Some progress outside the world

Well, the module gives me some little problems again. At the moment I'm trying to reanimate the DMFI... it stopped working a while ago and I couldn't yet find out why.
Huh, DMFI? Oh yes, that's the set of tools, scripts and nifty stuff from the Dungeon Master-Friendly Initiative , a must for every persistant world that wants to show off a bit. For players the nicest addition is usually the speech command system, you say *sits* and your character sits down... and of course the languages. Well, but that's exactly what doesn't work anymore, and so far I haven't figured out why.
On the positive side of things, Ben sent me some fixes for my haks, which means, no more crashes and incompatibilities with certain haks and tilesets. Finally I can make those interiors I had to put back two weeks ago. Yay.

Outside the mod, you probably noticed the new logo and blog layout (I hope you did, and I hope you like it - I do). Credits must be given to lowfatpretzels who had to look through my dozens of pics and gave some useful tips ( the thin red line! ).

I also opened a forum. Uh huh. I know, it might be way too soon, but who knows how long it'll take me to learn how to run it. It's linked on the right, you can go there and spam the Off topic section so I can delete it or whatever. Or not. It'll take a few more weeks until the forum will have a real use, I guess. :)

Finally some new areas

I finally had some enthusiasm again and made a few areas to be used around the town of Niederhoeve. So here's what players will find on the other side of town:

We follow the road to the farmlands and come across this mill...


A different view from behind the hill...

..and find a small cloister called St. Magnus.


We can also take a different path that leads us to a lake...


Which continues into the Niederhoevean Moor...


... which gets a little darker...



... and eerie the deeper we go in.


I think I have some good ideas about what happens in these areas. First off, I don't follow the rule that every area must contain some quests or encounters. I think for an immersive atmosphere there have to be some "travel areas" that have no other meaning than to give the player an impression of distance. However, I'll try to add as many small quests or things to be found to make it not too boring.

Let's start with the cloister. I was thinking a lot about monks in the module and would like to try making them more like a classical monk (as in christian history). I actually have no idea how to couple that with the FR monk and his mastery of martial arts, but might find a solution.

However, my idea is to make quite a few monasteries all over the module to give monks a reason to travel from one to the other. Some might be like the one in the screenshot, a small cloister in the middle of nowhere, while others might be huge like castles with a small city around it.

Furthermore, I think it would be a nice idea to make monk and nun cloisters, some monasteries will only be open for male while others only open for female monk PCs.

But before I do that, I have to fill those swamp areas with something nasty. No details on that yet.

A Nightwalk

Here are some new screenies, a walk in and around Rungholdt at night. I'm slowly getting the atmosphere right, I think. The areas are still missing a lot of content, but I think one can already see where it's going... well, here we go.

A view over Rungholdt's marketplace

Anna, my new love. She makes me grin every time I test the area. All she does is dancing, but I think at this she's extremely talented.

The cathedral with small alleys around it.

One of those dozens of small alleys - Rungholdt is a maze.

Top view on Rungholdt's Redlight district - it's a part of he docks of course.

The redlight district from a different angle

The bridge to the city gate

The road to Rungholdt

Niederhoeve: The tavern

And finally, a view on a misty river in the early morning hours.

On a sidenote, I just realize that Safari seems to have problems with Blogger... meh, back to Firefox.

Progress

Just a little screenshot of something that happened by accident when I tried to connect two parts of a river made with different water tiles.

Although I cannot use it in this area, I will definately rebuild it somewhere else... I think it looks awsome (much better ingame than on the screenshot).

What else? Oh, I finally got CNR to work, and some other scripting stuff. Now I'm connecting areas, make some "in between" ones (like the one on the screenshot) and have some new energy.

SM pointed me to a tileset I currently rebuild Rungholdt with, it's much darker now than on the old screenshots. A litle too dark for my taste actually, but better than the standard, and I don't want to use CC City Exterior until it's updated, which might take too long.

More later.

And here she is...

Since I had nothing better to do, here's a (half-) naked dryad for your viewing pleasure.




Don't get too excited, as you've probably learned in The Witcher, plants reproduce differently...


... or at least they say so...

Waiting... (haks part 2)

I hate waiting. I love letting others wait for me though, but I demand immediate attention and satisfaction as soon as I want something. I think I've never waited for something as long as for that stupid 1.69 patch. Yes, I know I could use the Beta, but... yes, the whole community is waiting for that darn patch, there's no update to the CEP, no update for the seasonal forest and no update for all the other haks I plan to use until that darn final 1.69 patch is out!

