Stop teasing me! Oh, and some music stuffs.

Just stumbled over this while reading Tchos' development diary ---
GOD! How long have I wanted a watermill in NWN2? This is so gorgeous! Beautiful! Amazing!
What a goddamn shame it's from Skyrim and therefore will probably never be available for us. Hey Mr. Mysterious modder, show yourself and make us stuff like this we can actually use! Pretty please? And while you're on it, please do all my custom content wishes for me... ah well, let's start slow.

Another little teaser comes from Tchos himself, I like that:

This video raised a few questions maybe some of you might answer:

1. Do you have any recommendations on free music in a similar style? I was always hoping to find some appropriate tavern music, medieval style, that is free to use. If you have tips on ambient music too, I might be interested - but I'm very picky here! As some might remember, Michael's tip on Arcanum's soundtrack was so far the best addition. If you know of any other free game music in a similar style, I'd be very interested. I'm NOT interested in any Synthie or modern-ish styles though, it must be classic, classy and atmospheric.

2. I was happy to see that old NWN1-style music effect, I also liked the Zzzzz for sleep which I would like to have back too. But I was wondering, does anyone know about flavor text in NWN1's and how to add it?


Finally let me praise Xaltar's Facelift pack again:

I nitpicked a bit about that in the comments, I know, but still... why did it take so long until someone finally did a mod like this that quality-wise goes through the roof compared to the vanilla stuff? I might have some issues with the makeup etc, but still, these heads eliminate the horrible "I have a flashlight in my mouth" problem of the vanilla heads, they look a few years more modern and actually COULD start a wave of new content - because so much else in the game is not on par with the quality of these heads and hopefully some people will say "Hmm, the base armor's texture doesn't work with these heads anymore, I need a retexture...." etc. etc.
I'd say this pack can be a huge advertising for NWN2 (and you should try it right away!). So kudos to Xaltar and hopefully it'll be an inspiration to others.

NWN2 is only as dead as the community wants it to be

More devastating news have struck our good old favorite lately (among other games), as most players might've noticed already:

PC Gamer

It always seems to me that as soon as there's a bit hope on my side for an extended life of NWN2 and I feel like building again, something new happens that ruins it all completely.
Fortunately, there's a bunch of really good people on the NWN forums (probably because D&D is a game for nerds :) ) and a community fix is already on the way, one that sounds very promising too.

Now that alone doesn't necessarily justify a blog post, but it got me thinking once more. The NWN1 community, which always outnumbered NWN2's, was so fast in adjusting to this new situation and fixing it with a patch that just on the side works for NWN2 too... but if it didn't work on NWN2, I wonder if anyone bothered to fix it too... the NWN2 boards are again awfully silent.

One more thing that also bugged me all the time and especially lately again is the custom content side of NWN2. I guess that my hope that a NWN Nexus site would revive and spice things up again was in vein, very few new files ever got uploaded that actually got me excited (a shining example against the trend is Xaltar's Facelift pack). What makes me sad though is that I often stumble over teasers... pics on the forums, pics on the Nexus that even show stuff I tried to do myself and failed badly at. Sometimes these are teasers for a PW community, but often they're private modifications or modifications for long cancelled projects. That these little gems are unreachable and rot away on some hard disks is incredibly sad and discouraging, and I really wonder what happened to the sharing aspect of the community, especially NWN2's.

Kamal said in some comment on this blog that he wishes that if I cancelled Middleforest completely, I'd at least upload my areas as prefabs to the vault. And yeah, I would - if it made any sense, because due to my heavy hak customizations oin any other computer without my complete hak set the areas will look like total garbage. That's the only reason I didn't upload them really, because hell, whatever keeps this game alive I'm willing to do. My nudie skins mod isn't that great and I only made it for my own project, but hell, just in case somebody else can use it, I uploaded it anyway. That little fix for dresses - most builders probably figured that out themselves because they're much smarter than me, but since I haven't seen it on the vault I uploaded it just for the sake of giving anything back, as mediocre or silly as it might be.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, if you want to keep this game alive there should be some change of attitude, an attitude I see more in NWN1's and maybe Bethgames communities, and that is - please share your little haks, you can never know if there isn't someone who desperately needs it, even if you think it's not worth sharing. Maybe you think it's great and you want to keep it for your future project you've been working on for 5 years already, as a teaser that makes your project unique... but really, if you don't release it this week, think again, I think keeping a great game alive should be the greater good nowadays.

Now I'm trying again to get this stupid Blender/mdb stuff working, oh hell... :P