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.

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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...

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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!

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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...

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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.

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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. 

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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)...

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