Seasonal forest is no biggie, I'm sure it'll be backwards compatible so I just started playing around with it. CEP is one thing I'm not sure about yet... it will be backwards compatible with itself, yes, but it might screw up all the stuff I tried to squeeze into the tight gaps between the 2da lines of CEP 2.0... I'd hate to do all that stuff again. But now I'm facing the problem of building the main city... or better, the center of merchandise, the place every player needs and will visit regulary, the place where you get your gear and so on. Yes, every module should have a place like this, noone wants to travel the world for hours just to get his first armor, shortsword and shortbow. Fine, so I started building that city long ago with the 169 beta. I tried various tilesets for giving it a more medieval feeling than the standard city.

The only one that really satisfied me was the CC City Exterior tileset by s030363l & sixesthrice. Ah, of course it has a nasty bug that crashes the game and toolset, also it's all blown up by TNO textures that will become obsolete with the 1.69 patch. I kept watching the site but there was no update, so I finally decided to try other tilesets and, well... ended up with the standard one. Now I'm halfway done and totally not satisfied - the city looks just too modern, whatever dirt I throw at it, and see... there's life on the CC City exterior vault entry again... update will come, but when? No idea. I decided I need it, so the city development won't continue any further. Um.. but that's the base, so what should I be working on now? All my ideas are focused on the basics at the moment, and being forced to concentrate on something else now makes me kinda stuck... I want to work on the stuff I already have ideas for first, not being forced to come up with new ones. Oh well. Well, that's one example.

The other one is my plan for a huge polar region. Think vikings, iceland, scandinavia. I love this longship hak and always wanted to make use of it. And I did. All of sudden when I was building the docks for Rungholt, it occured to me that there were too few standard bioware ships in the palette.... meh, the longships replaced all of them. I could've gone through that painful hak editing process again (which means, learning by doing) and blowing up my custom hak even further, or... throw them out, which I did. The last update for the longships has been somewhere in 2003, so I don't hold my breath anything will happen to them anymore.

Then there's the Barbaric North. Don't let the rather plain looking screens at the vault fool you, there's a lot of potential in this tileset, and it has longships! So even though I won't be able to add them to my Rungholt docks, I can at least use them up there in the north.
Here's a quick example... I have no idea why weather effects only fire when I start up the mod with NWNX, so... just imagine snowflakes.





But, of course... incompatibilities again. Gah! Why does everyone have to use the same 2da lines or whatever it is? Figured it must be the doortypes conflicting with either seasonal forest or Sigil or whatever... oh damn, I don't have the energy to fix (learn how to fix) that right now... no further working on the north until I decided if I want to fix it or just throw that tileset out too.

You see where this is leading.. everything I have ideas for either needs updates or fixes or I'm scared to work on it because I fear 1.69 (and it's tail) will screw up everything I do. I don't even dare to make any more armors because I see incompatibilities between the CEP and the other custom stuff coming. GAH! Where's that stupid Witcher toolset, I need something to do.

Oh, because screenshots always lighten posts up, here's one of a dock construction I played around with... those siege placeables make great construction equipment. I hope I can rebuild something like this with the CC City Exterior tileset.

A few more toolset scribbles

I call these toolset scribbles... a quick area idea, not perfect yet, but something I can keep for future use.

This one is a simple church interior for a village church. Wooden, not too fancy, the priest at the altar is called Father Hein (Hein is a typical name from Germany's northern coast)


The church from the outside. The village it belongs to is called Niederhoeve, a name I made up but doesn't sound too far off for the setting.

And this is an old cemetary, hidden in the forest behind the church. Of course there's something bad in that tomb, I already have an idea what it might be...

The first screenshots.
As you can see, one of the things I definately want in my mod is haks. A lot of haks. I know those scare the average player away, but the Vault is full of so many great things that absolutely have to be used. And one of the very best is the one I could build the whole module with - WoRm's Seasonal Forest. Actually, I do plan to make this tileset the base of my whole world. It's too good to be true, and with it I can create exactly the atmosphere I want. The Dark Forest will be the center of the world, so to say.


This first area I created (besides some very basic test areas using the micro set) is an Inn at the border of the Dark Forest. There will be a city to the north and some small rural villages, but this should be the last outpost of civilization before the adventure begins. Well, that's the plan. More to come.