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.

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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...

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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...

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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!

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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.

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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...

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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!

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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...

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 (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!

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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.

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