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!

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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...

Read More...

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!

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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

1. 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)
2. 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!!!

Read More...

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.

Read More...