must say, it is a whole different beast - the lights aren't rendering how I want them to and I realized too late that you can have only one static light per chunk. Since there is no way to change the level properties, I am stuck with what I have for this area. The good news is that one of the exportable area layout is almost done and that is another area I plan to devote time to over the weekend.

I also need to start reading up on cut-scenes since the game starts off with one and while it will be a simple affair, the few posts I've read on the forums seem to indicate that even a simple cut-scene takes a good amount of work to get it right.

This Past Week

2010-04-14T00:43:00.005-05:00

Most of the time spent this past week has been away from the toolset unfortunately.

First, there was the bazaar. I got into it a day late but once I realized you could get 500 points per Twitter challenge you win, I was hooked. I thought it will be easy enough to win a few challenges and get a decent score up to snag some t-shirts or lithos. I did end up winning 7 challenges but found out soon enough that the 'click-points' was a real leveler - so much so that people who hadn't even won a single challenge had thousands more points. I had to resort to posting my 'referral' link in the various threads in the Off-Topic forum and in end, won the last but one auction for a set of Mass Effect t-shirts.

Then, there was a map-making competition for Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic for which I was one of the judges and this was the last week of judging so I had to put in some extra time to play-test some of the maps I had put aside for a re-test. For those that don't know, AoW:SM is a turn-based fantasy strategy game similar to MoM and the HoMM series (though with much more depth compared to HoMM).

I did manage to get some work done in the toolset though. I finished a big interior level - the biggest in Act 1 of the story and started the process of piecing together the quests and dialogs. I am also slowly coming to grips with how lighting works and how the different types of light (and colors!) interact with each other. I still have some finishing touches to add to the levels - 'prop-discovery' is and will be an on-going process, I am afraid.

I have started working on the start area too, which will be an exterior level. This level will have 2 exported area layouts and one will be visible from the other in-game (one is a mountain-top and the second one is a village at the foot of the mountains but some distance away). My level-building skills face a real test when doing an exterior level so this one will likely take another 4-5 days to complete, at minimum. Next post will have some screenshots!

When it happens...

2010-04-07T10:30:00.005-05:00

I cannot speak for other module-makers but the first thing I set down when I started this module was - it should be different. Not completely alien with a new world with it's own lore and mechanics but should have something that makes it stand out from the crowd...at least in my own eyes. What could I do? Integrate the story with the official established canon. The two books - The Stolen Throne and The Calling - are pretty detailed about most of the happenings but there are some obvious gaps (well, maybe not gaps but interesting settings that haven't been explored fully) that can be exploited to tell a story.

Blood and Lyrium will seek to do that - weave a tale about already established settings, sneaking in canon events from the novels to influence the various threads. The story is set during Maric's struggle to regain Ferelden's crown and it is possible that the player might meet some of the key characters from the rebel camp. I haven't yet thought through the plot lines that extensively so it is also possible that you might not meet them at all - I don't want to give a tacked-on quest just for lore integration.

That said, this module will come with a race/background restriction for the player - Dalish Elf. This might turn off a lot of players but it is critical for the storyline - it wouldn't make sense for anybody else to play this story as it unfolds (except maybe one other race/background but that is for another post)

The First Step

2010-04-02T19:36:00.008-05:00

Welcome to my blog!

This blog will serve as a means for me to share information (and receive feedback!) on the module I am creating for the Dragon Age world, called (at present) Blood and Lyrium. At times, I might digress a bit to other games but that is another reason this blog is being created - to pull me back into modding when I take a break.

It happened before with NWN2 when I started creating a module set in Eberron. After months of accumulating lore and detailing the settings and working in the toolset for nearly 2 months, I took a break playing King's Bounty and Uncharted and never went back. Hopefully, this time around, that will not be the case.